I agree with both of these points, although I don't think of the first situation as "news" at all (in a sense that it isn't necessarily dealing with current eve

I agree with both of these points, although I don't think of the first situation as "news" at all (in a sense that it isn't necessarily dealing with current events that require time sensitive delivery). I think what you're digging at here is that you can't just provide a platform for freelance writers to write their pieces and pay them according to popularity - this model doesn't cover all cases. If there is demand for investigative journalism (which often, but not always, requires funding and cooperation) and reporting from dangerous areas, organizations would have to form that fund these endeavors. But, no matter how profitable this might be, this isn't a scalable business, so it isn't lucrative from a startup's point of view. It sounds like organizations like Associated Press will eventually transition to handle scenario two, which they'll publish via Twitter (once it lets content providers monetize their content), and some newspapers will transition to scenario one (once one top-brand newspaper or a startup builds a value-added publishing platform). The rest of the newspapers will simply die and many of the good writers will transition to a freelance model. Of course this gets very fuzzy very quickly, so most of these predictions will likely not pan out this way, but it seems pretty clear where the overall trend is going - technology will decouple a few concepts that are tightly coupled today. News would be decoupled from high quality written content, and production of content will be decoupled from its publishing and delivery.