I like the idea of subscriptions, and I do think they have more of a chance than advertising as far as being a sustainable way to make money for ads goes, but they won&#x27;t be the future of journalism as a whole.<p>Why?  Because to a certain degree, the majority of standard journalism simply isn&#x27;t commercially viable.  I mean, look at the kind of articles most news sites run.  Just plain old news, few if any opinions, only valuable because it&#x27;s a somewhat quick way of finding out what&#x27;s going on.<p>How are subscriptions going to work for that?  Why would anyone pay for plain old news when social media sites and aggregators (like Hacker News and Reddit) give you the same information for nothing? If you purely want to know what the latest Apple product is, when a new game will be released, what two celebrities got married or who won the football game, then why pay for an article about it?  It&#x27;s already all over the internet for nothing, thanks to people willing to post about that stuff for free.<p>This subscription thing only works for fields where news is difficult to report (say, from a war zone) or where the author&#x27;s opinion&#x2F;insight itself is valuable (read, not entertainment&#x2F;gaming journalism).  Unfortunately, this makes up a far lower percentage of journalism than some people like to believe.