Posted by zog
on September 11, 2009, 6:51 pm
Online "news" and print news is in peril because they claim they aren't making enough money to sustain themselves. Various schemes have been proposed, such as Fox news/Rupert Murdoch contention they will go to "all paid for subscription" to such things as "micropayments", payments you make per page view that google will be pushing. Advertising has always funded most of "the news" but that industry is in a shakeout as well, and online, it is trivial to block most annoying and sometimes security risky ads, and many do as a default setting. I wrote this piece addressing the current and future status if the "paid for news business"
News organizations today are becoming unprofitable because they not only have to support the actual journalists, but a BIG overhead of managers and "investors". Is there a real need anymore for this huge expensive middleman layer between the originator of the news article and the reader? This is just like record labels and musicians, it's in a big transition period and it's fairly obvious that a lot of those jobs in that industry are now technically obsolete and should and are going to go away eventually.
We already have the next gen news model, still in the baby crawling stage in a long term historical timeframe, it just needs more shaking out and tweaking,and that is regular bloggers who do a good job, and their "pay" is mostly the same thing they like, news and views from other people. This is called economically an "in kind" payment.
It is the primary source of wealth transference in the open source software world right now, you get paid "in kind" by getting to use other's open source code contributions, which you then tweak and modify to be used in your regular non software business to "make money".
There's still room for "cash" payments, but we really need to eliminate as much as possible all the unnecessary middle man skimming that goes on to make it affordable enough to be self sustaining. Digital products are *cheap* to make copies of, practically zero, so it is inevitable that this will have to be reflected in the "price".
Various jobs and industries have disappeared or been changed radically over human history, you just have to adapt and move on if you find one business model is unsustainable, and do something else, and that's just that.
I know I had to do it, after *several* factory jobs I had, as a much younger guy, got outsourced, I just gave up, admitted reality, moved on to something completely different, then I had to do that again, then again. I've had to change major careers now three times and am on my fourth, which is totally unrelated to the previous three types of work to "make money". Stuff just freakin' changes, and *that's it*, you do not have an exclusive right to always make the same money you used to make doing the same job, and trying to legislate this into existence or come up with some lame wild ass scheme to try and perpetuate it is just slap dumb, it just borks things all up and you'll fail anyway.
That goes for individuals, as well as entire huge industries. (that's why they should have let those casino gambling banks fail and go normally bankrupt, then society and the real market would have sorted out what those involved 'quant' derived paper financial pseudo products were really worth....which ain't near what they claim they are worth on paper)
Digital products of all kinds are our first true ubiquitous "star trek" level replicator technology. If we screw this up with restrictions or in trying to maintain completely stupid and obsolete jobs, what will happen when we have tangible goods cheap replicators?
Maintaining a hideously convoluted and stupid "artificial scarcity" of any sort of products will cause people to route around these restrictions, and that is just that. It doesn't work with "illegal" tangible products, it didn't work with alcohol restrictions, it isn't working with other dry or leafy products restrictions, despite a huge effort and laws and draconian penalties, and it is *not* going to work with mostly intangible digital products either.
If they make "news" too expensive or restricted in order to maintain some huge middleman distribution model from the last previous few centuries, it will get routed around. They are beating their heads against the wall on this one. All that will happen with their expensive news is that a sort of "News-peg-legger bay" will show up.
People say "well, it costs money to go send some reporter over to warzoneistan to report on the news" and similar to that, I'll counter that with saying there are ALREADY a lot of humans who can write a good enough news piece LIVING in warzoneistan right now. They don't need to be sent there.
That's what will take over from the old model of journalism eventually for the most part, and those local folks sure as heck would have an even easier time in getting some data out there from the "local to them" perspective than any other flown in dude. And they'll be doing it for free, because they *want to*, or incredibly cheap compared to today's prices.
Look at the popularity of just people wanting to write on forums like this! There's just millions of people who will write every day, for free, and give it away for free, *because they in turn get to read what other writers come up with*. We are already doing this and getting paid "in kind".
It's really a good deal for all concerned, it's fun, and it can and often is informative and educational or at least amusing and entertaining, which petty much covers "writing". This "in kind" payment is one of the larger endgames for digital products that aren't custom ordered for very specific and detailed and only of interest to a realtively few people purposes.
100
Message Thread:
« Back to thread