Earl Wilkinson's latest post discounts the imminence of paywalls, but he does point to an emerging hybrid of business models for media in the years ahead.
In broad outline, among them:
1. Direct funds from consumers for their niche passions.
2. Direct funds from businesses for databases and directories.
3. Foundations to help finance investigative work and memberships for extra access to content.
4. Contextualized content to alert people.
5. Advertising, with a print element, to finance the balance.
What he clearly worries about, though, is the way in which media aren't establishing value on content or thoroughly segmenting their audiences of strong and weak users. Those issues need reconciliation and at the moment companies are dancing around the issues.