The U.S. Senate subcommittee examination of the future of media heard a lot yesterday and the reports on it are worth noting, if for no other reason than their conclusiveness of a turning of the page (so to speak).
Arianna Huffington insists old media are dead. and she proposes an open-source journalism available to anyone and monetized through advertising. Senator John Kerry indicates a new business model is needed and worries that the loss of newspapers would result in too few journalists watching institutions, but he doesn't believe in relaxation of ownership restrictions to effect economic improvement.
Interestingly on the same day, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is indicating his newspapers are going to shift increasingly to a pay-for-content model. Or, as he puts it, they are going to control the relationship between their content and their customers.