As I have mentioned before I am perturbed by the illogic of those who say they don’t read “newspapers” because they get only their news on the “Internet.” The issue is not where we read news but what news we read. To prove it, I urge all network TV and print media to go dark for one day and show us what we would be missing.
Click through on a Google News item, and chances are you are reading news from a news media with salaried reporters, whether NPR, Associated Press, NY Times, Washington Post, or ABC and MSNBC. Even the Wall Street Journal lets you get some content for “free.” We may not pay directly by subscription and we may ignore the advertising, but we certainly “borrow” news someone else has paid for.
Why don’t we pay a cent to news sources, but we are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars a month in phone, cable, and cell fees? Those subscriptions come with absolutely no guarantee of Internet content. Why should Google get all its content for free? Wouldn’t you benefit from insisting that some of that money go to the people who make it worthwhile to use the technology you pay for?
Stop arguing over whether most of us read on paper or on a computer screen. Start asking what news we are willing to pay for. Google pays no one who its users want to “search.” It shares no advertising income with the most popular web sites which attract its customers. We pay millions of dollars a year to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cablevision, Dish Network, ATT, Verizon, Apple, iTunes, Samsung, Blackberry. Wouldn’t we all benefit from insisting that some of that money go to the people who make it worthwhile to use the technology we pay so much for?
The logic of paying for content was proved by Google’s recent settlement with the Author’s Guild, in which Google has agreed to pay royalties to the copyright holders of books that can be searched in their Reader.
We need to have a day when all news websites supported by non-internet business models go off-line. For one day, we would not be able to read free on the Internet news that is paid for by print and broadcast media. Make us go out and buy a newspaper (if we can find one). Make us wait until the “News Hour” on broadcast TV to find out what happened in Congress or on the stock market today.
If all those non-Internet news sources were to disappear, we would notice. People in Denver are already noticing the blank pages on their local internet, headlines The Rocky Mountain News used to provide Imagine how much international news we wouldn’t be able to read if the NY Times and ABC, NBC, and NPR News web sites went down?
Nothing is truer in American than “you get what you pay for.” If we don’t pay for our news on the web, what kind of news will we get? What do we lose by demanding our subscription or advertising fees being shared with the people who write the words we read on the Internet?
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