By Tom Foremski
siliconvalleywatcher.com
Hat tip to Danny Sullivan for pointing out the above panel at Web 2.0 Summit, which featured Robert Thomson, Wall Street Journal chief, and Marrissa Mayer head of search products at Google, plus Martin Nisenholtz, The New York Times Company, and Eric Hippeau from the Huffington Post, moderated by John Battelle. Title: “Whither Journalism.”
Video – Web 2.0 Summit 09: “Discussion: Whither Journalism?”
The reason this discussion is interesting is because Mr Thomson is a close confidant of Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp and one of the leaders in trying to create new business models for online journalism. One of those ways is to create a paywall – to charge for content.
This has been criticized by many online pundits who believe content should be free and that Mr Murdoch, and others that want to charge for content won’t succeed.
This is a ridiculous argument because it doesn’t address the issue of how content is created and the costs in creating content. An army of citizen journalists won’t be able to fill the gap caused by fewer professional journalists. We have to figure out a way to pay for professional journalism.
At the beginning of the discussion Mr Thomson gets to the point right away, when he makes the distinction between content creators and content aggregators and point out that the cost burden is being shouldered by the content creators. . .
. . . Producing original content is very expensive. Trawling web sites and taking the headline and top paragraph of a story is dirt cheap. The difference between costs for content creators and content aggregators is very large indeed.
The Huffington Post gets a ton of content for free. The New York Times has more people moderating its comments than The Huff Post has journalists on its masthead. Yet the Huff Post couldn’t exist without the content creators. Clearly there is a large mismatch here.
The tragedy is that on either side of the equation there isn’t enough money to pay for the content creation. . . READ FULL STORY
