Many of you will have seen that most major newspapers are either looking into or expressing interest in charging for access to their content online.
Indeed, they have realised what people are slowly dawning to - the revenue from online advertising is generally not enough to cover costs. So by putting all their content online they are losing money, and you can't do that forever without something having to give.
In response to this it seems inevitable that many major news publishers will make a small amount of content free but then charge for the rest on some sort of by-article or per-time-period basis. It will be interesting to see what impact this has around the world and if it shifts other publishers to charging for their knowledge and information. It is quite incredible that so much information is there for free on the internet, and it does seem unsustainable. As people work out how to use the internet (people at companies) and how to derive revenue from it, I believe we can expect to see less and less free content on the internet.
After all, people ultimately do a job, and they get paid for it. Now if the job they do (putting information online, running a website) doesn't earn back enough to cover their salary, then why should companies continue publishing content for free? They are not charities! The rather naive approach of shoving everything they can online has been a great boon to the early days of the internet, but these could be golden days. Expect in a few years time that there will be a lot less reliable/quality information available for free that is time-relevant content.
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