Poll says newspaper sites will die with pay walls online

Crowdsourced poll overwhelmingly says that pay walls will fail for media companies. Since they are currently working for content like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Packers Plus and much of the Wall Street Journal content, I have to wonder about the crowd. Of course, there is sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy in crowdsourcing polls predicting the future, since if the masses decide something will fail, it will fail. Anyway, 65 percent of those responding to this poll sees pay walls as the beginning of the end, predicting the "crowd" will flee to free sites. Of course, it doesn't say where those sites will be coming from without revenue to staff them.

Passion in the newsroom -- a good thing?

     A fight in a newsroom. Passion in the news business. Kathleen Parker hearkens back to newsrooms of old when passion was, she says, much more common. My memory says she's correct about the passion of the past when arguments at least were quite common.  My instinct says she's correct about how it would be a good thing. The three newsrooms I've been in lately have been pretty depressing places, not surprising given the huge staff cuts of the past couple of years.