Salvation for newspapers

News will be saved by a change in financial structure not a new technology

Journalists need to be paid. We all need them, so we have to pay..

It is a matter simply of how?

1 Pay-walls - don't work as this is simply propping up an industry (Printing) that is the very one that has to change. No one wants to pay by issue or by month for a subscription to a newspaper where they might read only a couple of articles - as there are millions more out there on the web and they are easy to reach.

2 Micro-payments - no one has tried this yet. It requires a close cooperation between banks, web sites, maybe ISPs, and journalists. But it worth thinking about

3 Or it could be about merger of delivery pipes and content creators. ISPs and journalists. The ISP delivers the paper if you subscribe to them, change ISP, loose you paper. But this rebels against Internet transparency. TV cable services, or maybe encrypted IP TV services could include the paper in the subscription. The old story of "lock up the pipe".

4 It could be Sky that now delivers both TV and News papers, as your computer gets merged with your TV. This sounds a lot more likely to me.

What an opportunity for a hardware maker like Apple, plus a broadcasters like the BBC to get together and make a product which is an IP TV plus news reader. All over the open transparent internet. But paid for by subs or licence fee. Oh but we have that, no? The BBC has a web site and a TV channel, What is missing is the openness to let all journalists use it and get paid by readership.

But wait, all newspapers are today producing video clips of the news, what happens if they become TV broadcasters in their own right? The question remains how to get paid, as advertising won't be enough. It needs ownership of the pipe? Encryption? Pay-per-view? Micro-payments?

It is the finance side that needs sorting, not the technology. Technology is not going to give the answer.