Domestic media concerns meant that I overlooked an important article by Clay Shirky, Why we need the new news environment to be chaotic, posted 12 days ago.
It is US-specific, but deals with questions that affect the present, and the future, of British journalism too.
He gets into the "journalism as philanthropy versus journalism as capitalism" dichotomy (see Jeff Jarvis's many, many comments on this over the large couple of years).
But Shirky remains largely agnostic about the differing benefits of not-for-profit and for-profit funding (while accepting that advertising is not going to flow to news websites as it had done to newspapers).
One key section begins with this statement: "News has to be subsidised, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free." He continues:
"News has to be subsidised because society's truth-tellers can't be supported by what their work would fetch on the open market.
However much the journalism-as-philanthropy crowd gives off that 'Eat your peas' vibe, one thing they have exactly right is that markets supply less reporting than democracies demand.
Most people don't care about the news, and most of the people who do don't care enough to pay for it, but we need the ones who care to have it, even if they care only a little bit, only some of the time. To create more of something than people will pay for requires subsidy.
News has to be cheap because cheap is where the opportunity is right now... the journalism-as-capitalism people... are right to put their faith in new models for news.
If for-profit revenue is shrinking and non-profit funding won't make up the shortfall, we need much cheaper ways of gathering, understanding, and disseminating news, whether measured in information produced or readers served.
And news has to be free, because it has to spread. The few people who care about the news need to be able to share it with one another and, in times of crisis, to sound the alarm for the rest of us.
Newspapers have always felt a tension between their commercial and civic functions, but when a publication drags access to the news itself over to the business side, as with the paywalls at The Times of London or the Tallahassee Democrat, they become journalism-as-luxury.
In a future dominated by journalism-as-luxury, elites would still get what they need (a tautology in market economies), but most communities would suffer; imagine Bell, California times a thousand, with no Ruben Vives to go after the the politicians.(You need to read this to grasp that point)
The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidise reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won't keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved."
Take 20 minutes off and read it all Source: here
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jul/21/clay-shirky-digital-media
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