Are you the sort of person who's stopped buying newspapers and instead expects their content to be online for free? Well, sorry to deflate your balloons, but the party’s almost over.

Web 2.0 types have been salivating over the death of newspapers for the past few years. They gleefully point to the rise of news aggregation services, blogs and (shudder) even Twitter as the new way to stay informed.

On the surface, it seemed they might have been right. Newspapers around the world are in financial trouble while the number of ‘free’ news destinations continues to thrive.

But when you look a little more closely at what’s happening, it becomes clear there’s plenty of life yet in the ‘old media’ news model.

I’m not saying that newspapers will (or even could) continue unchanged, but the concept that news should be available anywhere, anytime for free just doesn’t stack up. The reason? Good news reporting costs money.

While many online ‘news’ destinations are stuffed with opinion, rumour and fluff, there’s still plenty of people willing to pay for a factual view of the world and some intelligent analysis of what it all means.

A blogger may be well placed to deliver some celebrity rumour gossip, but how many blogs have broken stories that require the skills of true investigative journalists? Would Woodward and Bernstein have brought down Nixon if they hadn’t had the backing of a large news organisation?

So, rather than the changing the news gathering model used by papers, it’s a case of altering the delivery mechanism. Squirting ink onto dead trees must give way (almost entirely) to electronic delivery.

But here’s the thing. Just because you change the way you deliver the news, it doesn’t mean you have to stop charging for it. The world’s largest news organisations are closely looking at this and refining the revenue raising models that will be used. Just take look at recent comments from the head of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch.

So if you want your news diet to consist of mentally nutritious fare rather than celebrity and rumour-based fast food, prepare to open your wallet – you’ll be glad you did.