I think that people generally tend to mischaracterize information as valuable, when what they really mean is that access to information is valuable. For the past few hundred years newspapers have been the most efficient means of distributing information (providing access). They made money in their news distribution function not by selling information but rather by selling paper with information on it, which happened to be a very efficient and valuable means of distributing information. However in the past two decades the internet has made it considerably easier to share and distribute information and the newspapers have been stripped of their competitive advantage in this arena.

On the contrary, the business of finding/investigating information has improved significantly thanks to the internet. Expert-driven blogs are making a killing exposing the public to new information about a wide variety of subjects. THIS is the only valuable function of news that can be attributed to actual content. When a news organization breaks a story they profit (whether it be from paper sales or online advertising due to traffic to their website) because they have a temporal competitive advantage over the distribution of information about a specific occurrence (which means, for a little while, they effectively “own” that content until someone else can better report or distribute it).

If news organizations want to remain in business they are going to have to focus on their real competitive advantage: investigating and distributing new information. Otherwise they’re all but guaranteed to fail.

On another related subject, I believe that news is the foundation of our democracies around the world and is critically important to a smart, well-informed electorate. Trouble is most electorates aren't interested in being smart and well-informed.

Also related (sorry for rambling) consider this: Is free (such as Craigslist) predatory pricing? I bet you could build a case around this. Lawyers, please chime in.

I guess the question is – now that we've managed to unbundle the news, how does this type of reporting get paid for?

The interesting part will be that no-man's land of newspapers' folding and no new players having emerged yet. My bet is: it'll come out of left field, look like a toy or a premium priced specialized news service (think Bloomberg w/o the terminal), with serious background/academical grounding, some of the best writing we've seen.

The future's bright…

Wrong @petekazanjy. Other economics, other situation; Twitter “owns” the firehose, the content, the access, TOS, your tweets, your ass. It operates 'as is'. As is tumblr & co.

Who owns “news”, that Michael Jackson died? There is no copyright on reporting about the beautiful sunset in the Bay Area, and no copyright about events in general.

I blogged and argued the same way you did @cdixion …

“[T]he time where you can reap huge profits (being able to build an empire/conglomerate) is over. That is pure economics. Thus, it -the competition- drives down your margin as you compete for customers with basically the same good (the same story that Michael Jackson died). The end of the story will be, (1) that this process (or transition effects) will plateau … sometime, (2) distinction between competitors will be the overall brand and product (talent, track record, quality), and (3) price differences will be narrow for general news.

Basically, the business of publishing ‘what happened in the world today’, becomes a near-commodity, a digital commodity (laws of copy & paste, least ownership, creativity driven, distribution not controllable etc).”

And I commented about it here (http://www.theequitykicker.com/2010/03/08/old-m…) too at length. Basically copied my mind-blurps on 'media change' on tumblr.

It is a transition of an industry. There will be failures, success, collateral damage, … fights.

I am working on one of the answers, because I have a great pain in it too. I grew up behind a wall (Iron Curtain), I don't want a new wall. That is for certain.

Rich persons have their hands mostly in half a dozen businesses in, means that it will undermine the reporting about these associated businesses. See Salon piece about Mexico mogul who bought recently in into NYTimes holding and NYT didn't report about the unfair business practices of the associated Grupo Televisa owned by the Mexican mogul. You don't need to write a disclosure when you don't write about it. Period.

Here the story – http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/sausage/2010/0…

MJ.

PS: Disqus Twitter Login is broken

Your argument is exactly the reason that I'm not super bullish on real-time search engines. People often make the argument that real-time search can easily monetize because it's just search, but I suspect most real-time searches are news oriented and thus have a disproportionately larger percentage of difficult to monetize inventory than a general search engine like Google.

Well, I mean, Bloomberg sort of has (more from data, but real-time news makes up a good amount of that feed), and the social news sites sort of have, as well?

But they're both aggregators, perhaps the bigger question is whether non-analytical content (ie. just reporting) is a lousy business…

its like you teach the “Machine” everytime you “Say” something coool ain't it?

“cheap tickets afghanistan”

tell me what ads you see.

Data RULZZZ11011!

But there will always be a demand for quality, vertical, nicely edited news that either people will be willing to pay for or that will be monetized because of the quality attention via ad dollars.

But there is no doubt that this is a shrinking business.