In the 21st Century, print magazines are struggling to maintain, much less build, the subscriberships necessary to sustain them. Increasingly, publishers and editors are turning towards an online format. This is in many ways a positive development. If a magazine no longer has to print a hard copy and distribute it to stores, the magazine decreases its carbon footprint. And because a file needn’t get sent to a printer, who in turn must produce a paper-based product, the magazine can circulate its content much faster, and its readers can consume said content faster.

But a few problems arise when a publication becomes electronic. For one thing, there is no truly successful model for generating a paying, online readership. A number of sites have attempted this, including the New York Times. But even the Times, despite its breadth and depth of content, has a lot more casual, free consumers than subscribers, and dropped its premium content online subscription service back in 2007. Why, though, did relatively few people pay to read the Times online, when it is the largest digital compilation of news and opinion? Because, even if other sites have less comprehensive content, there are literally millions of sites on the web that provide information for free. In other words, why pay when you don’t have to?

The truth is that producing thoughtful, innovative content is an expensive proposition. Even the leanest magazine needs at least one editor and a few writers to fill up the pages, whether those pages are made of paper or attached to a website. One way to mitigate the expense of producing content is for users to produce it themselves. Ten years ago, blogging wasn’t part of the lexicon, and now blogs are a ubiquitous facet of the internet.

So, what’s the problem with blogs? By their very nature, nothing. Flatmancrooked has a blog (you’re reading it right now), and I hope you continue to peruse it. But the blog is a limited format because it is a short format. There are tens of millions of blogs on the internet, many very well-trafficked, and some extremely insightful. But most, including those maintained by news organizations, are forums for opinion and reaction. That isn’t to say that blogs can’t break news. If you think they can’t, ask Dan Rather. But the creation of most blog posts, no matter how well written, takes less time than writing an in depth article. Again, that doesn’t mean that some bloggers don’t research the hell out of their subjects before posting. But for the most part, a blog is a way to react instantaneously to an event.

That’s all well and good, but what does that have to do with the collapse of the print periodical industry? The answer is, in part, that most bloggers blog recreationally. If you’re writing as a hobby, you do it because you enjoy it, and though you wouldn’t mind being compensated, that isn’t why you started a Wordpress site. And if enough people produce content as a hobby—and millions do—a larger and larger share of the information on the internet is produced for and available at no cost. Accordingly, there becomes less and less of a point to paying for content.

For most readers online, this should sound like a good thing. You’re getting your information for free. But I want to make the argument that this is a dangerous trend, not because I’m a writer and want to save my industry for selfish reasons, but because if all information is free, people will stop producing it.

Earlier in this letter I mentioned that no one has produced a model for generating a sustainable, paying, online subscribership, and I’ve gone into a little detail above discussing why that is so. But if people won’t pay to read information online, there must be another way to monetize content and therefore compensate its producers. There is. It’s called advertising. If your readers aren’t going to pay to read something on your site, as a site manager you must entice companies to pay to put ads on your site that readers will then, hopefully, click on. This, theoretically, has been the most sustainable method of content monetization over the past century. When television was still just network television, ad buys supported the entirety of a network’s budget. But in the mid 20th Century, people weren’t as bombarded by ads as they are now. According to a recent Nielsen report, the average American sees 1,600 ads per day. And when we’re talking about that kind of volume, each individual ad becomes less effective, to the point that, eventually, we ignore them entirely. And if we ignore them entirely, companies become more selective about where and how they advertise (by the way, this is already happening).

In 2008, national magazine ad buys dropped by 9.4%, and newspaper ad buys were down $2 billion in the third quarter of 2008 alone. Internet ad buys rose slightly in the third quarter of 2008, but to inject a little personal anecdote into this letter, I wrote for a startup website last year that had planned to support itself on ad sales. The readership was very modest—30,000-35,000 unique visitors a month. But because the traffic was relatively low, the only sizeable sponsor pulled out after two months. The website collapsed immediately.

So, what are our options? We could all start paying careful attention to ads again, but that isn’t a reasonable request. We could all start subscribing again to the magazines and newspapers we value, but I fear that ship has sailed, or sunk, as the case may be. The question, therefore, remains. If there are those of us who value longer form journalism, which requires time to research, develop, and execute, will it exist in 15-20 years? My guess is, regardless of whether or not we solve this monetization issue, it will exist to some extent. But how prevalent will it be? Who will pay for it to get written if the resulting product is not saleable?

Rather than leaving you all with that unpalatable thought, I should mention that there is one, seemingly sustainable model for content monetization: National Public Radio. They are the beneficiaries of corporate underwriting and some private foundation money, but half of their yearly budget comes from their listeners. What may be important, though, is that their listeners are not obligated to pay. NPR operates instead on a tithing model. Granted, their medium is much more finite than the internet. Even with satellite radio, radio is still much narrower in scope than the internet because broadcasting requires expensive equipment—and a license from the FCC. But nonetheless, NPR has news and talk radio competitors who do not ask their listeners to pay to listen.

Why, then, do people pay to listen to NPR when they could consume the same content, from NPR, without paying? The answer must be twofold. Firstly, NPR provides consistent, high-quality, unique content, and that is an indispensable facet of their prosperity. But secondly, and this may be the crux of their continued success, during a fund drive the hosts tell the listeners that NPR only exists because the members donate money. They make clear that when people stop giving, the news stops. So if people want the programming to continue, they must give. And many do donate. NPR relies on its audience to fund half of its budget. They wouldn’t generate any revenue if they didn’t ask, and they wouldn’t get donations if they didn’t provide exemplary content. But they do ask, and they do receive because they offer an excellent product.

The tithing model may be the future of content monetization. It is only a slight revision of the original printed periodical subscribership model, where a subscriber would pay for a subscription to a magazine so long as the magazine delivered the content she expected. But now that the consumer can get that content without paying, and because very few publications are being direct about the nature of how content production gets subsidized, he doesn’t think necessarily that the disappearance of the paper magazine is a bad thing. But if magazines don’t come right out and ask for their readers to support them monetarily, either as print entities or online, the industry will continue to shrink. Starting a new periodical will become idiotic because there won’t ever be a clear avenue to solvency.