the fact that Associated Newspapers had competition, but I will not miss the regurgitated press releases that comrpise these dreadful free sheets

As a journalist I've got some kind of vested interest in this, and have several friends who are now getting less work because of LP closing. Not to mention several thousand distributors who are now out of work... Still, a few points, in no particular order:

As far as I can work out, the LP wasn't doing horrendously - lost a reported £12m last year, but compared to some titles and parts of News International, that's maybe not so bad. (Should also be said that NI's accounts are famously labyrinthine and a lot of the figures getting bandied around about what LP, The Times, Sunday Times, Newscorp, Sky etc make and lose are shots in the dark).

It's closure is more likely to be part of Murdoch's much trumpeted move away from free content. I'd imagine the thinking is that people are less likely to pay money to look at a news site when they get in from work if they feel like they've already read the headlines on the way home.

It'll be interesting to see what London Lite/Metro do. I read on Guardian Media that one of Rebekah Wade's first tasks with her new role at News International was supposed to be some sort of conference with Associated Media to reach an agreement, and stop bleeding each other white with the free papers. Difficult to see how any of them can keep grinding on when the ad market has all but collapsed and publishing anything (monthly or weekly, let alone daily) is ruinously expensive.

There's also the fact that all these papers launched at a time (2006) when most readers were still in thrall to reading about very rich/famous people coming out of nightclubs; it's easy to fill a paper with this stuff very cheaply. In the current climate, that might not be what people want any more, so what do the papers write about instead? As David Hepworth's pointed out in several recent columns/podcasts, proper content costs real money, and someone's got to pay for it somewhere...

I picked it up on the way home out of habit because the missus used to like it, but I thought it was rubbish.

Pointless stories fashioned from press releases, random pics of celebs simply wearing clothes outside a nightclub and ridiculous hyperbole and hysteria about subjects like swine flu.

What made it worse, in my opinion, was that all its news felt so out of date by 6pm because their print run was so early in the day. When sporting events like the cricket's on, they barely make it to the lunch interval.

Inevitably as a journalist myself I feel sorry for others who lose out because of its closure, but I don't think it's that big a loss.

if you were to remove the word "free" from the blog's headline - then I think you'd be closer to the truth. I think it is very close to 'game over' for newspapers as they exist now.

Newspapers are in a perfect storm of decling sales, economic downturn and diminished ad revenues and structural change - people are getting news from the web and young people do not have affinity with newspaper brands.

Advertising even if it returns post-recession - will be primarily web based and be of lower capital value

I do not think Murdoch's plans to charge for general content are likely to work.

The only sites that have been able to charge - FT, Wall St Journal - are specialist reads. Even there, the ability to monetize their particular audiences is considerably lower than for the print product.

Instead of trying to defend a business model that does not work any more (or will not within 5 to 10 years) - the major media groups that own newspapers should be using their energies investigating a sustainable one for the future.