The Era Of Free Online News May Be Over

The days of free news online may be ending, according to CNN. The Washington Post is probably going to start charging for news online and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News have already announced plans to do so.

CNN's Howard Kurtz writes:

We're all spoiled by the illusion that we can get whatever we want on the interwebs without having to pay a dime. Fire up the Google, troll the Twitter, see who's got the most tantalizing links. We all do it, and we all take it for granted.

But you can't have a media ecosystem in which everyone is aggregating, summarizing and retweeting content from everyone else. At some point there have to be actual human beings making phone calls and attending events and pawing through public documents.

If and when this happens, it will be yet another way libraries will remain vital and useful to communities. Because for whatever reasons individuals decline to pay for subscriptions, libraries almost surely will.