Dan Gillmor offers a plea to newspapers to open up their for-pay archives. He's got logic on his side but business inertia against it. Newspapers are used to getting revenue from their old content because third parties like Lexis/Nexis pay them for it and then charge whopping fees to their own customers to access the material. Those same papers are seeing classified ad revenue drain away to the Web; I just don't see their corporate leaders choosing to abandon this real revenue for the intangible possibility of long-term grown in keyword advertising on open Web archives.
Is this short-sighted? You bet. Is that Lexis/Nexis revenue going to vanish eventually anyway, as the open Web displaces it and reduces demand for the old for-pay stuff? You bet. Will the newspapers then lose out, long-term, as other institutions step into the vacuum on the Web and become the "publications of record"? You bet.
This is, I think, inevitable, given the pattern in American business that makes it nearly impossible for existing institutions to sacrifice this quarter's revenue for riskier, long-term goals. Newspapers as businesses are hugely conservative; they change slowly if at all. It seems almost certain to me that over the next 30-40 years local newspapers will vanish. We'll be left with two or three national institutions like the Times and the Journal -- they've got their own upscale market of people willing to pay for in-depth coverage, and they'll figure out a path to deliver it in whatever format their readers want. For local news and information, it will be cheaper, more efficient and more profitable to serve the public electronically.
The economic structure that supported local newspapers is going to migrate, is already beginning to migrate, online. And I don't think most newspapers are nimble enough to follow. New players will pick up that business -- and take on the mantle of providing local news. In the course of this change we'll gain some speed and variety and all the new possibilities of a many-to-many information world; we'll also lose some valuable traditions. Our recycling bins, at least, will thank us.
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