This may be a week of Costa Rican sun and 24 hours of travel speaking, but amidst the search for viable business models for journalism, should we actually want monopoly?
As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, monopoly rents were a large reason newspapers were able to sustain expensive, important journalistic endeavors like investigative or foreign reporting. As the geographic monopoly source of information, newspapers could charge extraordinary rates for advertisements. In turn, these profits subsidized the type of reporting that Paul Starr rightly notes is essential to democracy. More efficient competition, like targeted online advertising, has undermined this status quo.
So, does (limited?) monopoly information control, have a desirable benefit? Could Google’s continued rise and importance to online advertisers signal a new opportunity to capture monopoly prices and subsidize “hard journalism”?
It goes without saying that this vast, unprecedented level of global monopoly would have terrible effects, so, more prudently, perhaps the title of this post should be “should we wish for false-monopoly?”
It’s late; help me figure this out.
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No.
Or, more specifically, hell no.
I've yet to see a less efficient market produce more of something. Give it time. There are plenty of models that will make sense for investigative journalism… and they'll end up being better at it than the current inefficient models.
TPMmuckraker is a start. There will be more.
The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of “protectable scarcity”. There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears. We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans. That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.
Since we cannot — and should not — “re-create” scarcity (or local monopolies) to solve this problem, this presents challenging questions for the future of “long form” investigative journalism, which is expensive to fund and sustain. The best hope is to try to find create new cross-subsidies for investigative journalism, but where those cross-subsidies flow from is the difficult question. Non-profits? Micropayments? Google?? Who knows. Difficult days ahead no matter how you cut it. I wish I could be more optimistic, but it's hard for the reasons Zuckerman, Starr and many others note.
More here.
Haha. Thought I'd get you to respond to this one : )
As usual, you're much more eloquent than I. The search for new cross-subsidies is what I was trying to get at with “false-monopoly.”
Though Mike's new post says that maybe even cross-subsidies aren't needed: http://techdirt.com/articles/20090317/031231414...
Thanks for the informative post Kevin, you are great, keep posts like this one coming lot often, have just bookmarked you.
Thanks for the informative post Kevin, you are great, keep posts like this one coming lot often, have just bookmarked you.