Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?
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The rise of free content will inevitably continue. However, some content could become more expensive as well. Stewart Brand, a futurist who created Whole Earth Catalog, WELL and Global Business Network, famously started a meme in 1984, “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.”
Brand explained, “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”
Information becomes expensive when it is based on scarcities. Movie theaters can charge, in part, because a film is not available outside theaters. Attention and reputation are growing scarcities online. As users gain control of their information and identity online, the personal data could become the most expensive information of all and why the most trusted publishers will succeed.
There may be another scarcity emerging: the quality of investigative reporting. The price of news has dropped to zero due to information over-abundance. However, if the supply of quality news shrinks, it may create a vacuum in which the best writers and producers have renewed potential to earn money. In fact, Nicholas Carr believes a radical reduction of production capacity could actually help solve journalism’s problems. “The number of U.S. newspapers is going to collapse … and the number of reporters, editors, and other production side employees is going to continue to plummet. … As all that happens, market power begins—gasp, chuckle, and guffaw all you want—to move back to the producer. The user no longer gets to call all the shots. Substitutes dry up, the perception of fungibility dissipates, and quality becomes both visible and valuable. The value of news begins, once again, to have a dollar sign beside it.”
Conceptual Scoops
The greatest potential to capture value in journalism may be from “conceptual scoops,” a term John Battelle of Federated Media uses to describe investigative reporting that not only breaks new information, but also creates new frames for social and political issues. “Once you have a robust model for news online,” Battelle says, “that’s where conceptual scoops are going to live.” This type of reporting could spawn a new business-to-business model in journalism.
What happens when the pipeline for conceptual scoops dries up? Will aggregators have a new willingness to pay for them because they drive traffic? As a result, some journalism organizations may focus on investigative reporting and sell it to a smaller number of enterprise customers as “temporary exclusives,” rather than reaching for the broadest audience by themselves.
A consortium can help break conceptual scoops. Amanda Michel said that from her experience at Huffington Post, she learned that “a network, not an individual reporter, breaks news.” Nevertheless, the “scoops” still come from individuals who lead the investigative work. Perhaps with standardized measure of influence and reach, money will flow back to the media organizations that did the hard work of unearthing the stories. Similarly, paying journalists could have renewed potential based on stories’ performance.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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[...] Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?Information becomes expensive when it is based on scarcities. One emerging scarcity may be the quality of investigative reporting. A consortium can help break “conceptual scoops.” Perhaps with standardized measure of influence and reach, money will flow back to the media organizations that did the hard work of unearthing the stories. [...]