News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product

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.

Comments

IANAE (Economist)

[paiute]

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)