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RazaPanjwaniFirstPaper 7 - 18 Apr 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | What Nicholas Kristof and the Denver Broncos Suggest about New News Sources
| | | -- MahaAtal | |
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- I think there are a couple of issues that should be dealt with in revisions and haven't been touched yet. First, at least until recently, the losses of money by newspapers publishers were largely attributable to the fact that they were publishing newspapers. Printing and distributing newspapers is an extremely expensive and utterly stupid business in the 21st century: until the onset of the current financial panic, newspapers could have staffed and conducted their businesses on the web at a profit. The current advertising collapse is an event that needs to be segregated from the "Boo, hoo, Craigslist destroyed my business" bullshit the newspapers were giving out in 2007 and first-half 2008. Even now, if Rupert Murdoch owned all the journalists and other creative types he owns, but didn't publish any dead-tree newspapers with their stuff, the rest of his media empire would be wildly profitable. So there wasn't much reason to believe that the "newspapers or bloggers" analysis had any truth in it at all. You need to scrape past a very thick coat stupidity on the part of the publishers before you get down to the bedrock question whether employing the journalists and editors based on the available advertising revenue is profitable if you stop printing crap on paper and loading it on trucks.
- Second, as Maha points out, you aren't asking how we produce information, you're asking how we produce chatter. To call sportstalk information is ludicrous. What you need to explain, as she points out, is how hard news is gathered, not how businesses promote themselves using free media to the working people who are cheated by the opiate called "sports."
- Third, whether you are talking about the people she still insists on calling journalists or the people you call bloggers, advertising is what supports all their activities at the end of the day, and compelling people to watch advertisements in digital media is impossible. All the push advertising models (which excludes search-based advertising which is pulled by the user) will become history shortly. So the line between the journalists and the bloggers is irrelevant. The right lines separate those who are self-financed, those who are financed by push advertising and compulsory payment (the models destroyed by the net), and those who are financed by other means. All the analytic action based on other distinctions, whether it is you praising bloggers or Maha and other J-School parties promoting "make people pay" has to cope with the technical facts of 21st century life: you can't stop people from sharing, so you can't make them pay, and you can't stop them from filtering, so you can't reliably sell their eyeballs to advertisers.
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