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November 22, 2010
Alan Kohler makes an excellent point in his Added value needed for online media survival on the ABC's The Drum with respect to the future of the fourth estate.
His general point is that industries are being disintermediated by the digital economy and are having to reinvent themselves to stay afloat:
The most urgent of these is retailing. For thousands of years we have had to travel to a shop to buy goods because the shopkeepers have controlled their distribution, just as media companies have controlled information.Now we can go direct to the source of the goods, wherever they are in the world. The volume of shopping online is now ballooning and just about everything is now being bought on the internet and delivered to homes in packages - books, shoes, clothing, food, household items.Traditional retailers sitting behind the counters in their stores in shopping malls and strips are now facing huge challenges; many won't survive. Those that do will provide something extra that can't be bought online, some sort of added value or service.
An example. Black and white sheet film for my 8x10 monorail view camera costs $140 a box (of 25 sheets) in Adelaide and $80 from B+ H in New York. Sure, I have to pay the freight, but I can use the internet to place a bulk order for several types of film for several different film cameras, thereby spreading the cost of freight. The film is then stored in the fridge until I need it.
So why would I buy from the local camera shop withe outrageous markups charged by the importers? I would only visit them if they provided added value--ie;, to help me solve the problems I'm encountering with cameras (repairs) and photography.
Journalists working in the mainstream or corporate media are no different. Their model is one person speaking to many in a digital world of Web 2. that provides the mass ability to communicate with each other, without having to go through a traditional intermediary. As Kohler points out:
It is now possible for anyone to find out almost anything. Someone sitting at home can now read any press release, watch any press conference, or read its transcript, and examine any document anywhere in the world.The lowest paid jobs in society are those that anyone can do, but can't be bothered or don't have the time, like cleaning or driving. The danger for plain reporting is that it will be increasingly seen in that light - as a service that anyone can do but can't be bothered or haven't the time. No-one is going to pay much for that, if anything, and advertisers have already discovered that they are in the driver's seat with online media because there is a glut of inventory and it's all measurable and accountable, unlike newspaper advertising.
The digital revolution shifts us from the traditional transmission model to a communication model in an open space of publicly available information with the emergence of greater convergence of text, data and moving pictures.
Kohler's solution rejects both Murdoch's paywalls for transmission and the Guardian's free, open and collaborative journalism that loses money that Alan Rusbridger outlined in the 2010 Andrew Olle Media lecture. Kolher says that in order to survive in both cases journalism must add value - "specifically it must impart meaning. It must do what its customers cannot do themselves, which is to explain what events mean, not just report them."
Well, good bloggers in a post-Gutenberg world are already explaining what events mean ---isn't that the point of commentary? What was one a passive audience has become critics, commentators and photographers. So journalists in the corporate media have competitors and people will only read them if they have something valuable and worthwhile to say.
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I see from the link that Murdoch is going to erect paywalls for his Australian newspapers next year---The Australian, Sydney's Daily Telegraph and Melbourne's Herald-Sun. They will offer about 50% of their news stories for free and about 50% will be paid for.
No more Janet Albrechtson for free then?