When we embarked on the exploration that became Riptide, John, Martin, and I knew that how the news gets paid for and the evolving need for readers to pay for the news they consume would be a central theme. Even as we asked a few early readers to comment on the site, we got feedback on this issue — including from a newspaper publisher in Chicago who also happens to be my dad. Here’s what Bruce Sagan, longtime publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, had to say:

Thank you for this important and fascinating history of journalism and the Internet revolution. Or should I say, ‘Internet Tide?’

Your remarkable essay ends with the questions we are all asking: ‘What is going to happen next to the news business…?’ ‘How will accountable journalism be provided to a democratic republic?’ (We can assume that celebrity journalism will take care of itself.)

Among the commentaries from your interviewees, perhaps Tim Berners-Lee shows the way. We need, he says, a new payment protocol. We need an easy way to send money from the reader to the creators of accountable journalism.

His idea was along the line of voluntary action by the reader. That is probably an unreliable way to build a self-sustaining journalism enterprise. But if there was a new payment protocol that allowed easy payment for subscriptions, or a single copy or a single story (essentially the much-discussed idea in the industry of micro payments), readers could and would support the journalism they want.

It could be argued that the reader has always supported journalism with payment. The traditional view of newspaper economics has been that the reader paid a small fee and the advertising subsidized the journalism and the operation of the publishing company. But if you pull apart the operation of most newspapers in America, you can give a different kind of description.

At most American daily newspapers in the glory days before the web, the editorial budget represented only about 15 to 20 percent of the costs of operations. Thus 80 to 85 percent was spent on production, distribution, selling advertising, administration, etc. In most cases, the gross circulation income paid by the reader covered the cost of the journalism effort. The advertising paid for the ink and paper and trucks and production and distribution personnel.

And so all we need now is a system to create journalism that gets it to the reader without paper, ink, trucks, retail sellers, etc., and have the reader pay us the small amount they have always paid for their journalism. With that we probably do not need advertising to help us along.

Well, we know how to do the first part¬–something called the World Wide Web. The second part is a little more difficult, getting the reader to pay us. But we are learning how to do that. There needs to be a cultural shift; society must accept that payment has to be made for all kinds of news. News is not free.

And there will be a fierce fight over ‘fair use’ as the aggregators and the originators of content try to define copyright for another web abused industry.

But millions of Americans spend about a $1.00 a day or more on journalism products. Granted, they are not all looking for accountable journalism. Would many pay for accountable journalism on the web if it were required and easy?

Let us use your wonderful essay, Riptide. Here is a piece of real web journalism, a long form story about a very import issue in our society. It is well researched and it uses the web in its most inventive way, making it possible for me to dig deeper into the story itself by just clicking on a link (or many, many links) to find out more. Your story itself is an example of what web journalism can be.

And let’s assume that you are part of a journalism site and that it has subscribers who are interested in what this site produces. They pay for part of the cost of maintaining the news staff.

If I was not a subscriber to your news site but was told about the story by a friend (which would happen to me as I am a practicing journalist), and if I could get the story through a simple and easy payment protocol, would I pay a fee for it? And how many thousands are there like me and how much would that add to the income of the newsroom?

What if we had a system of subscribers, plus purchaser’s of just today’s ‘paper,’ plus the sale of an individual story. Could that support a local newsroom that covered city hall and read the school budget or maintained that proverbial ‘bureau in Baghdad?’

Time to find out. We need that new payment protocol.

(Maybe we should talk to the Department of Motor Vehicles in states that run toll roads. They seem to know how to get dimes and quarters and dollars from us in an automated and painless way. Journalism needs its E-Z Pass.)

Bruce Sagan, Publisher, Hyde Park Herald, Chicago, Illinois.