Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 26

While I understand the timidity of those publishers who don’t want to see the value of their Web site advertising decline if readers abandon them for free news content elsewhere, I’m reminded of the conflict in values and availability created by the cheap distribution system that is the Web.

That “information wants to be free” quip has been attributed to a statement by Stewart Brand in 1984 at a hacker’s convention and republished a couple of times since. This is the rest of what he said:

“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

Now, I might be swayed by the views of a majority of publishers, but I am convinced by the words of one newspaper executive in a recent interview with Steve Forbes, the publisher of Forbes magazine. That executive is Warren Stephens, chairman, president and CEO of Stephens Inc., the parent company for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Stephens said he thinks the newspaper “industry at large has got to move to a pay model for its Web content. And the sooner we all do that, the better off we’re going to be …”

Here is a snippet of the interview, which is available as a transcript and streaming video:

Forbes: One of your investments is in newspapers.

Stephens: Yeah.

Forbes: Tell us the future of newspapers.

Stephens: Oh, lord. I wish I knew what the future –

Forbes: We have an indirect vested interest in this.

Stephens: Yeah, exactly. Well, our newspapers in general are mainly small town newspapers. The biggest one we own is Las Vegas. We own the biggest daily in the Las Vegas area, which is frankly ground zero for the housing meltdown and real estate meltdown. So it’s been hit pretty hard. There are things in our newspaper, there are things in your magazines that you can only get in our newspaper or in that publication. We cover things that other people just simply are never going to cover. And that is going to be of value to advertisers. But I’ve come around to the view that having your website for free, giving away all your copyright, is not a very good model. So I think the industry at large has got to move to a pay model for its Web content. And the sooner we all do that, the better off we’re going to be because then –

Forbes: Any new vision scenarios of how this might come to pass? Not a lot of discussion about it.

Stephens: No. You know, I know the Wall Street Journal’s is a paid model. Actually my local paper in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Democrat Gazette, is a paid model. And it seems to work. And there’s a reluctance to do that for people that have been giving it away for free. But I think it’s got to happen. Otherwise, I don’t, you know, newspapers as we know them will I think cease to exist. They’ll have to go to some sort of just electronic-only publication and the ad revenues will be significantly less. I’m not one of those that thinks newspaper business is over. I think it’s declining, I think it’s for sure on a decline but I also think it’s just been severely impacted by the ad recession that we’ve all experienced.

So there you have it. That debate is over.