Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

[Thailandnotes]

I recently read Robert Levine's “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.” The first two-thirds of the book are an interesting expose on the miscalculations of the music industry, piracy via Napster, Pirate Bay, Megaupload, and the rush of newspapers to give away content online.

I “checked out” Levine's book here in Thailand from Amazon via my regional library back in the Northern Neck of Virginia. Amazon reviewers almost split evenly between 5 and 1 star reviews, a rarity.

A college teacher friend in the late 80's (at the time, she was president of the American Library Association) predicted very accurately the consolidation of publishers, the de-funding of libraries, and the decline of free information. I wish I could now see the future as clearly as she saw it then.

Today, inside the Washington Post's article announcing it will probably go behind a paywall in 2013 is mention of Warren Buffet's purchase of 80 mostly local newspapers and his determination to do the same with all of them.

Meanwhile, the 20-somethings I know are watching the World Series online for free, have never paid for music, and all use bit torrent clients.

Where's it all going?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...y.html?hpid=z3

[lektrode]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

....
.......
Today, inside the Washington Post's article announcing it will probably go behind a paywall in 2013 is mention of Warren Buffet's purchase of 80 mostly local newspapers and his determination to do the same with all of them.

Meanwhile, the 20-somethings I know are watching the World Series online for free, have never paid for music, and all use bit torrent clients.

Where's it all going?

about the time most people get all their media from the 'net - it'll likely go to the end of production of 'physical' media; ie: no more hardcopy books, newspapers, magazines, movies/music on CD's etc - just like the apparent direction of computer software and to lesser extent, hardware - up to 'the cloud' - where we wont get to 'own' this stuff anymore, only rent it.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

I recently read Robert Levine's “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.” The first two-thirds of the book are an interesting expose on the miscalculations of the music industry, piracy via Napster, Pirate Bay, Megaupload, and the rush of newspapers to give away content online.

I “checked out” Levine's book here in Thailand from Amazon via my regional library back in the Northern Neck of Virginia. Amazon reviewers almost split evenly between 5 and 1 star reviews, a rarity.

A college teacher friend in the late 80's (at the time, she was president of the American Library Association) predicted very accurately the consolidation of publishers, the de-funding of libraries, and the decline of free information. I wish I could now see the future as clearly as she saw it then.

Today, inside the Washington Post's article announcing it will probably go behind a paywall in 2013 is mention of Warren Buffet's purchase of 80 mostly local newspapers and his determination to do the same with all of them.

Meanwhile, the 20-somethings I know are watching the World Series online for free, have never paid for music, and all use bit torrent clients.

Where's it all going?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...y.html?hpid=z3

Take the long view.

English dailies started in the very early 1700s (I think 1703 in London and 1704 in Boston). Dailies hit their per capita peek in the late 1800s - early 1900s. They then slowly declined until the 1980s when they start going down a parabolic curve, the steep part of which we find ourselves in now.

Music distributed and funded by physical media begins in the 1880s, hits its own 40-50 years later, then starts declining quickly after its peak in the 1990s.

Warren Buffet can have fun trying to erect hard (non-porous) paywalls around local sites. Everywhere I've ever seen that done it has been an unmitigated catastrophe. I'm talking the only major daily in a 1-1.5 million person radius getting 300 online subscribers style catastrophe. And most of those are government and corporate accounts. Nobody will pay for it.

And to be honest, why pay for a local paper these days anyways? It's a bunch of truncated blurbs from the Times or the Globe and rehashed stories out of the AP and Reuters, which both the AP and Reuters provide for free.

So to get back to the long view:

We hit the peak of big-money media distribution between the late 19th and late 20th centuries. This stuff was only around for a couple of hundred years at best. It is probably not long before a generation grows up that never touches a pen or pencil.

Information will still be there. Its quality of analysis will probably decline. I think there's a case to be made that it has been declining. But synthesis will become easier. And more and more people will synthesize for free, as a hobby, much as you see here or on your local blogs.

20 somethings also are more likely to be in a band than ever before. And they play to smaller audiences. And they upload torrents of their own music.

