Your average journalist usually begins his career with a pop, like a big bottle of champagne. He effervesces about his profession, intoxicating all who encounter him. The party goes on for years as the young journalist conquers deadlines, corrupt politicians, and hidebound editors.
As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.
The idea that people won’t pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. But some successful paid sites hint that free content need not be the model the media are forever stuck with.
We’ve finally reached the point at which some of the finest minds doing the biggest thinking about the battered news business believe the best eraser for red ink is… charity. Financial pros David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and his colleague Michael Schmidt posit that the best way to save journalism is to go the nonprofit route, funded by endowments. But is it?
A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate. It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
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