Not so fast. Google is doing a lot of content hosting these days. It owns Blogger, Picasa, GMail, Docs, Appengine, Apps, Sites, Groups, Code, YouTube, Knol, Earth, Patents, and there’s something that may be even bigger that I can’t find right now.

Umm, that’s not news. There’s nothing new about that number. It’s also not something that was previously unknown.

This is an example of where the “thumb on the scale” hurts standard news organizations, such as the NYT. The Times may report the number, but you can be sure that whatever they say in addition will not be useful in doing something good about the number. In fact, it’s likely that whatever they enable will make things worse. It’s almost like they stage car wrecks to have something to report about.

I’d like to think that this is a consequence of “make a difference” news, which is absurd because journalists at best know how to write, they don’t know how to make things better. However, it may be a more fundamental problem.

The author is pining for a past that never was.

Journalism was never about important issues. It was about what journalists thought was important.

And no, they weren’t saints. They had their thumb on the scale.

And they lied about it, lies that modern journalists repeat, destroying their own credibility.

If you want journalism to be seen as credible, it has to actually be credible.

If you’re going to serve fluff, don’t be surprised when folks pick better fluff (Britney Spears gossip anyone).

awesome.

awesome

This is what’s truly offensive about the news-will-find-me attitude promoted by the online world. (See Jeff’s new post: “Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.”) The idea that being a citizen in a democracy comes without any kind of responsibility, that news is something that has to be marketed to you like breakfast cereal or liquid Tide.

This weekend, the Times reported that 36 million people in this country were on food stamps. Jeff, was that news in your stream? (Before I read the article it wasn’t in mine.) Did you blame this, too, on unions? Let them eat Googlejuice!

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Another piece of the puzzle: news is not one of life’s basic needs (like food and water). If people consume it free & easy today, and it becomes more expensive/difficult tomorrow, many of them will simply do without.

I’m not talking about breaking news or commodity news (to borrow jtrigsby’s taxonomy), I’m talking about Features/Analysis. The big media houses of today (e.g., Murdoch) have the resources, reputations, and credentials to get at more of the story than the current digital resources. Crowdsourced “tweeters” can tell you that the bridge collapsed faster and more accurately than the New York Times, but they can’t ask probing questions of the local government officials to find out that someone’s been taking kickbacks to contract out maintenance to a sub-standard vendor.

My fear is that true investigative reporting will wind up behind the pay walls, given its higher overhead, and that it will eventually die out because the majority of people will simply do without it – choosing instead to click by on the breaking & commodity news that’s easy to search for & retrieve.

I’m not talking about breaking news or commodity news (to borrow jtrigsby’s taxonomy), I’m talking about Features/Analysis. The big media houses of today (e.g., Murdoch) have the resources, reputations, and credentials to get at more of the story than the current digital resources. Crowdsourced “tweeters” can tell you that the bridge collapsed faster and more accurately than the New York Times, but they can’t ask probing questions of the local government officials to find out that someone’s been taking kickbacks to contract out maintenance to a sub-standard vendor.

My fear is that true investigative reporting will wind up behind the pay walls, given its higher overhead, and that it will eventually die out because the majority of people will simply do without it – choosing instead to click by on the breaking & commodity news that’s easy to search for & retrieve.

Innovation and creativity has *always* been the smart strategy. Competition is for suckers and those not smart enough to seek a path not already taken. Smart people don’t compete, they offer alternatives and create new markets.
(Note: Do not be fooled into thinking that there is wisdom in word games that claim that offering alternatives is a form of competition…)

bob wyman

First, people _are_ paying for news. Many pay for the WSJ already. Many more pay for physical papers.

Second, you’re assuming that the quality of free news remains stable. Right now, as you point out, most people would rather read the NY Times for free than the Wall Street Journal for money. OK, fair enough. But that could change if the Times, under financial pressure, cuts its budget, and thus its staff, and thus the value of its reporting. Then, would most people read an NY Times that’s not as good as today’s, or would they rather read the Wall Street Journal for money? That’s a far different question.

I don’t have the answer, but I suspect the smart strategy is to do whatever the competition doesn’t. If several big news outlets end up giving away decent but essentially unambitious news – which is what any paper that’s free online is headed toward – why compete with them when you could have a premium market to yourself? Many strategies that don’t look smart in the abstract are brilliant in the context of a market. In the abstract, should HBO have charged for television when everyone else offered it for free? Maybe not. But since it offers a differentiated good – one that will be increasingly differentiated as TV budgets decline – this works.

But we’ve seen over and over that most people won’t pay when they can get “good enough” for free. Free newsgathering seems to be good enough. Maybe that’s because newspapers have already raced to the bottom; maybe if the business/editorial wall had stayed stronger, newspapers would have a more compelling quality argument. But they don’t.

Charging is something, but it won’t work either. That’s the real lesson. Maybe Jeff’s wrong, and the solution can’t be found in the link economy, but again – that doesn’t mean charging’s the right answer either. If you have elite, compelling content that doesn’t get attention and inbound links, nobody’s going to read it. How many non-professionals do you really think sign up for Elsevier, or Lexis/Nexis, or the WSJ, or Gartner to read one article? Articles aren’t iPhone apps. I read them and I’m done with them. They’re pure, transient low-value impulse buys – and if I can’t read your article for free, I can usually read someone else’s that’s nearly as informative.

Look, there are plenty of services and products in the world that would benefit the public, but that nobody wants to pay for. Some of them we call “public goods”, and we put the government in charge: firefighting, roads, schools. News can’t be a public good; the propaganda incentive is even stronger than the profit incentive. They don’t mix well.

There are other services that we like, that we wish we could have, but that not enough of us are willing to pay for. We have a framework for those service providers, too: Resumes.

Maybe. But it hasn’t worked for Hulu (content taken by Boxee). Or Craigslist (which recently sued a scraper). As long as there’s money to be made in repurposing, people will do it. A sign saying ‘Please don’t steal’ is no substitute for one that reads ‘Shoplifters will be prosecuted.’

Yes. And one of those economic realities is that advertising will not support a major newsgathering operation. The only way to do that is to charge. Murdoch is facing that reality. You are hiding behind techno-utopian theories that have already been proved false.

Someone will inevitable point out that Murdoch makes an unlikely champion of labor, to say the least. I know – at this point, I’ll take anyone I can get.