Flick Harrison on Wed, 8 Apr 2009 05:38:08 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Google dubbed internet parasite by WSJ editor |
Morlock, People have been paying for journalism all along. They once threw coins to the bards, which was more direct, but nowadays, they buy the products advertised in the newspaper, and those advertisers pay the writers. The publisher was a middleman taking cash out of the equation. The problem is that now, more middlemen stand in the way of the buyer and the producer. The aggregators bring readers to the news, but they suck out a bit of the ad revenue. They do contribute to the value by picking stories that are interesting to the reader from an unreadable mass of information - though perez hilton's value is different than huffpo's value. There is definitely something scary about a world where no full-time professional newsrooms exist. I don't like corporate oligarchy news (i.e. the MSM, which the right, however, considers commie pinko news) but at least there's a check on outright corruption and the oligarchic feuds can be fought out fairly - without civil wars and coups. If daily news disappears - don't imagine home made indymedia can fill that void this decade - we're screwed. Something like Znet might have the reach and scope to take up some of the slack, but good god, not all of it. Public broadcasting, in Canada at least, is increasingly under threat as a waste of money as private news collapses; the right-wing noisosphere makes a convincing, if spurious, case that public broadcasting is to blame for the private sector's woes, and in the million-channel, billion-blog universe, public broadcasting is playing to an increasingly empty house. That means fewer champions in the Assembly fighting for it. I take Chomsky's analysis of the media's bias as gospel. But I can't see what we'll gain by letting the MSM go out of business without a plan to replace it. If it collapses because of some other corporate force - i.e. google, the cable ISP's, ebay and craigslist - snatching its market, there's every reason to anticipate something worse will take its place. My money says 'nothing' is most likely to succeed; followed closely by the type of "citizen journalism" represented by Rush Limbaugh's internet echo chamber; or in the best case, some kind of hyper-partisan, fragmented poly-polity in constant civil conflict and with ever-widening gaps in what's accepted as truth. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org