However, while I was watching the documentary 'Spotlight', which was The Globe's 2002 expose on the Roman Catholic church, it occurred to me - How are good newspapers to survive and turn a profit? Readers are unwilling to pay/subscribe and online ad revenue is falling.
It's a genuine problem and I sure hope some of these newspapers survive and are still around a decade from now. The WSJ, NYT, and WaPos will, but what about some of the the others?
1. Make certain articles freely available. They're not stupid--they can figure out which ones will draw people in.
2. Do it LWN-style: the current week's edition requires a subscription, after that it's free. If it's well-written, people will pay to not be a week behind.
They might not. It doesn't surprise me, nobody wants to read objective news anymore. They'd rather seek out and read things that confirm their biases. It's one of the paradoxes of choice; more information and we actually learn less.
And in some countries they actually are. There are laws in some European countries where you always have to disclose the full price and in case of reductions and offers you have to clearly show the original price.