So I’ve been hearing non-stop that Newspapers and Magazines are dying at a fantastic rate, despite having a higher readership among readers, especially young adults, than ever. The problem is that the internet is serving the content, which is then aggregated and served ad-revenue-free to readers. No revenue means no more quality journalism, and all your journalistic needs will be found through cell-phone captures and amateur bloggers. With the change of the medium, the message seems to have been released into the territory of ‘free.’ This is bad, not because blogging journalists are bad – they serve their grassroots purpose, most notably to serve up the important issues to the journalists and to keep them honest, but because journalistic expertise is at stake.
Not everyone is a coherent writer, let alone a good one. Not everyone knows how to get to the story, let alone the story behind the story. Not everyone has the desire to research issue to which they are writing, let alone research an issue or a problem for longer than a google search. Journalism has been around since the reign of Julius Caesar (the Acta Diurna); should a profession that has served the masses for over 2000 years go to the wayside because we don’t feel like paying for it anymore?
Sadly, as much as we’d love to have all free content all the time, we have to pay our journalists. They are various models we could go with on this one: micro-payments on articles (lame) premium content (better), or (as suggested by Jon Stewart) aggregator licensing (best). I’m sure there are others, but I hope that whatever model is used, that it is used to save this industry.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 16, 2009 at 10:16 am, filed under Internet and tagged Internet, journalism, Web 2.0. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.