Newspapers: Shut up and charge already
kingkaufman.com
kingkaufman.com
This is very much untrue, at least in the UK. The quality dailies have had a very strong year and have driven forward the debate on all kinds of things:- parliamentary expenses, the Brown/McBridge spin sleaze, the Iraq inquiry, the News of the World tapping scandal.
Whether we'd have seen anything like this kind of investigation from the BBC's news organisation or online is no sure thing. Possibly in a TV show like Panorama but then you're talking about 50 such shows a year.
Sometimes I feel like a minority of one but when the papers start charging I imagine I'll think its a good use of my income and I'll pick one.
While their average content isn't always that great, they are able to supply a level of investigation and fact checking that would be missed if they went out of business.
What I think is the case is that when some papers face the task of generating value, a lot of them will fold, but some of them will find it in themselves to produce good content. Being more directly exposed to the market will almost certainly cull the herd, but I for one would trade the quantity we have now for quality any day.
The fact that we're even talking about this rather proves the point that most of them have nothing of value to offer (recalling that "the media" isn't actually one monolithic entity). If the content were truly that valuable, they already would have locked it behind pay walls and people would be paying for it, as evidenced by the valuable content that has survived exactly that process. The problem here isn't the sanctity of newspapers or our society's undebatable need for them, it's that the market has suddenly heated up and they don't want to have to compete. Sorry, no such luck. It's time for them to stop talking and start doing, if that's what they're going to do.
Although Rupert Murdoch's already decided to do this for his arsenal of papers. In Australia it will work for the financial paper The Australian Financial Review, but we'll have to wait and see how it will work out for the rest of the 'normal' papers, including the only national paper in Australia, The Australian.
As for me, I'm going to continue to get my news primarily from the A(ustralian)BC and the BBC, both provided by taxpayer money and providing a public service with little of the advertising baggage that commercial providers come with.