Subscription used to work. They can work again, even better than before now that we have the facility for micro-transactions. A micro-transactional framework would have the added benefit of making it expensive for scrapers to steal content.

This is hard for me, an "information wants to be free" kinda guy, to espouse. But there are softer ways to do it, such as how The Guardian does it, or how public media does it.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of juice left in the "newstand" model. We just have to figure out how to translate the efficiency of "drop in quarter, get news" with digital currency and content. Like you said: a micro-transactional framework. That would be a hell of a thing to get started, but if you could my money's on it working like a charm.

This reminds me that The Onion is still doing print subscriptions, and they might be better value than most of real newspapers...