As a "hired mercenary" for the past decade, I've found the current environment too restrictive. We are witnessing a flattening of the U.S. editorial market along the lines which manufacturing and other industries experienced earlier. Why pay hundreds for a 500-word carefully crafted and researched piece of journalism when you can hired an ESL outside the U.S. for 1/10th the cost? Mid-range journalism sites of a half-decade ago are now chasing keyword searches ala DemandMedia. Pew Research just released their annual State of The News Media, wherein they point out the dollars of the late 1900s shrank to the digital dimes of the early 2000s to the mobile pennies of today.

Journalism is in a free-fall. Google and Facebook are controlling the vast majority of online ad buys. Companies getting into news are concentrating on news distribution (AKA aggregation) instead of news generation. The short-term solution will be to re-educate audiences to the cold, hard fact that while information might be free, quality journalism which interprets and fact-checks is not. The ad-supported model for online news is broken, except for a few brands. The long-term solution is the realization that corporations are good for some things, government is good for some things: supporting journalism during a time when - let's face it - only a minority of people 1) read, 2) read beyond 140 characters, and 3) look beyond the latest People cover or cable news snippets.