Paul Bradshaw’s post on new business models for news was the starting point here, written at a point when online advertising was growing but an online reader was still worth far less to a publisher than a print one. That gap was the whole problem: the revenue arriving from the web did not scale to the cost of the journalism it was replacing.
Bradshaw’s reframing was to stop treating news as a physical product. “The most successful online news operations understand that news is a service, not a product,” he wrote. “The BBC’s success is not just in the resources they have allocated, but the way they have done so because of the culture of a public service organisation.”
Taken seriously, that moves the commercial question from what a copy of the news is worth to what services can be sold alongside it. News organisations sit on a large stock of information about the places they cover — that is the business they are in — and the difficult part is working out which of it answers a need in a community specifically enough that someone will pay for the answer.