The news gatherers now are crowdsourcing news and spending billions setting up systems that will buy it for small amounts and sell it for micropayments. None of us know how it will be distributed and by home, but it will certainly need aggregators and sorters and that has always been the role of the editor.
So, the editorial role will not change but the paymaster will and the delivery vehicle will. We can probably see the next two or three generations of each of these, but after that it is pure speculation.
I have been writing that paywalls and digital rights management were doomed since the first e-publishing conference in San Fransisco in 1999. The very concept is illogical and the antithesis of the network itself. Now that the mainstream media has finally understood the impact of the new media, they are grasping at the same straws that music publishers and video producers have already gone through. As usual the pornographers are miles ahead. Heaps of free content, constant encouragement to register, peripheral products and services that go beyond the free content that a portion of the audience will buy.
The phone is clearly the current delivery platform, the rearview mirror, fridge panel, in-spectacle screen will be the next generation. On these small and embedded devices, there are very narrow opportunities for advertising as we now it, but those opportunities are also very deep. They will depend absolutely on location and comprehension of the current activity of the user. They will anticipate the user’s needs and support them in the buying process.
Again they will not have a direct relationship to the news which they fund, but they will become bound by the user experience in the same way that print media has been.
I could go on
