In a speech he's scheduled to deliver on Thursday to the West Midlands' CBI, the former editor of Trinity Mirror's Birmingham Post will explain why he thinks the news business is having financial difficulty, and why paid online content isn't the answer newspapers are looking for, paidContent UK reported today.

"I spent the last 15 years of my newspaper career regularly attending industry conferences in which the threats and opportunities of the internet were endlessly discussed and analysed. Pretty much everything that has come to pass was predicted, but what did the big newspaper groups do? Very little that was right, it turns out," Marc Reeves writes in his speech.

Reeves took a redundancy offer last year, and is now a digital publisher and media consultant.

People are less likely to pay for online content because they feel they've already bought the delivery channel - the computer - "so why should they add to the burden by paying for content that is available elsewhere for free?"

Publishers who view the Internet as a hurdle are looking at it wrong, he stated. "I believe the biggest challenge to journalism is not the internet - it is the inherent inability of the largest media groups to squeeze from it the revenues and profits they've been built on. It is also the tendency of too many journalists to leave 'business issues' to the money men and 'the management.'"

To read the entire speech, visit Reeves' blog post.