Since many of us don't have any money, does that mean were going to enter the Dark Ages again?

Maybe they'll start speaking and writing in Latin again, so they can keep the lowly ignorant?

The only writers making any money, will be those who dont piss off the Plutocracy.

Will Time magazine be fair and balanced. Or will David Brooks represent the lefts view?

America made in our image   because we paid for it?   

Social activist writers need not apply, you're going to be blacklisted anyways.

I hope PBS can make it.

Have they cut our lines of communications?

Can we go back to ol fashioned radio waves, or have all of those easliy accessable frequencies, been gobbled up by Corporate interests?  

In the office where I work, there is an old art-deco type scale.  (In fact, I saw an exact copy of it recently on PawnStars.)  It probably used to be on subway platforms or outside a Woolworths.  It advertises that you get the first 5 pounds free, and indeed, when you step onto it, the needle moves and stops at 5 pounds.  You then put in a penny to get your weight, but the hook is, you can set the dial on the scale and if you guess your weight correctly, you get your penny back.  Now, even adjusting for inflation, how big a money-maker could that have been?  I mean, even if you got 100 people a day to weigh themselves, (slightly more than 4 people an hour) and they all guessed their weight incorrectly, you still only made a dollar.  But the important part of course, was that the first 5 pounds were FREE! 

P.S. Being a writer is not a profession to undertake with the thought of making a lot of money from it.  If playwrights ever thought about how many people actually make a decent living from writing plays, well, no-one would ever write plays...

I guess that I'm one of those professional writers. The short answer is yes, I would like to be paid.

More broadly, it's not just the writers. Opinions pieces are cheap, but running a real journalism outfit costs money. Without money, there is no news.

That said, the NYT paywall represents a 20th century financial model that no longer works.

Before the Internet, most people who were interested in the news subscribed to a few newspapers and magazines, watched the network news shows in the evening, and perhaps listened to the radio on the way to work. All their news came from four or five sources.

The NYT paywall attemps to force people back into that old model. Few people are willing to pay for more than a couple of $20 subscriptions. If every website charged such a fee, people would get their news from a small number of sources, like in the old days.

But no one wants that, and there's no reason to go back to that. Moreover, it's a moot point b/c social media has made that impossible. How could you share a link to an article that your friends and followers don't subscribe to? (Incidentally, DD, the NYT wisely does not count Twitter links against the paywall, so if you want to read the Times, just follow it on Twitter.)

What we need is some kind of micropayment system so that people can pay for their news without an exclusive, all-you-can-eat subscription fee. It's shocking to me that no one has built that yet. Major media outlets should agree to a standard that would require readers to set up accounts from which a few cents would be deducted for each read. There's nothing particularly difficult about developing such technology, but it's nonetheless never taken hold.

Donal posted this on the In the News section, Dick.  Beats me; but I get the messages at the Times about how I'm coming close to my maximum use for the month.   I mentally say, "Yikers!"

I have mixed feelings about advertising.  Certainly it can be annoying.  It can also be entertaining and informative.  And for better or worse, we are who we are largely because advertising has paid for so much of the infotainment that informs our worldviews and educates us more effectively than any school ever did.  Maybe it is/was just easier to ignore offline advertising.  Not many read the classified ads everyday but they were always there, a newspaper's bread and butter.  Newspapers really need new revenue streams since the migration of Help Wanted, Real Estate and Personals online.  Without them it just may be back to the dark ages for all us free riders. :D

Writing this caused me to wonder if anyone has studied how the hit to offline Help Wanteds has affected unemployment.  Time to Google?

... good writers should be paid for their labor ...

Okay Day ...

Think about this ...

How much money did John Hancock earn for his signature on the Declaration of Independence? How much money did any of the signators make off that one and the Constitution?

In the Age of the Internet ... found wedged between the current Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius those authors of originals work found within the Net of Ether are on a global stage for the masses to hear hear their words. If the words have meaning then the author has talent. That implies entities seek to secure their service.  Those who fail to excite the ether are destined to reside in the Halls of Google and perhaps one day some one may become enlightened to the words once written long after the author has died.