In the old world we had centralized media -- paper is expensive, printing presses are more expensive, typeset articles more expensive still, then there's distribution, etc. -- so we need to optimizes the quality of the material that gets printed and distributed.
Today you can set up a wordpress or blogspot account for free. So the question is how do we get from a world of edited news written by professional journalists to a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news?
We have parasitic sites like Huffpost and Business Insider which essentially SEO content created by professional news organizations -- what we need is something that assembles equivalent stuff from citizen journalists, bloggers, and so on.
> a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news
That's a wonderful sentiment, one that I'd love to see come true. But until someone can make it happen, we must consider the possibility that it cannot happen.
I mean, just take a look at The Verge. They have an enormous amount of accurate and in-depth tech coverage, both text- and video-based. They are far and away better than just random bloggers posting gadget reviews - they have actual lawyers explaining the Samsung v. Apple trial, and they create wonderful video features[0] on niche communities that we'd never know about otherwise. Even though their articles and videos are plastered with ads, I just don't understand how they can become profitable, even in the long run. In any case, they had to hire the best of the best in the online tech journalism industry to build the site they have today.
I think that we're heading in that direction whether we like it or not. The classic newspaper is in essence a "middleman" between writers and readers who makes money by picking writers who will be popular and selling ad space. Whether or not there are publishers or an audience, there will always be writers -- it's the middleman who is being rendered unnecessary.
We're seeing the same phenomena in the music industry and television, and it happened in radio long ago (which is why most radio content is completely disposable, public radio being the exception).
What does the end-game look like? Probably something like Google News or the App Store.
It's possible that entities such as the New Yorker or the NY Times or The Economist can survive if they figure out how to switch from their middleman model to a "make good stuff and sell it to people" model, but it's problematic -- switching business models is very hard.
In the old world we had centralized media -- paper is expensive, printing presses are more expensive, typeset articles more expensive still, then there's distribution, etc. -- so we need to optimizes the quality of the material that gets printed and distributed.
Today you can set up a wordpress or blogspot account for free. So the question is how do we get from a world of edited news written by professional journalists to a new world where a lot of the content is provided more-or-less for free, but we still need reliable places to go for news?
We have parasitic sites like Huffpost and Business Insider which essentially SEO content created by professional news organizations -- what we need is something that assembles equivalent stuff from citizen journalists, bloggers, and so on.