3 ms·

This is the money quote: "Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depend

This is the money quote: "Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content."

nopassrecover 17y ago
Interesting relevance to the Marx view on productive labour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_lab...).
greyman 17y ago
There certainly is a management bureaucracy in MSM, but this is not specific to the so-called old media. But I think there is yet a bigger expense - when you do original reporting or investigations, that will cost you a lot of money to do properly. On the contrary, he is a blogger who probably just sits home most of the time, watching media and react to them in the form of commentaries. Now, I don't mean it in the derogatory means, it's perfectly ok to make money by blogging, but still...his perspective is rather limited and there is still a difference (in terms of business) between really covering news and just blogging about them.
- olefoo 17y ago
  I've wondered about that myself. Up until the last two years, it seemed like there was a symbiotic relationship between mainstream news outlets and bloggers where the old line media provided the facts (and a fair helping of bias) and the new line media commented upon, fact-checked and elaborated and recontextualized. About two years ago it seemed like the balance tipped and all of a sudden the old line media was reduced to verifying and validating stories that were already out there in a big way. I do know that there are blogs that do original reporting but it seems like there exists a place for an organization that is trusted to check out the ground truth of some of the more speculative stories. I don't want to live in a media world where it is impossible to tell if an article of financial news is a scandalous revelation or was just made up by someone who thinks that the elders of zion meet under a tree on wall street.
  - po 17y ago
    I'm not worried about the death of the news organizations, it's journalism I'm worried about.
- ZachPruckowski 17y ago
  See, you're assuming newspapers are actually doing original reporting that's all that expensive. Many stories running in papers and on TV (especially locally) consist of "well, let's call both sides and get their quote on this" or "let's base it off this press release" or "hey, my white house source just fed me the white house's 'unofficial' take", not "ok, let's track down Deep Throat II and launch a full-scale investigation of this incident involving hours of combing through records". The majority of "journalistic investigation" isn't hostile nowadays. What I mean by that is that they're not getting sources acting against their superiors' interest, and they're not breaking stories they've investigated. It's not like Watergate where you have dozens of people following leads for one story.

nopassrecover 17y ago

Interesting relevance to the Marx view on productive labour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_and_unproductive_lab...).

greyman 17y ago

There certainly is a management bureaucracy in MSM, but this is not specific to the so-called old media. But I think there is yet a bigger expense - when you do original reporting or investigations, that will cost you a lot of money to do properly. On the contrary, he is a blogger who probably just sits home most of the time, watching media and react to them in the form of commentaries. Now, I don't mean it in the derogatory means, it's perfectly ok to make money by blogging, but still...his perspective is rather limited and there is still a difference (in terms of business) between really covering news and just blogging about them.

olefoo 17y ago
I've wondered about that myself. Up until the last two years, it seemed like there was a symbiotic relationship between mainstream news outlets and bloggers where the old line media provided the facts (and a fair helping of bias) and the new line media commented upon, fact-checked and elaborated and recontextualized. About two years ago it seemed like the balance tipped and all of a sudden the old line media was reduced to verifying and validating stories that were already out there in a big way. I do know that there are blogs that do original reporting but it seems like there exists a place for an organization that is trusted to check out the ground truth of some of the more speculative stories. I don't want to live in a media world where it is impossible to tell if an article of financial news is a scandalous revelation or was just made up by someone who thinks that the elders of zion meet under a tree on wall street.
- po 17y ago
  I'm not worried about the death of the news organizations, it's journalism I'm worried about.
ZachPruckowski 17y ago
See, you're assuming newspapers are actually doing original reporting that's all that expensive. Many stories running in papers and on TV (especially locally) consist of "well, let's call both sides and get their quote on this" or "let's base it off this press release" or "hey, my white house source just fed me the white house's 'unofficial' take", not "ok, let's track down Deep Throat II and launch a full-scale investigation of this incident involving hours of combing through records". The majority of "journalistic investigation" isn't hostile nowadays. What I mean by that is that they're not getting sources acting against their superiors' interest, and they're not breaking stories they've investigated. It's not like Watergate where you have dozens of people following leads for one story.