Whether you're selling software or newspapers, it's tough to get paid in the digital age. This is due, in part, to shifting value.As Arnon Mishkin, a media consultant with Mitchell Madison Group, suggests, "The vast majority of the value [in news media] gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped." According to Mishkin, this sets up an untenable situation where the Googles of the world get rich on the work of organizations like The New York Times...which ultimately can't afford to be "scraped" anymore.Rather than rage against the digital machine, however, some organizations are fighting back, and doing so with one of the open-source industry's preferred tools: open core.The Financial Times, for example, is looking for ways to balance free use of its news assets while charging for premium content through micropayments (for individual articles) and subscriptions. The idea is to give away the core of its product to casual readers and charge for more "professional" interest.More ...