Patience may be a virtue, but it's not one that's much appreciated in the media business at the moment. As newspapers fold, the hunt is on for a workable business model for online news. Lots of things are being tried, but none of them provides the revenue growth needed to offset the income siphoned off by changes in media consumption patterns and the diversion of advertising revenues to the web.

Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the "make the bastards pay" school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. And recently a few desperadoes have made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill seeking legislative assistance and/or federal bailouts for newspapers.

It's difficult to keep one's head when all about one people are losing theirs, but let us have a go. First of all, some historical perspective might help. When broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s, nobody could figure out a business model for it. How could one generate revenue from something that could be listened to by anyone for free? Dozens of companies were founded to exploit the new medium, and most of them folded. The problem was solved by a detergent manufacturer named Procter & Gamble, which came up with the idea of sponsoring dramatic serials: the soap opera – and the mass market – was born.

The moral is simple: eventually someone will figure out a business model that works for online news. But it may take some time, and lots of outfits will fall by the wayside in the meantime. That's capitalism for you.

The problem at the moment is that the web is awash with free content, and in a competitive market the price always converges on the marginal cost – which is currently zero. But as providers disappear (or, like Murdoch, decide to charge), the supply of free news will diminish and something more like a normal market will emerge. Only then will we find out what people are willing to pay for news.

That takes care of the economics. But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson's celebrated maxim that "the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed". In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades.

Johnson's lecture opens with him reminiscing about his youth as a geeky adolescent hanging round the College Hill bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, on the third week of every month, waiting for the arrival of MacWorld magazine, which was then just about the only published source of news about Apple products. He contrasts that vanished, information-poor world with the current luxuriant ecosystem of online news and comment about Apple – or indeed about any other computing topic you care to mention. And he goes on to contrast the volume and diversity of online news and comment about the recent US presidential election with that available during earlier elections. Eight million people watched Obama's Philadelphia speech on YouTube, for example, and the speech was available in its entirety.

What would have happened to that speech, Johnson wonders, had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? "Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it … A few serious newspapers might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that's about the most we could have hoped for."

But in Johnson's view the ecosystem of technology news is the most instructive case study because it's the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. "The web doesn't have some kind [of] intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields", he writes.

"It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of MacWorld to the rich diversity of today's tech coverage is happening in all areas of news."

So, perhaps – to adapt the famous Orange advertising slogan – the future's bright, the future's networked.