A lot of blogs just link to a NP story, and then provide commentary.

The main thing killing the MSM is that bloggers by and large are willing to provide shitloads of content for free. Until that dynamic is controlled the pay for content media is going to have a hard time on its hands.

Well reported Will, and Randy!

Well reported, Will!

It’s more than good to see you back here again!

Don’t be such a stranger! Arguably, your absence is the reason for that debacle at The Hub during the last few days!

Keep on typin’ man! Keep on typin’! And I’ll keep reading!

Deal?

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

Government policies and the economic downturn have some effect on the timing, but it was going to happen eventually. Newspapers are now monastic scribes, facing the invention of the printing press.

Even if they could wipe out all their debt, they’d still still lose money on a product that can’t compete with the Web.