“It really is a lovely, lovely job.” So said my news journalism lecturer, in his lovely south Welsh lilt, some 18 years ago about the profession I was about to enter.

But if you buy what Time editor Walter Isaacson penned in unprecedented fashion last week, journalism is lying on the ground, wounded, dying. It’s a difficult topic to get to grips with given the British media penchant for sensationalism, but they’re right: journalism is in crisis.

I have mates and former colleagues and peers ‘gracing’ the columns and newsdesks of the Mail on Sunday, The Times, the Financial Times, ITV and lots of regional papers. Every one says the same thing: our line of work is in big trouble. Because we have no real idea how to charge fairly for what we do in a changing world.

As Walter points out, this is idiocy. More and more people are craving news content, and the old (I admit, fairly straight-jacketed) conventional approach to reporting has been taken in new directions by the possibilities of new media.

News, news analysis and features are some of the most important things most of us read in our lives. What’s more, most of us are prone to reading it every day, often many times a day. Whether you’re a busy board executive with FT alerts on your iPhone or a builder with The Sun poking out of your back pocket just below a startling piece of fleshy exposure, you want news. You want media content. And you are prepared to pay fairly for it.

I often bang on about the PR industry being commercially naive and too hung up on the ‘craft’ of PR rather than developing its value as a strategic business tool. Yet despite the move online, rich media and constant restructures, the world of journalism seems equally uncommercial at the moment.

How do you charge for content? You offer them content, and charge them for it.

Not in the clumsy way that publishers did in the mid-1990s. Not in a way that intrudes on the experience. The Economist has long charged for content and it offers the type of journalism that warrants it. The FT’s recent online makeover continues its vein of offering a teaser, then the rest being on subscription, albeit I think it’s extremely cheap at the price. Most regional papers though are now providing far more diverse content yet few charge for it properly, it at all.

When we can bring the wonder of news instantly to people across the world, have opened our eyes to more personalised and insightful analysis, and have the ability to make it dialogue with the reader than one way traffic, it is ridiculous that journalism has not yet cracked how to earn an honest crust in a changing world.

More on this soon. Perhaps not in a newspaper though.