I've said it before: There is no value in proper journalism because there's too damn much of it in the market. I think the subscriber model will work much better once 70% of these companies have died off and the remainder can get back to real journalism. If the better ones have to survive the storm by taking on sponsored content, that's what has to happen.

At one time we had tons of newspapers for every moderately large city, and now all of those papers are now online and expect to make money covering all the world's news like they did before. The problem with that is none of them are geographically limited anymore, they distribute everywhere, which probably sounded awesome to them until they realized all their old competitors and a couple million more they had never heard of were all doing the same thing and eating their lunch.

The problem with news online right now is there is just way too much of it, there is demand, but when you can get more or less the same information on 5,000 different sites, who the hell cares what your particular site has to offer? Add to it some blocking users of adblock or switching to a subscriber only model, and you have a clear reason why these companies can't make money.