The basic notion behind a paywall is, “Journalism is expensive, therefore people should pay for it.” The notion ignores evidence to the contrary and locks in a mindset that believes the way we’ve always done it is the only way to do it. Paywall advocates are not innovators, and if you’re not an innovator in the fast-moving Digital Age, you’re dead.Yes, there is evidence that journalism doesn't need to be expensive, just look at the Huffington Post. This is what Owens is referring to with the euphemism "innovation": cutting labor costs by not paying people. Under capitalism, this is tradition, not innovation.
And how does "citizen" journalism reach folks who don't have access to the Internet, or who are otherwise unmotivated to dig for information on whatever issues that might be of interest to them?Newspapers aren't free. From what I can tell the USA Today costs about $1 an issue. 30 issues a day and that's $30 a month, only $5 less then the cost of a dataplan for a 4G modem, and used computers and cellphones can be pretty cheap. (for clear.com you get a wireless modem for a one-time $39 fee. Again not too expensive)
there's a huge amount of value in the traditional newspaper's investigative and editorial processes. I really don't want to be a dick, but it's starting to sound straight up ignorant at this point when blogs are put forward as some kind of alternative to traditional investigative reporting. You want the truth? The truth costs.When did I say that blogs could replace newspapers? What I said was that it may not be economically viable in the long run. There may just not be enough people willing to pay the price they'd need too in order to have it produced.
This represents a kind of magical thinking about the internet I don't quite understand. It's always some version of: "Internet-enabled disintermediation and piracy are killing off this [thing that is held to be important] in its current form, but by the power of the internet something else will spring up to take its place and it will be even better. Bloggers will cover complex local politics for free!Has it occurred to you that in a lot of places, local politics is not all that complex?
What's interesting about this to me is that this thinking is fundamentally not all that different from a certain kind of thinking about GM crops.Magical thinking on GM Crops? What? I realize there is a controversy about them but so far most of the "magical thinking" has turned out to be right, as far as I know. There haven't been any major health problems caused by them. What's the problem? This is what Wikipedia says:
A 2008 review published by the Royal Society of Medicine noted that GM foods have been eaten by millions of people worldwide for over 15 years, with no reports of ill effects.[122] Similarly a 2004 report from the US National Academies of Sciences stated: "To date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population."[7] The European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2010 report on GMOs noted that "The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."You weren't very specific about what the supposed "magical thinking" regarding GMOs, but it's hardly a damaging comparison.
Gradually I believe, we have swallowed the message that profitability is the primary, perhaps the only, criterion for evaluating whether or not an institution or public service is of value.If you think that something is a public good, then you should be arguing it should be paid for by the government with tax money or something. You can have something like the BBC or a beefed up NPR/public TV. Obviously there can be conflicts of interest, but there are obviously conflicts of interest in privately owned newspapers as well, and in theory you should be able to make it more transparent, independent, accountable, then a privately owned paper.
How about town criers?Pretty sure they worked for the government.
How about pub signs depicting signature animals? What about advertisements on papyrus? What about all the political marketing found on stone and other durable media in ancient ruins? Do you suppose the guys making that stuff were doing it for free?What does any of that have to do with newspapers? It's entirely possible that a lot of that stuff was done for free, either by adherents to a cause or by the proprietors of a shop. Even if some retailer hired a sign maker to make a sign, there is a huge difference: They weren't funding the creation of other media to run those ads. They were just sticking them up on the wall.
Any time an argument is made for maintaining quality, the rebuttal seems to include an accusation of demonizing capitalism. I don't understand why this is.Well, a lot of the "newspaper defenders" seem to want to force people to buy a product they don't really want, for some reason. People don't want to pay for classifieds if they can get them for free, people don't want to pay much for local news, when they can get national news for free.
Working with the financial, legal and other resources that blogs have? What about the obvious: Watergate.Some "Blogs" have grown up and do have a lot of resources. Gawker media got a mole inside of Fox news, and now they're paying $20 for any candid photo of Mark Zuckerburg to make some kind of point about privacy. But again that's national/corporate news not local. So obviously local news is more difficult to monetize.
"Handbills are recorded as being in existence from the 14th century onwards in Britain – and were used to publicise everything from wars to health concerns.They were not supporting the production of other media, though. That's the point. People may have been printing handbills, and they can still do that today. The collapse of the newspaper industry doesn't prevent you from printing and handing out hand bills, or paying someone to do it.
The opening of England's first public theatre in London in 1576 was announced with the use of handbills."
These were not people printing and distributing their own handbills, but rather paying others to do it for them. Others in the period would have employed street callers for similar purposes.
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posted by halekon at 5:11 PM on June 6, 2012