I think people are dancing around the central problem with charging for news alone: it just doesn't work. This is the debate ongoing among news professionals, discouraged that commercial journalism is not sustainable without great effort. When access to news was limited to the local newspaper, a few television stations and some scratchy AM radio broadcasts, advertising paid the freight of a news operation. The internet completely destroyed that. To get people 'into the tent' many news operations dropped all payments, making the audience used to the idea that news was free.

In the media, there is the 'three-legged stool' of revenue: providing news is not among the three options. Either you have a huge audience to make banner ads feasible, you institute a pay-wall, which will drive a certain percentage of your audience to free alternatives, or you offer for-fee services on top of your commoditized news. GigaOM, for example, is celebrating its 7th anniversary, largely because it created a premium service that offers expert analysts. Others, such as the Atlantic, offer advertising interspersed with their content, a new way to provide ads that both will be seen by readers and gets advertisers closer to the news content.

A second path - and one my company is exploring - is as a nonprofit. WordPress news could be seen as a service. Obtain funding grants from the WordPress foundation and other companies wishing to see WordPress flourish. Then concentrate on producing content. Otherwise, all the enthusiasm in the world will not pay your light bill.

A fatal mistake often made by news sites is picturing their target audience as the readers, the users. Wrong. To be successful (and fiscally afloat) you must see your audience as your advertisers, the companies looking to reach the users.