Isn&#x27;t the value of the article completely divorced from the time it took to write it? (I don&#x27;t pay more for a movie that took five years to make than one that took a week.)<p>News is one of the more obvious examples that things become less valuable as more people have access. If I am the only person in a room to have read an article, I am more interesting at a party. If everyone read it, I might as well be discussing the weather. If I find out about an earnings report a microsecond before other investors, that news is much more valuable to me than it is to them.<p>Journalists also have to deal with instances where weeks of effort failt to uncover anything worth writing about. The patron&#x2F;artist model might be the only way to support individual journalists. It might turn out that journalism looks a LOT like private investigation or corporate espionage.