Journalism as we know it: baby, bathwater

In a Guardian interview, David Simon, the bloke who did The Wire (which I still haven’t seen, lamentably, though the BBC2 total rerun starting tonight might do it), says corruption in US local politics will run riot as the newspaper business collapses. He’s right, and we won’t be immune in the UK – though we have less of a culture of corruption and less to lose in our local press, which even in proper cities like Newcastle consists mainly of cats up trees, public order convictions (don’t get me started on that) and hagiographies of local businesses. There are, of course, many more good things that will be lost if the press, local or national, ceases to exist in the form we’ve known it for the past 300-odd years.

So how should we move forward? Charge money for journalism online, says Simon. He’s wrong. It’s almost superfluous to number the reasons why paid-for online content has failed; it’s failed, move on. Just for the record, though…

1. People can’t handle paying money for stuff that only exists in cyberspace (that’s why you wouldn’t steal a car but yes, you would copy a DVD for a mate). While it might be good and perhaps even possible for us all to learn to alter this way of thinking in the interests of constructing a functional economy of digital content, making us take this counter-intuitive step will require immediate concrete incentives, like being able to get a movie easily and reliably right now instead of titting about with dodgy software, rather than long-term abstract incentives, like having an effective free press
2. Paid-for content has to have a wall round it to prevent it being accessed for free, which means it can’t be indexed properly by search engines, which means it’s pretty much invisible to anybody except those who are already paying for it, which means it might as well not be on the Internet at all, and won’t bring its owners the usual benefits of being there
3. Because of (2), nor does fenced-off content contribute to the increasingly semantically coherent body of knowledge that the web contains, and we’re supposed to be making an argument about how to preserve newspapers because they’re a good thing for humanity at large, not how to ensure newspaper owners keep making lots of cash, which nobody cares about except newspaper owners
4. Newspapers have never been funded by their cover price, but mostly by advertising, and there’s no reason why that would change now. Ad revenues are declining for lots of reasons, but not because people selling things don’t want to communicate with people who might buy them. Advertising is still an effective mechanism for funding communication, and advertisers want media designed to get people in, not keep them out – duh

So the future is free online newspapers funded by advertising, yes? Partly. The future is also print. People will pay for a newspaper because they understand the transaction and they get something to take away in return for their money. Selling newspapers creates local employment and contributes to the viability of community facilities such as newsagents (if that sounds a little obvious, remember when they were called tobacconists) and post offices. Making newspapers supports sustainable forests. Reading a newspaper gives you something to do other than staring at a bloody screen for another hour.

What’s not to like about newspapers? Can we not focus on making them work, rather than fantasising about the web doing things it isn’t good at?

Tagged as: Business, Internet, Media