Monday morning roundup: Two looks at ways to make journalism pay

A short Monday post for right now.
TechCrunch has an interesting, detailed take down of the idea that micropayments are the future of journalism.

Some salient points (I’ll let you read the whole thing if you want to):

• Everyone NEEDS to make profit, but only strong businesses will. In other words, just because you run a media company, it doesn’t mean you automatically deserve to make money.
• The micro-payment ideas might be great for publishers or companies like Google, but not necessarily for journalists.
• And this quote, from Freakonomics: “Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news.”

The founder of Spot.us has a lengthy post on PBS’s MediaShift Idea Lab blog with some insights on the start-up’s first six months.

The big takeaway? Readers are less willing to pay for the quick-hit, short journalism that dominates so many newspapers these days. They want something in-depth, well-reported and that presents original ideas. Big-think analysis pieces (like the one I’m writing now?) aren’t as popular.

So what say you? Find any interesting media analysis today?

A new portal?

There was a time when portals were the next big thing. Yahoo, MSN, all the big Web companies wanted you to set them as your homepage and use them to navigate. They’d offer you sports scores, headlines, TV listings, whatever you wanted to see.

You don’t hear much about it, but leave it to Google to re-invent the idea. For more than a year, the homepage on every computer I use is my iGoogle personalized homepage. I can change what I see on there pretty easily, and through the magic of AJAX, it loads and re-loads seamlessly.

A news site isn’t likely to make a similar idea work. But they can leverage what Google’s already doing. You can add RSS feeds to your homepage by hand, and a lot of times I do just that. But it wouldn’t take much work to have an online person create a “gadget” that people can search for and add to the page. It would get people who might not be comfortable using RSS looking at what’s on the site. And you could let the reader customize the stories they see, as well. We need eyes looking at our content. Who cares where they link from?