In the era of newspapers, people never really paid for news.
News have always spread freely among people, thanks to radio and television, word-of-mouth, small talks at bars, phone calls: “Did you hear what just happened?”.
What people paid for, for years, were essentially two things: the work of research, curation and fact-checking conducted by journalists, and the physical support on which they were distributed. That is, paper.
The former is still valid, while less noticeable: if the role of filtering and monitoring of news by news organizations is getting more and more disrupted –in an era where information overload grows at a rate of millions of bits per hour– the role of reporters is still crucial to guarantee accuracy and truth, to debunk hoaxes and verify the reliability of the sources. In this sense, nothing has changed. What has changed is the way this process happens; the techniques have changed, the available tools have changed, the platforms have changed (Reported.ly, anyone?). But even in this radically transformed scenario, the role of journalists has stayed the same. They should provide reliable information: it is a service. And people, I think, are still willing to pay for it.
But what about paper, and newspapers? Newspapers were essentially made up of two elements: content, and the paper where this content is printed.
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