The situation in the newspaper industry is not good. 10 major US newspapers, according to Time, will go out of business or go digital-only very soon. It's time to change business models, otherwise that last train might go away and never come back.

UK's Guardian has done exactly that, by opening up its content freely for anyone with something called the Open Platform. It's a...

"...suite of services that make it possible for our partners to build applications with the Guardian."

It consists of two parts: the Content API, which lets you freely retrieve data from Guardian's vast content database (over one million articles), and the Data Store, a collection of stats and data sets curated by Guardian journalists.

In short, Guardian will let anyone use their content on their site or web service. How do they plan on making money then? Well, this bit from their announcement might give you a clue:

"The Guardian is positioning its Open Platform as a commercial venture, requiring partners to carry its advertising as part of its terms and conditions."

Therefore, instead of trying to charge you for content that can easily be duplicated ad infinitum, Guardian will let anyone duplicate and use their content and then slap ads on top of everything. Launch partners include The Cass Sculpture Foundation, which is using Open Platform to add Guardian articles about British artists to its site, as well as Stamen and OpenStreetMap, which developed a service that makes use of users geotagging Guardian articles, positioning articles, images and videos on a map.

Will it work? It's too early to tell, but it definitely beats going out of business, and Guardian is showing some guts by embracing new business models instead of clinging on to old, defunct ones.