The Growth of Bottom-up Culture
A brilliant meditation by Julian Sanchez on the evolution of bottom-up remix culture:
Empowering Amateurs is a Good Thing
I’ve beaten the “economics of e-books” horse to within an inch of its life, so I’ll make one more point and then leave the poor horse alone. One point that tends to be missed when people worry about how writers or musicians will make money is that it’s far from obvious what the optimal number of professional writers or musicians is.
Consider baseball. There are tens of millions of people who play baseball and softball (I’ll just use “baseball” to refer to both for convenience). They span all ages, races, and social classes. And they do it for a wide variety of reasons. Some are kids who are doing it because their parents made them. Some are high school kids who do it to raise their status at school and become more attractive to the opposite sex. Some are college kids with sports scholarships. A huge number are adults who are doing it for the exercise or as an excuse to drink beer. And a tiny fraction plays baseball as a full-time job.
It’s hard to see any reason to be concerned, as a public policy matter, with the fraction of baseball players who play professionally. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a baseball fan complain that there aren’t enough games to watch. Indeed, the number of baseball games being played could drop by a couple orders of magnitude and it still wouldn’t be physically possible for a hard-core fan to watch them all.
You could make the same point about a wide variety of other cultural activities. Knitting and quilting, wine and beermaking, and cooking are all cultural activities that people perform at a wide variety of skill levels and with a wide variety of “business models.” They’re all “industries” in which the low end of the market is dominated by people who have entered it as a hobby, social activity, or retirement project. My wife reguarly buys $20 worth of wool and then spends 100 hours knitting a sweater with it. Obviously she’s not going to be able to sell the sweater at a profit, but that’s not the point.
There’s something perverse about the way the 20th-century book and recording industries were driven almost entirely by commercial considerations. There’s no reason book-writing or music-recording should be a primarily commercial activity, any more than ice skating, crocheting, or playing tennis are. But the limits of 20th-century printing, pressing, and distribution technology forced anyone who wanted to reach a large audience to employ a commercial business model. The vast majority of people who would have liked to offer books or music to a large audience didn’t have the opportunity to do so at all. The Internet is restoring a healthier balance to these cultural “industries,” allowing people like my former co-blogger Brian Moore to write as a hobby without necessarily expecting to ever quit his day job.
It’s hard to predict exactly how this will affect the number or compensation of professional writers or musicians. As a sometime freelance writer, I certainly hope that the market for paid writing will expand, and I suspect that will hold true in the long run. But it’s also not clear why this should be a matter of concern from a public policy perspective. If the market for paid writing shrinks, it will be because the amateur stuff is good enough to meet more of the demand. That’s bad for sometime professional writers like me. But it’s a good thing for the public as a whole—both because they get more stuff to read and because some of them get the satisfaction that comes from writing for a non-trivial audience.
Making Money from Free Books
Conan O'Brien: struggling to make ends meet with free content
Still, people don’t seem to find these examples very persuasive. Many people have an intuition that there are some kinds of content (television, radio, weekly newspapers, blogs) that are naturally monetized through ads, and there are other kinds of content (books, movies, CDs) that can only be monetized effectively by selling copies. So let’s take a look at an industry that has traditionally been focused on the sale of copies, but is currently seeing that business model challenged: the music industry.
It’s important to draw a distinction between the recording industry and the broader music industry of which it is a part. I think we all want a future in which enough musicians can make a living that we’ll have a generous supply of recorded music to listen to. But it won’t necessarily continue to be produced be produced by the small number of vertically-integrated, high-overhead firms that dominated the recording industry in the late 20th century.
The recording industry is doing poorly, but the news in the broader music industry isn’t so grim. Check out this chart from the Times of London spotted (as usual) by Mike Masnick:
The red line at the top, “recorded revenue (to labels)” is the one that has been getting all the press lately. It’s falling like a rock, whcih is bad news for the employees and shareholders of record labels. The light green line, “live revenue (to artists)” hasn’t gotten as much attention, but I think it’s just as important. It’s going up rapidly, and that’s good news for musicians. The dark green line below that, “PRS revenue,” are the royalties paid when copyrighted music is played in public venues. As we might expect, this revenue stream has been relatively constant over the last few years.
