Marcel Weiss's Library tagged newspapers →  View Popular

, the internet offers its own democratic way of filtering content, allowing what people think is important, relevant and interesting to be aggregated and heard. It may be messy and far from perfect, but then, so is democracy.

Newspapers, in contrast, are many things, but they are not democratic. They are hierarchical authoritarian structures designed to control and shape information. This is not to say they don’t provide a societal benefit—their content contributes to the public discourse. However, how is having a few major media outlets deciding “what is news” democratic, or even good for democracy? The newspaper model isn’t about expanding free speech; it is about limiting it to force readers to listen to what the editor prescribes. When is the last time you had an opinion piece or letter published in a newspaper? There are many more voices in America that deserve to be heard aside from Ivy League educated editors and journalists.

This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:

Right now, Apple doesn't make money on iTunes, but it loves the service because it has helped the company sell nearly 200 million iPods and some 13 million iPhones to date. Apple would be interested in developing an iNews service only if it would move more iPods (or a new tablet version, rumored to be in the works). Given the newspaper industry's track record of convincing readers to pay up, it's doubtful newspapers would be attractive enough to lure in new Apple customers. (By most estimates Amazon has sold only 500,000 Kindles since its launch, hardly a number to brag about.) The sad fact is that journalism and books, while culturally invaluable, don't have the consumer demand that music and videos do. "The only places nickel and dimes work—ring tones, music and in-game currency—is when there's an end-to-end monopoly," notes Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of new media at NYU and an early micropayment critic.

But the monopoly newspapers once commanded has been obliterated by the Internet. How would a newspaper that adopted a micropayment system compete with outlets that remained free? If the Times went behind a micropayment pay-wall, couldn't the Washington Post undercut them and attract a lot of readers seeking free, quality news?

I hope by now I’ve made it clear that I think free makes the most sense not just for the Times or the Journal but for virtually every newspaper including the one I work for. There are those — like former journalists Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist and Dorian Benkoil at Corante who disagree, and think that subscription is a model that works, but they are wrong.

I should clarify that. They are right in the short term, but wrong in the long term. As the Times has admitted, charging people for content created a subscription business that made money, but one that wasn’t growing very much (if at all). I’m not privy to the numbers at the Globe and Mail, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have seen a similar pattern.