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All the news that's free to print

Sad but true:

The rapid adoption of tablet computers like Apple'si Pad has not reversed the slide in paying customers for news, as many media company executives had hoped the devices would.

Only 14 percent of tablet news users are paying directly for content on the device, according to an extensive survey from the Pew Research Center's Project for excellence in Journalism

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“In some ways news content on portable devices will go the same way as digital music did a decade or so ago with proliferation of high speed internet and personal computers,” said Dan Nathan, trader and editor of RiskReversal.com. “For a long while people thought they were entitled to it. It wasn't until it was cheaper and easily accessible through iTunes that people actually bought it

If media companies need to make the content cheaper still, that means crushing layoffs and cost-cutting measures in the news business may not be over yet.

Newspapers didn't help matters by falling in with the "online is free" culture and putting up everything we had in the print edition on the Internet as well. Hey, you can read all this stuff online for free, then we want you to pay to read exactly the same thing in print a few hours from now. Right. Surprisingly, not many people think that's a great deal, and I'm not sure there's a way out of the hole we dug. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

My own prediction, for what it's worth: There will be a handful of really giant aggregators of news, like Yahoo and Google, and maybea few of the big outfits like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today will be a part of the pack. At the other end of the scpectrum, there will be thousands and thousands of one- and two-person operations who make a little bit of money contributing a small slice of the news. What will be lost will be everything in between, which includes most newspapers with their middleman function.

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