No use in papers thinking 'if only we didn't go free'

NET RESULTS:The internet's original 'gift economy' meant it was inevitable that newspapers' online content would be free, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

A FEW weeks ago, I was a bit exasperated to hear two people on different radio programmes within days of each other state that they thought newspapers should never have started to offer their content, for free, online.

One commentator was from the US, and works for one of the papers that, like many over there, is fighting for its existence. He wondered who had ever come up with such an idea, one which has forced everyone into doing pretty much the same thing.

An Irish journalist subsequently echoed his comments on another programme a day later. Giving content away made no sense.

Well, maybe not in the old, non-net world order, but it makes sense, and is virtually unavoidable, in the new, internet-dominated world order. And, at least at this phase of the net’s development, I think there’s little that can be done – even if it currently makes no, or little, business sense for many publications.

There’s a long history of why this is the case, but it goes back in part to the “gift economy” approach to information and services taken by many of the internet’s early creators and users, where no quid pro quo was attached to its gradual formulation.

Much of the internet thus was developed as a collaborative effort with no thought of material gain or even exchange. And, unusual for a project with its origins in the US department of defence, it evolved, expanded and eventually was opened up to wider and wider rings of communities and then, to the public.

When Tim Berners-Lee began thinking about how to make the content of the expanding internet more easily accessible and shareable, and developed the notion of the worldwide web and HTML, which rather magically turns lines of code into a visual smorgasbord of content, the intent again fit roughly into what sociologists call the “gift economy” format. The whole point was to make information freely available – not to create a business model for it.

As the medium took off, initially with technologists and academics, this same Berners-Lee philosophy dominated. The web itself was a medium free to use and was designed to enable people to make information available. It was not a commercial medium. Information should be free, in every sense of the word.

Initially, businesses weren’t particularly welcome. People looking at today’s online marketplace, who weren’t using the web in its formative years, may not realise the resentment and suspicion that many at first felt towards any attempt to start to commercialise this open, international community space.

On the other hand, there was palpable excitement that the web was taking off. The existing web community – inasmuch as it can be artificially viewed as any cohesive whole – seemed on the one hand delighted that the wider world was beginning to realise how amazing the internet was and, on the other, alarmed at it turning into one giant shopping mall and medium for ads.

Fast forward to 2009 and what we have is something in between the two extremes. We have had just over a decade of this extraordinary medium and, in general, the web remains true to its origins in that most information is freely accessible, but it has also adapted to become a revolutionary business medium. However, if with one hand it giveth opportunity of new ways of doing business, with the other, it taketh away existing business models. That is the way of disruptive technologies. They severely alter the existing landscape, be it social, cultural, commercial, scientific, technological – and generally, all of the above in various degrees.

The internet is easily one of the most disruptive technologies humans have developed. Not only because, in itself, it has changed how people communicate, work, play, think. But also because it in turn becomes the medium, the electronic transport through which additional technologies, in subsequent waves, continue to hammer away at what has been, in order to create some new version of the world that is faster, more responsive, more transparent and in some ways, less forgiving.

Newspapers have the misfortune of being in a business that is pressured on many sides by the internet. They lie between the rock of the net thrown open to those who can produce and distribute information and the hard place of the net altering and accelerating the mode of delivery.

News is now, not tomorrow morning; many citizens are also contributing to the information flow and talking back to the formal news creators, sometimes rather stroppily. They are taking and supplementing what the formal news creators produce and other competitors are also offering their product at the daunting price of “free”.

Meanwhile, an advertising model has not yet materialised which enables a wholesale transfer to the new medium of the net.

Personally, I’m confident that professional journalism, and many news outlets, will survive this daunting transitional phase. We’re just (just!) having to reimagine an entire industry at the moment.

But to imagine that all would have been well if only some misguided editor hadn’t decided to post content free online . . . Attitudes like that succinctly express why some in the media still do not understand this disruptive new medium, and why some will never survive its challenging new realities.

klillington@irishtimes.com; weblog and podcasts: www.techno-culture.com