The failure of legacy print publishing isn't about advertising. The failure of legacy digital publishing isn't about advertising. Information needs to be treated as you would any physical asset. The primary difference is that information is the most liquid asset in the world. Information has very few barriers to transmission, supply is almost entirely an artificial constraint and only a question of time and demand before a market for information is satisfied.
What that means is that print papers are slow transmission conduits with a relatively high artificial barrier on supply. Information follows diffusion principles in that it naturally wants to move from high to low states. Got secrets? ;)
Snazzy UIs, native readers and whatever kind of third-party aggregator everyone wants to build will be a failure. I know for fact that if I paid journalists anything, they would write on nwzPaper; no questions asked.
At a 13% proficient literacy rate in the US, and worse in most of the world, it's a challenge to cultivate a new journalism environment online, but it is absolutely a solvable problem.
Patch.com, Examiner.com and Yahoo's associated content have all but thrown in the towel. AOL has bet big on Armstrong and Patch and per their February job req, it looks like they want to double down!
The new journalism content and revenue model can only develop on top of the right platform. The stakes are quite high as the first winner will also win many adjacent markets as well!
I am biased, but I've got years of thinking and development into developing an actual platform solution that can efficiently scale global. Six months of beta knowledge and data and the next iteration coming soon.