Would you pay to read the MSM?  Not if you’re like most people, according to this AP report of a Pew Research study:

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons,” a new consumer survey suggests.

That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

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There’s more:

About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online – including those who already do.

There’s little brand loyalty: 82 percent of people with preferred news sites said they’d look elsewhere if their favorites start demanding payment.

“If we move to some pay system, that shift is going to have to surmount significant consumer resistance,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, part of the Pew Research Center.

What kind of resistance would it get from you?  And if the MSM disappears — the organizations that actually pay for newsgathering, support their writers and, for all their faults, up until about 20 years ago maintained fairly high standards at the national level — what kind of a world will it be if left entirely to the blogosphere?

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Meanwhile, this just in:

While the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) struggled under the weight of economic pressures and debt last year, top execs personally did pretty well, even as the company reduced its newsroom by 100 staffers. As the company’s recent Q4 results showed, cost-cutting led to greater profitability and that appears to show in the compensation of chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and president/CEO Janet Robinson, according to the NYTCo’s latest SEC filing.

In total ‘09, Sulzberger’s compensation was $5,986,738, more than double the $2,331,599 he earned last year. His base salary for last year was $1,046,238. Robinson did even better, earning a total of $6,262,755, which included a base salary of $962,500, for a significant 31.9 percent rise in earnings over last year’s $4,753,314.

Other execs also did pretty well. Michael Golden, vice chair and COO of the Regional Media Group, took home a total $2,400,841, which was a 71 percent gain over the $1,496,959 he got in ‘08. CFO Jim Follo earned a total $1,297,269 last year, a 20 percent rise over the $1,096,794 the year before that.

No wonder this man is smiling:

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Over to you.