[jmhnilbog]

Isn't the value of the article completely divorced from the time it took to write it? (I don't pay more for a movie that took five years to make than one that took a week.)

News is one of the more obvious examples that things become less valuable as more people have access. If I am the only person in a room to have read an article, I am more interesting at a party. If everyone read it, I might as well be discussing the weather. If I find out about an earnings report a microsecond before other investors, that news is much more valuable to me than it is to them.

Journalists also have to deal with instances where weeks of effort failt to uncover anything worth writing about. The patron/artist model might be the only way to support individual journalists. It might turn out that journalism looks a LOT like private investigation or corporate espionage.