Models - Can you build a wall in a swamp? - "Reflections of a Newsosaur: What stops publishers from charging for news"

Here is the second installment of the piece to which I posted a link yesterday. We are down to some serious economics on the one hand, and I think some serious need of rethinking the whole idea why it is that people engage their newspapers. My feeling is that we will learn that it cannot be divided between pay and non-pay sides of a "wall", nor can it be divided on the basis of great news stories v. fattening school lunch menus. What newspapers are missing is the chance they have to be more like local Wikipedias than the normal ad hoc collection of what the reporters and editors think turns out to be today's news. If there ever was a time when we needed context to our lives, this is it. Paying for access to disorder which is how one would have to generally describe a newspaper's printed front page today (in terms of content) is not likely to fill many piggy banks; paying for access to order and value in one's life is another matter. We need to get more creative juices thinking imaginatively; it is distressing to see how locked into formulas we are that "may" have come out of the print life of newspapers (and still not realizing that people buy newspapers mostly for reasons unrelated to what would be on the paid side of these proposed walls).