If you’re a British musician, this chart is fantastic news. The bulk of the revenue from CD sales go to labels, not artists. In contrast, musicians get the lion’s share of live show revenues. And so if consumers are shifting their spending from CDs to concert tickets, that’s great news for musicians. Moreover, this chart makes clear the fundamentally antagonistic relationship between musicians and their labels. When a customer buys a CD, most of the revenue goes to the label. When a customer buys a concert ticket, most of the revenue goes to the musician. So the musician’s interest is in having as many people as possible listen to her music, whether or not they pay for it. In contrast, the label wants to maximize CD sales, regardless of the effect of the band’s fan base. This analysis helps explain the ridiculous situation where OK Go has been prevented by its label from allowing embedding of its latest music videos. The benefits of embedding—a larger fan base—accrue mostly to OK Go. The benefits of disabling embedding—slightly higher YouTube ad revenues—accrue mostly to EMI.
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Postrel on E-Book Prices and Demand Elasticity
Virginia Postrel makes the case for cheap e-books:
The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren’t physical–no printing, no shipping. Ah, say contrarians, printing and shipping make up only a tiny fraction of a book’s costs. E-books aren’t really cheap.
Like publishers themselves apparently, these wise guys are using the wrong cost figures. To calculate the cost of a copy, they’re loading on fixed “pre-production” costs like the editor’s salary and the publisher’s rent. They’re including the marketing budget. But these are fixed costs. They don’t change when you produce another copy. They may be important when deciding whether to publish a book at all, but once the money has been spent they’re irrelevant to what you charge for a given copy. Optimal pricing should be based on the marginal cost of that incremental copy. Cover that incremental cost, and selling one more copy is profitable. The common intuition that e-books should be cheap reflects this basic microeconomics: Producing and delivering another e-copy costs next to nothing.
The other side of the equation is consumer response: How many more copies will people buy if the price goes down? Or, in economic lingo, what is the price elasticity of demand? Book publishers talk (and often act) as though book buyers aren’t particularly price sensitive. The Borders and Barnes & Noble coupons in my email suggest otherwise. So does what little academic research exists on the subject. In a paper looking at people buying physical books using a shopbot, economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Astrid Andrea Dick, and Michael D. Smith found very large elasticities: A 1 percent drop in price increased units sold by 7 percent to 10 percent.
Of course, people who use shopbots are likely to be more price sensitive than average. But there’s anecdotal evidence that prices matter a lot for e-books. As The New York Times reported recently, most of the books on the Kindle bestseller list are being given away for free. And comments on various discussion threads among Kindle users suggest that many are bargain hunters looking for a good, cheap read rather than a specific title.
Copyright and the “Right to Profit”
Over at the America’s Future Foundation website, Sonny Bunch responds with indignation to Matt Yglesias’s argument about the inevitability of free music. He starts by quoting the following excerpt from Matt’s post:
It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things.
Bunch responds:
No! False! The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs.
I have trouble getting too worked up about the semantic question of whether copyright infringement is “really” theft or not. I don’t engage in illegal file sharing and I don’t condone the practice. But at the same time, there are important differences between literal theft and copyright infringement, and I don’t think it’s particularly illuminating to equate the two.
But I do think Bunch is on shaky theoretical ground. America’s Founders had a pretty clear view of this subject, which they enshrined in our Constitution, and it’s at odds with the story Bunch is trying to tell. The Founders placed property rights protection in the Fifth Amendment, reflecting its status as a fundamental right. In contrast, the copyright clause appears in Article I, Section 8. That’s a section that enumerates the powers of Congress, not the rights of citizens. Indeed, the Constitution does not require Congress to grant copyrights at all, and contains no specific protections for copyright holders. To the contrary, the only specific requirement is a limitation on copyright protection; it requires that copyrights—unlike traditional property rights—be “for limited times.” Finally, the Constitution contains an explicit statement that the purpose of copyright is a utilitarian one: to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.”
