What is journalism worth? - more

After you get done digesting Tim Porter's thoughts on the newsroom and redefining our news language from my earlier post today, click over to the Christian Science Monitor's "All the news that's fit to be given away" and the companion piece "New US tabloids: more Ja Rule than Jack Straw."

It's the usual good work by the Monitor that should get us thinking more about a core issue often discussed here -- What is journalism worth, and why aren't more journalists truly engaged in this debate?

I can think of one argument for free or very low cost: We need reasonable access to good think pieces such as this.

(One industry executive has gone so far as to suggest (in Ifra's "newspaper techniques" - it's members only, unfortunately) that the new model might be free paper, paid Web. Others are toying with pay for today's news, but you can access the stories free in a couple weeks, the theory being that the value is in the immediacy.)