Bring together a bunch of journalists and the talk will inevitably come round to the state of the industry, how the young don’t buy newspapers, how no one wants to pay for news anymore and the like. This is a familiar litany of complaints but it overlooks a fundamental issue in the business of journalism. News has always been pretty much free to consumers. As Chris Anderson points out in

Author Kevin Kelly is blogging as he writes his new book on technology, The Technium. A post highlighted by BoingBoing discusses the meaning of value in a digital world where the Internet “copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it”. Kelly goes on to argue that when “copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free,

The world is shifting towards a model where everything is free – free software, free music, and, of course, free news. The question is what is the cost of free. How much are we prepared to pay for the privilege of “free”, asks the ReadWriteWeb: We are raising a generation of kids who do not want to pay monthly subscriptions for anything. Give me stuff for free and stick some