Over the weekend, I bought the Boston Globe off the newsstand for the first time in quite a while. The reason for buying the paper was this eye-catching headline: Times Co. threatens to shut Globe; seeks $20m in cuts from unions

I was shaking my head sadly at the irony of the situation as I was walking out the store. Maybe it was a gut reaction…the thought of losing the paper made me want to actually pay money for it for the first time in ages. Shelling out a mere 75 cents was the least I could do—a sort of tribute to an era gone by.

Indeed, people paying too little or nothing at all for content and online advertising has pretty well brought about the demise of newspapers in the US. The list of newspapers and magazines shrinking, on the brink of shutting down, going weekly, going online only etc etc is too long to type up here. The loss of newspapers should be thoroughly freaking you out now.

Or not. Online users have become so used to finding and accessing online content for free that perhaps some don’t really mind the loss of newspapers, because there will be other free content/websites to take their place. With so much free content out there, we’ve been overwhelmed and as a result, we’re losing the ability, or just don’t have the time or energy, to differentiate good content from bad. Voting/recommending/sharing/tagging tools online will only do so much.

So with the glut of free content, the online culture that says that everything should be free, and the perception that good content is worth as much as bad content (ie not much at all) online, could we ever go back to asking people to pay for the good stuff they read online?

If the genie is way too far out of the bottle, what is left to do? Turn journalism into a nonprofit enterprise? Just not have newspapers and well trained, tough-nosed journalists to put in the time and work needed to keep politicians and companies in line, to look out for us little people? The mere thought scares and saddens me.

Maybe we should do some market research before giving up.

What kind of content would you pay for online? Anything?