I’ve been thinking about the (apparently) dying state of the press (by which, I mean the journalistic/news media industry). It seems that the internet, having nearly destroyed the music industry, has decided to take on journalism as well. This is troubling on many levels.

The internet is an invention, a piece of technology for the dissemination of information and really nothing more. It is the 21st century version of Gutenberg’s printing press, which also had a radical impact on culture and whole industries. The internet’s advantage is that it can move large amounts of information over nearly unlimited distances and duplicate it and edit it with ease. Now, the cost of reproducing information and distributing it is almost zero. This includes news. News online costs so little that it is being sold free, with ad revenue being used to cover the cost of operations. The problem is that ads will not cover the cost of a full newsroom.

My experience with purchasing music over the internet is, in my opinion, instructive on why there is hope for newspapers online. I buy nearly all my music through iTunes. It doesn’t cost more than it would offline and it is often a good deal. I use iTunes over the other sites out there because it is easy and the quality of the user-experience is exeptional.

I would pay to subscribe to a digital newspaper, whether it was local or national, if it had the same level of user experience and produced a similar quality of material. I get tired of AP retread news articles and appreciate genuine investigative journalism—and consider it worth paying for. Paying for print newspapers is out of the question, because I, like most of my peers, do almost everything electronically. But a well-designed newspaper experience, with quality journalism and rational editors, would definitely be worth paying for.

Free is not always better for businesses, but they have to realize that customers pay for value.