Indeed, if Bunch seriously believes that the function of copyright law is to “punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs,” I would be curious to know whether he obtained Matt’s permission before quoting his blog post. This, of course, is permitted under copyright’s fair use doctrine. But if copyright is just another form of property rights, then theft is theft. I don’t think there’s a section in Locke’s Second Treatise that says stealing is OK if it’s done in small increments.
I was also puzzled by Bunch’s argument that copyright law is justified by artists’ “right to profit from their labors.” This is a peculiar argument to see on a blog of a free-market organization. In a free market, people do not have a right to profit from their labors. To the contrary, the genius of capitalism is precisely that profits are determined by consumers through the market process. Sometimes people make poor business choices and lose money. Sometimes increased competition pushes down prices and drives the least-efficient producers out of business. This is, in fact, exactly what’s happening to incumbent recording labels. That’s unfortunate for shareholders of those companies, but for the rest of us it’s simply part of the market process that has made us such a wealthy nation.
Similarly with authors, artists, and other creative people. Their compensation should be set by market forces. As I’ll be explaining in a future post, I don’t think zero-priced content means that musicians or authors won’t be able to make a living. But that’s neither here nor there as a policy matter. The fundamental point is that copyright is not a welfare program for musicians or authors. The function of the copyright system is not to ensure artists can “profit from their labors,” it’s to benefit the general public by “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.”
Why Books Want to Be Free
Yesterday I sketched a model of pricing in the traditional book industry. The question I’d like to address now is what this model implies for the future of the eBook industry.
My argument leans heavily on the proposition that the price of content tends not to vary with the quality of that content. So before I get into my predictions, it’s worth commenting on how universal this “law of one price” seems to be. The price of content varies by medium (hardcover fetches more than paperback) and timeliness (first-run movie theaters charge more than second-run movie theaters). But in virtually every competitive market for mass-market content, prices tend not to vary with the quality of the content itself. New music CDs are almost always priced at $10-15, new movies at $15-20. Magazines sell for $3-$5 a copy at the newsstand. Movie theaters charge the same price for tickets whether the movie is a $200 million blockbuster or a $2 million indy movie. There’s every reason to think that the mature eBook industry will conform to the same pattern: a “standard” price will emerge, and publishers won’t deviate from it very much.
What will that price be? The obvious point is that the marginal cost of “producing” and distributing a new copy of an eBook is very close to zero. So assuming a competitive market, we should expect prices to be pushed down to zero.
There are two factors that will push the prices of eBooks down to zero. First, the supply of eBooks is likely to expand dramatically, as publishers will have every incentive to publish a lot of books that they would have judged to be not good enough for paper printing. This increased competition will put downward pressure on prices. Second, the market for eBooks has no natural floor. Almost any price—$10, $5, even $1—is still well above marginal cost. And so once eBook publishers start cutting prices to build market share, there’s no obvious stopping point.
This is a fairly simple—some would say simplistic—argument. And it’s an argument that tends to trigger strong disagreement. Matt Yglesias, for example made a version of this argument about music earlier today, and got a lot of comments like this:
Making a song requires time from a songwriter, skill from a performer to learn the parts, and the expertise of a recordist and the use of the recordist’s highly specialized equipment.
The distribution ought to be slightly higher than the cost of distribution, which via the internet is close to zero. But you are forgetting the costs to make the song in the first place.
Of course, Matt was not “forgetting” the cost of making the song. Rather, he understands that prices in a competitive mrket tend toward marginal cost (the cost of the last unit), not average cost.
Still, it’s not crazy to think that in a market where books cost $0, so few authors will be willing to write new books that consumers will be willing to start paying again. But I do think it’s misguided. There are a lot of people who will happily write books (and songs) for very little money. Publishers routinely reject manuscripts that represent hundreds of hours of an aspiring author’s work. Most of these manuscripts are terrible, of course, but a significant number are not—the publisher simply judged them insufficiently good to recoup the cost of printing on paper. That calculus will change dramatically when publishing costs next to nothing. It will be worth taking a chance on even books that have a very modest chance of success. And some of those, will, in fact be popular with readers.
