The answer to the iTunes of Journalism, is, of course, an ad-free subscription P2P Newswire service. Tailored news delivered automatically via a mesh of servers and clients – the system will still work in case of major grid outages. The pay website model has the problem of success and catastrophe dropping its service, therefor rendering it unwieldy at best or completely unfunctional at worse. 9/11 shuttered news sites for a time because their servers went into overload from the increased demand. But if the news service was a p2p service, the more people that logged on, the faster the news service itself would work. In fact, it is the ONLY way a pay service could work in time of disaster. Allow ad-based access to articles from the newswire on the web, but no commenting ability. Make the community pay-for play, even if it’s just a small fee to help keep the master p2p mesh (scatter servers in datacenters around the world, so no one location can cause a news outage, the last thing you need in a crisis) up and running. You wouldn’t even need huge beefy servers, anyone’s computer can run a p2p network. You’d just need a lot of storage, for the database. The hottest news articles will download the fastest because they will be archived on every reader’s computer. Important news headlines can be broadcast through this network, accelerating as they go.
Security would be of utmost importance, but it always is.
In any case, monolithic journalism as we knew it must dissolve. With an enhanced P2P network, people can link their blogs to their accounts, and have their blogs (whether internal or hosted on their own external server) geotagged so news stories near them can include links to local blogs that reference the subject material. Official journalism colored by the people’s voice. We know, as a society, that people at the top can be well rotten too, and we all have a stake in the future of America. No non-participatory news network will do.
In the NYT story, he mentions some websites that are pay-for-play news outlets, and lets loose their modest number in relation to their circulation numbers. A fairly high ratio. What I want to know is how many of those web subscribers are folk that used to be paper subscribers, and if the number of web subscribers is greater or less than the number of print subscribers they’ve bled over the past 15 years.