Probably none, but consider thinking about this: what kind of consumer will accept to read the smelly crap spewed by legacy news outfits in exchange for that much tracking and monitoring?

Imo, this is all horseshit — if that. The truth of the matter is that legacy news outfits have rushed to ever newer lows in quality, in an effort to keep their costs down. In the past decade or so, they’ve been paying the price, and they’re heading the way of the dinosaurs as a result. Good riddance.

I’d wager there will be three types of survivors. One will be like Business Insider and boast an impressive ability to output slimy click-baiting headlines with essentially zero content. Another will be more like Arment’s The Magazine, which sticks to aggregating compelling opinion pieces behind a paywall. The last will be the news agencies themselves — AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP, etc. — which can monetize themselves by selling market data. Oh, and maybe a fourth: the likes of Le Canard Enchainé, which I wish actually offered an iPad app so I could read their delicious quips from abroad.

News outfits such as Le Monde or Les Echos have no future whatsoever imho. Their utter uselessness has yet to dawn on them because they still have legacy subscribers that continue to miraculously maintain them afloat.

Take an honest look at Le Monde’s site right now. It’s almost entirely blog posts and AFP articles posted either verbatim or barely transcribed with an ounce of context, alongside metric shit tons of ads. Not discontent of offering a repulsive website, they additionally offer an iPad app that is so bad that whoever designed it should get shot. Readers can (and do) read Reuters, AP and so forth on Yahoo News or Google News, without the clutter. Le Monde’s potential added value (the occasional opinion piece) is a notch above zero. They simply deserve to die; the faster, the better.

Les Echos is admittedly more welcoming from a user experience standpoint, but barely more useful as a source of news. One gets more interesting stuff by following a few financial blogs and monitoring a handful of specialized blogs, user groups and forums (i.e. crowd sourced data).

I’d like to make a bet. 50 years from now, and hopefully earlier, the business of being a journalist be very close to that of being a rock star today, except that they’ll cater to an elite few who actually pay for opinion pieces with no ads or tracking, and TV outlets who secure their occasional presence for a fee. They’ll live side by side with gazillions of Mechanical Turks or similarly outsourced canon fodder who feed worthless news sites akin to Business Insider, which will cater to the masses and run on ads. And they’ll all get their primary source of information from citizen journalists reporting for free on blogs and forums, the latter of which will be the primary source of Reuters and AP editors who monetize their presence by selling market data and syndication.