The time has arrived to liberate media from their reliance on advertising. Media need to scale back their ambitions, to return to their niches, to reclaim the loyalty of core audiences—a move that will yield superior editorial and sustainable businesses, even if such retrenchment would crush owners’ (mostly delusional) fantasies of getting gobbled by conglomerates or launching IPOs. To rescue themselves, media will need to charge readers, and readers will need to pay.
