I doubt the advertising model will be satisfying in the future. And therefore I exppect a kind of micropayment system to come up and replace it, at least partially. So: you have a contract with a couple of “newspapers” (or syndicates), and you agree to a payment of let’s say $0.05 per view, without a fixed fee (as was the case with TimesSelect). Something like that.

What do yu think?

Mat

So if I do that I can still dance on the grave of Times-Select? :-)

And what do we have to do to get comment preview in this place?

I do find all the exploration that is going on in trying to find new ways to sustain journalism is exciting, even though it isn’t at all clear that anyone has found a viable model yet.

Of course, as a software guy, I am a congenital optimist, in spite of 15 years evidence to the contrary.

What I hoped to do in this post was say, “Hey, everyone, while we celebrate the ‘demise of Times Select as a triumph for the Web,’ let’s just remember there’s this elephant in the room — that the business model of old-style journalism is disintegrating in our fingers and after 13 years of the Web industry we still don’t know how to replace it.” I don’t think of you as one of the people who is blithely ignoring, or even cavalierly downplaying, that point. I just found your post a convenient starting point to review it. If it seemed like I was somehow targeting your post as a bad example, my apologies.

To the extent that I hope for a “deeper coming to terms,” I guess I see that as a matter of remaining conscious, throughout all our celebrations and explorations of the Web’s new freedoms and possibilities, of two things: One, that we’re living through one of history’s big industrial transformations, and those transformations always carry a human cost, and it’s often very convenient for those who benefit from such transformations to put the human cost to the back of their minds. Two, that it’s worth acknowledging that as of right now, it looks like the “newsroom of the future” — whatever it is and however it evolves in this new media space — might well be one with lower wages, less job security and fewer overall paying jobs than the newsrooms of the past. It might also be a place with more freedom, more room to innovate, more surprises and more discovery.

None of us knows how all these pluses and minuses will balance out. Let’s just all try to keep a clear inventory of all said pluses and minuses as we explore what our programmer friends call “the problem space.” I’ve always found your inventory pretty thorough, Jay.

As you probably know, I don’t disagree at all with your analysis: Online revenue is not making up for lost print revenue gained under monopoly conditions. Web advertising will grow but not at anything like a replacement rate. Reyling on one revenue stream–web ads–is risky; and when there is a downturn, as we know there will be, the results are likely to be very ugly. While print revenue is slipping away, it doesn’t appear possible to charge online, whether you’re Slate, The Chicago Reader or the New York Times. An economic model that would pay for news staffs of the same size is nowhere to be found.

And so after I acknowledge all that–and I do acknowledge the bitter truth of it–what am I supposed to do, as a writer and observer of the scene…. I mean to show that I am not being cavalier, to “come to terms” with the bottom line in financing good journalism?

Should I work on diminishing people’s expectations of what journalism can in the future be? Would that be helpful?

Should I put my hands on my hips, declare real journalism expensive, and ask other people, the people crowing about the Internet: hey, where’s the money going to come from?

Should I be thinking up new revenue opportunities for the people at news companies who get paid to think about revenue opportunities?

Should I be grabbing venture capital and spending it on business models I have no reason to think would work?

I should not sugarcoat it; that much I get. Don’t (cavalierly) assume that Web revenue will pick up the slack when so far there is not much evidence that it will. Don’t portray the demise of Times-Select as a triumph for the Web when it’s really just the sad end of a misguided strategy that was ill-matched to the Web. I get that. I do.

What I don’t get is what you have in mind by coming to terms with the bottom line in the journalism business today, by meeting it “head on.” I guess I don’t know how to do that. So I have done thing I do know how to do: warn against legacy media thinking, discredit the curmudgeons who are anti-Web or willfully ignorant of it, denounce dumb ideas like “make Google pay reparations,” describe as best I can how I think the Web works journalistically, and try to figure out how a combination of pro and amateur might create new firepower, since there is no economic model for the old firepower.

That’s my version of head-on. It is neither satisfying nor adequate; that much I know. I agree with you that it does not look like a solution to anything. But it’s the only course I could figure out for coming to terms with where the business is. There seems to be some deeper coming to terms that you wish to see happen. Can you give us a hint?