The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell ponders the question: "Is free the future?"

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win."

"Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

-- Wired editor Chris Anderson, in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, as quoted by Malcolm Gladwell (see below)

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"The digital age, Anderson [right] argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.' Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: 'In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.' To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and 'yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.' . . .

"He goes on: 'There may be more [professional journalists], not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won't be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free -- paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards -- may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.' . . .

"It would be nice to know . . . just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does [Anderson] mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson's reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference."

-- Malcolm Gladwell, in Priced to Sell: Is free the future?,
his July 6 New Yorker essay-review of the Anderson book

by Ken

Funny how these things come together. Just yesterday, in reporting Dan Froomkin's new gig as Washington bureau chief of the Huffington Post (following his unceremonious dumping by the lords of washingtonpost.com), we were glimpsing the future of journalism though the eyes of Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. And that's going to lead us more or less directly into the remarkable essay-review by Malcolm Gladwell that I've sampled above.

I had been delighted to learn from Glenn's report that Dan Froomkin was in fact "inundated" with approaches regarding potential employment, and on that basis I was happy to quote Glenn's comment, "People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices." I wasn't so confident, though, about the rest of the paragraph from which that sentence was excised:

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

I certainly agree that the Infotainment News Media have done themselves no favor by (a) shrinking and dumbing down their news coverage and (b) purging it of anything that might be felt as hurtful by people in positions of power. Newspapers might have a stronger claim on readers' interest and loyalty if they were actually attempting to, you know, report the news, without fear or favor. And certainly it's good to know that some alternatives are taking shape, even if it's happening almost exclusively online.

Where my optimism runs aground is in any suggestion that we have even glimpsed a workable alternative to the mainstream "news" media that are now in possibly irreversible decline, however well deserved that decline may be.

In good part, this is because of the developments that are described in Chris Anderson's book -- as represented in Malcolm Gladwell's essay-review, I should make clear. While it may be true that newspapers could have tried bolstering rather than diluting their journalistic commitment as a counter to their economic decline, that's pretty much irrelevant to the array of social and economic forces that brought on that decline.

And the reason I'm recommending the Gladwell piece to you as urgently as I possibly can is, I'm guessing, the same reason Gladwell himself was moved to devote so much time and energy to writing about the book: that the reality it represents really is to a good extent real, and has to be grappled with by anyone who cares about ideas, the quality of ideas, and indeed the concept of "values" in civilization.

In case it isn't already clear, I should note that Gladwell doesn't draw at all the same conclusions from the phenomena observed by Anderson, or share any of Anderson's near-giddy excitement over those phenomena. This giddiness is reflected in Anderson's habit (as you may have noticed) of capitalizing the word "free," or should I say "Free"? It may well be true that we are witnessing "an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'” But is it really of no concern whether this is a good thing?

Here is Gladwell again:

The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:

Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.

Gladwell begins his piece by recounting a scene that I like to think will send a chill through most readers:

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he'd just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper's content to the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic reader. "They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue," Moroney testified. "I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device." The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. "I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device -- not just ones made by Amazon?" He was incredulous. "That, to me, is not a model."

I suppose someone of Anderson's world-view might answer that it doesn't matter what the publisher thinks, since, after all, "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill." (To which Gladwell replies: "But information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?")

I recognize that it may be difficult, perhaps extremely difficult, to resist this trend, but difficult isn't the same thing as impossible, and of course not remotely the same thing as undesirable. I imagine that back in the days before copyright laws, cranks who argued that the people who created the content of published materials ought to have some rights in their selling were told there was nothing that could be done. "What are we supposed to do," voices of reason might have said, "travel all over the world grabbing larcenous publishers by the lapel and saying, 'See here, you can't do that, my good man. Why, you've got to give those chaps money, like a percentage of every copy you sell'?" I imagine that argument sounded pretty ridiculous the first several thousand times it was advanced.

If nothing else, I'm grateful to Chris Anderson for raising these issues -- possibly even grateful enough to read his book. And I don't want you to think I've given you more than a sampling of either his arguments or Malcolm Gladwell's responses.

There's an awful lot to discuss here, once everyone has read the Gladwell piece. I myself have, if not exactly a personal stake, then at least an active interest, as someone who used to write for money and now writes for, well, free. (No, not Free.) But that will have to wait till another time. For now, let's just bring this back to the questions raised by Glenn Greenwald about the future of journalism.

"Clearly, journalism itself is not dying," he says, and I guess I understand what he means. It's true that if you look around the blogosphere, you'll find a healthy number of people ready and willing, even eager, to do real journalism. It's also true that hardly any of those people are able to do more than eke out a bare-subsistence living -- and those are the lucky ones.

Because it also remains true that, at least as far as I know, nobody has yet imagined even the foggiest outline of a new form of news-gathering or news-disseminating system to replace the rotting hulk of the decaying Infotainment News Media. In other words, however badly the New York Times and Washington Post may be doing their job, nobody I'm aware of has even a ghost of an idea what could take their place.

(To be continued, I think.)

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