While not exactly endorsing his employer’s new paywall, David Carr makes a case for funding the journalism:

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan.

[...]

People, real actual people, went and reported that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost. The Times is hardly alone: AFP, Reuters, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, the BBC and NPR are all part of a muscular journalistic ecosystem. But it seems an odd time to argue against a business initiative that aims at keeping boots on the ground during a time of global upheaval.

Speaking of real people, four missing Times journalists were released in Libya today. But, you know, bloggers and opinionators are doing just as good a job covering the conflict from Starbucks.

Meanwhile, on Twitter’s fifth birthday, Dave Winer:

Neither company has a way to sustain itself financially.

Not only that, they don’t have any ideas.

The difference between the Times and Twitter is that we’ve known that about the Times for a long time, and only suspected it about Twitter.

Got a better idea?