Letting Time Solve the Online News Dilemma 188
The Guardian's John Naughton isn't looking to micro-transactions or licensing fees from search services to solve the online news business model problems that have come to a head recently. Instead, he's simply waiting for capitalism to do its job in killing off the providers who can't cut it. Once that happens, he says, the remaining organizations will be in a far better position to see what web-goers will pay for online news, and he doesn't think it will inhibit the growth of an increasingly information-rich news ecosystem.
"Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the 'make the bastards pay' school of thought. Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce. ... But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson's celebrated maxim that 'the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.' In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson's insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades."
Pretty rich coming from the Guardian (Score:1, Informative)
Subscription model (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will People Pay? (Score:2, Informative)
Will people pay for well-reasoned, researched, and written commentary and opinion columns?
It doesn't exist.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"Why Speculate." Michael Crichton, 2002
Re:Parasitic Google? (Score:4, Informative)
It's more like "Google has to pay for the privilege of displaying content creators freshly created content next to Google ads."
There are no ads on the Google News homepage or the Google home page or even the iGoogle homepage so I don't see how they are using ads with other people's content in your case.
Without you using Google, those news sites wouldn't get the 10% of clicks you generate.
If newspapers don't like it they can use their robots.txt file to block googlebot. Even worse, Google News has become more of an opt-in crawl where you have to request it and meet certain crtieria. You even need to include a unique numerical id in your urls for google to include you in the news index.
Newspapers could opt out of google news but it would be the equivalent of providing newsstands with front pages that contained no headlines or stories. People walking by wouldn't see the attention grabbing headlines that might cause them to buy the paper and see the advertisements contained.
Re:Will People Pay? (Score:2, Informative)
This is good old fashioned journalism at its best; a competent team of reporters going over a huge amount of data and expressing it clearly and succinctly in terms the public can understand.
But [guardian.co.uk] apparently they paid for the data. Some peddler was trying to sell it to major news organizations and they're the ones who decided to buy it after several refused. You skipped that part, otherwise nice post.
Re:News is now entertainment. (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, no fear-mongering on Fox News of course. Nope, never.
Hey, why's everybody laughing?
Re:Capitalism and news is a joke... wikileaks FTW (Score:3, Informative)
I think you have no idea what real capitalists think, or perhaps don't even have the slightest clue what real capitalism is.
Wikileaks, a privately owned and operated news source, as an example of what's wrong with privately owned and operated news sources? While simultaneously being lauded for being better than privately owned news sources? Where's the punchline to this ridiculous train of thought?
Wikileaks, for lack of a better term, is private charity. Private charity is part of capitalism! Wikileaks is a capitalist outgrowth! In fact, one of the things that makes Wikileaks so special is that it specifically makes it difficult for governments (as well as corporations) to silence reporters! If Wikileaks were run by the US*, do you think it would ever publish any US government leaks?
Why it is that people refuse to associate private charity with capitalism is beyond me. Private charity is capitalism's natural way of dealing with the little segments of the economy where the profit model hasn't been figured out or is presently for some reason broken, be it quality reporting or caring for the sick or disabled.
Fact is, Wikileaks simply wouldn't exist is a society where all wealth was publicly/governmentally owned, because those in charge would eventually recognize the danger it poses to their power and "repurpose it for something more productive for the good of society."
To say that capitalism isn't solving the news problem is intellectually dishonest, at best. Wikileaks is, in and of itself, great evidence to the contrary.
*Insert any government here.