Journalism: Valuable, Yet Can't Make Money

Adam Smith once wondered that even though water is far more critical to life than diamonds, it is diamonds that are worth so much more! Jeff Jarvis asks the modern day equivalent of that question:
“If information is so much more valuable to society than entertainment, why is it so hard to build a business—namely, journalism—around selling access to information?”
In contrast to movies and serials that continue to thrive.

His answer is very, well, informative. The key point?
“Information itself cannot and must not be owned…That is, you cannot copyright the fact that the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012, you can copyright only your treatment of that information: your cogent backgrounder or natty graphic that explains WTF a boson is.”
If you are wondering why society should not allow the information to owned by anyone, here’s why:
“Society cannot find itself in a position in which information is property to be owned, for then the authorities will tell some people—whether they are academics or scientists or students or citizens—what they are not allowed to know because they didn’t buy permission to know it.”

Jarvis feels the mistake many journalists make is to consider their treatment of the information/news to be as good as the best entertainment on TV or in the theaters. Once he puts it that way, the problem is obvious.

After all, no two soaps or movies or documentaries are ever equally good; so they are not interchangeable; and so we are willing to pay to watch the one we like. On the news side, that’s not true: the difference between the treatment and presentation of news is rarely all that great across two magazines or papers or channels. And if something gets commodified, it’s almost impossible to brand it and charge a premium.

In turn, this lack of too much differentiation is because better treatment and presentation of news takes time; and in the news industry, old news is worthless:
“We face the factor of time in the pricing paradox of information: The more valuable the information, the faster it will spread and the faster it spreads, the less valuable it becomes.”
And even if journalists add value on top of the news, most people are still likely to say the cheaper version is good enough and not pay for the better version (Financial content is the exception here). And if a site or app puts together the kind of news that you care about rather than hurling the one-size-fits-all group at you, it wins: why else are Google News, Facebook News Feed and Apple News gaining in popularity?

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