We're democratizing the information beast. Kids aren't playing music with dreams of becoming rock stars anymore. They're playing just to hope somebody hears and likes what they do. Often times there are cadres of musicians listening to and promoting each other's work. No more suits. But very little pay, maybe just enough to cover gas money and equipment replacement.

Still, no longer will capital records control what you listen to, if you don't want it too.

You can listen exclusively to ambient jazz or doom metal for a year and not hear everything out there. And odds are, no matter who you are, you'll find something you like. You can sift through thousands of people's thoughts on any given matter, and some are likely to be coherent and worth your time.

I think we may lose many journalist-career paths. We already have been. But these jobs didn't exist in the 17th century either. They were a blip. Radio is already almost dead. Unless you like hearing the same 14 tired Led Zeppelin and AC DC songs again and again for fifty years. Clearchannels numbers are going to hell, mostly because they mandate playlists to DJs. Which is why DJs provide no value and now outfits like MikeFM use pre-recorded voices and software programs to play music without the labor cost of a DJ. Even still, listenership is way down. TV viewership is way down too for the 20 and under set.

I don't think any of this is the end of the world. The publisher mergers are a bigger problem. I still don't think there's a good modern way around books. But if they make the Kindle or Nook market easier for writers to get into - remove some of the barriers - you might see that change as well.

Really, we created a media landscape and set of intellectual property laws around the concept of a real cost of replication and transportation of media. As the limit of those costs approaches zero, the whole thing is going to stop making sense. We're already there with that kid from BU who is getting a PhD in physics and who may never be able to truly work because of a $675,000 fine for downloading a handful of songs as an undergrad. It make no damned sense.

But as with any dying industry, it'll first turn into a lawsuit mill. Maybe that's Buffet's plan. Provide nothing; sue everyone.

In the end of the day, it's all going down. There will be no more TV, radio, newspaper, etc. etc. Those distinctions will die. New Orleans already doesn't have a daily. Millions never noticed. Who is a better librarian than Google? It's a company that made itself the world's librarian. And it's not done. All information will be available everywhere. Ad revenue, not payment for physical media will fund this stuff (except for maybe books?) Television shows funded, written and produced by fans will pop up (right now they are mostly poor, but that's partially because television studios snap up the exceptional ones). And news will not be spoon-fed to the teaming masses by patricians.

We'll have to read and watch and listen to what the plebs have to say too. That's truly what frightens everyone, I suspect.

[cobben]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

Where's it all going?

Capitalism to be replace in short order by . . . . what system? Internet-connected self-organized "free" labor?

The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?

Open-source software, shared innovation and crowd-sourced manufacturing threaten capitalism as we know it.

. . .

Engineering scarcity

What is important, however, is that Facebook is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a much larger trend in our society: an exponential rise in the creation of use value by productive publics, or "produsers", as Axel Bruns calls them. It is important to understand that this creates a huge problem for a capitalist system, but also for workers as we have traditionally conceived them. Markets are defined as ways to allocate scarce resources, and capitalism is in fact not just a scarcity "allocation" system but also a scarcity engineering system, which can only accumulate capital by constantly reproducing and expanding conditions of scarcity.

Where there is no tension between supply and demand, there can be no market and no capital accumulation. What peer producers are doing, for now mostly producing intangible entities such as knowledge, software and design, is to create an abundance of easily reproduced information and actionable knowledge.

This cannot be directly translated into market value, because it is not at all scarce - it's over-abundant. And this activity, moreover, is done by knowledge workers, whose ranks are steadily expanding. This over-supply threatens to make knowledge workers' jobs precarious. Hence, an increased exodus of productive capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetisation, which only operates at its margins. In the past, whenever such an exodus occurred - of slaves in the decaying Roman Empire, or of serfs in the waning Middle Ages - that is precisely the time when conditions were set for major societal and economic changes.

Indeed, without a core reliance on capital, commodities and labour, it is hard to imagine a continuation of the capitalist system.

The problem is this: internet collaboration has enabled the creation of use value in a way that totally bypasses the normal functioning of our economic system. Normally, increases in productivity are somehow rewarded, and these rewards enable consumers to derive an income and buy products.

