&gt; No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought.<p>Now we&#x27;re really getting to the heart of it: in an economic environment where growth is valued above all else, including actual value, publishers can&#x27;t accept that they might have to make less money.<p>Honestly, though, I am highly skeptical that for-profit businesses controlling our media is even a good thing. Look at NPR, which is supported entirely by donations and grants: they don&#x27;t make much money, and incidentally they do some of the best reporting I&#x27;ve come across.<p>Ultimately, I think the NYT and its ilk aren&#x27;t &quot;failing&quot; at subscription models, they&#x27;re failing because they can&#x27;t compete with a myriad of more local news sources. It&#x27;s hard to maintain a business when you have to send reporters to Cairo to report on Arab spring or to Tokyo to report on the Fukushima reactors, and local readers can get eyewitness reports from Redditors and Twitterers. It doesn&#x27;t help that major news sources are increasingly untrustworthy and sensationalized. Ads are allowing them to delay the inevitable, but I think the end result will be decentralization. There&#x27;s no reason for me to get my news about the Arab spring from the NYT when Al Jazeera has reporters who have been on the ground there for decades and have far more context; there&#x27;s no reason for me to get my news about Fukushima from the NYT when I can read the English version of the Japan Times. News Aggregators make this easier. And incidentally, there are plenty of small news sources operating on subscription, pay-per-article, PWYW, donation, or other business models.