The free market is great. Everyone makes choices in their own self-interest, and in turn, we get a Darwinian system that emphasizes efficiency and favors better products and businesses. YouTube, energy drinks and mainstream hip-hop, to name a few — I love how the free market benefits me.

Thanks, choices of millions of consumers.

No system is perfect, and free-market outcomes don’t always benefit the general population.

Traditional media are an obvious casualty of capitalism. Newspapers are on life support, and TV and radio news will also soon be replaced by the Internet.

With the highest respect to those who put together such fantastic products, it’s great progress for old media to die. The Internet is indisputably better: News gets out faster, errors are corrected in real-time, advertisers get accountability, and there are infinitely more ways to tell stories and connect with audiences.

I hate to see traditional media go only because TV and newspapers are moneymakers. Most online-only operations will likely never make as much money per consumer as other media outlets. Right now, news Web sites exist because the traditional media — a magazine or a TV station, for instance — is covering the vast majority of the costs.

Ad revenues for free online news can’t sustain the amount of news we have access to now. If the Internet is the future, keeping journalism alive will largely be done through nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica or public-subsidized operations like KAET.

That’s a shame, because private-sector journalism organizations have a lot of advantages over nonprofits. I love NPR, but it’s not for everyone. Just look to the ratings of Fox News versus PBS.

Corporate media might pay too much attention to celebrities and car chases, but at least they’re getting people to watch the news. And it’s healthy to have competition keeping news organizations sharp.

Many point to subscription or pay-as-you-go news Web sites as a business model. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the planet refuses to pay, and why should they? Unless it’s a specialized or niche service, most people won’t pay for news. This has been proved over and over by countless failed attempts, and journalism can’t only exist for the elite who pay for it.

Another free-market solution: propaganda. Institutions or governments will always be willing to pay for a “news” organization that pushes a pro-somebody point of view. Obviously, that’s not going to fly.

The work of newsrooms can never be fully replicated by someone’s blog or any other form of citizen journalism. And sites like Wikipedia are successful only because over time, the tyranny of the majority produces acceptable accuracy (an unusual example of markets at work). That’s great, but this model can’t meet the need for investigative journalism, up-to-the-minute business reporting, and quick-turnaround news analysis.

So assuming the 21st century requires that people know quickly and accurately what’s going on in the world, we could let governments and nonprofits take over journalism. The fixed costs of a newsroom are likely too high to support through free-access Web sites.

Some entrepreneur needs to get past all this in-the-box thinking. It’s a serious problem: Who’s going to pay for our news?

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.