Chris Hayes: Online news business is in crisis due to lack of a viable business model Chris Hayes, a news presenter at MSNBC, asks a poignant question about whether there is a business model for online "digital news"? That is a troubling question since he is a prominent employee at a well regarded online-only news organization. And it is a crisis, as he says, because with the Internet as it stands we must have valuable high integrity news outlets that are also viable businesses, or we will lose the free and open society we enjoy.

The death of news outlets has been a long time coming - not just business models Today layoffs at several prominent news organizations caused the news industry to cry wolf about business models and how the Internet was a big threat to the traditional news organization business model. In the thick of this debate came Jeremy Littau with a series of twitter postings explaining his take on what really happening. According to Littau the issue started in the 1980's with a consolidation of news organizations and hedge fund managers starting to strip newspapers of value.