Let's say you're standing in a field strewn with gold bars. A man comes up to you and offers to sell you a gold bar for $400,000. You point out that you are standing among hundreds of gold bars, all of them free for the taking. He points out that it was a lot of hard work extracting gold from thousands of tons of ore, casting it, assaying it, etc.

Just because something cost a lot to make, doesn't mean it's worth a lot. Sorry.

To be fair, we do not exactly have an oversupply of WSJ caliber journalism.

To also be fair, WSJ is hardly high caliber journalism, and since the sale to Murdoch has degraded significantly in quality

And therin lies the situation. WSJ is worth very little to the very many. I see it as just another editorialized website. Was it always that way? No. Paper editions of the wall street journal were very good, on occasion. Web editions in the new age of journalism, not even close. No where near worth even trying to go around their paywall.

The beginning of the end for me with the WSJ was when they changed the printed size.

I would disagree. Their opinion pages have become more conservative, but their business news and investigative reporting is just as good as it always has been.

I agree. However I do always wonder why conservative views are devalued. I am a paid NY Times digital subscriber and I think the price is robbery however despite being conservative, I do find value in the other viewpoints. It seems like many equate conservative viewpoints as 'not worth supporting.' In my opinion, it's worth it for me to read the other side because I don't necessarily need an echo chamber reinforcing my own bias. Perhaps ironically, I subscribe to The NY Times and not the WSJ.

But I don't live in a world surrounded by gold bars. I live in a world where news comes from Buzzfeed and CNN and Fox News and less scrupulous "news" organizations who are only looking towards the next eyeball. I am surrounded by bars of iron. Your parable simply doesn't match the world I live in.

Consider BBC, Al Jazeera, MIT News, and many many others. I won't say those are all gold, but they aren't lead.

Ah, yes, this is also why the US has no sweat of the brow doctrine, with the prime example being "trying to copyright a phone book".

That's not the problem. I might be willing pay a lot for news. What I don't want is 100 different newspaper subscriptions. And to say that you should just pick a favorite newspaper and get everything from there is like demanding you decide what books you want before visiting a library.

That's exactly the problem with the person I replied to. Maybe there's a micropayment solution that someone will crack the nut on after decades of people talking about it. But that solution is definitely not 5¢ an article for WSJ quality news.

Blendle is a decent attempt at per article payment for journalism.

I tried it for a few months and was happy, but found out I don't have time to read articles in full anyway. I'm sure it will work for someone else though.

My personal opinion is that news orgs should operate as non-profits, since profit motive drives them to editorialize and publish things to get money vs publishing things to inform people about what's going on. I want reporting, I want facts, I don't want entertainment.

You think non-profit "news" sources don't editorialize? Democracy Now doesn't editorialize? State run media doesn't editorialize?

Perhaps that's true for the top 10% most engaged WSJ users.

But, how do you know how much value I'm getting from that news source? I usually get my news from many different sources. And sometimes, I don't even read the entire article. Only a small percentage of the articles are actually of interest to me.

> The amount you want to pay for news is not anywhere close to the value it is providing you or that they make from ad revenue.

What amount would be close to the value they make from ad revenue?

I would speculate they make between $5 - $20 CPM and they show 3-5 ads per article view. That puts the revenue between 1.5¢ and 10¢ per article pageview.

Micropayment approaches and payment processor rates vary, but I'd generalize to probably 30% take rate. So assume 3.5¢ to 7¢ payment per article. Do you pay for every article you load? Do you pay again if you load the article twice? What if you don't like the article and don't want to pay? I don't think it's quite as simple as 3.5¢ to 7¢ because no one has really proven this model to work yet.

> What if you don't like the article and don't want to pay?

YOu read the first free paragraph, if you like that you pay, if you dont like the rest of the article you dont get a refund since you have already consumed the article.

A $20 CPM? I'm thinking it's nowhere close. That's exceeding TV level CPMs.

The WSJ is very valuable for enterprise advertising. TV is going to hit a much broader segment of audience, which will include many people who won't care about EnterProse Corp's new widget for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.