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.
IANAE (Economist) (Score:5, Interesting)
But look at me this morning. I am reading the Boston Globe site, for which I pay (essentially) nothing. I am accessing this site via a Comcast connection, for which I pay waytoofarkingmuch per month. Yet I get a huge benefit from the Globe, information that is directly relevant to my daily life. From Comcast I get nothing but the passing along of the signal. There is something wrong with this picture.
If I were the Globe, I would think outside the newsbox. I would do something like set up a wireless network in and around Boston and sell internet access way under Comcast's price. The home page for this service would be boston.com or its descendant. The monthy access fee would cover the network costs and cover running the news organization.
There are probably technical problems to this fantasy, but IAANACSM (Also Computer Science Major)
Re:wonderful. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, HBO continues to exist, so I suspect you will still be able to buy print where you are mostly paying for the news, rather than the ads.
Re:Investigative Journalism? (Score:3, Interesting)
The way investigative journalism has been paid for in the past, must indicate that in a free market, consumers are willing to pay for it somehow. That is, (for example) the Washington Post's management believe that by spending money on investigative journalism, they can retain readership / gain new readership from the New York Times.
I *hope* that this principle continues in an online world. It might not be a matter of paying money for content. For example, however much you may hate advertising, you might be willing to go to a source with lots of ads and great journalism, rather than a site with no ads and crappy journalism.
Or, it might turn out that - however beneficial to society *I* might thing investigative journalism is - the market as a whole just doesn't think it's worth that much. That's markets.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:4, Interesting)
What am I supposed to pay for, exactly? What is the value they bring to my news-reading experience that is so good that the free sites can't keep up? And if the free ones start to disappear, a fully distributed p2p news network isn't hard to create. All you need is to combine rss with a p2p protocol and throw in some search and filter options.
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Interesting)
so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
In my experience quality correlates much less with price than with recommendations, and I certainly cant say pay-for news is among the areas where the players have created such expectations.
we're going to get crappy, slanted news
Two crappy slanted articles disagreeing with one another often leave you with a better understanding of reality than one high quality (less obviously slanted) article. And anyone with an agenda can publish anything they want; that doesn't mean anyone will actually read or care about what they publish.
"Today an eight car pileup"
Today, going by the average numbers, 136 people were killed in traffic in the US. Does putting those accidents in the news actually add anything of interest or is that a typical example of excessive creation and dissemination of information in a distributed world? Does anyone not personally affected care at all? About one of them, about all of them? Is it so important that we should, as a society, use artificial economic barriers to promote the production and distribution of such information?
Information is no longer a scarce product in almost any sector, in fact, the readers time is most often much more scarce. News media needs a huge, massive die-off (or people need vast amounts of more free time), or there simply won't be anywhere near the demand levels needed to motivate any kind of beyond-market incentive for news production.
Re:'Good' people still go to that 1 toll booth (Score:3, Interesting)
You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
You probably would. But crucially, that tweet would contain a URL pointing to a mainstream news site.
Journalist gathers news. Newspaper distributes news. Word of mouth (or tweet of Twitter) spreads awareness of news.
Re:Investigative Journalism? (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad thing about this was that, at one time, at least as far as the Big Three networks went, it was pretty much part of the deal with the FCC that the news departments remained independent. That's how guys like Murrow could go after seemingly all-powerful people like a certain Junior Senator from Wisconsin.
There was a time that journalism was seen as a sacred trust, a key element of liberal democracy. While I'm sure most journalists still aspire to the high ideal, at the same time you have to wonder. Of course, the reality is that journalists, particularly in time of war, have become the willing or unwilling pawns of the military, but maybe I've grown a lot more jaded, because as one-sided and ludicrous as the old News Reels seem to be, there's nothing to my mind that compares with a reporter and camera crew on a leash at the service of Uncle Sam when they're whacking Arabs. In the end the journalists ceased being enamored with this whole "We're with the troops!" crap and started reporting at least something vaguely resembling reality, but it took too damned long, and effectively misled the American people as to the inadequacies of the invasion and the occupation that occurred afterwards.