And this, in turn, means that the John Grishams and Agatha Christies of the world will have a lot more competition. Thousands of talented writers who failed to persuade a publisher to print their books on dead trees will now have the opportunity to publish directly to peoples’ Kindles. Some fraction of them will catch the imagination of readers and find a large audience. And that puts downward pressure on Grisham’s book advances in two distinct ways: because publishers are cutting their prices to compete with other publishers publishers, and because publishers have many more popular writers from whom to choose.
And as we’ve seen earlier, the price of content almost never varies by quality. Avatar cost $200 million to make and has been widely hailed by critics, yet tickets cost roughly the same as tickets to Jennifer’s Body, which cost $16 million to make and was widely panned. So it’s hard to imagine a stable equilibrium where new authors’ eBooks go for $1 but John Grisham’s eBooks go for $10, because content consumers tend to be price-sensitive.
If that sounds like hand-wavy theorizing to you, consider that it perfectly describes today’s blogosphere. There are millions of blogs in the world. The overwhelming majority of them are not very good, but even the top 1 percent still represents vastly more content than any one person can read. And the competition has made it virtually impossible for bloggers to charge for copies of their work. Even the most popular blogs are available for free online. Every “A-list” blogger understands that that he’d lose 90 percent of his readers overnight if he tried to charge a subscription fee.
Notice that this is true even though some of the top bloggers are extremely talented and have large and growing audiences. The zero price of blog content isn’t a negative judgment about blog quality. It’s simply a reflection of supply and demand. Even at a price of zero, the supply of high-quality content exceeds the attention span of the average reader by a huge margin. Which means that the equilibrium price is zero. There’s no reason to think the economics of eBooks will be any different.
In my final post in this series, I’ll look at what this analysis implies for content creators. The short version: we’re not all going to starve to death.
Update: One point that I should have made explicitly is that this argument has absolutely nothing to do with illegal file sharing. Obviously, illicit file sharing has accelerated the decline of the recording industry, and may very well have the same effect on the eBook market. But prices would continue trending downward even if the recording industry figured out a way to completely stop illicit file-sharing, because lower prices are what you always get when barriers to entry fall and competition increases.
Ignorance and Competition in the Book Market
I’ve been having a long Twitter discussion with Will Wilkinson about the economics of the book industry. Will wanted to know how authors could make money without “digital rights management” technology, and I replied by saying that writing a book has always been less about making money than it is about promoting the book’s author, and I suggested that the activity is going to become a lot less lucrative in the future.
To think clearly about the future of the book industry, it’s essential to understand its present. In particular, to make an educated guess about what the price of a book will be in the future, we need to understand why books cost what they cost today. I think there are two key insights that largely explain the structure of the book market. First, publishers are really bad at predicting whether any given book will be a success. And second, there is an almost unlimited supply of aspiring authors, some non-trivial fraction of whom would, if given the opportunity, produce a best-selling book. Call these the ignorance and competition assumptions, respectively.
Now, today’s book prices have two distinct and puzzling characteristics. First, book prices don’t vary much and don’t seem to be correlated with popularity or quality. Most categories of hardcover books cost around $25.00. Publishers do not seem to charge extra for books by famous people. They don’t jack up the price if a book is well-reviewed, or offer discounts they’re panned in the New York Review of Books. As Paul Graham has observed, publishers seem to price their books in rough proportion to the cost of the raw materials: longer books are somewhat more expensive, but what’s actually printed on the page has relatively little effect on a book’s price.
This can be explained by ignorance (on the part of customers) and competition (among publishers). A customer generally don’t get to read a book before you buy it, and other indicators of quality, such as reviews, are only weakly correlated with a given customer’s enjoyment of a book. Moreover, there are lots and lots of books to choose from. These factors, together, make the book-buying public strongly price-sensitive. A publisher selling a $40 book in a market where the norm was $25 would lose a lot of customers. Because book-buying is always a hit-or-miss affair, few would want that specific book enough to pay an extra $15 for it, while most would have plenty of other books of similar perceived quality and dramatically lower price.
