In case you haven’t heard: Plenty‘s folded, National Geographic’s Green Guide‘s gone all digital, and GOOD magazine’s now a quarterly.

Green mags aren’t the only mags going out of business, but the news made me a bit sentimental — until I realized I didn’t have a subscription to any of these. In fact, while I do have a number of magazine subscriptions, I haven’t paid for any of them….

I muse about this at length at FilterForGood — but after I wrote that, I finally picked up last week’s copy of Time magazine (yes, a paper copy — I’m a subscriber). The cover story: “How to Save Your Newspaper” by Walter Isaacson.

Unlike one L.A. Times reporter’s insistence that the only way to get good journalism is by paying for the paper version of the paper, Water isn’t interested in force-feeding an anachronistic medium to people who clearly don’t want it. Instead, Walter focuses on how to make web publishing viable for newspapers. After all, even if newspapers could survive on just web advertising revenue, that would make newspapers beholden to advertisers for 100% of their income — a rather scary proposition for a newspaper that should serve its readers, not advertisers.

Walter’s idea’s to basically come up with a simple micropayment system that lets people easily pay a few cents for newspaper articles — sort of like an EZPass for internet content:

Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day’s full edition or $2 for a month’s worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.

A nickel for an article actually seems rather steep to me — but what if the cost was a cent per article? A lot of people don’t even pick pennies up from the sidewalk, so I’d imagine many people would go for it.

I also wonder if newspapers could go the public radio station-route, having a pledge drive a couple times a year. Of course, since most newspapers aren’t nonprofits, I’m not sure that would be a viable option.

All of this had me thinking about how to make more of my living directly from green LA girl. Writing for this blog is the writing I enjoy the most — but also the writing that pays least. Lately I’ve felt my attention and time’s getting fractured into so many different outlets. Some people might enjoy that, but I’d actually prefer to focus more on this blog.

That’s not to say I plan to charge for content on green LA girl anytime soon. I guess the death of mainstream media as we know it just has me thinking…. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on these changing times –

Images via Green Guide, Plenty, and GOOD

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