That’s the proposition floated by
Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, in today’s Miami Herald:

Could news survive without advertising? Actually, your subscription check is already enough, all by itself, to pay for the news you buy this paper for — 18 percent of revenues to cover 11 percent of costs. In an online world, the advertiser could go the way of paper and ink.

Nobody knows how much of the erosion in the news audience is from the steady corruption of news into dumb, inconsequential forms fashioned to grab readers for the sake of marketers. But just as HBO has shown how the noncommercial, subscription model can re-energize entertainment programming, we’re approaching the moment when the news business may have no choice but to remodel itself.

Wasserman’s argument, briefly, is that mass-market advertising is dying. His solution is the reverse of current newsroom trends: cut the bloat in advertising, not the newsroom.

I am reminded of Robin Sloan’s EPIC 2014, with its prediction of the New York Times as a “newletter read only by the rich and the elderly.”

But will this argument ever fly in a non-academic setting? And why did the Herald publish it?