The basis of the debate is that due to free online content causing less people to buy and read newspapers and watch commercial television news the commercial providers of news are struggling to stay in profit. The government provided content obviously doesn't have to worry about profit because it is provided at the cost of the tax payer and is made commercial free.
The biggest problem I see is that the problem with money and profit is that it is based entirely on scarcity. Newspapers were scarce because only a limited number of papers could be produced and so the news read by a limited number of people. With the advent of the internet, news is now in abundance. Not only is there no limit to the number of computers that can read the one news story without having to spend extra resources producing it (i.e. paper), but there is also an abundance of news providers. For the first time in the history of the world I can read about a story from the BBC, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, and probably thousands of other news blogs, and all I have to do is load it up on a screen as a minuscule amount of data.
Since news is now in abundance, it is near impossible for a profit to be made. The commercial sites are saying they will have to start charging for online content, but people will just go elsewhere for their news, without having to pay for it. News has become a public good, and as such profiting from the providing of news, as put by Mark Scott, is a dying empire.
Money and profit not only cause great atrocities in the world but as we who don't control the money start to see how much abundance technology has brought us and will continue to bring us we will slowly wake up to the fact that the financial systems of the world are obsolete.
I thought you'd get a kick out of this. I read your blog post while procrastinating before writing my POL essay, to kind of get my brain in the mood to think about stuff to write about.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, lo and behold, the very thing talked about in that episode of media watch was a perfect fit to one of my POL305 Essay topics.
I ended up using that episode of Media Watch a few times, got a few good quotes out of it too.
I'll was going to attach my essay but it makes my comment too long (by about 2000 words :S) but if you wanna read it I can email it to you or something.