> On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources. This is huge. For a story that anyone can

> On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources. This is huge. For a story that anyone can cover ("Cat Stuck in Tree!"), there's mass-market competition where a hundred players can run their own versions of the same story. If one of those players is willing to work for free (or Reddit karma, or 'exposure', or whatever else), then the value of that information drops to ~$0. Mass market journals used to get by on marginal costs, but those are ~0 too now. What they have left to offer is writing quality and accuracy, but its increasingly looking like those aren't worth what they cost. And the quality dilution of high-end journalism has made the problem worse, by driving journalists into ever-more-direct competition with the free sources they can't possibly outprice.