[SketchySeaBeast]

So what's the impetus for the news business to be available online? If the world wide web should be a free love utopia of data slurping why would these agencies, who have been built on the assumption that the creation and presentation of their data has an inherent worth? How do they get remunerated for their efforts? Or do they just never try to take advantage of this new epoch and die off, leaving us with a billion half-assed citizen journalists?

[krageon]

I would pay for a source of journalism that had any actual effort put in it and wasn't blatantly and hilariously wrong almost all of the time. Sadly news agencies don't fit that bill at all.

[malnourish]

Read reuters, you don't have to pay for it.

[SketchySeaBeast]

So do you/would you pay for something like the New York times?

[michaelmrose]

I see nothing wrong with them charging money for their work they just can't depend on being able to exercise absolute control over the presentation because instead of being dumb data to be displayed on a remote device its code to be run on the end users device.

You can't separate all the interesting aspects of this distinction and ignore the ones you don't like.