Show Me The Money

As the news industry keeps searching for the model that will pay reporters for hard work of reporting online, David Carr writes in the New York Times about Steve Jobs and how how iTunes changed the game for digitized music:

Mr. Jobs saw music ... as an ancillary software business to generate sales of the iPods and iPhones. That’s not a perspective that flattered people in the music business, but it did persuade listeners to pay for their wares

It seems obvious to me that newspaper will disappear the moment an affordable digital alternative that offers more or less the same functionality (and a whole lot more) comes along. The issue remains, if newspaper itself is no longer a vehicle for news, what replaces it? It could be a computer, a phone, digital paper, something like a large iPhone.

News organizations need to be concerned about how to get their news into those place as much as, or more than, they are concerned about how to maintain their old business infrastructures.