Working in the publishing industry coworkers and I discuss the future of journalism all the time in hopes that we can figure out how our web presence will pay the bills. As you might guess the debate is advertising vs. paywall.

So of course when Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp. is ready to charge for content and the Associated Press is developing a plan to tag and track it’s content it makes us wonder what we should be doing.

The AP seems to be clearing the paywall path by charging $12.50 to quote five words and harassing bloggers that quote as few as 39 words yet somehow it all feels short sighted.

In fact, I think there’s a coming flood that will be a force so big on the economics of journalism that these old methods will be exposed for their silliness in the near future. That force of course is teenagers.

The napster generation has come of age and their little brothers and sisters are now becoming great consumers of content. While the napster generation felt privileged to ‘find’ free content this new generation feels entitled to it. Guy Kawasaki points out via a panel he hosted how kids aren’t going to pay for much, heck they won’t even pay for internet if they can find it for free.

So what’s the future look like?

Well there’s the playbook of politico.com and there’s the ‘go long’ option like what Techcrunch proposed with the ‘New New York Times’.

Whatever it is, it has to be about the customer first and innovating for them.