[camccann]

Someday soon we're going to reach the end-game: ad-blocking will become ubiquitous in browsers, and this long, strange nightmare of "free" content and "zero marginal costs" will have to yield to the simple reality that content costs money to produce.

Which doesn't actually address the problem of getting any significant number of people to willingly pay for it.

It's entirely possible that the end game will not be "oh well, time to pay for content again", but rather "remember the good old days, when content actually existed?"

[JCThoughtscream]

Both of your views are, in my opinion, far too pessimistic, and not representative of the reality of the developing industry.

The fact is that there is content being generated online - and while the prevalence of linkblogs and content aggregates get all the, ahem, press, I suspect that they're not close to being a majority, or even all that significant a minority, of the various efforts currently made to evolve the business facet of news to fit the new digital paradigm.

As for the aforementioned ragtag band of hacker journalists needing to feed themselves at the end of the day, hell - even print media took decades, if not centuries, to settle on what is now a static and matured advertising structure and method. Do you really think a whole generation of newsfolks that've grown up completely immersed in the frenetically paced digital world /won't/ figure out a way to carve a profitable niche from it all?

The fact is that the factors that've kept newspapers relevant even as radio and televised news quickly outstripped them in influence and coverage don't hold up so well in the face of online news. Not when online news offers the exact same content for cheaper overhead for producers, advertisers /and/ audiences, and without the physical constraints of the standard tabloid sheet, quality of print, incompatibility with other media, or the untimeliness of once-daily release. It shouldn't at all come as a surprise that there'll be a few enterprising minds that'll seek to take advantage of these blatant advantages and exploit them for personal gain.

If you can trust people for anything, it's in finding a way to profit. And I fully trust my generation of journalists and editors to find a way. As ideological as it makes me sound, Capitalism really did get that bit right.

[pyre]

> If you can trust people for anything, it's in finding a way to profit. And I fully trust my generation of journalists and editors to find a way. As ideological as it makes me sound, Capitalism really did get that bit right.

It's important to note that this doesn't exclude the possibility that they all become corporate shills for one company or another. Not that I believe such a thing will happen, 'they will find a way to profit' doesn't always connect up with the more romanticized David-vs-Goliath imagery of 'hacker/journalist' rebelling against the mainstream media establishment.

[gaius]

Do you really think a whole generation of newsfolks that've grown up completely immersed in the frenetically paced digital world /won't/ figure out a way to carve a profitable niche from it all?

There already is such a model. If you look at Reuters for example, you can read the news delayed by 20 minutes at reuters.com for free, or you can pay and have it delivered in real-time to your Reuters terminal.

And now a story: Reuters in London had a big Jumbotron screen outside their headquarters. A crowd gathered there to hear whether London had gotten the 2012 Olympics. The people in the surrounding buildings were all traders and got the news and spread it to the crowd long before the Jumbotron updated. That was rather embarassing and a quick hack was done to allow marketing folks to override the delay if necessary...