As someone who partially learned English by reading the LA Times and still associate a good cup of coffee with the Sunday edition as a great pleasure in life, the impedding doom of traditional papers is unsettling. The LA Times in recent times was known as a “writer’s paper” with in-depth long-format reporting coupled with artistic photographs, many of which have been exhibited at museums and and art galleries.
Imagining a future where this type of quality, factual reporting is replaced by the wisdom of crowds causes me to shudder a bit, especially when one reads the divisive and uninformed set of battle cries which fill the comments section of any major news article on-line.
As Clay Shirkey points out, newspaper companies are not entirely guilt-free in this regard. After all, their planning for the internet age was narrow in thinking and tried to translate existing models in a new world. As a consultant, I’ve had an opportunity to see the turmoils that media companies are going through and the fact there are no easy answers except to accept a lower profit world with a lower cost model.
Sentimental value aside, as Clay makes a great point that we should “shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’…” If the new forms of journalism can do an equal or better job than newspapers, we should embrace this change, even letting go of the comforts of paper and coffee on a Sunday morning. However, the implications of this new journalism has cause for concern.
Mark Cuban’s ShareSleuth uses a market based award system to spur journalistic endeavors. However, if this practice became widespread and “investigative” stories were published in a constant attempt to gain competitive advantage or share price movements, it would become extremely difficult for the public to discern advertising campaigns from newspaper reporting. Free market economics assumes perfect information. Although it’s widely accepted that there is some imperfect information, its still considered “good enough” for free market economics in general. However, this theory will be widely put to the test if there is not only imperfect information but purposely misleading information. This would further hamper the ability of the market to allocate resources effectively and undermine one of the central benefits of market economies. In addition, areas such as regional government does not have direct economic outcomes so this model would be inadequate to provide journalism for those regions.
It’s undeniable that the internet has significantly lowered cost for journalism and openned niche opportunities. The basketball rumor site, Hoopshype, became an fast growing source of industry news even though its runs by three guys in Spain who have no direct access to NBA players, executives, agents or coaches. The Guardian’s cost effective use “crowdsourcing” also shows the opportunities of internet journalism. However both those examples demonstrate the need for some form of traditional media. Hoopshype gets most of its materials for scanning news sources throughout the world. The Guardian, a traditional newspaper, organized and coordinated the “crowdsourcing” for an article, this was not an instantaneous growth of crowd journalism.
Accepting a lower margin world is hard for any company, however if my beloved LA Times is to survive on to the next century, it will likely need to look at these models and see if they can serve as an aggregator and coordinator role rather than its current core strenghts of writing articles and printing newspapers. It’ll be interesting to see what that future looks like.
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One a related note, Clay Shirkey points out that the US has been resistant to micro-payments. With an advanced credit card payment system and innovations like PayPal, I’ve always been puzzled why this has been a “cultural issue” in the US, in comparison to areas like Japan and S.Korea where micropayments are widely used. Riot Games first release “League of Legends” will soon be testing if micro-payments can be implemented in the US in one of the most widely accepted genre in Asia, on-line games. Should it be a success, it may point out that the oft-stated cultural hostility to micro-payments maybe overcome if there is a compelling value proposition.
