Interview with John Lloyd in the Sydney Morning Herald:
…good reporting requires time and money. How can the internet, where most information is free, pay for it? Lloyd fears that if papers cannot find an online business model they will slip inexorably into being a niche product. Who, then, will investigate and challenge power? A blog is being born every six seconds but bloggers are usually polemicists, often ranters, not reporters. Will we drown in a sea of opinion, deprived of the fact-gathering that is essential to making democracy work?
“The fear one has is that the old is disappearing and the new has not yet taken its place,” Lloyd says. “It’s a period of some confusion, possibly even of peril, for democracy.
Perhaps, he adds, “if we deprive politicians of their legitimacy – either by saying all politics is corrupt or by undercutting them by making them part of the entertainment industry – then essentially we deprive democratic institutions of their legitimacy. It is difficult to know what would then take their place.”