Marc Andreessen is co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Earlier this year, via Twitter and then a blog post, I put down my thoughts on how the nature of the news business has changed, and what I believe its future looks like. In a word: fantastic. My optimism, and how we get to that future, gathered a fair bit of attention—and pushback—both inside and outside the media world. A “golden future” and “journalism” are not concepts you often hear used in close proximity. But my prediction hasn’t changed. The news business will be 10 or even 100 times the size it is today. That doesn’t mean a $60 billion business grows into a $6 trillion business, but the audience, the number of news outlets—and yes, the financial opportunities—will grow massively. Here’s how it happens.

The news business should be run like a business. Advertisement Thinking of news as a business is not only not bad for quality, objective journalism—but it’s also pro-quality. A healthy business is the foundation for being able to build high-quality products, and to do so sustainably. That includes journalism. Analyzed as a business, the news industry is going through a fundamental restructuring and transformation, for worse and for better. The main change is that from the end of World War II to 2005, news businesses were mostly monopolies and oligopolies. Now they aren’t. The monopoly/oligopoly structure of newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV news pre-2005 (the year the shift away from traditional media to online really went mainstream) meant restricted choice and overly high prices. The key to the old businesses was—way more than anyone ever wanted to admit—control of distribution. That’s wonderful while it lasts, but wrenching when that control goes away, as any suffering newspaper owner can attest. The end of monopolistic control doesn’t mean that great news businesses can’t get built in highly competitive markets. They just get built differently than before. Now, with everyone on the Internet, three things are happening simultaneously: 1. Distribution is going from locked down to completely open. Anyone can create and distribute. There is no monetary premium for control of distribution. 2. Formerly separate industries are colliding on the Internet. It’s newspaper vs. magazine vs. broadcast TV vs. cable TV vs. wire service. Now they all compete. Both No. 1 and No. 2 drive prices down. 3. The market size is dramatically expanding—many more people consume news now vs. 10 or 20 years ago. Many more still will consume news in the next 10 to 20 years. Volume is being driven up, and that is a big, big deal. Right now everyone is obsessed with slumping prices, but ultimately, the most important dynamic is No. 3—increasing volume. Here’s why: Market size equals destiny. In tech, as in the news business, going after massive markets matters. The winners in tech today can become much larger than those of prior decades because the markets they can sell into are enormous, global and growing. The same dynamic exists in media. READ MORE The Future Of News ‘The New York Times Is Not Going to Turn into BuzzFeed’

So yes, the big opportunity for the news industry in the next five to 10 years is to increase its market size 100 times and drop prices 10 times. The media will become larger and much more important in the process.

There are many ways to make money off journalism, but only if you abandon the race to the bottom.

Culture Clash More than ever, the journalism world needs to understand the tech world—and vice versa. “ The traditional culture, which is, of course, mainly literary, is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining—standing on its precarious dignity.” The British chemist and novelist C.P. Snow offered up that observation in 1956 in an essay and subsequent lecture discussing the divide between the sciences and humanities. It was a uniquely unsettling era: The mechanistic Soviets, having tested a hydrogen bomb with around 20 times the explosive force of the device that flattened Nagasaki, were on the march, and scientists, as Snow put it, were “on the up and up; they have the strength of a social force behind them.” But Snow was no technosuperiorist; he lamented the inability of these “two cultures” to speak the other’s language. “Neither culture knows the virtues of the other,” he wrote. “[O]ften it seems they deliberately do not want to know.” While the humanities were “too much on the defensive,” Snow found scientific culture “certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash.” Today, this same science culture, this civilization of engineers and math, is again on the rise. And to many, it feels like it’s running away with the future. In contrast, for the liberal arts, non-engineering culture—the tribe to which many journalists belong—all this technical stuff is getting really weird and scary. You can’t fault people for getting a bit nervous: Technological breakthroughs like shrinking computers into pills that can be swallowed or the virtual currency Bitcoin are going to change the world in unpredictable ways. As a consequence, we read about, listen to and watch manifestations of that uncertain feeling every day in the mainstream press. You see it in the constant discussion about whether robots are coming for your job; you see it in the debate over privacy and whether those with hacker skills are the only ones who can have it; you see it in essays like Leon Wieseltier’s recent article in the New Republic, in which the book critic slams Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, as a “data mullah” who “cannot conceive of public reason except as an exercise in statistical analysis and data visualization.” The recent cover story of Newsweek, which claimed to have discovered the identity of the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, is another great example. If the Newsweek story is wrong, as many think it is, then an innocent man was falsely exposed, made vulnerable, his life changed forever. More importantly, the reporter evidently made little effort to learn anything about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, let alone cryptography or math or programming—a major factor underpinning the story’s many shortcomings. (My view is that it doesn’t matter who Satoshi is. The ideas that are at the core of the Bitcoin protocol stand on their own, the math stands on its own, the code stands on its own.) The point is that, for people who aren’t deep into math and science and technology, it is going to get far harder to understand the world going forward. Those of us in the engineering culture have to really work hard to explain this stuff and make it intelligible. We have to reach across and bring people with us, as opposed to letting new technology freak people out—or pass them by. The days are over when you could unleash something as fundamentally transformative as, for instance, Bitcoin, and just say, “Hey this is great.” You can’t expect everybody to embrace change without having translated it from weird and scary to something that normal people can wrap their heads around – that’s our responsibility. As for news organizations, it’s more important than ever that they hire and train reporters from the technology side of the divide. Math and science majors. Data whizzes. Hackers. We’re going to need an army of Nate Silvers to explain what’s going on. Just ask C.P. Snow.

