Does Journalism Create Economic Value? And If Not, Can Journalists Expect to Be Well Paid?

In the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, media economics expert Robert G.Picard set out to explain “Why journalists deserve low pay”.  While the po-faced, Socratic tone is likely to alienate those who sympathise with the current plight of professional journos, Picard raises several points that people working across the media world should consider.

The most meow-worthy section reads thus: “It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.”

But while a generation of print producers splutter “but it is intrinsically good!”, Picard is right to be so contemptuous. As Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com told us recently: “You don’t need 100 versions of one newswire story… We’re just going to need less outlets, there has to be some sort of big consolidation for that part of the market to start working properly.” Generic news, especially when there’s the BBC doing it so well and for what feels like free, can’t be the core moneyspinner of a newspaper any more, or even perhaps the core content. 

“The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area”, Picard notes, also suggesting that American newspapers must also do local news more deeply and well than their television rivals. UK titles are already doing niches well – the Guardian with media, the Times with education, the Independent with reactionary stories about science that make you wonder what on earth they believe in – but they’re going to need to make more of this unique content that people are willing to pay for.

What Picard gets wrong is that, merely, “scarcity raised the economic value of content”. True, information has become less scarce when the prime publication and distribution channel is a free content-management system rather than a printing press, but it’s a real jump to suggest that economically valuable content, i.e. quality content, is no longer scarce. I would argue that there is really a very small amount, if any, quality unpaid journalism out there. While the nobility attached to journalism by its old print masters is embarrassing, people will undoubtedly pay for good writing, which non-professionals simply don’t offer. I mean, have you read most British blogs recently?

Something that print has going for it is its tactility. The very act of holding a magazine or newspaper means you’re physically interacting with it, and that’s surprisingly powerful – it can build a relationship that’s lasting and easily monetised. As Jeff Jarvis and Jason Pontin have noted recently, titles need to give their readers what they want, to serve them, and the readers will pay for that. If you build the relationship with the reader, and give them what they want, then asking them to pay for it online won’t be much of a stretch. Allied to this, I think there could be a small but worthwhile market for more luxurious editions for the real devotees, even after the normal mag has gone online and onto readers.

It’s the same with quality blogs like TechCrunch or Gawker – these have really engaged communities, who wouldn’t mind paying for access. Micropayments for blogs would obviously be lunacy, but subscriptions would work. It doesn’t matter that Gawker is, the majority of the time, an aggregator of other content; people will pay for the snark, the hyper-literate community, the relationship. Tone alone can make content unique, and therefore valuable – this is the advantage that blogs have.

At the moment, with an ad-funded model, publishers want to please as many people as possible, because they need a lot of numbers to turn a profit. They have to offer a wide range of coverage that may well be done better by a number of content creators each devoted to one particular niche, and are therefore in a weak position. It’s true to say that objective news coverage has no value – it succeeds as plainly written, pure information. But once writing provides information that can’t be reported by amateurs – and it certainly exists, from recipes to the halls of power – then it can be monetised. Of course everyone’s been enjoying not paying for things, but that doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate its value enough to start paying for it.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 20, 2009 2:50PM |