On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 15:24 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: > The problem is that the _production_ of information (journalism, etc.) > is not free; it has a positive marginal cost.
When you think about it: most if not all interesting information out there is *not* produced by journalists. It is produced by event witnesses, politicians, public servants, corporations, social figures, researchers and experts of various fields, and citizens as part of the public. All of those real producers of information are already funded for what they do. With ubiquitous internet none of the real producers of information need journalists to meet the public. And the public has always spent time (and so money) on news, and with internet tools the public now just does the filtering and aggregation on this "news" budget without need for the obsolete middleman. In France state spending on "journalism" support is already staggering, the rest is paid by advertisers, a very small amount is spent by customers (and probably not even covering the distributions networks). As one french TV CEO famously said the role of TV journalists is just to prepare the mind of watchers for TV commercials. The following blog (it has a daily mailing list too) is mostly dedicated to the "free / make money" stuff: http://techdirt.com/ Gladwell post is here: http://techdirt.com/articles/20090701/0422125421.shtml Sincerely, Laurent _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
