Mark Cuban advances the argument about paid news in his rejoinder to my rebuttal of his attack on Newser (ie, aggregators are dastardly). His notion about how to make money on news is to trick the consumer into buying it. (His blog post is actually a bit confusing and convoluted, but Newser's summary of it is very clear.) A big media company's strategy, he says, ought to be to take all the content it owns, from news to sports to music to movies, pack it up into an interesting package, and charge a lump sum for it.

He makes this all sound a bit like an infomercial. Buy the brush, get the broom, and we'll throw in the ultra-super-sweeping instructional video.

It's not about news, in other words, it's about marketing.

In fact, he agrees with me: Nobody is going to pay for news. Not unless there's a sweetener—some sugary entertainment add-on.