News has gone through a few interesting changes over the years. Papers used to be openly partisan — supporting a political party or an ideology. Then we had the growth of organizations that claimed to be dispassionate and objective. The “independent” newspaper. Of course they never really were objective, but they tried.

Now the news business is going through its most serious challenge. Readership is down. Classified ad revenue has gone to Craigslist. Many people don’t feel they need to subscribe because they can read the content online for free, and online ads don’t compensate a newspaper for its costs.

The result — there will be a weeding out process over the next few years as superfluous news organizations go under.

Also, technology has exposed an ugly truth about news content. It’s basically all the same.

A long but interesting article about how Google is trying to save the news business (see How to save the news) highlights this through the inside perspective of a guy who helped run Google News — which, as you know, aggregates stories from thousands of different news services.

This aggregation provides an opportunity to compare news stories on similar topics, and apparently they’re just not that different, no matter which source they come from.

That could be the result of journalism training, or a journalism culture, or any number of things, but the bottom line is quite clear. There are too many outlets offering essentially the same content, and there’s no reason to purchase an article from one paper when you can get the same thing for free elsewhere.

This will doom any effort to put newspaper content behind a pay wall.

… however … a paper might be able to charge for access to content that is unique. The Wall Street Journal does okay with its paid model because it’s considered essential to business.

The conclusion is that the future of news is in niche marketing — i.e., stories written from a particular point of view for a particular audience. That helps the news organization in two ways: (1) the consumer might be willing to pay for such content, and (2) advertisers are willing to pay a premium for access to a niche audience.