Information Wants to Be Expensive
February 26th, 02009 by Alexander Rose
Long Now member Tony Hansmann spotted this piece in the Wall St Journal which cites Stewart Brand’s quote on information in regard to the collapse of newspapers.
One reason most media companies suspended normal business practices online, such as seeking subscription revenues, was a misinterpretation of one of the most powerful observations of the Information Age. When author Stewart Brand coined the expression “Information wants to be free,” he focused on how technology makes it cheap and easy to communicate and share knowledge. But the rest of his quote is rarely noticed.
This says, “Information also wants to be expensive.” The right information in today’s complex economy and society can make a huge difference in our professional and personal lives. Not having this information can also make a big difference, especially if someone else does have it. And for valuable information, online is a great new way for it to be valued.
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Posted on March 2nd, 2009 at 12:18 pm
This was a great piece. I do like the NYTimes, but I found it interesting that they ended their piece on the closing of the Rocky Mountain News with a quote that from one of the paper’s editors that I think is telling of the reasons behind this and many other newspapers’ demise:
“They want the amount of print you would find on a cereal box, which is what you get online,” said Mike Pearson, 49, a features writer and editor for The Rocky for 21 years.
“They want headlines only and graphs that summarize everything without going into a lot of analysis. And they feel entitled to even the most complex and sophisticated news coverage for free.”
This encapsulates the industry’s disdain for its readers and what they want: both a disapproval of the demand for briefer news and a misunderstanding of what their readers and would-be readers do want. (Yes, a lot of people do want in-depth coverage–but they want it on certain topics….customized..and often they’re getting it somewhere else. Magazine articles have long been a place where more in-depth analysis of news topics are undertaken–which is more appropriate than in a daily publication. The WSJ is another option of a newspaper that is still in the black precisely because they have offered a valuable product that isn’t just interchangeable with that offered by any other news organization.)
A piece on a marketing and branding blog commented on the closing of The Rocky Mountain News and the decline of the newspaper industry in general, saying that newspapers never really got marketing after the age of penny papers, and that as they were transformed into institutions, they just began to think of themselves as indispensable. (Full post.) The author, John Tantillo, has published other pieces (ex. profiling TriCityNews) and has also suggested that it is the local papers (more in touch with their target market) that stand a better chance at enduring while the big-city newspapers fail.