I would say yes to your first question and no to the second. I would probably pay something modest for TPM or something like it, if I really understood that a subscription was the only alternative to the news & opinion source I trusted and relied on going under.
However, I'll never let any website show me ads as long as I can help it, and I think this point of view is shared by many. And it seems pretty reasonable to assume that as fast as advertisers come up with new formats for web ads, the good folks at AdBlockPlus will come up with ways to get rid of them. So I think advertising, even targeted advertising, is not the answer.
]]>I agree with the "designer prison" label -- but I bet for mainstream profit-making, it's inevitable to some extent. I mean hell, if even those of us who critique it end up buying into it in some way...
And yeah, advertising is not the answer. I too haven't seen more than a handful of internet ads in ages -- thanks AdBlock Plus!
]]>Yes, there are other ways to fix the system without sending half our country into a republican-voting tizzy. And single-payer systems are not perfect by any means -- in fact when it comes down to it I'm not sure I'd prefer them to the hybrid system I'm under in France -- not that I think the U.S. could copy wholesale the French model either. Bottom line is, we will have to develop our own model that works for our country's unique situation.
I would love to hear your thoughts on more moderate effective reforms -- looking forward to hearing more when you get the chance!
]]>Apart from my rambling response to Quinn above, I think one thing to pay attention to is the success of iTunes. When I was a high school Napster user, I thought I'd never pay for music again. And yet today I regularly buy music from iTunes that I know I could get free elsewhere if I really wanted to. And I know I'm not the only one. Why? Because iTunes somehow tipped the balance between the total amount I have to spend in terms of time, effort, and money to get a song or album, and the value provided. They succeeded at making it worth it to me, and millions of others raised with the internet, to pay a little bit for something I know I could find for free if I worked a little harder, or settled for a slightly inferior product. Maybe news organizations can learn from this??
Of course, iTunes also benefited enormously from government regulations against file-sharing. And I can't imagine an analogue to that in the news industry. So maybe my tentative comparison is total bunk. Like I said, if I had the answer I'd be in the business myself!
]]>I also love newspapers and read several daily, although that might make me a generational anomaly. But I have the same complaints as you do about their volumes of wasted newsprint (although I tend to hang on to the travel section and wherever they happen to be hiding the crossword). Clearly, they're doomed in their present form, and good riddance.
There are two crucial things, however, that I think can't be replaced by the aggregated blogosphere. This is really just off the top of my head, so I'd love help thinking it through. And just to be clear, this is not to say these things can't be replaced by online journalism -- the dead-tree papers are only going to be useful until every house has high-speed internet access and every American has web fluency -- according to our president-elect, something that we can expect sooner rather than later.
The first thing is large-scale archival research like the Guantanamo Docket that I linked to in the post. This is pretty tedious and thankless work that no pageview-addicted blogger or even team of bloggers would find it worth their while to engage in. But the public deserves access to this kind of information. That, so far as I can see, takes salaried researchers at journalistic institutions that are going to make their profit elsewhere.
The second thing is worldwide investigative reporting, deployable instantly. I agree that I'd take the account of the passionate devotee to any given cause over that of your average barely-interested reporter. One thing that the blogosphere should be teaching newspapers is that readers want specialized information and thus expert-level journalists. However, someone has to pay those people who are devoting themselves 24/7 for 20 years to the environment or what-have-you. Frequently those experts are currently paid by universities. Of course many academics do blog, but as long as they're academics first and bloggers second (or third, or fourth), the reader can't be guaranteed that they'll be available as a reliably continuous source of information at the drop of a hat. I'll take myself as an example. My area of expertise is Islam in Europe and N. America. I don't have a blog about this, but let's say I did. Now let's say an Islamicist terrorist attack happens in Paris, but I'm drowning in grading, or translating, or whatever my day job happens to be. I might be better equipped to go report on the situation than Joe-the-Paris-bureau-reporter, but I can't guarantee I'll be able to do so tomorrow unless that reporting is my job.
To my mind, blogging can give us the first version of history faster than newspapers -- case in point, the twittering from Mumbai during the recent attack. And blogging can give us opinion more cost-efficiently than newspapers -- as they say, everyone's got one. But it's the in-between -- the educated but also immediately available investigative reporting, especially with a global reach -- that I have a hard time imagining anything but institutional journalism providing. Now the key will be for journalistic institutions to realize the things they are uniquely capable of, and to develop those capacities. (i.e., steal some of the brain trust from academia and teach them how to write.) And then, of course, to have a profit model to support that. I wonder, though, if newspapers started actually providing this, and only this, whether people wouldn't be more willing to pay for it.
Sorry for the epic-length comment! But I'm fascinated by this situation and still haven't hammered out what I think about it.
]]>I like Fareed Zakaria very much, and like what (admittedly little) I've seen of Andrea Mitchell. Terry Gross and Jon Stewart are the best interviewers out there that I've seen/heard, but both are much better suited to their current jobs than they would be to MTP.
Really, this just adds confirmation to my long-standing view that it will never be worth it to own a TV. Here I thought teevee news was onto something, giving Rachel Maddow her own show, but this is a step in the opposite direction (towards irrelevance).
]]>(uh-oh, my inner terrible punster seems to have been let loose...)
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