“A wealthy benefactor or cat GIFs”

I won’t spoil the great title from Mathew Ingram:

In the good old days, the journalism business was subsidized by all of the other things a newspaper contained apart from the news. This included classified ads, obviously, but also horoscopes, gardening columns, the comic page and other add-ons that had little or nothing to do with news or journalism. Gradually the internet has taken most of these pillars away, and left newspapers with just the hard news — in other words, the only thing no one wants to pay for.

He goes on to list the different money-making models used by online news sites today.