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LedeWire Blog

Insights on the future of journalism, micropayments, and quality content

Why would anyone ever pay for water? Water is free.

By Morgan Ramsey • December 23, 2025

Two guys are standing at a spring. One takes a sip and says, “Man, this water is delicious. We should bottle it and sell it.” The other replies, “That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone ever pay for water? Water is free.” Funny to think that in our lifetimes (well, my lifetime at least), the idea of paying for a bottle of water was absurd. I feel like that cartoon is a good metaphor for what I see happening in the world of digital media.

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Removing Friction to Expand the Market (i.e. focus on growing the Pie)

By Morgan Ramsey • October 27, 2025

When the internet first arrived, no one could define its total addressable market. The concept of e-commerce felt abstract — who, after all, would ever trust a website with their credit card? Yet today, e-commerce has not only surpassed brick-and-mortar retail in growth, it has redefined how we buy nearly everything.

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Incentives determine outcomes

By Morgan Ramsey • September 03, 2025

If you can truly understand incentives, how people are being rewarded, you have a good chance of understanding how they will behave. Follow the incentive, and you can usually predict the outcome. Which is why I think so much of the polarization we see online today isn’t some great mystery. We built an internet that rewards attention at all costs. As a result we got an internet full of outrage, noise, and content engineered to keep people fired up and scrolling.

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"Show Me the Value!!"

By Morgan Ramsey • August 21, 2025

“Won’t micropayments cannibalize our subscriptions?” I get why that fear shows up. Subscriptions have been the lifeline. The notion of potentially disrupting that lifeline is unsettling. But my view is this: your work is more valuable than you believe.

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Where'd your audience go?

By Morgan Ramsey • August 05, 2025

The most influential interviews in America aren’t happening on network TV anymore, they’re happening on podcasts hosted in spare bedrooms. Dozens of independent creators now command audiences larger than any of the late shows. But with the shift to a more fragmented, decentralized media landscape comes a problem we haven’t solved yet: how do we fund the kind of meaningful, deeply researched content we used to rely on institutions to provide?

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You want to build a new internet?

By Morgan Ramsey • July 08, 2025

For the past 30 years, we’ve lived in a world where the vast majority of the internet was free. At least, that’s how it felt. You could search anything, read the news, connect with friends, follow your interests, and never pay a dime. It was a fantastic deal. We got powerful tools, endless content, and instant access to the world, and all we had to give up was a little time and attention. But even that ‘free’ model was built, as all markets are, on the exchange of value. It’s just that the value we were giving up was a lot more subtle.

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Who Pays for the Next Scoop?

By Morgan Ramsey • July 01, 2025

There is an absolutely profound shift happening to the Internet, and it’s happening faster than most people realize. The shift from search-based discovery to AI-generated answers is already underway, and it’s upending how content is consumed. My guess is it will very quickly change the way that content is valued as well.

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AI Is Swallowing the Free Internet

By Morgan Ramsey • June 13, 2025

If we can give readers a simple way to compensate the creators whose work resonates — no commitment, no hassle — I think the outcome can actually be better than what we’ve all grown accustomed to over the past 20 years.

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