idio Platform

After reading this fantastic post on the Future of Journalism blog, I’ve been inspired to collect together the best quotes about this emotive issue. With no further delay, here is The Future of News: In quotes.

The basics:

Clay Shirky explaining the desire of news audiences to share content:

When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.

Jeff Jarvis speaking about his “link economy”:

We need to do what we do best and link to the rest.

Respected venture capitalist Fred Wilson weighs in on the news issue:

Monetise the audience, not the content.

Kevin Kelly follows this statement about online news by listing what can’t be copied:

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Paidcontent explains the difficulty of marketing atomised content:

People will argue that the scrapers create value by pointing to many obscure stories that captured the imagination of linkers and got unexpectedly high traffic for a very obscure site. Fine, but was that site able to monetize the jump in traffic? And, how likely is that site to create a sustainable business by consistently winning a surfing game of serendipity?

The business model:

Clay Shirky says newspapers are missing the point:

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.

And underlining the severity of the problem, Clay Shirky writes:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

The Future of Journalism blog critiques the Associated Press (and other newspapers’) stance:

The business plan, then, is to “mercilessly sue” the people who are giving your customers, former customers and potential customers what they want. And, in this confusing new-media world, many of the people you will be mercilessly suing will be your customers, former customers and potential customers.

Writing in a different post on the same site, King Kaufman jokes:

“Good journalism takes time and money. Having people work all hours to cover, edit and package the news is expensive. Basing reporters throughout central Ohio and in Washington costs money. So does covering sporting events across North America. And employing world-class photographers and artists comes with a price, as well.” Holy smoke, dude. You need to come up with a business model!

Paid content:

A professor at Boston University and research scholar at M.I.T., Marshall W. Van Alstyne writes:

Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news.

On the topic of micropayments, Clay Shirky says:

The word ‘micropayment’ is a trope for desperation, entering the vernacular of a given media market only after threats to older models become visibly dire .

Summing up his thoughts on why ‘free’ is a stable strategy, Clay Shirky writes:

In a regime where most of the participants are charging, freeing your content gives you a competitive advantage. And, as the drunks say, you can’t fall off the floor. Anyone offering content free gains an advantage that can’t be beaten, only matched, because the competitive answer to free — “I’ll pay you to read my weblog!” — is unsupportable over the long haul.

And a final word from King Kaufman:

“You get what you pay for” is not economics. It’s debatably wise consumer advice… We pay the doctor and the accountant because they have skills that are scarce and valuable, something that cannot be said about the content of almost all newspapers and news Web sites. This is not even high school economics. Stop being willfully stupid about this point, newspaper guys.