This story gets most of the picture right, essentially noting that traditional journalists (including magazine writers) will have to adapt to the platform or attract a small but craft-oriented audience. This is well worth the read. But it contains a fatal error: for all its innovative thinking, it left out advertising and how that impacts the platform, both in monetizing it as well as living up to Fourth Estate standards. The Internet and other digital innovations are programmed for revenue generation in a model that gives away information for free, especially timely information, and vends information about information that updates and sells more than once. (It is not coincidental that Fabrice Florin, one of the most progressive new media thinkers in the world, divined NewsTrust.net, which intuitively embraces the digital convention of information about information.) This NYT media writer is correct in noting that the platform will dictate the rules; but she misses the point about how journalism will change because of that mandate. For newspapers to succeed, reporting will change from gathering facts that people need to know to vote intelligently (or to hold others accountable) to facts that can be stored, updated and vended by database subscription. Example: A traditional reporter accesses the police log and reports drunk-driving arrests. The print convention believes that information has value; the Internet convention gives it away for free. The new media business model will require that reporter to file those drunk-driving identities in a databank updated regularly and vended to attorneys, psychologists, Alcohol Anonymous chapters and addiction counselors. This paradigm, I have argued in such magazines as The Futurist, has resulted in a global mall rather than a global village. The value of NewsTrust.net is in the experiment, not the platform; will our social network remind the tweeting moguls of the prevailing new media that they, too, have an obligation to society rather than stockholders? Or will NewsTrust.net go down as the last gasp to preserve fundamental principles of democracy with an unofficial Fourth Branch of government (aka the news)? The utility of NewsTrust.net is that it uses Internet conventions to preserve that democracy. Ironically, it is unaware of the worth of its data in setting a new media business model that can influence the direction of the Internet post Negroponte.