aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Opinion v news

Kos on the Times v Wall Street Journal influencing public opinion:

The Wall Street Journal is not stupid. They’re smart. They’ve put their news content behind a pay wall and have done quite well revenue-wise for their troubles. BUT, they also want to influence public opinion. And being a key component of the Right Wing Noise Machine, the WSJ editorial board has made sure their opinion material is accessible to everyone. Heck, they have a guy emailing their content to bloggers. They even have a separate site for it: OpinionJournal.com. You want your dose of Peggy Noonan (must ... supress ... gag reflex), or John Fund, or James Taranto? You’ve got them. No pesky paywall between their opinion content and the people they hope to influence.

The New York Times, on the other hand, is the textbook definition of stupid. They take the one part of the paper that is a commodity—the opinion—and try to charge for that. No Krugman? Who cares. Give me Brad DeLong. No Bob Herbert? Whatever. Give me James Wolcott or anyone at the American Prospect or Washington Monthly. Or any of the thousands of columnists at other newspapers, and the tens of thousands of political bloggers.

Is it really stupid to try to charge for your commodity? What else do you charge for?

As a citizen rather than as a partisan, I think hard news is more important than opinion. I want opinion based on hard news. Keeping the news pages open is more important. I applaud the Times for that.

As a left-leaning partisan, I note how the left abandons the columnists they profess to admire over a measly $4.16 a month. It seems a reasonable price point to me to help keep a valuable media asset afloat.

TimesSelect may well fail and I’d prefer an advertiser model (though I note that bloggers object to that too) but I sure don’t blame them for trying. I quote again from Business Week’s important story on the challenges facing the Times:

THE CONSTANCY OF THEIR COMMITMENT to high-cost journalism has put the Sulzbergers in an increasingly contrarian position. Many of the country’s surviving big-city dailies once were owned by similarly high-minded dynastic families that long ago surrendered control to big public corporations that prize earnings per share above all else. Editorial budgets at most newspapers, as well as TV and radio stations, have been squeezed so hard for so long that asphyxiation is a mounting risk. The proliferation of Web sites and cable-TV stations has produced an abundance of commentary and analysis, but the kind of thorough, original reporting in which the Times specializes is, if anything, increasingly scarce.

In effect, the Sulzbergers have subsidized the Times in valuing good journalism and the prestige it confers over profits and the wealth it creates.

We say we want that in our media institutions, but we flat-out want it for free. Sounds like the left has an issue with money to me.

I’m as big a fan of citizen produced media as the next guy, but I’ve got just as much praise for the MSM. It’s a wonderfully synergistic ecosphere we’ve got these days, and I’m on the side of those who’d like to see what newspapers like the Times do continued.