ABSTRACT
For a century the archetypal media barons held a near monopoly on the world’s news with a business model that effectively controlled all access to a mass audience. The constant refrain of media executives, from Rupert Murdoch down, is that the economic model of industrial media production that created the 20th century’s moguls is no longer working. Various forms of alternative journalism have not been immune from the commercial pressures. As Chris Atton and James Hamilton suggest, citizen media of all varieties face the reality that they must operate and survive in global media ecology that is shaped by economic laws of capitalism. The free news model was predicated on assumptions: that Internet users expect free content and that, over time, advertising revenues would pick up and make news websites profitable. A new type of content bundling—alongside subscription models such as the one the Christian Science Monitor adopted—is device bundling, which involves collaboration between media content companies and hardware producers.
