Posted 3:22 PM by Gene

News hacks are in a bind: if they charge for their news, people will avoid their sites; if they don't charge, they lose money. Problem is, the only unqualified success among charging news-based sites is Consumer Reports. The more sites that charge the more people may go to "unofficial" sites. The blogging movement, though but a drop in the news bucket and largely talking to itself, shows the old professional filtering process is slow and cumbersome anyway. And it isn't so much the Internet that has caused people to drop newspapers from their media menu, but the hacks' stale, tired, knee-jerk, unchanging ways. It is simply easier to get the news electronically -- period. "Free" news may be slightly on the wane. It isn't going away.