Nope. Not as such anyway. I was saying you can't seem to go from paying steady dollars for a brand name to paying pennies per article.

Personally I think there's a minimum pain point for parting with your money, and if the value of a product falls beneath that for enough people, then it's just not viable under any conditions in that market - it won't matter how well you do what you do, or how cheaply, you'll have to change the product somewhat. I suspect newspapers are going that way for a couple of reasons. One being that to appreciate high quality news requires a high-quality education so they can't leverage that aspect of things particularly well to win that way.

I think. -chews her lip- I suspect if you want to look at news as a product then you have to look at where its value comes from and start splitting that out and optimising for it. Information is part of it - where does most of that come from these days? Press releases. Journal articles - which is to say when scientists want to push their press releases. Aggregating others news sites - which is to say the press releases of press releases. Most of the information content of news these days is aggregation, not writing.

The commentary? The commentary in news isn't up to much. (Well, see appreciating HQ news requires HQ ed - not a good value proposition, I suspect.) You read a couple of books on the history of an issue and then read the newspaper about it and the newspaper rarely has anything to say that would impress a first year student. And there's a more serious problem represented by comments - if people ever manage to fix the rating systems to allow trust metrics to generalise properly - how many reporters can you retain vs how many commentators are their on the net? Someone out there is going to be an expert, if we ever find a way to leverage trustworthy reputation in a meaningful manner then the odds are the people who are going to be listened to aren't in your newsroom.

What's the other service news serves? I think that one's obviously entertainment.

So. If you wanted to do news and make money at it... how might you do it? I guess you might make your newspaper a bot, and have it process press releases. And you would tag those with metadata and run a ticker service - like the stock markets. And when a subject was clicked on in the ticker, that would link into short summaries of all the press releases on the subject - ordered chronologically and by how closely they related to the original subject - as objects, linked tiles perhaps, on the same page. Commentary from the top rating authors according to your rating system could be in boxes connected to the individual stories when someone clicked to expand them, or rolled over them.

And that might be how people could use your service to explore the information side of things from a perspective that they couldn't do on their own. Your service could become an aggregation/visual research tool that people could use to rapidly walk through very large subject areas.

And the other side of things? Entertainment? I think we've seen it. I think it's reddit. Oh, maybe not Reddit reddit - but something similar. You might organise your front page using drag and drop stack rating of the summary tiles and just do it so that it doesn't organise them by relational metadata but by time and popularity.

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I don't know, that's one way you might try to shake things up - and that's a service that I might consider buying into because it would allow much more powerful capabilities for researching a subject than google does.

However, the long and the short of it is: I think news is going to have to change fairly radically to leverage what value there is left in it. Because at the moment you have to look at a newspaper and ask yourself: What does it actually do in terms of creating value? Does it give people any new ways of looking at things, does it make anything easier for people that they won't shortly be able to do for themselves?

I can't see it managing to reach over that pain barrier of actually parting with your money unless there are no less painful alternatives available otherwise. If it's just a middle man, and nothing else besides, then I think its disease is terminal.