Osama Bin Laden, Yoga, Jon Stewart, and other words we love to clickety click.

Words have worth, to all of us.

But when content is free, how do writers get paid, and media stay in business? Great article in today’s Sunday NY Times re: the challenge that we here at elephant and all our sister blogs and news sites are facing.

Click image below for article, well worth a read if you love the rapidly transitioning, crumbling and simultaneously growing Fourth Estate:

Excerpt:

…for some — possibly foolhardy — reason, a lot of people still want to work in journalism, and even amid the depths of the recession, there have been stirrings of creativity. A multitude of younger, nimbler enterprises have popped up, unencumbered by the past and ready to try anything. History suggests that few of these ventures will ultimately survive: Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent. But it’s quite possible that the experiments they’re staging are already producing the kind of innovations that make for new, sustainable business models….

To check out elephant’s sustainable business model, which we just pioneered a month back, click here. Our plan is to pay writers (unlike, say, Huffington Post or many other blogs), improve our journalistic quality as we continue to rapidly grow in readership, and…you know, stay in business. Our loan runs out June 17th. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen.