With the possibility fading for digital advertising to serve as a panacea, attention has returned to making people pay for their news online.This has worked for a handful of prominent newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, with well-heeled readers and specialized business content.

The New York Times has also done well, enrolling nearly four hundred thousand subscribers since it introduced its pay system in 2011. The Washington Post, on the other hand, dismisses paywalls as “backwards-looking.” CEO Don Graham claims they can work only for papers like the Times and the Journal that have paid circulation spread across the nation. Pay-walls have been a flop otherwise, and a study of three dozen papers that attempted to do so found only 1 percent of users opted to pay. Nevertheless, by 2012 some 20 percent of America’s 1,400 daily newspapers were planning to charge for digital access, and some firms, such as Gannett, claimed they were generating significant revenue. They are inspired by the success of dailies doing so in places like Finland and Slovakia. The key, apparently, is to be able to offer a lot of content at a low price—ideally by numerous newspapers combined—which might be easier in a small nation with a distinct language than in the United States, where English-language material grows like kudzu online. Whether there is an endgame is unclear—subscribers have never provided sufficient revenues for news media—and it appears as much an act of desperation as vision. Of course, there is no time to be concerned with the externality that paywalls invariably cut many people off from access to the news, with all that suggests about their undemocratic character.

The latest hope is that the rapid emergence of mobile communication will open up new ways to monetize content. But the point of professional journalism in its idealized form was to insulate the news from commercialism, marketing, and political pressures and to produce the necessary information for citizens to understand and participate effectively in their societies. In theory, some people were not privileged over others as legitimate consumers of journalism. That is why it was democratic. It was a public service with an ambiguous relationship with commercialism; hence the professional firewall.

Journalists made their judgment calls based on professional education and training, not commercial considerations. That is why people could trust it. The core problem with all these efforts to make journalism pay online is that they accelerate the commercialization of journalism, degrading its integrity and its function as a public service. The cure may be worse than the disease.

So it is that top editors at the venerable Washington Post “have embraced the view that studying [Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to determine where to focus the paper’s resources.” They are desperate to find the content that will appeal to desired consumers and to the advertisers who wish to reach affluent consumers. In this relationship, advertisers hold all the trump cards, and the news media have little leverage. In the emerging era of “smart” advertising, this means shaping the content to meet the Internet profiles of desired users, even personalizing news stories alongside personalized ads. The best stories for selling tend to be soft news. “The challenge,” Joseph Turow writes, has been “trying to figure out how to carry out editorial personalization in a way that wouldn’t cause audiences to freak out.” He points out that all the logic of the system points to advertisers demanding that they get sympathetic editorial mention as well. Research shows that that makes for a far more successful sales pitch. As one frustrated editor put it, “This crap may be groovy, but it still stinks.”

Nothing much changes when one looks at the new companies that have emerged to use the Internet as a battering ram to enter the news media industry. “All these people who forecast the end of newspapers because of the decline in advertising and users being unwilling to pay for content can’t explain how the new Internet journalism websites are going to survive or even thrive—since most of them, too, need paid ads and/or subscribers,” said Greg Mitchell, the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. “I just don’t get it.”

The new commercial ventures range from “content farms” to apps to major efforts to establish newsrooms and re-create a sense of news media online. The content farms, like Demand Media and Associated Content, have “embraced the attrition of the church-state boundary and turned it into a business model.” These firms hire freelancers to produce articles quickly and cheaply to respond to popular search terms, and then sell advertising to appear next to the article. The needs of advertisers drive the entire process. The key to commercial success is producing an immense amount of material inexpensively; the leading content farms can generate thousands of pieces of text and video on a daily basis.

Pulse has emerged as one of the leading commercial news apps, with 13 million smartphone users who get it for free. Pulse aggregates other firms’ news and makes its money working with advertisers and merchants. It is moving into “branded-content advertising,” by which ads get slotted next to appropriate stories for individualized users. The outstanding question is whether Pulse will generate a workable business model and then can establish a monopoly position due to its scale and network effects, like Twitter. By 2012 it moved aggressively to provide local news—with the ability to place advertising in real time that addresses one’s exact location—and become a global operation; the service is already available in eight languages. Pulse does not generate original news, and its founders concede that they don’t know much about journalism. Nor do any of the other mobile aggregators generate any original journalism, but some of their revenues will probably end up in the hands of other news media and may eventually contribute to paying actual journalists.

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