The internet has had a broadly similar effect on the production of news and music. It has made both readily available, often for no cost. This has created an expectation that such products, be it news or music, should be free. But in both cases, someone somewhere is still working their butt off to provide a service and needs to get paid so they can continue existing.

I’m not very knowledgable about the business models the music industry is implementing to remedy this, though people do seem willing to purchase tracks through iTunes and such so maybe the music men will eventually recoup their revenue that way.

But as far as I’m aware, and I could be wrong, subscriptions to news sites have tended not to work too well, at least for UK papers. I would argue this is largely due to the existence of the BBC. Any UK paper considering charging subscriptions for its site risks losing traffic to the Beeb which doesn’t have to worry about such things, thanks to the licence fee.

As it is now online, so it has long been in print, advertising pays for the content. Unfortunately, the presence of free news online seems to be influencing the expectations of the newspaper-buying public. This is purely anecdotal, drawn from my own experience, but increasingly, people seem to expect good quality news for free. And I’m afraid that’s just not how it works.

We produce two papers. Both come out on a Friday. One costs 40p and the other is free. People can pick it up the free paper from the office and it is also delivered through the door of most houses throughout the area.

The free sheet makes its money by selling a lot of space to advertisers; it usually has one full page of news, the front page, and that’s it. In recent weeks, we’ve had people in complaining it has too many adverts in. But they don’t make the connection between the number of adverts, the amount of news and the lack of cover price. If you’re paying nothing, why should you expect quality journalism?

You have to pay to get news because it takes effort to produce. We put the decent stories, the ones that took the work, in the paid for paper. It’s only 40p. It probably won’t kill you to buy it.

Being informed about the world is not a right. It’s a privilege, and one you have to pay for, if you don’t do the actual digging yourself.

In my ideal and probably unworkable business model for journalism, people would pay a financially viable amount for a year’s worth of news, without adverts, and the world’s journalists would publish stories as and when things actually happened, rather than scurrying 24/7 to generate copy from sometimes what are complete non-stories. If the subscription were large enough, journalists might even work harder over sustained lengths of time to find really good stories… who knows?

I originally assumed this idea was completely unworkable… imagine subscribing to a magazine and receiving it on a random basis. A one week gap. A one month gap. A two day gap. But regular production is an attempt to impose an order on a something that is not uniform and never will be. And when you publish less-than-brilliant stories, to fill the gaps between the good stories, people do notice. It’s a catch-22. People have become used to 24 hour news, but they also want quality. Unfortunately, it’s just not always feasible.

But, and it’s a big but, perhaps one day our consumption of news will evolve to the point where we subscribe to websites, and receive e-mail alerts to let us know when something new has happened, whenever that might be.

Alright “new” things happen all the time. But not all of them are interesting. I’ll pick a news provider and they can let me know when something worthwhile has occurred.

Hm. I seem to have reached almost the opposite conclusion to just over a year ago. Am I now in favour of personally-tailored news sources? Is this really any different to what we have now?