Some of the best news about the news business is the gigantic expansion of the market, a function of the rise of the developing world plus the expanded reach of the Internet. So how big is it? If you extrapolate from the number of smartphones globally, by 2020, the total potential market for news will be nearly 6 billion of the presumed 7.5 billion total global population. However, we all have to get more sophisticated about defining and segmenting markets. It is critical to really understand the who, where, when and why to serve that massive audience effectively.

Many evolving industries, for instance, are seeing the “death of the middle.” The winners offer either the broadest breadth or the deepest depth while the middle market—that’s your regional newspapers and newsweeklies—is withering. The advice applies here, too: Go maximum mass or maximum specific.

News organizations are also going to have to mix and match revenue models. I see eight obvious ones: advertising, subscriptions, premium content, events, cross-media promotion, crowdfunding, micropayments and philanthropy. How might these models play together? Take investigative journalism, widely believed to be the least commercially viable type of news. The total global expense budget of all investigative journalism is tiny, in the neighborhood of tens of millions of dollars annually. We can solve this one easily via crowdfunding, philanthropy and subsidization by otherwise healthy news businesses—a combination that should easily cover the global tab of investigative journalism, and even increase the money available. There is around $300 billion per year in philanthropic activity in the United States alone, for instance. It’s way underutilized in the news business.

Successful new news organizations will have to abandon tired old formulas.

Some artifacts and ideas in the journalism business arguably are counterproductive to the growth of both quality journalism and quality businesses. It’s why some organizations are finding it so hard to move forward.

An obvious one is the bloated cost structure left over from the news industry’s monopoly/oligopoly days. Nobody promised every news outfit a shiny headquarters tower, big expense accounts and lots of secretaries!

Unions and pensions are another holdover. Both were useful once but now impose a structural rigidity in a rapidly changing environment. They make it hard to respond to a changing financial environment and to nimbler competition. The better model for incentivizing employees is sharing equity in the company, as some upstart online news organizations are doing.

Here’s another thing holding back the future of news: the notion that “objectivity” is the only model worth pursuing. The practice of gathering all sides of an issue, and keeping an editorial voice out of it, is still relevant for some, but the broad journalism opportunity includes many variations of subjectivity. Before World War II, subjectivity was the dominant model in the news business—lots of points of view battling it out in the marketplace of ideas. As with people and opinions, there were many approaches to writing or broadcasting on the same topic. But the rise of objectivity journalism was an artifact of the postwar era and the new monopoly/oligopoly structures news organizations had constructed for themselves. Introducing so-called objective news coverage was necessary to ward off antitrust allegations, and ultimately, reporters embraced it. So it stuck.

But the objective approach is only one way to tell stories and get at truth. Many stories don’t have two sides. Indeed, presenting an event or an issue with a point of view can have even more impact and reach an audience otherwise left out of the conversation. There’s a reason so many newer sites are writing with verve and voice: It works.

Journalists will have to play well with their business colleagues.

The opportunity for leadership in the journalism business just happens to be the same leadership opportunity as in all businesses. Leaders just need to start leading.

One start would be to tear down, or at least modify, the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works. There ought to be more awareness and communication on both sides, so that decisions can be made with full knowledge of the financial and journalistic impacts.

Before the journalistic purists burst a fountain pen, consider that there are intermediate points between “holier than holy” and “hopelessly corrupt” when it comes to editorial content. Paying attention to the business doesn’t equal warped coverage. It equals a growing business. There are many businesses that balance incentives and conflicts all day long. Those businesses are able to hold the line on quality and make great products. The point is: There isn’t just one way, but there ought to be many ways, to skin the cat in news.

All of this requires abandoning the past, something that, admittedly, is very hard but necessary to move forward. Today’s news organizations are spending 90 percent of their effort and resources on playing defense. They are protecting the old artifacts and business model rather than going on the offense and making the future. Newspapers and other media outlets that are just now making it across the digital chasm would be much better off today if their leadership had shifted resources and focus harder and sooner. Without a strong offense, and a view forward rather than back, a bad result is inevitable in the long run.

The best approach is to think like a 100 percent owner of your company with a long-term time horizon. Then you work backward to the present and see what makes sense and what remains. That is a tough exercise, and an even tougher mind shift. As we have already seen in the demise and downsizing of scads of newspapers and other periodicals, not every news organization will make it. And that is OK. Further consolidation will be required. The United States alone has 15 full-scale national news organizations, plus more from international markets and all the online news organizations cropping up. That’s too many.

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The good news is those that survive and thrive will control their own destinies. As business models get re-engineered and this brave new world of news comes to pass, there is an understandable fear that oceans of crap will drive out quality content. I don’t think that happens. In fact, I believe the opposite will occur.

Think of it this way: On the Internet, there’s no limit to the number of outlets or voices in the news chorus. So quality can easily coexist with crap. All can thrive in their respective markets—and there’s a market for garbage, too. The good news is this: The more noise, confusion and crap, the more the need for trusted guides, respected experts and quality brands.

Remember, most great businesses are not big businesses. This market is plenty big enough for thousands of high-margin, small to medium-sized businesses. There are many examples of companies in the news business doing it right.

Not every experiment will work. That’s not the point. Experimentation and, yes, some failures—even big ones—are needed for creation and, ultimately, success.

I’m very bullish on the future of the news business. But to paraphrase Tommy Lasorda: “Nobody said this job would be all that easy.” Yes, it will be hard—but I’m sure it can be done, and it is worth doing.