The good people at Nieman Lab asked me to contribute to their annual prediction package about the coming year in journalism.

I wrote about what I call the coming "subscription-pocalypse" and its impact on newspaper journalism:

The implicit promise of a subscription site is that you are getting something worth paying for, something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s what my friend Dr. Andy Billings called the HBO model — as long as it has one thing you can’t live with you, you’ll keep paying for it.

The problem for newspapers is the idea of giving people something they have to have. Newspapers are mass media outlets, which mean they have to reach a broad audience. In sports, that means they have to have a game story because somebody might not know who won. That’s not the audience that a subscription-only site is after.

Read the whole thing here: