"Never make someone a priority for whom  you're just an option."

I've read innumerable variations of this line (including a remarkable number of grammatical and spelling variations) on countless online profiles - whether it's cheap philosophy or painfully won wisdom I know not. The line occurred to me in a different context at a lunch this week at which the Overseas Press Club, a convivium of American foreign correspondents, handed out fellowships to a dozen younglings who wish to follow in their journalistic footsteps. Always these days, media gatherings are grim, sardonic affairs, with about as much optimism as I have capital gains. I fell into a conversation with a veteran of the New York Times (and not just its print pages, but its website, which is an extraordinary resource), now working elsewhere, about the problem of paid content - the problem, rather, of unpaid content. We agreed that he's a fool who thinks monetizing eyeballs is a sustainable business. (A fool whose name is Legion, unfortunately.) It can't go on and everyone knows it. Even in good times, when they return, there won't be enough advertising money to support giveaway journalism.

Trouble is-and it was trouble when Sock Puppet ruled the Web-that in a digital world one company's revenue is another's loss leader: a priority, competing with an option. In an unintended consequence of convergence, on the digital High Street Prada (which makes money selling shoes) is just one storefront away from the pawnshop (which practically gives the shoes away because it makes money on the loans it makes), whereas in the real world the two are in vastly different parts of town. Thus I work for a consulting firm that publishes a magazine that makes more money for us from the leads it generates than from its advertising and circulation revenue; but the company I used to work for publishes a magazine that's supposed to be  highly profitable in its own right.

Over the years, I've developed a Tennessee Williams theory of capitalism, which holds that a business that depends on the kindness of strangers is in trouble, or will be one day. In that sense, what's becoming obviously true for newspapers is just as inevitably so for anyone else, whether they're electronics retailers or law firms or dental hygienists: You've got to find clientele who are willing to pay you for your pains, or the pain will become yours.

My luncheon colleague and I didn't solve this for his alma mater. But we're Facebook friends now.

Thomas A. Stewart is the Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz & Company. Formerly the Editor and Managing Director of Harvard Business Review, he is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st-Century Organization.