There's an interesting UK/US divide here -- I'm in the UK, where most papers don't have a subscription, and where the cover price contributes substantially less

There's an interesting UK/US divide here -- I'm in the UK, where most papers don't have a subscription, and where the cover price contributes substantially less to a paper's revenue. That said, even at their 1960s best I think it still stands that US readers "don't pay for content". They paid for less than half of operating costs by your figures, and this in what we now think of as a newspaper gilded age where competition was substantially less. Now you may say that operating costs can be lower today, and would be vastly lower if the dead trees were out of the picture, and you'd be correct -- but it's still not a rosy picture for journalism if it has to depend on selling its wares directly to the public, instead of selling the public to advertisers. It calls for a complete culture shift on both sides: journalism has in the past been subsidised so heavily by advertising that readers have never had to bear the expense of its creation. That's the real problem, which the author doesn't really get across. It's not that people won't pay for online content at all, it's that they won't pay enough -- they won't pay enough to meet the costs of creating it, and they certainly won't pay enough to meet the current profits that persuaded investors to back newspapers. Yet without their regional monopolies, the media groups can't make enough from advertising to cover the shortfall. That's why the talk is now all about alternative business models. It's just difficult to think of a plausible one, because by its very nature journalism burns up cash. It's somewhat similar to venture funding, in that you pay reporters and photographers good money, and often they come up with nothing and only occasionally hit the jackpot. To get investors to take those sorts of risks with cash, there has to be a good return. And for the sums that we're talking about here, the opportunity cost of sinking it into journalism can be very high indeed.