Underlying all the discussions about blogs, the Internet, the future of journalism, the death of daily newspapers, and so many related topics is the question, “who will pay for the news?” The idealistic answer is that information should be free. We should be able to get our information freely off of the Internet. News sites should not charge for the distribution of what is, after all, normally public information. Likewise, service providers shouldn’t be getting in the way of people’s access to information. The net should be neutral.

Yet it does take time and energy to gather, make sense of, and distribute information. Different people will have different motivations to engage in this activity, and this will affect the way the information is understood and distributed.

One motivation is simply to make a profit. Gathering and distributing news becomes no different than raising, slaughtering and distributing pigs or chicken for consumption, and it is telling to hear people talk about the public consumption of news. Indeed, too often news stories distributed from these large corporate entities are nothing but Twinkees, sweet and enjoyable for some to eat, but containing little to no value and contributing to national health problems. Others might be juicy pork chops, perhaps from some slaughtered pig in lipstick, and the whole focus ends up being about the gravy train.

Recently, Tom Curley President and CEO of the Associated Press spoke about their efforts to get the gravy train back on the tracks. At the Xinhua Beijing Media Summit he spoke about “News Registry – a rights management and tracking system.” He says, “The NewsGuide would enable news publishers together to create a preferred web destination for consumers of breaking news, which also would serve as a conduit to related content displayed on the publisher Web sites.” In other words, he is recognizing that news publishers have lost the battle to be the primary destination for news and he is trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

He also says, “The News Registry will use a common taxonomy and format around intellectual property rights and licensing rules. It will reflect common understanding around the aggregation and indexing of published news content and will enable participating publishers to share mutually in new licensing opportunities whether based on subscriptions or advertising.” To me, this raises all kinds of issues. Part of what makes the world of the web so wonderful is that it allows people to look at the news through many different prisms instead of some common understanding of how news should be indexed.

Even small websites can fall prey to this desire to ride the gravy train. I spend a lot of time surfing blogs and find many of them which focus on how to make a quick buck online. Some are actually quite interesting as potential incubators for new online revenue models. Others are more interesting for illustrating the potential pitfalls of an internet based information economy.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), recently issued new guidelines on what sort of disclosure a blogger most provide when they receive something of value related to something the blogger is writing about. Advertising Age finds the new rules, which are scheduled to go into effect on December 1st, Excessive, Ridiculous and Hypocritical and Ken Wheaton suggests the rules are so silly, the only option is laughter.

Dan Gillmor, who is currently running the Knight Center for Digital Entrepreneurship describes the new ruling as a dangerous federal intervention in social medial. Yet Glenn Fleishman, in the comments, says that he doesn’t have any problems with the new guidelines. All the folks he knows already adhere to the guidelines and if there is a seamy underbelly of blogger payola, it is probably just as good that it gets revealed. If we go back to the idea that all information should be free, then it would seem information about who has been receiving what material interest ought to be free as well.

Yet this still leaves the issue of who will cover what news and why. Advertising agencies and PR firms will do what they can to get bloggers to cover news about products they promote. Communications directors will send out press releases about issues that they want covered. Individuals might write about some of this if they get freebies they like or if the issue is near and dear to their hearts, but what about the rest of the news? Especially, what about the news that takes a lot of hard investigative reporting to uncover?

Soon after the FTC released their new guidelines, they announced another event. On December 1st and 2nd, they will sponsor Public Workshops and Roundtables: From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?

The new FTC guidelines exposed part of the problem with who pays for news. The workshops and roundtables have the potential to explore this further. Some of the problem may well have been created by the consolidation of news organizations to being highly leveraged corporations trying to maximize ROI on a product they treat no differently than pork chops. Yet there are plenty of other issues, and hopefully, plenty of new ideas on how we can pay people to keep information free. How do you believe news gathering and dissemination should be paid for?