Nicholas Carr has some interesting thoughts on ZDNet Tech bloggers being paid on a page-per-view basis.

“Pay-per-view journalism is inevitable. It simply brings the compensation model in line with the content model. Online publishing breaks the old bundled-content model of print publishing.”

Now I’m all for new business models in journalism. But I’m not sold on this being it. Dan Gilmore at the Center for Citizen Media shares some of my concerns.

What happens to the quality of content if journalists are just looking for the quick buck? If success is measured by page-views what happens to the tried-and-true journalist that wants to be informative, accurate and unfortunately — sometimes boring?

Or as Carr put it “a shift in the way publishers and journalists make money means a shift in what gets written and what gets published.”

That shift will more than likely become a distraction in social bookmarking, one of the fastest ways to get traffic to a site. While I am a fan of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine and Netscape—I’d even consider submitting and voting on links in them an act of journalism—I think anyone seeing an investigation through to the end should focus on just that, not trying to raise their reputation on a social news site and garnering traffic.

Plenty of social bookmarkers consider what they do a new profession, perhaps the youngest profession in the world – over at Netscape they are getting paid $1000 a month to submit links. Leaving bots behind, some news aggregators have popped up that hire social bookmarkers to scour the Web and pick the “top news from around the ‘Net.” They call it “human-aggregated content,” but I call it social bookmarking with the social.

The point is, it takes time and effort to use these tools to create a valued service that in-turn generates traffic. That’s why Netscape is paying social bookmarkers. It makes sense to keep that their job, and keep journalists working on their craft.

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David Cohn is editor of NewAssignment.Net’s blog. He recently wrote about his experinece as a journalist and a social bookmarker in Columbia Journalism Review.