“The Death of News”
From Salon’s Gary Kamiya (http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/):
Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don’t usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast.
From The New York Times op-ed by Swenson & Schmidt (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html):
Although the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down…
The other option, unmentioned by either author, is the nationalization of journalism a la the UK’s BBC. The quality of PBS’s Frontline suggests the attractiveness of this approach.