Up to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable, because there isn’t enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more.
Sounds like good, solid economics to me.
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What does “the amount of news produced” mean? Does it mean that number of column inches of text written by paid newspaper staff? If so, then yes, that amount is unsustainably large for Internet-ad economics.
If “the amount of news produced” means the number of important and interesting facts unearthed and transmitted to the public, I’m not so sure. Would the world really be a worse place if there were only 10 paid outlets re-writing AP/reuters stories and publishing them for public consumption as opposed to the current number (certainly way more than 200)? Would “the amount of news produced” really “shrink”? It doesn’t strike me that it would in any meaningful sort of way.
Of course there are local issues as well… but that’s simply a question of how far down the long tail paid reporters can afford to go.