The second puzzling characteristic is that books are dramatically more expensive than their cost of raw materials. Printing and distributing a book costs around $5. This means that every book sold for $25 represents a huge profit to be divided among the bookseller, publisher, and author. This too is explained by ignorance, this time on the part of publishers. The print process is characterized by high fixed costs and economies of scale. This means you have to sell several thousand copies of a book to recoup the costs of printing it. Most books do not hit this target and so lose their publishers money. Hence, when you buy a book for $25, you’re not only covering the $5 it cost to print and distribute that book, but you’re also helping to defray the costs of several other books that wound up in the remainder bin.
With this background, it should be easy to see how authors’ compensation is determined. To simplify the math a bit, let’s assume there are only two outcomes for a book: hit or not-hit. Then the value of a manuscript is the profit from a hit, times the probability of a hit, minus the losses from a non-hit times the probability of a non-hit. Our ignorance assumption means that the probability of a hit is low, which means that the expected value of printing a book—and hence the value of a manuscript from a first time author—is very low. And this is what we see in the marketplace. When a publisher takes a chance on a non-famous, first-time author, the advance tends to be relatively small.
Things look different for repeat authors because the ignorance assumption doesn’t apply with the same force. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling have demonstrated that they can write books that appeal to large audiences. And this means that not only is the payoff for a hit higher, but the probability of a hit is much higher as well. And this puts them in an extremely strong bargaining position with publishers and allows them to become very wealthy. Hence, we see a highly skewed distribution of earnings, with a tiny minority of authors getting multiple hits and making millions of dollars, while a huge number of authors write only one or two books, get paid very little for it, and fade back into obscurity.
Now imagine a world with omniscient publishers. Every publisher can now predict exactly how many books any given author will sell. This will have two effects. First, obviously, publishers will no longer print money-losing books. Only those books that can recoup their costs will be printed. And second, given my competition assumption, many more best-selling authors will be discovered. Both of these developments will push prices downward. The ability to avoid wasting money on duds means that publishers have a lot of room to cut prices. And publishers’ ability to find new bestselling authors greatly increases the number of bestselling books that can be printed. A world of omniscient publishers would be a world of commodity publishing: publishers would get much smaller margins and bestselling authors would get much smaller advances.
So let’s return to our own, non-omniscient world. We might say that what makes a best-selling author valuable isn’t just his writing talent—an author was probably just as talented before he was discovered as after—but in the knowledge that the author is, in fact, capable of producing best-selling books. And producing this knowledge is (or at was until recently) really expensive—to find one John Grisham, you had to publish a bunch of books by unknowns and see which ones sell. This means that the people who have convinced a publisher to bear the costs of “discovering” them have what amounts to a uniquely valuable credential. They can extract significant rents because even though there are likely plenty of others who could produce novels of similar quality, it’s too expensive to figure out who they are.
In my next post, I’ll explore how these considerations shake out in the age of the Kindle.
The Bottom-Up Revolution in Trucking
There’s a strong argument to be made that the Jimmy Carter administration was the most libertarian-friendly of the last half-century. One of the administration’s signal accomplishments was the deregulation of the trucking industry. Jesse Walker tells the story:
Consider the farm policies established during the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt’s agricultural advisers fell, roughly speaking, into two competing categories. One group, representing the old agrarian anti-monopolist tradition, wanted to level the playing field for smaller operators. The others saw big business as an ally, not an enemy; they believed, as Hamilton puts it, that the feds should “cooperate with monopolistic meatpackers and milk distributors to achieve efficiencies in the mass production and mass distribution of food.” The second group quickly became dominant, and the policies that followed encouraged consolidation and privilege: Price supports fed the biggest agricultural interests, dairy regulations locked a milk cartel into place, and acreage reduction requirements led to evictions of tenant farmers.
