Newspaper journalism gets words of praise
Print media's role vital, Obama says
By DAVE MURRAY, Toledo Blade
September 20, 2009




Doesn't mention Wikipedia, but it does suggest that the situation WRT professional journalism vs. the blogosphere/wikiland axis might get some high-level attention in the upcoming months.

The question is, what can the US government actually do about it? This suggests that they're going to give tax breaks to newspapers that reorganize as non-profits, but IMO tax breaks aren't likely to be enough to counterbalance free-sector competition, given that they still have to charge money for subscriptions. I still believe the best way to deal with the problem is to level the playing field, by curtailing or eliminating the "service provider" loophole used by social-web publishers to avoid their having to monitor and take responsibility for content.

Otherwise, web publishers will always have a huge financial advantage, since they don't have to hire fact-checkers, gatekeepers, etc. - much less printers and delivery people. This is basically what many of us have been saying all along - maybe now is the time to really make this point publicly, if there's a chance the Obama Administration might be sympathetic to the idea...?

Obama's more into "free" government money. I can't imagine him telling bloggers that they need to lawyer up.

Besides--and it pains me to say this--they can't really demand accountability because of how the internet responds to even minimal impositions of responsibility. Every hint of "censorship" or "unfree speech" (including suggestions that one should actually pay for valuable intellectual property) results in ridiculous over-reactions which render the medium even less responsible. So if he's in to fighting losing battles against unfixable problems, Obama might get to that sometime after we win Afghanistan.

Tax breaks and subsidies are easier. Besides, everyone else is getting them.

Pity the newspapers. The internet might have freed them of the burden of a very expensive distribution model, tons of paper, massive presses, trucks, distributors, sub distributors and carriers down to rural drivers and girls on bicycles. But instead the internet takes a nasty turn toward free content and undermines investigative reporters and journalists.

I think "a business model" ain't on the way. More hope for some kind of non-profits getting foundation grants and fundraiser. It might be possible even for government grants if they keep investigative arms but forswear partisan endorsement and positions, but that would be a loss in itself. Besides they would get no peace as every crook with his hand caught in the cookie jar would scream "partisan." It is almost certain that in addition to investigative journalism some kind of citizen volunteers would cover library board meetings and such. This might be alright so long as the "newspaper" was responsible for the content.

Too bad that every day WP is setting new bad practice as a non-profit that might become common practices in future non-profit internet communications/news enterprises. The last thing in the world you would want is atomized content, immunity and editorial control by a "community" of amateur content providers rather than representation from the wider community for whose benefit the investigation and information is directed.

Yeah, I'm afraid of where we're heading. Private ownership of speech is a great thing for many reasons, but one of the best is that they can conduct political investigative reporting. We can imagine a truly independent source of funding, but I have a hard time imagining it in the United States.

Unless this problem is solved, we're looking at a decimated journalistic profession and increasingly fragmented and rudderless bloggers. I fear that self-feeding extremists bubbles like the "birthers" will become increasingly common in a world with little professional reporting.

Yep. And very few people are talking about it. If your work-product is information-processing, and you're in a world where this work-product is instantly copiable and destributable for nothing, YOU ARE SCREWED. Copyright won't even protect you, since your conclusions don't necessarily have to be put in your exact words.

For this reason, people have being trying like mad for some time to connect the product of thinking (whereever it occurs) to some material product, which they can sell as-a-package. For journalism, this was print on dead-trees. But if you can't do that, or it becomes impossible, again, YOU ARE SCREWED.

As well all know, pharmaceutical companies don't sell drugs. Drugs are cheap once you know the formula. What the drug company sells is information. Yet they need to instantiate it in a pill, or they'd go broke. There's usually quite a lot of black art involved with making the molecule (especially as related to making it cheaply) that isn't even in their patents (hope I don't shock you). But even there, they badly need the (lousy) protection of the patent system. Such as it is.

If the basic problem if IP theft isn't solved, the motor that literally drives the world, will cough and die. A few John Galts will have to go back to locking up their generators with a padlock, and selling power without telling us where it comes from. Everybody else will just wallow in a mire where it's impossible to get any traction out of thinking of anything new.

Investigative journalists who write short pieces are the Canaries in the Coal Mine. If you look at the books of Bob Woodward, you can sort of see that he saw this coming from a long way off, and switched to something slighly less easy to steal. But I'm sure even he feels the pinch.