Time to debunk “Saving journalism, a farthing at a time”

Publishers need a profit, like any other business, but that doesn’t mean they all deserve to turn one, and certainly not at the expense of better, more innovative publishing businesses that are waiting around the corner.

SHOOT: Bottom line, the Media is going to contract in tandem with every other industry, probably even more so. Newspapers and magazines in particular are going to be shed like winter feathers in spring. The lean innovators will survive, and I'd predict these will include talented bloggers {like me] and streamlined corporates with strong brands. There aren't many of either which is a tremendous opportunity for the opportunists out there.

Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news. - Marshall W. Van Alstyne

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Fisher correctly points out the dismal state of the economy has driven advertising revenues down, and this puts newspapers in dire need of finding out how it should subsidize its operations in different ways, with the realization that the printing part of the equation is inevitably going to fade away and that there’s too little money to be made from online advertising to make up for the costs of transferring its entire publishing business (as it operates today) to the Web. The rest of his opinion piece comes down to this: wishful thinking and misunderstanding. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation, and in large part they have themselves to blame for that. Fine with me if they want to escape from that situation by retreating behind paywalls - in fact, I encourage them to do so and die there soon so we can kiss that idea goodbye once and for all. Introduce paywalls, ease the choice for news addicts, see what happens.