There you go. Curtis's friend saw the value in a strong photograph in the local paper, was willing to pay for it, and is probably going to come out ahead of things in the long run.
Having spent the last 23 years in and around the newspaper business, I can tell you that newspapers have been run into the ground by the bean counters. You start with a profitable, well run, papers with strong content. Then someone figures out that if you take the ad content percentage from 50% to 60%, then you're bringing in more ad revenue, and spending less on editorial content. That works so well that you decide to push that to 68% (in Canada, above 70% and you become an ad flyer and you lose your editorial tax status) percent ad content. At the same time, you figure that the experienced journalists make too much money, and replace them by a string of unpaid interns, or kids out of J-school who get massive work loads dropped on them. Experienced photographers are laid off, and the intern is given a point and shoot digital and told to go wild. As a result, the paper is crammed with ads, looks like crap, and is full of errors and poor reporting. You wonder why readership is dropping?
A friend of mine started his own independent newspaper locally, and is doing well by it. I've been helping out with the photos, and having a pretty good time. The original local paper, which is corporate owned, is (no kidding) hated in the community for the screw ups they've done. These would include such things as naming the wrong team the winner of the local baseball playoffs, and getting the wrong MVP to boot (first rule of sports reporting; find out who won the game!), and recently falsely reported that the wife of a local businessman had killed herself after arranging have her business fire bombed for the insurance. The wife was actually visiting her mother in England, and the only business they owned was obviously un-fire bombed. With opposition like that, it just makes it too easy.
The other thing is that production and printing costs are far lower than they were back in the day. Presses are much cheaper and easier to set up, and as a result printing costs have come way down. When I started as a newspaper photographer, there were five ladies (all of whom smoked non-stop) who laid out the paper using hot wax guns and exacto knives to stick columns of text down. Not only was that labour intensive, but it took a warehouse sized office to do hold all the equipment. At our paper, one guy does all the advertising and editorial layout on a stock G5 20 inch iMac using common Adobe software, and then sends it via FTP to the printer. Where we used to have a darkroom that I spent half my day in, now I do all my processing at home and send in the photos via FTP to the office for layout.
Bottom line is that newspapers will probably start to shift away from large public companies, to being privately owned, independent businesses. I don't think you'll see the days of the highly paid unionized journalists coming back anytime soon, but I've never been into that scene, so it doesn't bother me.
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