Two pieces of writing making points about free content

I'm synthesizing two very interesting pieces of writing today, but of which I presume to be paid work, and which take opposite sides on the debate.
In my soggy New Yorker that came through the mail slot at the height of today’s thunderstorm is a piece by the highly-paid Malcolm Gladwell challenging Chris Anderson’s notion that “information wants to be free in the same way water wants to run down hill… things made of information are losing value.” And the piece is free here.
That’s bad news for an information-based economy; it’s worse for the notion of professional journalism.
By late afternoon, and the skies turning gray, I was sent a link from a friend with a piece in Gawker.com by Hamilton Nolan entitled “Let's Screw Up the Entire Internet to Save Newspapers.” Nolan, who I’m less certain wrote the piece for pay, and certainly not at New Yorker rates, makes the case that ideas such as Judge (and author) Richard Posner’s idea of making linking a copyright infringement, or Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz’s idea of legislating a 24-hour embargo on content before it can be linked “The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic,” Nolan writes. And in writing, he makes the point indirectly: His writing, as a commodity, just isn’t close to Gladwell’s; his argumentation is worse. He’s just spinning an angry riff that could not have taken long to write. Gladwell’s prose speaks of deliberation and thought. It's the difference between grilling a hamburger and creating a dish at a Michelin three-star restaurant. Yeah, they're both cooking... but not really...
And as a commodity, good content isn’t cheap to make. If talented people can’t earn a wage on their content, they find other things to do. Amateurs and hobbyists fill that vacuum, and as much as a once-in-a-blue-moon talent rises from that crowd, usually it doesn’t (the latest internet-to-book sensation is the blog Look at This Fucking Hipster, which tells you way too much about the state of the book industry).
Nolan sees the Posner and Schultz ideas as insidious ways to feed corporate interests; I see newspapers (having toiled at several of them) from cubicle level – already-not-well-paid professionals doing good work under tough conditions and worrying about how to support their families.)
Information may want to be free, but work such as Gladwell’s runs uphill. Where Nolan’s piece is just a blast from a laptop, a rainy afternoon considering what a writer like Gladwell has to say is a intellectual experience, which I want more of.
The notion of linking only has validity if there’s something good to link to: Something substantive, meaningful and important (and sometimes just entertaining). Information sought out, hard-won, well rendered. If there isn’t a way of compensating talent for work, then the new “free” journalism comes at a larger cost.
In the end, the "newspaper," (by which I really mean an organization that gathers and reports news, and puts it out in print or online) is still where all the news is. TV, YouTube, personal blogs and other amateurish efforts simply won't replicate the work of professionals.

Addendum: Here's a piece, also from Gawker, about Andrew Sullivan wanting to write for free. But he's being paid. But he'd do it anyway. Weird.