Nicholas Carr hits the nail on the head with this recent posting about how new economic forces unleashed by the web threaten good journalism.

The web unbundles the [old media content] bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click.

And worse:

investigative journalism is really expensive for newspapers. You’ve got to assign talented reporters to a long-term reporting effort that may or may not even end in a story. And you’ve got to pay their salaries and benefits during that whole time. And their expenses. God forbid the story requires original reporting in some distant place like Africa.

On the other hand, if you could get some cheap freelancer to hack together a story on new developments in high-definition televisions, that could really be a bonanza. Manufacturers, retailers and programmers bid a lot for clickthroughs on HDTV-related ads. And the readers attracted to a story on developments in HDTV are likely to be considering some kind of purchase - and thus in the mood to click. Ka-ching, ka-ching.

I think pandora’s box is open and the classified ads funding model for newspaper journalism will slowly but surely die. And heaven knows newspapers were not doing enough investigative journalism even before all this started happening. But this does not bode well for the future…

Update: The New Yorker points out that US newspapers are actually thriving economically… at the moment. But from what little I know I don’t think the same could be said for the national broadsheet UK dailies for example.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Amateur media production, mass media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.