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The ones who do not want to be well-informed will be just as uninterested in quality journalism, regardless of whether the government is paying us to provide them with it. The ones who do will be willing to pay for it — as long as we make it worth their money.

• The news isn’t going anywhere. What’s going on, in other words, isn’t the collapse of the industry, still less its disappearance, but its transformation: from print to digital, yes, but more fundamentally from advertising to reader finance.

News, especially in North America, has traditionally been funded, not by newsstand sales or subscriptions, but by advertisers — the ones who have deserted us for Google and Facebook. Now, for the first time, we’re having to ask readers to pay something closer to the full shot.

That isn’t going to be easy, and not everyone is going to survive the transition — in fact, most of the legacy media companies will probably fail. But the one thing guaranteed to impede them from taking the necessary risks and hard decisions is the availability of government lolly.

Conversely, the one thing that is guaranteed to focus our attention on the reader — as businesses, and as writers — is if the reader is paying the shot. We don’t have to guess at this. It is the business model, increasingly, for top-end papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It is also the business model for all that is best on television: the pay channels that are responsible for TV’s current “golden age.”

This is a watershed moment for the industry. Once we take the cash, we will — inevitably — get hooked on it. What is more, we will make it virtually impossible for government to stop supplying it. A newspaper goes bust today, that’s sad and a loss. But a newspaper goes bust because the government, effectively, killed it? Unthinkable.

There is still time, perhaps, for everyone to come to their senses. But I have the sinking feeling the fix is in.