Wanted: Online Payment Plan for Print

Every publication now must compete with every other around the globe, many of which are willing to offer their content for free. They also face competition from thousands of aggregators, who take journalists' content, monetize it for their own profit, and, in many cases, give little or nothing back to its originators. That's been true for years now, but the election is over, and we're still staring into an economic abyss that offers little hope that publications -- not to mention TV and radio -- will have time to manage decline while they figure out what's next. What to do? The media grandees weighing in had plenty of solutions (micropayments! Pay walls! ISP taxes! Nonprofit status!), but they can be distilled into two distinct camps: those who believe that consumers can be made to pay -- even a penny -- for content and those who don't.