Shirky believes newspapers are unlikely to survive. A question to ask yourself: Why should WalMart subsidise a newspaper office in Baghdad? A quote to frame the thinking: society doesn´t need newspapers: what it needs is journalism.
Shirky believes newspapers are unlikely to survive. A question to ask yourself: Why should WalMart subsidise a newspaper office in Baghdad? A quote to frame the thinking: society doesn´t need newspapers: what it needs is journalism.
What society needs and what society – i.e. the people within it – thinks it needs are two separate things.
What society needs is good objective journalism. The kind that keeps politicians and large vested interests on the straight and narrow.
Increasingly, consumers want news tailored to their viewpoint and their interests, which tends to play, if not to the lowest common denominator, then well below the ideals of strong, responsible reporting.
Newspapers, even the structure of contracted journalists writing exclusively for one organisation, may well disappear. But what replaces it – a networked model, possibly with heavy amateur or reader input – will suffer some of the same issues.
Namely, that in a low barrier to entry market like online news publishing, the likely differentiator will not be cost (because lots of news is already free) but quality. And quality costs. But the issue of how to monetize content when fair use rules and linking destroy the value of exclusivity still remains.
I fear what this means is that there is considerable disincentive to move away from quality. Certainly there is limited incentive to invest heavily in the kind of worthy investigative journalism that gives news organs credibility. In that respect, the writing was on the wall some time ago when the Sunday Times disbanded its flagship investigative team while Mahzer Mahmood – the fake sheikh – continues to receive budget to expose philandering celebs and mouthy aides.
The flight from risk becomes more apparent if news organisations to move to a networked model, where commodity news is gathered by a group of skeleton staffers and other stories are commissioned on their own merits. What freelancer will spend months investigating a story when there is no guarantee of a market for it? When the Watergate scandal broke in
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