Here’s my answer to the thought experiment: user-contributed content wouldn’t compare very well to the front page of The New York Times, at least not for the thing I’m most interested in -- original reporting about dishonesty and corruption in government. John Carroll, the former executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, has made a couple of interesting points recently on this topic. The first is that breaking a story like illegal wiretapping of citizens by the federal government can be undertaken only by organizations big enough to afford the lawyers necessary to sustain the inevitable response by the government. No blogger could possibly break such a story. The second point is about the investment required in creating sources. When Carroll was a young reporter, he would stop by the office of a government official once a week, and the same thing would happen: they would chat about the weather, Carroll would ask him if anything was going on, the official would say no, and Carroll would leave. This went on for months, and Carroll sometimes wondered whether he was wasting his time. One day, the official told Carroll to close the door, and he showed Carroll incriminating documents about a local corporation’s plan for a new headquarters that involved financial impropriety. Carroll published the story, and the plan was stopped. Ideally, other branches of government act as watchdogs on each other, but sometimes, one party controls all branches of government, and all we have left are newspapers to protect our freedoms. TV news doesn’t seem to be interested in such things; radio news has disappeared in this country except for NPR, which gets much of its funding from the government; and individuals off the street simply can’t even get in the door of the most important sources. Newspapers are the only institutions big enough to counter the power of the government. The issue isn’t whether it’s worth paying $5 for a single article, which isn’t a serious offer from the Times given the offer on the same page for 8 cents per article if you buy access for a month for only a few bucks more. I’m no business strategist, and I don’t know anything about online business models. But I don’t understand why so many people aren’t willing to pay for the privilege of reading a free press that stands up to an increasingly fascist government just because that content is online. If the Times and the Chronicle start charging for content, I’d sure as hell pay.