I always thought that the problem statement for rfs1 is excellent - far more insightful than other rfs statements and hints. Perhaps this is because you've spent more time thinking about the problem.

This is an incredibly interesting problem I've thought a lot about, so I'll say the following despite the danger of turning this into discussion about rfs1. Since I first read it, I found myself disagreeing with the following statement:

We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.

I think one of the fundamental questions is what type of content is valuable today (compared to what type of content was valuable two hundred years ago). Back when the newspaper business started, news were extremely desirable and difficult to get (and therefore valuable). Someone actually had to travel to the front lines, record the news, and then break it faster than everyone else in order to make money. The cultural artifact of this remains today - newspapers are still called newspapers, and when you turn on CNN you often see the term breaking news (despite the fact that every other channel is "breaking" the news as well). But this model has almost no differentiating value today - real-time publishing technology is so cheap that anyone can break news, and therefore no one wants to pay for it. News is a cheap commodity, not unlike orange juice.

Today we have an opposite problem - there is an exponential explosion of content, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for services that filter rare, excellent, original content from the rest of the noise (I don't count digg and reddit because they do a very poor job at finding excellent content). People are willing to pay for excellent writers, balanced and insightful opinion pieces, and articles about current events that actually teach us something, rather than tell us what happened. Some "traditional" publications have already figured this out - Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal (although the future of the latter is in question precisely because of potential for declining quality). They didn't completely embrace this model and don't take nearly full advantage of information technology, but they're on the right track - they accept great guest authors, provide valuable and insightful opinion pieces, and give us articles that teach us things. In exchange, their customers have consistently payed up while other publishers have seen a steady loss of readership.

The trick here is branding - Economist has a world class brand that's recognized for their valuable content. Once they get around to using modern technology to take this model to its logical extreme, there is no stopping them. I suppose a startup could do it first if it figures out a good way to quickly build a brand (which shouldn't be hard, considering how little good content is out there and how many people complain about it), but fundamentally there is nothing stopping Economist from doing this - they're already in a perfect position to do it. All they need a little bit of technology (this should be easy), and a bit of a psychological shift in their culture. They're already on the right track - the solution is definitely not too far from their current model.