Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

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.