The firrst, from Time Magazine, says there's some hope in a future "micropayment" system where, like we've become accustomed to paying $0.99 for a song on iTunes, we'll someday pay a couple pennies for each news story we read on iNews (or, more likely, each news source's Web platform):
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
In the NY Times, David Carr advocates for something similar. He also points out that the traditional regulations that have prevented newspaper mergers in a single market are outdated and have prevented some necessary consolidation. I'd like to add that antitrust laws keeping newspapers and TV stations from merging are also too old-fashioned, at some point they're both going to be doing the same thing on the Web, so we might as well get them working together now. The traditional barriers are meaningless, and meanwhile the old stalwarts are crumbling. Here's the money quote from newspaper analyst John Morton:
“Only newspapers are economically organized to cover a broad swath of events,” he said. “A lot of aggregators have been taking advantage of that, and pretty soon, there will be nothing to aggregate. But that can’t really be discussed among newspaper owners because of antitrust problems.”Clearly, newspapers have done a lot to get themselves in this hole. But outdated regulations shouldn't be making the problem worse.
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