Today, there are five sound models of news delivery (with news just being a content category with the distinction of having an especially short lifetime):

1) Free (self-paid) sourcing, free (self-paid) delivery: Typically, gatherers and deliverers are interest groups that want to draw attention to topics or agendas that would otherwise go unnoticed or underreported but are vital to the gatherers and deliverers. The people that are donating time and money to make it happen do not do so with the hope of financially recouping their expenses. Example: Indymedia, Discovery Institute, Greenpeace, perhaps Teleread.

2) Free (self-paid) sourcing, source-paid (or externally paid) delivery: The gatherer has money to pay a deliverer directly or indirectly for distributing their news. The source pays because they This is done if a commercially vital agenda can be helped by handing out the news, so the news in question are typically advertising, policy inducing spin or PR pieces. Examples: CEI, or INSM in Germany

3) Delivery-paid sourcing, reader-paid delivery: Some journals pay their researchers to gather news, and are paid by their audience for delivery. Example: Stratfor, NewScientist, Stock market newsletters

4) Delivery-paid sourcing, externally (ad-) paid delivery: News gatherers are paid to deliver content to publishers, which use the content to attract audiences that they can sell to advertisers. This is the predominant model for print and TV.

5) Publicly paid sourcing, publicly paid delivery: Some European countries (such as Germany) have a public TV, radio and internet news sector, which is paid by a mandantory fee by all people possessing receivers and overseen by regulatory commissions to ensure quality and neutrality standards.

Peters contribution is motivated by a new, transitional model:

6) Free sourcing, externally paid delivery. Here, customers or advertisers pay for the delivery, while the deliverer makes use of news which are in the public domain.

These free news are either willingly contributed by internet users in their spare time, or they are scooped from the portals of other news deliverers which made them publicly available.

Some of the news deliverers that make content publicly available resent the fact that Google scoops their news — but of course they may stop Google from doing so simply by preventing it from indexing their pages. They do not do it, because the advertising value for their brand as a news deliverer, and the value of the additional visitors outweigh the losses.

Model 6 is usually not sustainable for the news source as a primary business. However, this is no reason for the deliverer to pay the source! This will only work if the deliverer can earn additional money by buying content. Which currently they do not (although Amazon is experimenting with earning money by having the Kindle audience pay their favorite bloggers).

The situation for some news provides may be dire, not simply because Google is not paying them, but because online eats into print and TV, and online margins are too small due to the abundance of available free competition. As long as the major news providers do not agree on taking all their online content off Google’s index, this situation will not change, and there is no good reason why it should.

In the same way, if all the cute girls unite and refuse to be photographed unless being paid, perhaps Canon will start rewarding them. Until then: fat chance.