The dilemma is:  People are willing to spend $4.00 for a Vanilla Latte but not spend $2.00 for a newspaper or even $1.00 for an internet news feed. Can the news media survive?

It costs money to gather and disseminate news.  And for the last hundred years or so the model has been to sell advertising to pay the cost.  People it seems want news but they don’t want to pay to much for it.  Now, we all know, the model is changing.  Newspapers can’t sell enough ads to pay for reporters and editors and are hemorrhaging money.  Craigs list took away the classified ads and the internet took away a lot of the print ads.  And young people don’t subscribe to or read newspapers, they get their news from the internet.  Reporting of local new is dying.

On television the only news programing that is gaining readership is Fox News.  All of the rest are losing audience.  More young people get their current affairs from The Daily Show, a comedy, than from the networks.

So what is going to happen?  Will reporting die?  No but it will change and the new model is still in flux.  There is a huge opportunity.  Right now it appears that people won’t pay for news on the internet.  But they will read articles that have ads next to them and they will watch some short commercials to get to content they want.  One possible model is a local blog that consolidates articles and give links much like Google does on a national basis.  Altadena Blog.  They were the best source of information on the Station Fire last year.

The next piece of this puzzle to develop will be reporters who specialize in local content by type.  Someone who covers just traffic issues for instance or schools or city councils.  How to get them paid when someone reads their stories needs to be worked out.  But it seems possible.  I’m imagining an ASCAP of the internet.  So if you clicked on Altadena Blog and folllowed a link from there to the Sierra Madre City Council meeting a few pennies would flow from the Altadena blog advertiser to the City council reporter.

The point is that what looks like a problem for the LA Times is an opportunity for the someone else.