On this thread, I joined Andrew Sullivan in worrying about the effect of the commercial world on the content of Internet publications, and now a couple of more developments come to light.
First, ptressel @ The Daily Kos reports on the demise of Al Jazeera America, starting with this great contrast:
When other news outlets were obsessed with Football! or Oscars! or political horserace!, AJAM was writing about lack of police training in dealing with the mentally ill, or that that PTSD and depression is driving an epidemic of suicide among firefighters (to pick just two recent stories). If you read the Overnight News Digest diaries, you’ve seen AJAM stories there frequently.
AJAM is closing for financial reasons:
Great journalism doesn’t always draw a big audience. That’s what happened here at Al Jazeera America (AJAM), where superb reporting, bolstered by a first-rate opinion section, found a following, just not one big enough to interest major advertisers.
— David Cay Johnston, The way news should be done
And he continues from a broader viewpoint:
Independent news organizations are hurting across the board. The problem is not a bad economy, it’s not the 1%…it’s the Internet that’s the culprit, and our penchant for free content. We’ve gotten used to advertiser-supported, non-subscription content — we watch shows on YouTube, we read our monthly allotment of free NYT articles, we ignore content behind paywalls, or look for someone to copy it out and repost it. But purely ad supported content isn’t paying the bills for real journalism. So what we get instead is infotainment, scandal, shock-value — we get what sells ads.
I think this is a great point, and I know that, while I subscribe to a number of magazines, I do not currently subscribe to any online-only content1, instead depending on free articles and using up monthly free allotments. There’s nothing precisely wrong with such an approach, but, as ptressel points out, it turns out there are long-term consequences to the current dominant content model of the Internet.
In contrast, recall Stewart Brand’s assertion
Information wants to be free!
While the original context was somewhat different, the phrase enjoyed a brief period of great popularity amongst the technorati. but has since faded (or at least in my perception). The problem is that production of information can be a costly business. The original context of Mr. Brand’s slogan had to do with scientific information2, wherein scientific journals can be a costly investment; the Internet offers a way to lower the cost. Similar arguments apply to information outside the scientific realm. But we’re seeing the downside of this claim: the contamination of information with commercial interests, where the accuracy of the information becomes a secondary consideration to the private interests of the sponsors. (The sponsors need not be commercial, but can come from other sectors as well.)
Second, in the previous post on this thread, Science was reported to have mixed sponsored content with real content. Now this is happening at another online publication, Treehugger.com. I observed this just a day or two ago, but I had not been at the website for a while. They are intermixing commercial advertising with the links to their articles. True, each commercial link is clearly marked with a small, green “SPONSORED”, but these advertisements are intermixed with the standard TreeHugger content. In a very visual manner, they are breaking the old newspaper rule about separating editorial content from advertiser influence, and while maybe the reader should be on their toes when reading any website, I still find it jarring that a website with an explicit purpose of doing good is not properly segregating commercial articles from the important content of the website.
Stay tuned as the parsimony of the typical Internet user continues to influence the information we seek and – sometimes – find.
1I did subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s now-dormant The Dish. Andrew indicated in public postings that they thought their model was working, but there was a dependency – explicit – on Andrew’s personality/temperament as an important draw for subscribers, and when his health fell apart, the model did as well. Which is not to condemn the approach – simply be aware that the model, like most, has its weaknesses.
2NewScientist (20 February 2016) reports that Sci-Hub.io
… claims to have 48 million journal papers, and that its mission is to “remove all barriers in the way of science”. It was set up in 2011 by researcher Alexandra Elbakyan, thought to be based in Russia, after she couldn’t afford papers behind paywalls.