A similar fate befell the young trucking industry. After the Motor Carrier Act of 1935, drivers who wanted to start a new trucking firm “suddenly needed much more than just a truck and trailer to start in business,” Hamilton explains. “They needed to gain operating authority as well, which the ICC granted only after lengthy and expensive proceedings meant to discourage competition.” There was one bright spot in the law, though—a rare victory for the populist elements of the administration. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace “recognized that independent truckers might undermine the monopoly power of railroad-based food processors,” so he endorsed an exemption to the ICC’s restrictions on the trucking trade. Drivers hauling farm products would be relatively unregulated, a decision that allowed a fleet of tiny trucking firms to flourish. Meanwhile, in the rest of the industry, the government’s rules favored large, established companies—and, later, the Teamsters, who negotiated sweetheart contracts with the cartel while disdaining independent drivers.
The Interstate Commerce Commission maintained a tightly-regulated trucking cartel for a half-century until the late 1970s:
Mike Parkhurst was a trucker turned reporter whose magazine, Overdrive, aspired to speak for the independent owner-operator; it was filled with exposés and editorials attacking the Teamsters union, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), and the maze of state and federal rules that befuddled and burdened the ordinary driver. In his magazine and in testimony before Congress, Parkhurst called for a sweeping deregulation of his industry, a push that culminated with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. The new law, sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and signed by President Jimmy Carter, radically reduced the ICC’s authority, eliminating entry barriers, price controls, and other policies that had protected a cartel of carriers from competition. Before 1980, independent truckers had been limited to transporting farm commodities. Under the new rules, thousands of new firms flooded into the remainder of the industry, driving down prices for manufacturers and consumers alike.
The debate over deregulation during the 1970s is interesting because it didn’t break down along traditional partisan or ideological lines. The leading advocates were liberals—Stephen Breyer, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter—but the movement also had significant support from the free-market right and from small entrepreneurs. Large, incumbent firms in these industries joined forces with their associated unions to oppose reform.
The battle, in other words, was between advocates of competition and advocates of corporatism. The corporatists dominated Washington policymaking in many industries from the New Deal until the Nixon years. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, their power collapsed in the mid-1970s. And the result was a sweeping transformation of the American transportation and communications industries whose benefits we continue to enjoy today.
Why Geeks Hate the iPad
Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter, explains why he’s “disturbed” by the iPad:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
I think virtually every computer programmer has a story like this. Some of us started in grade school—I demoed a simple BASIC program I’d written for show-and-tell in the second grade. Others didn’t find their knack for programming until after the graduated from college. But in any case it was tremendously important that we could sit down at the computers we (or our parents) already owned and start screwing around with them. We didn’t have to order special unlocked developer computers, nor did we have to submit our programs to Apple before they’d run on our friends’ computers.
I think the difference in lived experience largely explains the sharply divergent reaction you see to this issue between programmers and non-programmers. For the general public, the openness of a digital gadget is an entirely abstract issue, like whether the product is environmentally friendly or was made in a sweatshop. But there’s nothing abstract about it for those of us who regularly open up a command line. Using a locked-down computer feels like using a pair of safety scissors. It isn’t just that it’s likely to be a less innovative platform in the abstract—though it is. It’s that it’s conspicuously lacking what we view as core functionality.
Now, the obvious response is that Payne and I are not the target audience for the iPad, and we shouldn’t complain if Apple produces a product that works for everyone else. Which is fair enough—I certainly don’t want to stop Apple from making the kinds of products it wants to, or customers from buying the products they like. But it’s important to bear in mind that it’s in your interest to be using the same platform as the geeks, because (as Paul Graham has pointed out) we’re likely to come up with innovations that you’ll find useful. And we’ll probably share them with you—but only if we’re using the same platform.
Authority vs. Involvement in the News Business
Via Mike Masnick, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has a great piece explaining what’s at stake in the paywall debate:
The second issue it raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’. Again, this is similar to the other two forks in the road, but not quite the same. Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context – ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay – both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?
Or to put it another way, do we want a top-down journalism industry in which readers passively consume what reporters dish out? Or do we want a bottom-up journalism industry in which readers have the opportunity to be an active part of the journalistic process? The former is arguably better for professional reporters. But I think the latter is better for almost everyone else.
