Food for thought: my own media habits have changed in a somewhat different direction than Brian's as find myself consuming more and more of my news on the iPad, but there's still universal insights here worth contemplating:

"What seems to be happening is that many are now willing to pay pennies to read professional media stuff, on their iPads and iPhones and Google-Android equivalents. How much of a real business this will turn into remains to be seen. Very big but very different from the recent past would be my current guess...

"...Meanwhile, all those who, like me, want also to write about it (whatever it might be) and to link to other writings about it will continue to want free stuff. It's absolutely not - or not only - that we amateurs are cheap. The key is linkage. If we can't say to everyone reading our own free stuff: hey, have a read of this (no link there because that is my exact point), there is, for us amateur writers, no point in us reading it either.

"Another way of putting all this is to say that whereas it used to be that the Mainstream Media were … the mainstream media, while us internetters all lived in our dusty little caves of off-message opinion, gibbering and cursing with only our closest friends, now it is the pay-as-you-read ex-mainstream media who will be the ones living, if not in caves, then at least indoors, so to speak, and hence ever more cut off from "public" opinion. Think: Palace of Versailles. That this switch is already happening explains a lot about the current state of politics, worldwide..."

Oh, and few but Brian could have me voluntarily read about cricket, the topic of blog post these quotes are taken from.