Of course, the flip side to that is you’d better keep the right reporters on your staff to do that killer journalism. I’m guessing that most newspapers retain their best reporters during layoffs, but I also know that personalities and salaries can come into play and sometimes a higher-paid and/or outspoken critic in a newsroom can get the axe over a lesser-talented by faithful, follows-orders writer.

In regards to charging for content, I’m not against all pay walls. It’s a matter of supply and demand. Especially for regional and national news, most stories are commodity. If a news organization like the NY Times or CNN took a unilateral move and put all of their content behind a pay wall, people would just go elsewhere. Philosophically, however, I’m much more of a “freetard” in the sense that I want to create value by giving things away. I’d recommend reading Charles Stross’ Accelerando for a better exploration of this.

The whole business model thing is huge, but it’s meant to be huge. There isn’t going to be a single answer, but rather a multitude of answers. If you’re creating something of value, then logically you should be able to monetize it.

I feel like a lot of the problem was largely that value was lacking in the mainstream media products before the internet, and that those products were so capital-intensive to produce that the market barrier to entry kept the competition (and the quality) minimal. Just before the internet started becoming a major destination for news, the production of journalistic media was largely consolidated into the hands of a few, proprietary, and heavily capitalized competitors. Basically, if you didn’t like what was on CNN, you had either Fox or MSNBC as alternatives. Now anyone who has access to a computer could potentially be an alternative.

I’m curious, though, if you suggest increasing online value, would you be open to the idea of charging for content? I’ve seen this done in a few places, where essentially their product is of a journalistic quality in such high demand by its readership that they have managed to survive on charging for content. I still sort of repel from the idea, a little bit, because I’m generally not a fan of constructing paid-membership classes of the informed while the rest of us banter about with sub-grammatical vitriol on YouTube comment boards. It might happen anyway.

Or, perhaps, the content is of such a quality that it attracts enough viewership to warrant high-paying ad placement? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Crosscut seem to be attempting this route, but the success so far has been limited.

Where I see a major challenge is that it’s hard for a journalistic operation to finance itself when a lot of the revenue sources have been “staffed out” to craigslist, eBay, and others, while their more-or-less unintentional syndicates like Facebook, YouTube, and Google are getting the ad traffic. Newspapers and the AP end up only with the costs: that is, paying people for the time and energy it takes to produce and deliver the content. I think improving the quality of content and dedicating resources toward delivery will no doubt improve their chances. And I think flattening the newsroom is an obvious move. But how exactly, when we get right down to it, we can pay the person who has to grill the shit out of the mayor in an interview for the time they spend doing it remains somewhat elusive. (Or should we, even?)

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this, because I admittedly have no answer. The best-case seems like something where the content’s so good you can charge for it, but if that were to become widespread enough to finance journalism, I think the copyright would become unenforceable. Plus it would sorta limit the broad-based participation element I think is vital, and you mention as so in third section. I’m thinking a model more along the lines of community-supported agriculture, Group Health, or community land trusts might be closer to what needs to happen. You might, essentially, pay on the front-end for news you get on the back-end.

Community and open source stuff are all good, but at the end of the day, someone has to fork over some cash. Thoughts?