A lot of  comment has been generated by Roy Peter Clark over at Poynter with his post, Your duty to read the paper.

I’m  paraphrasing  it a bit but in general he thinks that no matter what medium we work in, as journalists, we need to buy and read newsapers. He notes:

Until we create some new business models in support of the journalism profession, we’ve got to support what we have, even as we create and perfect online versions that may one day attract the advertising dollars and other revenues we need to do what we do well.

When I added this to technorati I noted that perhaps we should simply dock a percentage of journalists pay to keep papers going. A kind of old media tax. And that got me thinking that this really is a financial model that newspapers haven’t considered.

I know that there is a kind of tacit tax in terms of pay and working conditions but lets take this seriously.

Perhaps we could try:

1. A profession wide paper tax (say 3%) to keep newspapers going. Let’s call it a multi-national insurance contribution.
2. A share scheme where the share certificates come in an attractive array of wall charts.
3. Putting a free newspaper in with every CD sold at HMV.

Or, maybe, people like Roy Clark could spend a bit of time encouraging everyone to fund, support and engage with creating more engaging content and we could invest that ‘currency’ in saving newspapers.

In the meantime, any other ideas for generating money from the staff creating your product are welcome.