More on the ‘micro­pay­ments for news’ debate, this time from Whar­ton biz school profs:

News­pa­pers and magazines, saddled with high fixed costs and high dis­tri­bu­tion costs, have been hit by both the free cul­ture online and the ease with which their product — which is costly to pro­duce but easy to copy and paste — is hijacked by free sites put together by unpaid blog­gers. Most papers have resor­ted to offer­ing their con­tent for free, but online ad rev­en­ues alone have not covered their high fixed costs. Con­tinue read­ing →

How many times have you read demo­cracy will suf­fer without journ­al­ism to keep it hon­est? I gave up count­ing a long time ago. But the most power­ful anec­dotal (of course!) refor­mu­la­tion of this hoary nos­trum comes from David Simon in the Wash­ing­ton Post.

In the course of rail­ing against a ‘cover-up’ in the Bal­timore Police Depart­ment, Simon describes his former role as a police reporter nego­ti­at­ing the insti­tu­tional ant­ag­on­ism (checks and bal­ances?) between the bench of the Mary­land Dis­trict Court and the Bal­timore PD.

That nego­ti­ation relied on Simon hav­ing the veiled threat of a judge’s home num­ber. As he wrote: “To be a police reporter in such a cli­mate was to be a prince of the city…” Con­tinue read­ing →