[chc]

As somebody actually in the newspaper industry, I've been telling everyone who will listen for years now that the future of news does not look like newspapers, not even online ones. The idea of an "online newspaper" is like a horse-drawn carriage with mechanical horses are powered by gasoline — it obviously should be a car, but that's what you'd end up with if you were too tied to the idea of horses to let it go.

The trouble for newspapers is that they're used to having a certain scale and mode of operation. The future of news is small teams running a website with little of the ceremonious structure that defines a newspaper. As long as they're lean, they'll be able to take in enough revenue to keep writers living like writers mostly do today. But I don't think there's any way to squeeze the New York Times into that shape.

[euroclydon]

Who pays for investigative journalism in that paradigm? It sounds like the whole concept of a journalist is going out the window. It will be up to the soldier to write his own account of a battle, rather than an embedded journalist, etc, etc.

[chc]

You seem to be using an extremely narrow definition of "investigative journalism." Most investigative journalism will go on about as much as it always has. Some member of the team will investigate a topic and write about it. That's what investigative journalism is.

If you specifically mean war reporting, I don't know. I suspect some kind of nonprofit will spring up to fund reports on wars, but that's contingent on it actually being something any appreciable number of people value as much as it costs.

[rmc]

What's your idea of the future of news?