Product vs. business
I've been re-reading Steven B. Johnson's excellent essay on the future of news from last March (thanks to Eric Kuhn for pointing me to it again). It makes many great points, but one stood out particularly for me:
[...] there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
I think this distinction is crucial. It's probably true that newspapers as a stand-alone business will have it more difficult in the future (there will probably still be some that are profitable, but not many). But the newspaper as a product, either as part of a bundle of news products (newspapers, magazines, websites, TV shows, Twitter channels, Facebook pages, whatever), or cross-subsidized by, say, a lucrative business intelligence department, most likely has a future.
