Digital BW, The Print

On 15/12/2015 00:40, David Kachel david@... 
[DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint] wrote:
> The unwritten laws of the internet say you don\ufffdt charge for information.

Sleight of hand is how we got there. Everybody pays, through taxation for 
the salaries of the academics who were the early providers of information. 
Latterly everybody pays as a cost factored into advertisers goods and 
services.

A vast majority can see no reason to pay for pictures, either. That's why 
the profession is the walking dead. Journalism as a whole is dying. Why 
pay for newspapers when their content is aggregated and available for free?

Past a certain point, creative endeavour becomes expensive to sustain. If 
money isn't available, it stops happening. Only the independently wealthy 
can pursue excellence without inhibition, the rest must concentrate on the 
day job.

This isn't good for media quality or inclusiveness of varied viewpoints. 
It's especially not good for creatives in less wealthy economies. Unless 
we are careful, we shall end up unwittingly in an echo chamber of 
self-affirming viewpoints.

There is another consequence, of 'free' c/o indirect revenue from ads and 
sponsorship too. That what value there is, is harvested and kept by 
aggregators like Google, FB, whose monopolistic indispensability is 
increasingly woven into everyone's personal and business lives.

With this proposition, all you can do is withdraw and be a hermit. Back 
when you actually paid to view magazine and newspapers, if they displeased 
you, if the quality fell, you voted with your wallet. You no longer have 
that option in this realm of let's-pretend-it's-free.

Personally I wouldn't subscribe to LL because I've not seen much content 
there that has impressed me. But, the existing model, of entitlement to 
pro-bono, of covert advertiser agendas and sponsorship by PR axegrinders, 
isn't going anywhere healthy. It's reminiscent of C20th fishing, when the 
pursuit of cheap fish led to ever bigger boats and more efficient 
harvesting. And then one day, the fish were nearly gone.

Creative work is an ecosystem. No-one is looking at how sustainable it is, 
except creatives - the small fry at the bottom of the food chain, that 
everyone feeds off.

-- 
Regards
Tony Sleep
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