News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product 156
Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.
Content value by their standards. (Score:3, Informative)
A: This is the media, if their content was better, they wouldn't need to force charge people for the vast sums of shitty content they spew in much higher proportions than the actual good content.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
I'd rather have fairly obvious slant that might encourage people to think more critically about what is being presented. To me, that is far better than knowing that shit like this [foxbghsuit.com] goes on under an appearance of legitimacy. It would be different if there were elements in the media that actively sought out and rooted out this kind of corruption, but there aren't -- those two reporters, as individuals, decided not to be intimidated, bribed, and silenced and that's the only reason why we know about this. It doesn't take much wisdom to know that most people would have caved. The questioning man wonders, for every example like that one that we do learn about, how many go on that we've never heard of, and of course under that assumed credibility that, as you point out, the established media commands? Say what you will of Internet bloggers and their political biases; they are unlikely to deliberately falsify a story in order to avoid losing Monsanto's ad revenue.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Informative)
...except we're already getting news for free and it's already crappy and slanted.
"free news" has been around for over 50 years. It's nothing new. It's not a Frankenstein monster created by the internet.
The real problem of the internet is that it breaks down geographic
barriers both in terms of direct competition and what your customers
are exposed to. In short, you're customers are in a much better
position to realize that you are trying to sell 'shit on a shingle'.
Although media like newspapers were already in decline before "the
internet got to it". The bean counters and corporate vampires were
already feeding off of serious journalism.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Informative)
For the moment, yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay? The entire question is whether there will continue to be 49 free lanes on the highway.
Well I guess some free sites may hit the buffers in the future but given the BBC is the world's oldest [wikipedia.org] broadcast organisation I don't see it going out of 'business' any time soon . . . I put business in quotes because it is publicly funded and only part [wikipedia.org] of the BBC exists to make a profit. I think the model is sustainable, especially considering the high esteem in which the BBC is held both within Britain and throughout the world, it benefits no-one apart from the Murdoch's of this world to let public funded broadcasting go to the dogs.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Informative)
I live in a town with a mill that produces newsprint. It's been having on-and-off troubles in the newsprint division since the late 1980s, long before the Internet became a meaningful consumer product. And it's not the Internet that is causing the current woes, but an economic collapse. I'll wager plenty of newspapers went down in 1929-1930 as well.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:5, Informative)
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
Anyone with 5 minutes, a major historical news story and google news archive [google.com] can demonstrate the fallacy in your argument. You have described _exactly_ the state of mainstream news today - crappy, slanted news delivering the message they want you to hear (i.e. profitable to special interest groups). Pick any of the most significant events in the last decade where powerful special interest groups had a firm position, and the mainstream news has rolled over to shaft their viewer/readers with exactly the wrong message to suit their corporate masters position, flooding the media echo chamber [wikipedia.org] with the deceptive message in the process. Check it for yourself in the archives.
Pre-Iraq war - news message: weapons of mass destruction ("we must invade, there is no other choice"). Special Interest Group: The MIC. [wikipedia.org].
Financial Crisis pre-2008 - news message: Money supply increases, what money supply increase? M3 discontinued [marketoracle.co.uk], its not important... move along nothing is broken here as reflected in the total absence of mainstream news coverage [google.com]
The majority of news sources that told it how it turned out (in retrospect), were non-mainstream news sources - and thanks to services like google news archive it can easily be demonstrated. You did not hear significant anti-war positions [wifr.com] from the mainstream news cool-aid stand, which remained completely silent [google.com]. You also could have also known well in advance that inflation was heading for the moon, and where and why to best place your hard earned savings [billcara.com] for the coming economic storm from independent professionals not driven by increasing the bottom line, but instead in delivering accurate high quality news.
Publishers of mainstream news can't cut it on the internet, because they cannot compete with free high quality alternatives from motivated professionals.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Informative)
Wikinews' current top story: "Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan" is sourced from Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Both commercial news gathering organisations.
It's a great aggregation and distillation service, but it's not a replacement for traditional newspaper news gathering.
Re:Actually, more like nine years ago (Score:3, Informative)