• Paid Content, Thursday, January 5, 2012 3:04 PM

"When a paper abandons the standard paywall strategy, it gives up on selling news as a simple transaction," writes Clay Shirky in this long, thoughtful piece about newspaper economics.

"There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country," he claims. "What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism."

Since responses to the metered paywalls of papers like the New York Times indicate that most pay to keep a valued institution alive, Shirky wonders if "this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."

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