By Jeffrey the Barak

As more and more newspapers disappear from the marketplace, more of us turn to the Internet to read our news.

But although there are many sources to choose between, only a few actually gather the news, and these news organizations have to give it away and foot the bill.

No longer can they rely on the business of printing, selling and distributing paper that sells for a quarter or a dollar, and no longer can they sell page after page of print ads to cover the rent, salaries and countless other expenses of news gathering.

To illustrate this, let me use one of my own daily routines. I have in my Google home page, a ‘gadget” or columnar panel that highlights Current News. This is tier one.

If I click on the header it takes me to current.com. This is tier two. Once here, I can select a news article or click on “more news” and then select an article. Let’s assume I do the latter and pick an article that is not in the top three. This is tier three.

In “more news”, I select an interesting headline, click on it and arrive at tier four, an excerpt of the article, that includes a link to the original article which in this case resides on bbc.co.uk

So I click through to here and arrive at the page on BBC, tier five, and see a television interview video and read the article, which was gathered in the UK by BBC staffers. None of my money went to the BBC, and I was five tiers away from the article.

Along the way, I saw advertisements. There were none on Google, which is one of the many reasons why it is better than the mouse-over pop-up ridden and animated Yahoo!, There were none on Current, except for links to Current features, but then on the “more news” page I saw a small ad for Mini (the car). At the article level of current I saw one ad for AT&T, and then at the final BBC tier, there were no ads, except for BBC features links.

So assuming I did not shop for AT&T service or BMW minis, I got my story for nothing.

This is great for me, and I am not complaining, especially since my eyesight is not really up to reading a traditional newspaper anymore. But somewhere, someone has paid a lot of money to bring me the story, and eventually, we may end up with a news shortage, because no-one is paying the bill.