Funding Rupert's retirement package vs finding a new way to share information

I read Richard Glover's Saturday column in the Sydney Morning Herald, headed 'Rupert's on the money', on actual newsprint. Yes, real paper! Well I started to, anyway. I didn't finish it (or the whole paper - I rarely do these days) as I had better things to get on with, like breathing, eating, sleeping and whatever. But I looked it up again online, because I spend more time online than with my head in a newspaper (yes, it was different way back when, pre-Web...) and the subject - pay-for-view - does interest me.

I can understand Richard's thinking, suggesting as he does that we are willing to pay through the nose for convenience food yet baulk at paying relatively small sums for information online. He asks 'why is it so?' and goes further to suggest that it shouldn't be like that at all, that information has a value and that by rights it should be distributed for a fee, not freely. After all, no-one stands around on street corners handing out free coffee and sandwiches, do they? Now on the surface that sounds plausible in our consumer society, where very little is absolutely "free" and where goods and services are traded in markets and in theory find fair prices. Note that, "fair" prices, where supply and demand meet and share out resources. Nice theory.

In that way Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is certainly free to offer its journalistic services for a price, and good luck to them with that. It may work, they may find the sweet spot in their pricing that covers costs, and more. But unless the vast majority of old media close ranks on this - as well they may - "free" content just a click or two away will draw the punters and their dollars. But if they do close ranks they will be running a risk - the risk of being labelled a cartel. Not that name-calling - or even legal action - has ever scared these guys off. So they may get away with it, and lock their "information" behind a wall. Of course the wall will leak like a sieve, but it will provide some revenue relief for the old guard of the media -at least for a while. Fair use and foul will mean that good (or perhaps 'desired'?) content gets quoted and blogged outside of the walled garden, so nothing short of a totalitarian lock-down would save old media from slowly leaching to death. So why fight so hard, belittling the upstarts? Why not put the effort instead into finding a new business model, one that works sustainably?

Philosophically I have to say that information - be it the daily news, data or reference material - should be free. Freedom of information is something that we cherish as a right, something enlightened and empowering. So stashing it away behind a paywall is fraught with danger, in that it's inequitable in its distribution, it limits the sum growth of our human knowledge and technology and is a simple power play. It could be seen as a blatant misuse of the "information" in the first place. When we invented the wheel, did we share it or sell it? When we copied the wheel from nature, did we pay nature back for the intellectual property? I would guess not.

Nice though that philosophy is, it's not going to work. Most of us live in a society where our lives - our means - depend upon income derived from achieving a fair price for our goods or services. So we are left with Rupert, Richard and their cohorts hoping to create something, anything, in a digital age that they can swap for cash. The problem is that they keep coming up with poor analogies for their plight - like Richard's example of exorbitant sandwich and coffee shop prices - to illustrate that what they do - to gather, filter, qualify, refashion and regurgitate (in varying degrees of "quality") information - is just as worthy of payment as that coffee that may cost $5 but gives you a break from your work, gets you out of your chair and lifts you for an hour or two. But Richard himself answers that when he eschews the $5 coffee, makes and takes to work his own sandwiches and avoids most of what he sees as underwhelming and overpriced. So to use Richard's own analogy, how should we avoid these old guard media barons and their underwhelming, over-priced content, if not by blogging or fashioning our own?

Let's face it - we have stepped into a virtual, digital world and the old model of printing on paper, trucking it around and burning up finite resources just doesn't work like it used to... and it will only get worse. Subsidising "quality content" with the classifieds cash cow is all but over. And walling up your online content - be it your news, your images, or your music - may stem the tide, but by clinging to old ways - the "physical model" of distribution and ownership - you are just delaying the inevitable. The internet has created a new paradigm, where we are able to freely disintermediate, removing any middle layers that may distribute but don't effectively value-add, putting information ownership and publishing back where it started - with the people. If old media don't adapt quickly enough to that online opportunity, by truly adding value and leveraging their strengths, then they will be overwhelmed by change. They may retreat into their walled cities but they will waste away.

In fairness, you can check Richard's piece out too, just here: http://sn.im/rhjtg

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