THINQon : To pay for news?

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Patrick Renfield

To pay for news?

Latest Post: April 27, 2010 at 9:01 PM

13 followers

http://nytimes.com

Pulitzers were announced today. Washington Post and Nytimes snagged their usual few. But it got me wondering. In however many months (sometime next year or late this year?) when Nytimes.com starts charging subscriptions, will I go along?

I check the nytimes website multiple times daily. As a college student it is my main source of national and world news. I hardly know anyone my age with a working physical newspaper subscription. (Freshman year roommate had the Sunday Times delivered). It's just not done anymore. It's all online and constantly updating and readily accessible even by phone. Not only that but it is quickly digestible (a bonus and of course not) and the hyperlinks quickly take us around to all the other documented sources. But should I pay for this?

My dad is a recently sacked journalist so I know I should. Peoples livelihoods need stability and why shouldn't I pay for the Pulitzer-prize winning high quality of the Times. There's a reason I go to the website, they have the best news with the best writing (though a lot of crap now too that also came with the internet).

But the other part of me (the young one who hasn't paid for music in maybe 5 years) takes issue. We are undeniably moving towards an open-information society. What is Google's trademark after all? Free. If I don't go to the times I'll no doubt find the same story littered over the internet in almost every nook and cranny. And there are definitely going to be illegal sites cropping up everywhere and somehow reposting the exact same articles as they arrive on the Times website. So why should I pay? If someone is offering me the equal thing without risk of punishment, why not go along? In a lot of foreign countries you'll see street vendors of all kinds, fruits and vegetables, silks and scarves, odds and ends and gadgets. All of these vendors exist on the black market and very likely the exact same wares are being sold legally in store fronts right behind them. Is it wrong to purchase from the street vendors?

The issue is that my analogy is not perfect to intellectual property. It's theft. The street vendors aren't stealing the fruits from the stands behind them, only possibly stealing their business. But what can be done? I legitimately don't have much money, and if I see a little pinprick way to avoid spending what little I have, I'll snatch it right away. It's easy. But should I feel ethically invalid?

What is to be done?

Reply to:

Mark Opal

April 27, 2010 at 9:01 PM

13 followers

Well, another question to raise: Are bloggers journalists? If the new way to read news is to stay intuned with the blogosphere, to keep yourself inundated on twitter-feeds and let your social networking devices bring you up-to-date minute-by-minute live feeds then what exactly are we losing?

    If anyone has been following Apple in the news lately then it has been impossible to have missed the story about the stolen 4G iPhone. Basically the story goes that a probably intoxicated apple employee left the top-secret about-to-be-released summer edition of their iphone line at a bar in California sometime last week. A tech-savvy bar goer saw the phone for what it was, snatched it, and took it home to reap the rewards. And of course the phone went to the highest bidder. A Gizmodo.com writer (a tech blog) paid the man $5,000 for the phone and then proceeded to post everything he could about it as soon as possible.

    Last Friday the gizmodo blogger came home in the middle of a police ransack. They confiscated his computers and servers as allowed by a legitimate warrant signed by a local judge.

The parent company of Gizmodo came back firing:

    “Under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist,” Gizmodo wrote in a letter to San Mateo County, Calif., authorities on Saturday. “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” Gizmodo continued, adding that he works from home, his “de facto newsroom.” “It is abundantly clear under the law that a search warrant to remove these items was invalid. The appropriate method of obtaining such materials would be the issuance of a subpoena.”

    But what distinguishes a blogger from a journalist? Does a writer for gizmodo merit the distinction journalist?

What makes someone a journalist? Is it a code of ethics or is it merely the place of publication? Is it the news distributed or the way in which that news is gotten?

    What bloggers represent is the dissolution of a journalistic code. It is a DIY mode of information-gathering that isn't necessarily wrong, only something new. What this new open-sourced mode suggests is that privacy is dead, or at least in its death throes. What newspapers like the NYtimes offer is the promise of capable and trust-worthy news. Whether those are things that the public deems worth paying for is something that we will only find out in the upcoming years. My suspicions however inform me that the answer is a resounding no. No one cares that the apple phone was received illegally by Gizmodo who knew full well that it was stolen. People want the information and they want it no matter the methods. It's this unceasing thirst for instant and beforehand knowledge that will inform the future of news.

But again I ask, what are we losing exactly? Ethics change with the times.