Jay Rosen weighs in on newspapers in a brave new world at the Britannica Blog.

One weakness of the old subsidy system was that it hid the true cost of serious journalism from the people who benefit. Instead of finding new ways to hide the cost, a wiser course might be to increase the number of people who understand that serious reporting is a public good, who have a grasp of the economics. In other words, public opinion might have to come to the rescue.

Frank Wilson is contributing to a Britannica Blog forum this week called “Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?)” You can see the titles of upcoming articles on the main page. Today, Nicholas Carr writes:

So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

Clay Shirky replies (in a way) by saying newspapers must experiment. Shirky’s thinking seems in line with what usability expert Jakob Nielsen has said for a long time, that pay-by-click advertising doesn’t work well and can’t continue to fund websites. In this article from August 2007, he refers to studies showing again that web readers ignore web banners, and even when they look at them, they rarely remember company names or info. “Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad,” he says, so funding an online newspaper through web advertising won’t work in the long run, even if it pulls in some money now.

So the call for new business models for newspapers is the right call, but what will the answer be? I’m not a businessman, so I doubt I can help, but I will shoot the hip. News orgs. need loyalty networking.

As James Levy says in a Britannica comment: “The experimentation you propose needs to get to the core of what journalism needs right now: transparency and trust. There is no longer any scarcity of information, so journalists should be disclosing everything, archiving everything. And that’s what will make them professional.” That’s right. Take your newspapers online by building trust, honesty, and depth. Aren’t the news magazines doing this already? How successful are they?

Some are worried that the blogosphere will simply promote the lower common denominator to the exclusion of serious journalism or commentary. Alisa Harris quotes Eric Alterman saying, “And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.”

Commenter Bob Buckles notes, “When a cow is milked, the cream rises to the top. So to, the best of internet ‘journalism’ will be the stuff that is aid attention to, unlike the professional ‘journalism’ of Dan Rather.” Naturally.