Desperate newspaper companies in the US (and elsewhere) are now seriously thinking of charging for their online offerings. Guest blogger Eli Lipmen considers the consequences.
This article by Eli Lipmen.
Last week, newspapers executives from major American news agencies held a private meeting to discuss paid content. James Warren, a former news executive who wrote about the meeting in the Atlantic Magazine, claiming that the top newspapers and news agencies in the United States have run out of options to keep their doors open and are coming together to come up with a sustainable business model to maintain centralized authority by monopolizing information and knowledge.
Warren likened this meeting to that of the world powers meeting in Yalta in 1945 or the beleaguered mob bosses in 1957 who met to consolidate their power and centralize their authority.
However, a better analogy for this meeting could be the series of agreements signed from 1859 to 1909 by the three global agenices to create a news cartel that divided up the world’s news market among its members LSE Professor Terhi Rantanen describes the commodification of information and the monopolization of news by the three global agencies – Havas, Reuters, and Wolff (CTC) – in her new book ‘When News Was New’ and which Charlie posted about here.
As Prof Rantanen argues traditional news is losing its audience because information is “everywhere, it has lost part of its former value. Noboby wants to pay for a general news service but everybody wants to use it”.
With the introduction of new media and communications technology she goes on to argue that the difference between news and information, comment, and entertertainment is disappearing, changing the very nature of news as we know it.
Information in the internet age is like water – you try to control and package it as a commodity to be sold, and the information will find another route to reach its destination.
In the end, the efforts last week by the newspapers to figure out a ‘models to monetize content’ will ultimately be doomed by their inability, unlike their predecessors in the 19th century, to control the distribution of knowledge because they cannot monopolize the lines of transmission.
Interestingly, the site that brought this story to my attention was the Huffington Post who will be significantly effected if the newspapers follow through with their plan to ‘monetize content’.
They might even be destroyed as a news source because they rely heavily on linking to stories from other news sources and would not be able to afford any proposed pricing scheme (they only have 4 or so journalists on staff, although they have a network of thousands of bloggers and contributors).
It will be interesting to see the battle lines develop between traditional producers of news content and new producers of content (like Huffington Post) who rely heavily on traditional content.
This article by Eli Lipmen.
News is now indeed like water. This is great on the one hand – means more information, possibly better information, and improves the chances to get to a better democracy. Informed decisions are at the basis of every well-functioning society.
But on the other hand, this could result in a huge problem. If we conclude that there’s no money to make at all from news, who will provide us with information? how well? and how?
In theory, if we didn’t find effective business models for the new environment, the consequences could affect the Internet as a whole. I can hardly see faster pipes and improving infrastructures if nobody wants to run their services on them. Are we risking a ‘bankruptcy’ of the Internet?
P.S.: It’s not related to on-line contents, but this article reminds me a story that Chris Anderson has reported on his latest blog post:
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/05/a-tragic-tale-of-free-gone-horribly-wrong.html
The best of the news agencies are able to leap a critical gap: The conversion of information into knowledge.
News and information are indeed like water and in web 3.0 they will become like air. We are becoming a world of cub reporters, each striving for a Big Scoop. But Big Scoops are nothing more than information.
Those agencies, publications and channels that are followed for their world views need to now focus a bit less on information gathering, as armies of willing gatherers are out there. They need to pay more attention to the reasons their audiences adhere to them and to refine their “personalities” to create sticky relationships with their readers, turning them into viewers and active participants, generating still more knowledge through that readership.
“News is now indeed like water … But on the other hand, this could result in a huge problem. If we conclude that there’s no money to make at all from news, who will provide us with information? how well? and how?”
We get high-quality water, don’t we?
Too much. Too quickly. Unsustainable for all to survive.
Whether we are dedicated students, conscious observers or just passive consumers of media and information, we know that what we are being supplied with as news product, is too often, very shoddy work, produced in too little time by ‘professionals’ who haven’t earned their stripes under conditions that guarantee veneer-like result.
We are in a Great Transition. Those who think of this recession as a condition to wait out, and return to ‘the way it was’ will be in for a big surprise. Many aspects of our world are in for a significant change. It may be less dramatic to many as it takes place, but I absolutely believe that in five year or ten years, when we will look back, we will be astounded.
And where and how we get the information and ‘news’ won’t even resemble what we have right now.
The commentary above is only the second half of what I wrote… I hope the whole comment will appear, because the above partial doesn’t make complete sense.
These are all great comments to my post. Recently, Charlie wrote about a proposed model for US newsrooms – a publicly funded and nonprofit system. The post can be found here: http://www.charliebeckett.org/?p=1233#more-1233.
Just the government owns, distributes, and regulates water in our modern society, the government can play a role in providing quality information and news to its citizens to maintain a functioning modern democracy.
@King Kaufman: I hope you agree with me on the fact that news flows because people now share, ‘twit’, blog someone else’s articles in one click, or by copying and pasting in one second. Can you imagine a world where these people have to write their own articles and dedicate time to it without getting paid at all? Would it be as fast and ‘like water’ as it seems now? I doubt so.
Let me answer with this link, that I had not read before posting my comment. I just came across this article today:
http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2009/06/03/should-the-internet-be-free/
And particularly:
“In the end, it will be the punters who decide. How many people will pay for Sunday Times online content and what will the Times’s social media strategy be? Some of its competitors are likely to stay with a free model for as long as they can, but will they be able to fund decent journalism? And the social implications of all this will be discussed by future historians: are we witnessing a fracture of our news environment into a premium paid for service and a cheap and cheerful freesheet culture?” (Damian Tambini)
@Luca Schiavoni: I don’t see why I have to imagine a time when people write their own articles etc. etc. without getting paid at all. First of all, I can imagine that, since it happens now. David Simon’s quote about never running into bloggers at city council meetings or whatever was hilarious because, well, who else writes about city council meetings now? Civics nerds with blogs. But anyway, what I can’t imagine is a world where no one has figured out how to pay for essential reporting.