I've been idly thinking about what we know now that we didn't know [about web media economics] in 2009, so I'm going to think out loud (and in much more detail than is useful to you, but I don't really know which of these things matters yet):

Works:

* Threshold charges (pay after 10 articles) work for general interest publications with unique talents (Vanity Fair, New York Times), or for valuable niche reporting (WSJ, FT.)

* It's also a golden age for tiny for-profit niches, as with the success of Shaderoom or Baseball America

* Non-profits work in many cases: when you have a committed community (Texas Tribune, biting NPRs rhymes), a prestige publication and a good Rolodex (ProPublica), or a network that makes for an attractive target for sponsors (Radiotopia.)

* The biggest organizational change (rather than economic change) is the rise of networked journalism. Cablegate, the Palestinian Papers and now Panama Papers all required syndicated effort, both for protection against nation-states and because of the scale of the work. 'We do all our own work' pubs, most notably the NYT, are often not included in those syndicates.

So all of those things are working, but they are all points, not fields. That still leaves a lot of the old environment to crumble.

Doesn't work:

* Famously, nothing has ever replaced print ads, or even come close, in terms of free money. It's the 2nd decade of the 21C, and the core rationale for the Boston Globe memo was still 'Print losses equate almost directly with overall revenue decline.'

So much more horror is coming from the transition to a world of advertising abundance, because the :30 spot is the new full-page ad, and the rise of ad-blockers suggests there is an upper limit to how much shit users will tolerate with their news.

(And keep in mind that the Globe memo was written in a boom year. As Dick Tofel often notes, we are statistically closer to the next recession than the last one, and when Home Depot decides to cut back on free-standing inserts, every paper with a circ of under 50K is going to take a blow.)

* It's not clear if focussed non-profits (e.g. Syria Deeply) can survive without being part of a larger entity, or having a bead on rich's people's pocketbooks.

* It's not clear if the 'network of niches' model, as practiced by Gawker, Vox and the Awl, can be repeated (or last long-term, even for those orgs.)

* I don't know if this matters or not, but sports journalism turns out not to be hospitable to real journalism, by and large. The weirdly parallel fails with Grantland and SB Nation suggest that general interest sports sites can't successfully report on socially contentious issues when it requires sympathy for any point of view other than robust masculinity.

* One sign that this might matter outside of sports sites themselves is for sites like 538, which do 'stats', some of which are about sports. (538 has suffered somewhat in this election because Silver, quite inadvisedly, became a pundit, and advised everyone that just because every number they could get their hands on said that Trump was doing well didn't mean that Trump was doing well. This is a weird sentence to write, but Silver would have been better off if he'd been a numbers guy[...])

* And on the subject of 538, another thing that has stopped working is the "My name is my brand, so I'm starting a new site" model -- Silver, Salmon, Sullivan. It turns out Drudge was an outlier, not a harbinger.

David Carr once told me that he'd been offered a site of his own if he wanted to leave the Times, and said he'd never taken the idea seriously, because "I'm like a guy who's just walked into a party with Brad Pitt. Everyone is looking my way, but if I walk away from Brad, I know the attention won't follow."

* The fever dream of "I'll start a tech vertical, and build from there" is ending. As writers across the country are working on this week's roundup listicles of iPhone 7+ launch date rumors, the public's appetite for tech news is settling into something more ordinary. (This is what hit Mashable.)

* 'Branded content' and 'native advertising' are really just ways of slicing public trust very thinly, and selling it a bit at a time. Remains to be seen if that trust can be replenished in other ways, to make it sustainable, or if it's just slicing bits off a gold bar, so that at some point everyone doing it just runs out.

* Large-scale doesn't mean much in this industry. HuffPo and Yahoo are both large-scale, but they are not web scale, so the economics for them are surprisingly grim. This will hit Vice and Vox as well as HuffPo.

* Platisher is a noun with no plural form. Might work for Medium, but being everyone's non-FB CMS looks like a winner-take-all game.