&gt; On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources.<p>This is huge. For a story that anyone can cover (&quot;Cat Stuck in Tree!&quot;), there&#x27;s mass-market competition where a hundred players can run their own versions of the same story. If one of those players is willing to work for free (or Reddit karma, or &#x27;exposure&#x27;, or whatever else), then the value of that information drops to ~$0.<p>Mass market journals used to get by on marginal costs, but those are ~0 too now. What they have left to offer is writing quality and accuracy, but its increasingly looking like those aren&#x27;t worth what they cost. And the quality dilution of high-end journalism has made the problem worse, by driving journalists into ever-more-direct competition with the free sources they can&#x27;t possibly outprice.