I've thought a lot about the plight of newspapers, but still struggle to get my thoughts into black and white. I apologise if this ends up overly wordy and/or m

I've thought a lot about the plight of newspapers, but still struggle to get my thoughts into black and white. I apologise if this ends up overly wordy and/or makes no sense at all. The way I see it the newspapers are now facing an existential crisis, and I personally see no easy way forward for them. Print sales have been on the decline for the last 20 years and with it a decline in their ability to sell valuable advertising. I think we all know that newspaper prices are subsidised by advertising, so falling advertising sales, will inevitably lead to a rise in newspaper prices. With online advertising dominated by the big internet companies that leaves a small slice of the pie for the newspaper publishers, and correspondingly a need to chase the algorithms to try to get clicks. This, inevitably, is leading to a race to the bottom to chase every last penny of advertising. The only way to save themselves is to get people to pay for journalism, but this presents many obstacles. Nobody wants to pay for anything on the internet - we have all been trained to expect everything for free. Even those of us who are willing (and financially able) to pay for journalism now have an expectation of being able to access a variety of sources and won't necessarily want to pay for subscriptions to a variety of publications. Far too expensive. Unfortunately, a paid news aggregation site seems like a pipe dream right now. No publication wants to lose their brand under someone else's banner; and you can't really blame them for that. Even if you could find a way, no one would be able to agree how payment should work. A payment per article click would just lead to a similar situation to today, with click-bait headlines designed to draw you into clicking on poor quality articles. We all know that micro-payments haven't managed to make any kind of traction. So we have the current situation where those publications that do have quality journalism have a hard time getting reader attention away from a deluge of click-bait articles designed to stir base emotions so they will be shared widely by incensed readers, thus earning more money. Those that can are having a hard time finding funding, usually relying on a mixture of advertising, begging for reader donations, and paywalls. Meanwhile, the industry as a whole is on a slow death spiral whilst readers are begging for ways to get articles from a wide variety of sources at a fair price, but no one can think of any feasible way to offer this. That's my own personal, probably biased and non-objective, view on the situation. What do you all think? Am I right? Wrong? A complete idiot? I'd love some feedback. Something else I'd love to know: how many of you out there have subscriptions to one or more news publications or make donations to a small news publication?