How do you properly compensate those that do the hardest work in getting "the facts" if endless copies can be made cheaply?
I suppose the answer is something like iTunes for the news. However, I'm not confident that market forces can pick the best reporting. I mean, Fox News does really well financially. How many people do they have in Haiti?
The difficult-to-collect facts would be those necessary for in-depth and investigative pieces. I specifically called that out above as being pay-worthy. I can absolutely see for-pay access to those news pieces.
What doesn't work --can't work-- is charging for things like box scores, election results, stock news, press releases, traffic/crime/weather. (Excepting perhaps extremely time-sensitive subsets of that data.)
And if the NYTimes isn't discriminating between their quality, signature content and simple daily news - the customer isn't going to either. They're just going to be frustrated that if they try to use the NY Times for more than 1 big story a month, they're penalized. Or, god forbid, try to read the NYTimes.com at work, at the library or at a coffee shop...
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Perhaps the term is "cheap" instead. Because once someone has broadcast "the facts" it is very cheap to inform everyone else.
How do you properly compensate those that do the hardest work in getting "the facts" if endless copies can be made cheaply?
I suppose the answer is something like iTunes for the news. However, I'm not confident that market forces can pick the best reporting. I mean, Fox News does really well financially. How many people do they have in Haiti?
The difficult-to-collect facts would be those necessary for in-depth and investigative pieces. I specifically called that out above as being pay-worthy. I can absolutely see for-pay access to those news pieces.
What doesn't work --can't work-- is charging for things like box scores, election results, stock news, press releases, traffic/crime/weather. (Excepting perhaps extremely time-sensitive subsets of that data.)
And if the NYTimes isn't discriminating between their quality, signature content and simple daily news - the customer isn't going to either. They're just going to be frustrated that if they try to use the NY Times for more than 1 big story a month, they're penalized. Or, god forbid, try to read the NYTimes.com at work, at the library or at a coffee shop...