Kathlyn Clore photo at Stanford University
At last week’s
Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, I spent a few hours in the academic track, a new course of offerings at the annual InJo event in Palo Alto, California.
Doctorates and Ph.D. candidates from around the world presented their research in 15-minute snippets. Everything related to the intersection of journalism and innovation.
Normally, I would choose to listen to journalists who did some “best practice,” rather than sit through afternoon of academia. But with the industry in such a mess, it is a good time to listen to the people whose job it is to sit around all day thinking, reading and researching. They actually have time to examine situations more in depth and dream up, from their ivory towers, solutions.
One talk that made a lot of sense from me was Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb’s presentation on “Telecommunications innovation and the shape of the British news market.”
Silberstein-Loeb, an American who is doing a fellowship at Oxford University Saïd Business School, talked about lessons to be learned form the nationalization of the telegraph industry in Britian.
At a certain point, he writes, nationalization of the medium broke up the collusive trio of the Press Association (PA), an organization of the provincial press, London press, and Reuters. This made it more expensive for provincial (smaller) news organizations to have a competitive (or much of any) access to news.
“So, nationalization liberalized trade in news, but a single news organization promised a reduction in
costs to individual newspapers and to facilitate increased and equal access to the news,” he writes.
So the monopolistic trio got going again — to protect the plurality of the news market, especially in the farther-flung regions.
After examining a similar situation with the rise in news wires, Silberstein-Loeb concludes that “monopoly, collusion, and price discrimination helped to protect plurality among newspapers.”
Flickr image by photobunny
His paper also examines the beginnings of the British Broadcasting Company (the predecessor to the corporation) which lead to a similar conclusion.
He concludes, then, that “Cooperation is, and has always been, the way forward. Before the widespread use of telegraphy, newspapers exchanged news by post. When the telegraph was invented, newspaper publishers formed news associations. The Internet offers great possibilities for increased collaboration. The model of the PA (or the American Associated Press) – an association of newspapers sharing content – should be reinforced and exported by encouraging greater cooperation among newspapers around the world.”
A parallel point Silberstein-Loeb made at Stanford University last week: the news media in their current (crumbling) form were forced on a population of people (by the colluding groups like AP, Reuters, etc.) who never had a chance to create any other kind of structure for information markets.
Back to cooperation, though: Silbertein said during his presentation of this thesis that, “Despite the fact that some people have predicted the collapse of the AP … We ought to rely on cooperation more extensively. I can imagine an AP of the AP.”
It’s a conclusion that flies in the face of decisions made at publications like the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun, which have stopped their subscriptions to the AP in favor of all local content.
But this line of thinking seems to have prevailed in the offices of Ohio newspaper publishers, who recently entered into a content-sharing agreement in order to stay afloat.
And more recently, the EU today unveiled this translation and content-sharing project, an aggregation attempt that is certainly about cooperation (but will it help any of those newspapers make money?)
Part of why collaboration may be necessary to ensure media pluralism, the American scholar argued last week, is because journalism is and has always been a supply-side business in which it is difficult to let the market determine the value of news.
News publishers push information to the public and put a price tag on it. Readers are pretty much unable to determine if the value of that news they’re consuming is fair until they consume it.
With newspapers, of course, the price of news has been so low (as low as a penny, historically) that it’s easy for readers to conclude that they can be fairly assured that the price of NOT KNOWING is higher than the value of buying the day’s news information.
I don’t know if Silberstein-Loeb means to make any real conclusions - beyond “embrace monopoly” - about how journalists should make money on the Internet (THE big problem), but his thoughts and the promotion of looking at current problems through a historical lens are worth consideration.
