So like plenty of others who came before me, I’m cautious of pay walls. But I also take issue with Fast Company’s rebuke of paid content, mainly because I doubt the way the survey pitched questions to respondents. So 77% might say they’ll never pay to read online news — that’s a pretty vague way to phrase it. Not everyone reads “news”, they read the “Times”, the “Journal”, the “Post”, etc. I would be more interested to see what happens to the data when you ask people what they would pay to access specific brands online. My guess is the vast majority still would not pay. But the numbers also might not be as dismal as Fast Company suggests. And maybe people won’t pay to read stories, but what if newspapers could create something more comprehensive, enduring and essential than individual articles? How can newspapers develop a potent freemium model (see no. 8) that forces journalists to produce content that truly commands a price above $0? See http://newsinnovation.com/ for more ideas on that.