There's been a lot of foofraw in the media over the last couple of weeks around the business model for journalism. Walter Isaacson did a cover story for Time magazine arguing that micropayments will save journalism and got himself on Jon Stewart. O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference in NY last week had a lot of discussions around these issues, and there was a nice wrap-up in yesterday's NY Times.

I read the Time piece, and I have to admit I'm on the other side of this question. Isaacson notes that no less a figure than the inventor of hypertext thought micropayments were A Good Thing. As much as I respect Ted Nelson, his notion of transclusion-based billing just isn't going to work in this case. Certainly not the way Isaacson thinks. Anyone interested might wasnt to dip a toe into the blogging and twittering that's come out of the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference.

Looking back at my Twitter window, some of the smarter summary comments (which should probably be read as glosses of presentations or conversations at the con) came from sf writer/digital guy Cory Doctorow, who noted "Content can be copied for free, so it is free. Containers aren't free. They cost money to make. Use unlimited content to sell containers," and, "Best way to predict the future is 2 imagine that the thing you can't live without will stop existing and prove to have been unimportant," and, "Gutenberg didn't end religion, just cathedral building."

Also at the conference was David Durand (one of RI's own, at PVD startup Tizra, who do book->pdf conversions for online publishing) "What's worse than being linked to a lot and not knowing how to monetize it? Not being linked to at all."

And from the blogosphere, here's media theorist Clay Shirky's response to Isaacson. He saves the money quote for the end...

"We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one."

Equally opinionated theorist Nick Carr replies:

"Excess production capacity goes away, particularly when that capacity consists not of capital but of people. Supply and demand, eventually and often painfully, come back into some sort of balance. Newspapers have, with good reason, been pulling their hair out over the demand side of the business, where a lot of their product has, for the time being, lost its monetary value. But the solution to their dilemma actually lies on the production side: particularly, the radical consolidation and radical reduction of capacity."

And here's an interesting take on where the "value" is in news, and how it might be monetized. Not sure it's quite right, but thought-provoking. And one of the responses is from someone local (who references the Providence Journal).

Hat tip: I find a lot of this stuff by following journalism and media theorist Jay Rosen.

And yesterday, the NY Times ran a Freakonomics quorum with Shirky and a couple of digital media boffins, and the opinions similarly split, with William Baker, former CEO of WNET arguing, "Consumers must learn to associate costs, even small ones, with regular access to reliable news." And Marshall W. Van Alstyne of Boston University saying, "Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean."

Read the whole NY Times roundtable, it's fun.

Like education, reporting/newsgathering is a knowledge industry, and I take Carr's point that we need to find ways to support "real" reporters to do stuff citizen journalists can't. But I do fall more on the side of the Shirky/Doctorow crowd. I think the real model is open source software — also a knowledge intensive sector — which manages to produce very high quality objects of production even though it is no one's "job" that they get paid for. That's the model that is both caused and supported by our distributed digital world, and there's a pony in there somewhere.

Let's hold that happy thought as we wait for the next round of layoffs at the ProJo. We already lost our East Bay edition. What's left?