More than 50% of Americans now get their news from the internet. Couple that with the impact of an economy in free fall and rapidly evaporating advertising revenues and you have one of the most severe downturns in publishing the industry has ever experienced. In media circles, the debate has definitively switched from if they should charge consumers to access some or all of their content online, to how best to do it.

Read the whole release here.

It’s been a few months since our cherished Seattle newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer, ceased print operations. The sad loss of this venerable institution was a wakeup call for all of us at Aurumis and we’ve taken a hard look across the landscape of publishing in the United States. The struggling economy has exacerbated weaknesses in the purely ad-supported paradigm which purports to supply ‘free’ content to the masses. The simple fact is that advertisers cannot support the cost of good journalism alone. Information may want to be free, but the folks that find it, report about it, edit it, and publish it need to make a living. The technology exists for us all to pay a nominal fee for the content we depend on to ensure its viable future.

Some cynical pundits argue that the print behemoths cannot survive in this new era and we are better off without them. Aurumis believes that with the right tools our old print friends can weather this storm. We have paid for news for hundreds of years. Free news and information is a recent blip in history; a passing fad. It doesn’t work. We’re here to fix it.

Please join us in supporting intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and imaginative entertainment by supporting professional writers and content creators.

It’s fitting that cartoonist Dave Horsey drew a cartoon alluding to a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The demand for quality news and information has never been higher and continues to grow. We hope to serve the journalism industry in whatever form it takes, be it incumbents reinventing themselves to new, nimbler groups delivering quality content online. To see Dave’s cartoon, see his site: http://www.seattlepi.com/horsey/viewbydate.asp?id=1917.

If you ever get the chance, someday pay him for it.

-The Aurumis Team