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From TFA:

Would any of the currently proposed net neutrality laws prevent Cablevision from charging other people for web content that it gives to its own ISP customers for free? Or is this considered an acceptable competitive practice?

Both the Newsday columnist who resigned over the Newsday paywall and the NY Times columnists who protested the NY Times paywall are just that: columnists, not reporters or journalists.

Columnists are people for whom the newspaper is a vehicle for the broad distribution of their writings, which are not even notionally constrained by the standards of fact reporting, or even news analysis. Columns are vehicles by which the columnists ideas, pet causes, ideology, other products (like books), etc., are promoted. The interests of columnists may be very different than the interests of journalists with regard to paywalls.

Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) [lwn.net] has managed to keep going by having a temporary paywall. That is, you pay to get immediate access to articles, and after a week, anyone can see them. This might work in some cases, at the least, you could generate some revenue if people were willing to pay for immediate access, while not driving away the authors who want many readers. I will say that for LWN, they're making some money but they certainly aren't rolling in it, so even if that works, it will not bring back the massive money inflows that these organizations are used to.

Let's be honest: There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen. The internet has permanently changed the market. I don't see that the U.S. government needs to get involved; we have NOT lost the ability to receive news. Yes, many news organizations are going out of business, and in the future we will need fewer of them. But that's simply how competition works.

Modern news distribution derives its value from two things: First, the reliability of its product. Second, the timeliness of its product. Newspapers and magazines fail the test because they are release daily, weekly, or even monthly -- whereas other distribution mediums can do it in seconds or minutes. This is not, however, what killed them. The deciding factor is therefore the reliability of the product. Unfortunately, the news industry has made several very bad decisions regarding this:

First, was catering to certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc.) and following the demographics rather than the story. While this improves profitibility over the short term, it sets things up for a diminishing returns cycle -- to maintain the higher profitibility the product must be targeted more with each iteration, leading to an alienation of those who do not share the increasingly-restricted viewpoint. That is to say, they become aware of the bias and lose confidence in the product. This "short sell" ideology permeates many industries -- in some cases, the results are more dramatic and immediate than other cases.

Second, was the packaging of such information. Even leading up to the 9/11 media event, packaging of information from major news sources was being called into question. Scandals rocked the New York Times, Washington Post, and all major television networks within a three-year timespan -- why? In every case, the rush to get the information to press caused errors to be made. In other words, a lack of process control. The coverage of 9/11 -- with its constant flood of meaningless and un-contextualized data overloaded people. Simply put, anything that's "hot" is over-saturated and in their rush to deliver the latest "news" they bury people in a crap-flood of information -- there was a loss of impact.

The third factor in the loss of reliability of major media organizations was a lack of peer review. Because most of the media distribution in this country is owned by a select few individuals and/or corporations, the industry homogenized. There was no further innovation. In the quest for profitibility, only methods of reporting and investigation were used that guaranteed eyeballs. As history has shown time and time again, the key to the long-term survival of a business, or industry, is adapability. This was sacrificed when the industry homogenized into only a few major corporate players -- leading to formulaic products that were too similar to one another.

Finally, the rise of social networking and the internet proved that word of mouth is the most effective way of spreading information that is NOT time-sensitive. Ironically, the random churning of information on the internet was better at distributing stories than decades-old systems of distribution: Why? Because the information had been separated out into a free-format. Like CDs, where you have to purchase the entire album in order to get that one song -- this was how the media operated. No longer -- and the result was that over a period of days or weeks, many millions more would see a given product because of referrals by friends. The news industry failed to capitalize upon this by creating stand-alone product that could be distributed between people and remain intact (for example, with its advertising or "related" content hooks, perhaps in something similar to PDF).

Reporters may leave if their newspaper starts charging for content, yes. However, I think a few more reporters might leave if the newspaper goes bankrupt. People aren't buying newspapers any more. They may not want to pay for online content now, but that's mostly because the 'free' online content is being subsidized by papers which are rather quickly going out of business. As that happens, the remaining papers will end up charging for online content (since how else will they make any money) and people will either pay for it (because there's no other option for getting good journalism) or not pay for it (because they'd rather read free blogosphere crap). But if there's one thing I'll lay odds on, it's that expensive content (like good journalism) isn't going to be available for free. TANSTAAFL, you know.

I used to read Thomas Friedman's oped column regularly until the NY Times put him behind their paywall. Eventually they dropped the paywall but by then I was too late. I just didn't care that much any more. The few times I did pick up his column I realized that except for his columns on the middle east (his field of expertise) there wasn't much that he had to say that was incredibly relevant. I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.

The paywall made me realize that for the most part there isn't much separating such oped columns from the average blogger. However had the NY Times not put up the paywall I probably would still be reading their oped columns regularly.