Comment There was praise aplenty last week when Steve Jobs stepped aside as Apple CEO. Jobs was lauded as the saviour of newspapers and the man who halted the "inevitable" trend towards unpaid or low-paid production of free digital media. But like the Marshall Plan aid, the Jobs Plan aid came at a very high price. Newspapers don't need a saviour, for it is perfectly possible for newspapers to save themselves. Nobody forced newspaper publishers to give away their material for free. Or to bow to the now thoroughly discredited idea that premium content must be given away on the internet at marginal cost. The evangelists demanding this, as James Murdoch correctly pointed out, were simply out to build parasitic businesses on their backs, while peddling a utopian vision based on wishful thinking, not economic reality. But similarly, newspapers need not follow terms set out by Apple, and this week one of the most important publishers refused to knuckle under and was ejected from the party. It may be the best thing that ever happened to it. Apple insists on a 30 per cent cut of recurring subscription revenue, from all content companies, not just magazines and newspapers. Apple blocks companies from the Apple App Store if they dare direct potential subscribers around this tollbooth to a more complicated web signup form. Many publishers have complied, but Pearson's Financial Times , which already has a successful online subscription business, objected. Native apps have many advantages over web pages. The reader