heavycola wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:heavycola wrote:Two arguments at once! it's a CC gangbangBigBallinStalin wrote:@heavycola:
Anyway, that guy is assuming that his news agency is a more worthy source mainly because he deems his own articles as worthy. Why support the competition? He implies that he knows what's best for others, which is a claim I can't swallow. Over time, I'm speculating that the collection websites will differentiate their aggregated sources and provide information to more specific target markets, thus expanding the range in quality and subject matter of information.
So, if the mainstream media are out (which I highly doubt), we'll still have good alternatives.
For example, a blog's credibility comes from its posters. Marginalrevolution.com is a great blog site on economics, and no mainstream media business model was required.
No, his point was that without news gatherers there is no news to aggregate. The NYT (in this case) is not a more worthy source - it IS a source. Blog posts are opinion. Blogs don't have stringers, fact checkers, editors, international networks. Good journalism - and I am admittedly an optimist here - is an attempt to filter out opinion and conjecture. It's never entirely successful, but the distinction exists, and it's an important one, and it is in danger of disappearing.
I don't see how the demand for on-the-ground informers/reporters would disappear without that guy and his obsolete business model. The NYT gets their news from people who ask questions and go places. Without places like NYT, it's not like the people who can ask questions and go places would suddenly disappear. There's profits to be earned from "exploiting" that line of work.
if it's an obsolete business model, where are the profits to be made? The NYT made a net loss of $39 million last financial year. I know most broadsheets in the UK are hemorrhaging money. Yes the demand will still exist, but who's going to pay for it? A phone call to a government press office can be made cheaply from any blogger's bedroom. But reporting on the ground, from inside a warzone, demands time and resources and local contacts and money.
Colvin's last report from Homs is behind the Times' firewall but it's probably around elsewhere now... it's a powerful piece of reportage, and it is about the harm being done to civilians by the war and the harsh conditions inside the town. Reporting, in other words, that IMO would have been impossible without the resources she had. According to one obit, she once left a satellite phone on overnight, costing her employer $25,000 - how many bloggers could take that hit?
She was a pretty extraordinary woman actually - had her left eye taken out by shrapnel while reporting on the civil war (sorry, furthering the interests of the NWO elite) in Sri Lanka, then only had local anaesthesia so she could report on the operation. And then she carried on reporting from warzones. (She must have been a very highly paid PR agent).
They probably need to reorganize their capital structure in order to capture profits through different means. If they fail to re-organize, then they might go out of business. It just depends. So, the service of providing information might not be the problem (i.e. the business itself); it's how they capture profit which is the problem (i.e. the business model).
I don't know what bloggers would do about obtaining inside information. Some Syrian might upload stories to a website, and his friend would find a translator and write stories. It could be that the business structure is that simple. Maybe that even exists, but we don't know about it.
Providing information, I imagine, is very similar for private intelligence businesses. Take Stratfor, for example. It's a private intel service that provides detailed accounts of situations across the world on their website. It (used to) cost a monthly fee, and as far as I know, they're in business.
NY Times doesn't charge a monthly fee for their website, yet they expect to somehow be a profitable business by earning income from their newspapers, or whatever, maybe advertisements. Obviously, they need to find new ways of obtaining profits. Maybe they could take a percentage of the earnings from the books of their reporters, maybe they could charge for their website, or exclude the good articles to only paying members. There's many ways out there; it just depends on hiring the right people to find those opportunities and implement them.
So, I'm not really worried about mainstream new agencies failing and there somehow being a lack of information available for the public. For each one that falls, there's less competition for the others, thus a more likely opportunity of obtaining more profits. Again, the main problem seems to be their means of capturing profit; it's not so much a problem with the business itself--just the current, unprofitable business model.
