Amid all the talk of business models for journalism, I thought you might be interested in an example from history — the collapse of the business model for poetry.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, rhymesters were rolling in it. In 1811, Sir Walter Scott’s advance for Rokeby enabled him to buy Abbotsford. Continue reading
Seamus McCauley responds to Ryan Sholin and tells it like it is:
Maybe the elephant in the room is a reluctance to even think of newspapers (or journalism or whatever you want to call it) in business terms. Because if we did, we wouldn’t start with the premise “since we’re definitely going to keep making journalism, how can we pay for it?”
We’d already be thinking “is there enough of a market for journalism to keep doing it?”
And nobody wants the answer to that question, because we kind of know already what it probably is.