Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The constant attempt at various corporations to conflate morality with legality in the minds of individual citizens is very ironic in light of the fact they have no such confusion themselves. What is moral is irrelevant to them, and even the issue of legality is only addressed as far is it doesn't hurt profitability too much. They have the option of being able to easily change the legal goalposts when they find the legal issues too much of a hassle.
Morality and legality can overlap, but they are not at all the same thing, and any attempt to claim they are is only convincing to children.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
If news is always a resource, and we expect to get it for free now that the distribution method is relatively free, how will we, as a community, pay for investigative journalism? Surely we can agree that news is significantly more valuable when there is someone who makes the effort to dig it up rather than waiting for it to land on their desks. I am willing to allow all the news about Brad and Angelina to be left to bloggers who just do it for kicks, but what about covered up scandals and government conspiracies (ie- NSA Wiretapping Program, Secret CIA Prisons, Torture)? I would really rather have some competing news outlets paying people to investigate things like that.
It's been like that in printing for years. Publishers (at least of magazines and newspapers have been talking about selling "eyeballs" for years. Ever since I did my first production job the industry has known that issue and subscription sales have only just covered the printing costs. A decade ago no one in the print industry would have been able to maintain a straight face while saying the consumer neded to carry the cost.
And if you dont believe me, go take a look at an oldschool periodical publishing house and check out what their sales department does. In case you can't find one anymore I will tell you. They sell ads. Or rather adspace. Or rather, viewers. Just like broadcast TV.
The bigest problem with the news industry right now is that the online advertising market isn't able to subsidize their massive brick and mortar operations like a 4c backcover ad would have done. That's because their old scarcity model no longer applies. Advertising space is no longer hard to come by, distribution is easy and there is basically no barrier to entry. IN other words, potential competition is infinite.
Of course, like most of the content industry, the current publishing business structures are top heavy (as far as costs compared to value) or middle heavy (as far as number of non-productive jobs). We are seeing the death of the middlemen, NOT the content producers.
Unless the middlemen and non-productive types can manage to buy the legislation they need to maintain their old business models. If they can make it impossible for me to have access to distribution again, then they might be able to go back to business as usual.
The way I see it this is about paid services trying to offer the same bullshit as free services do. Can anybody honestly say that they trust news sources any more than they trust gossip? The problem is that journalism used to be a respected profession, but then some publisher along the way figured "Hey we don't need to report the truth, we only need to report what's 'amazing'", and people bought it. When the internet came the cost for deliverance of these "news" was cut to almost nothing. Now these bullshit publishers, who were already living off advertisement and the cost for the paper itself was more or less the production cost minus human labour, got to reduce that last cost which was the cost for the paper, thus solely existing due to ad exposure. Some tried the hybrid model, which seems to have failed, while still offering the same bullshit content. How can anybody expect to get paid for that?
I'm not against paid services, infact I very much hope someone brings forth a news service that reports truth, and if someone does I have no reason not to pay for it. But pay for lies? Hell I can just ring my neighbours doorbell for that.
I am the lawn!
The concept of micropayments in the context of content has been a pipe dream for over a decade now. To businesspeople, it's one of those ideas that's so appealing they just can't let it go because they can't grasp just how complex a system it is, and how many people will simply say, "no thanks," because they don't want to feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed to death for something they're used to getting for free. Micropayments have enjoyed some success in online gaming, but will never work in the news biz because for every site that will charge for articles, you'll find four more giving roughly the same thing away for free and living off the advertising alone.
I don't know what the future of journalism will look like, but I can tell you that it won't involve charging the end user per-article payments or subscriptions. Anyone who thinks either of those will work for the industry as a whole in the long term is either blinded by greed or on crack.
Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?
After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.
All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.
I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?
Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.
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 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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Lets see Free vs Paid, I know which one I trust more.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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 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 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..
Financial Crisis pre-2008 - news message: Money supply increases, what money supply increase? M3 discontinued, its not important... move along nothing is broken here as reflected in the total absence of mainstream news coverage
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 from the mainstream news cool-aid stand, which remained completely silent. 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 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.