Sorry for my delay in replying. My slam on your publication (and by extension, you) on the use of what most people would consider to be editorial space to flog lamps is well-deserved -- no matter where you are in your development arc. If the price of delivering 'free' news is to pervert one's editorial space to serve advertising interests, then I'm afraid I'm not totally with the program. However, I hope your publication does mature, grow and develop the revenue base to provide a good living for yourself and your wife and to hire journalists and do classically good work of the one example I identified in the post -- or perhaps a different type that is even better. Entrepreneurs are to be admired. It takes guts, given that 80 per cent of small businesses fail within five years (in Canada, anyway). But back to my main point for a moment: 'Nothing that costs is truly free.' Read that phrase again. The point is that 'free' is a bit of a misnomer, because the 'free' good will have hidden costs associated with it (see 'flogging lamps in one's editorial space'). I think we can agree that in-depth, high-social-value journalism is expensive to produce. The question then becomes how to monetize it in a way that provides a reasonable return on investment. In the online world, charging directly for news is ... exceedingly difficult. That's a given. I've seen millions wasted on strategically unsound subscription-based websites. I personally think the approach of some European publishers - to charge for certain services around the news - may well make more sense. Whatever one thinks of a subscription fee, the traditional revenue pillars of newspapers -- circulation revenue, classified and display ads, other -- allowed some of these businesses to survive for multiple generations, do some decent work in the process and make good profits. But I suspect we both agree the traditional print model is on the way out -- and has in fact been eroding for some time. Unfortunately, I don't immediately see a new model that will preserve the best of what the old model could deliver, given the realities of the new world. If you're going to offer a 'free' product supported totally by advertising, it will have to be very cheap to produce. That's going to be limiting in the types of journalism that can be supported. That will hurt communities. That is a real cost -- one that from where I sit, is blithely ignored by the 'news should be free' crowd. Thanks for the efforts to deepen my historical knowledge of U.S. newspapers, but believe it or not, I already knew some of that stuff.