But this is no longer happening.

. . .

[cobben]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?


Occupy' as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation

. . .

This system as a whole is managed by a state. But the social democratic welfare state has increasingly become a corporate-welfare state, in which the gains are privatised and the losses socialised. In other words, the state has become an extension of the corporation and is less and less a servant of the citizenry. We can see the progress of this model in how the so-called "troika" (consisting of the European Union, European Central Bank and the IMF) is now imposing slash-and-burn politics in Greece.

Occupy and open-source models illuminate a new possible reality, in which the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit:

• At the core of value creation are various commons, where innovations are open for all to share and to build upon;
• These commons are protected through non-profit civic associations, which empower that social production;
• Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy comprised of ethical companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, not to creating private profit.

Where these three circles intersect, citizens decide on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.

This model can exist as a submodel within capitalism, and to some extent already does so in the present system, as the open-source software business ecology. It could also become, with some necessary hacks, the core logic of a new civilisation. Occupy has not just shown us prefigurative politics, but prefigurative economics as well.

[cobben]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

Remember David Graeber, the anarchist monetary anthropologist - "Debt - the first 5000 years"?


What's all the fuzz about money?

Debt-free money may well be the solution to restoring a sane monetary system.

. . . compound interest remains a phenomenon that violates physical and mathematical law, meaning that unpayable debts must be cleared periodically through major systemic breakdowns and deleveraging on a massive scale.

But what happens when society is in ecological overshoot, using 1.5 times more than the earth's generative capacity already? Then the problem of compound interest becomes a dramatic impediment to the survival of the human race where interest-based money is directly responsible for the destruction of the biosphere. The existence of capitalism, debt and interest-based money are intimately intertwined. What needs to be understood is that "interest" is not a natural, trans-historical feature of money.

Negative interest

Indeed, traditional "pre-modern" societies were marked by the use of negative interest money, whose loss of value reflected the ongoing decay of natural resources (and the "physical" nature of the money was itself subject to decay). In Bernard Lietaer's excellent new book, New Money for a New World, of which I read part in the manuscript version, has a very interesting section on medieval Europe before the 14th century, where the European population doubled in just three centuries.

In the "Brakteaten" system of the European Middle Ages, Lietaer writes, people had to give their coins back every four to six years, for example, five coins in exchange for four. The result was that accumulation of money was not very profitable, meaning that those with money had very good reason to invest it into productive resources or to lend it out, which was itself a core reason for the economic wellbeing of that time.

In this period, Lietaer writes, farmers enjoyed a five day working week, which included not just the day of the Lord, but Blue Monday, the day of the family, as well as more than 100 religious festival days. Female skeletons in the cemeteries of the time showed them to be quite tall, a sign of excellent health. However, after the defeat of the Cathar heresy, the French king re-introduced centralised royal money and interest. According to Lietaer, the results soon proved to be catastrophic and the 14th century was plain horrible.

Lietaer offers an interesting hypothesis - that it was not the plague which destroyed the High Middle Ages, but actually the dislocation through centralised money, which decimated the social fabric and allowed the plague to make easy inroads. By that time, the social pressure of the banking and merchant sectors became such that the Church slowly abandoned its opposition to usury. As the historian Jacques Le Goff has argued, it even introduced the idea of Purgatory, so that bankers could pay off their sins and shorten their punishments.

. . .

[cobben]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

European party politics is muddy waters, but the main thrust is clear.


A German Pirate Party could bring a European coalition

. . . the party has clearly taken on a progressive agenda, and extended its commons approach not just to the digital commons, but to the physical commons, proposing generalised free public transportation and a generalised basic income, which takes labour out of the sphere of being a freely traded commodity and turns it into a commons. . . .

. . .

In this way, a new progressive majority can be created around free culture, respect for nature and its limits, the necessity of social justice, and the free ethical enterpreneurship - all of which can create a new political majority for social change.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Can the Washington Post Erect a Paywall?

Thanks for the links, cobben.

This appeared in truthdig today...

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture...ted_20121207//