Claire Austin is a Journalism Program Intern at Knight Foundation

News economics debates are all over the web these days. Highlights:

Bob Picard, editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies, writes that journalists deserve low pay because they aren’t providing real value. He says that value comes from access to sources, ability to determine the significance of information and present it clearly. More on Picard at his blog.

Philip Meyer, Knight chair emeritus of the University of North Carolina, explains the ‘influence model’ of news in his book ‘The Vanishing Newspaper.’

Penelope Muse Abernathy, current Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at UNC, wonders about nonprofit models for the New York Times. A Miami Herald column by Ed Wasserman, Knight Chair in Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, says digital media often follows an Op-Ed model, with content coming directly from topic experts rather than from journalists.

A new PricewaterhouseCoopers study says consumers are willing to pay for news online.

Jeff Jarvis, director of the Interactive Program at the City University of New York, talks about a ‘new ecosystem of news’ as the replacement for the old model on his blog. He is going to prepare several new digital media economic prototypes. Anyone interested in getting involved in the economics of journalism and digital media should contact him.