With $188 worth in ad revenues, how much journalism can you afford to put into the average online article?

This is to me the most important questions, my new analysis raises: We as a society needs someone who on an ongoing basis scans the radar for poor functioning, mal-conduct and fraud in government and business, and sees to it that matters are digged into, holding those in charge responsible.

The bloggers, the Google-news and Digg aggregators or the Wikileaks won’t be able to keep up the work by themselves. They’re great vehicles for findings, revealings and transparancy. But they’re endangered by their voluntary character: things only gets uncovered if we’re lucky enough to have a dedicated, well-formulated and -connected man on the scene of crime. And the voluntary setup is to often much to fragile in terms of ressources to keep on digging, when things gets complex.

A few established media will be able to keep up the work – particularly niche-sites with long-tail potentials (which will only give us exactly this: niche-coverage of niche-subjects).
Most established media won’t. there’s simply not enough money for high-cost news production in a world where established media will have to fight the googles, facebooks and craigslists of this planet in the battle for the advertising dollar.

This is what I document in my latest report: that an average article in established Danish online media only makes $188 in advertising revenues. When the rent, the servers, the sales staff are all paid, not much is left for journalism. Read on:

[Download "Economics of news: the case for qualitative journalism on the internet" as pdf]