DISQUS

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

I haven't seen a media mogul with a scared wig. In fact, the ones I've observed (granted, from something of a distance), are dancing a jig. It tends to go like this: "FREE WORK! FREE WORK! We don't have to *pay* writers anymore. We can cut our staffing costs, and replace even the pitiful amount of money we pay them now with cut-rate blogger labor, 'cause those folks are willing to WORK FOR FREE, they love it so much!!!"

This is often called "citizen journalism".

The scared wigs I've seen are those who do have jobs as paid writers - and are losing them from outsourcing.

Mathew · 3 years ago

Well, Seth -- all I can say is that you obviously haven't seen any of the media executives at the company where I work. I think they're pretty scared of what Web 2.0 makes possible (The ones who have thought about it, that is), and of what that could do to their business models. The compensation model for "citizen journalsim" is kind of a separate issue, I think.

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

Let's distinguish between being scared about a business model in general, from trembling before The Power Of Love.

That is, for example, music industry executives are terrified that the Internet might destroy their business through massive copyright infringement - disruptive, indeed. I haven't yet seen one who thinks podcasters for free are going to make the music business obsolete. Rather, there's quite a gold-rush on as to how to set up a middleman business mining the free podcasters and to make money off them. Not exactly the disruptive I think was intended above.

Tom Foremski · 3 years ago

Well, I've drained several savings accounts and am working my way through emptying my pension plan because I can't stop doing what I'm doing and I don't want to take a day-job like 99.999999 per cent of the Blogosphere.

We will have a professional media that can pay for itself because otherwise everything becomes partisan and skewed. Also, the blogosphere doesn't have to get up every day and do this. Journalists do it every day.

Everybody can be their own courtroom lawyer, but we know what the punchline to that one is. Similaraly, a society that relies on bloggers for its media and decimates its media professionals is foolish. Democracy relies on the quality of its media. Society uses media to think through big problems and we have some massive ones to deal with.