Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 27
A lesson in history and economics, along with a dim glimpse of the not-too-distant future, are delivered today by The Wall Street Journal.
On its op-ed page, which remains free so the public can be so enlightened while much of the rest of the paper requires an online subscription, is a piece by Peter Kann, the former chairman of Dow Jones & Co, which publishes the paper. He also was a Pulitzer-winning reporter.
Kann explains the rather pragmatic decision by the WSJ to not join the publishing lemmings who decided the business model of newspapers should free online, supported by advertising.
“At the dawn of the era of online editions this newspaper,” Kann writes, “like all the others, was faced with a free or pay choice. At the time, I was chairman of Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, and virtually alone we chose to charge for our online content. The reasons for this have been the subject of much ensuing speculation.
“Allow me to explain: As a predominantly business newspaper the Journal's content was distinctive and very largely unduplicated. That content arguably had a much higher degree of essentiality to customers than general news or entertainment. …
“So the decision to charge for an online edition was less courageous than it was consistent.”
As I have addressed here in the past, in case you haven’t noticed, Kann points out the problem for American society as a whole, not just publishers, editors and reporters.
“The real threat is to the future of news—informative, relevant, reliable news of the wider world around us, Kann writes. “And that is disappearing as newspapers, whose reporting staffs still produce most of the news, no longer can afford to do so. As their news budgets and staffs continue to shrink, the key question is what can fill that gap?”
Not television, he says. Not the Internet, he says. The first is devolving into cheap shout-fests, fires and car chases. The second is derivative commentary with no original, professionally gathered news content.
Sorry to give away the ending, as you should read his piece in its entirety, but Kann succinctly concludes, “As to all the free online editions of our newspapers, their business model does not begin to cover the cost of significant news reporting. So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public.”
