Giving It All Away

The debate about free news content mirrors the same debate about how great it is that music was liberated from "the man" and the shackles of old-style corporate culture by the internet.

Youtube, last FM, rhapsody, spotify, Pirate Bay: all proclaimed as the future at one time or another, are routinely praised for their forward thinking approaches and new business models.

Everything will be paid for by advertising. Whoopee, everything is free!

Then some find they can't make a buck especially if they have to do old-fashioned things like pay out royalties to those old-fashioned content providers at old-fashioned rates.

Thus the old, out-moded, out-dated content providers are told they must revise their business models in order to support the new players on the block - aka "we totally screwed up in our projections for profitability but if you don't cut your rates to something we can afford then you're obviously a dinosaur."

As with the future of music, so with the future of news.

We won't need old fashioned things like journalists because we'll have hordes of citizen reporters roaming the streets with their Flip cameras. Thus the news becomes something akin to a somewhat anodyne "this event happened here today" rather than any nuanced or in-depth reporting.

The problem with the "everything for free" culture is that we've forgotten the truth that lies behind of some of those distinctly old-fashioned sayings.

"If it looks to good to be true that's because it is too good to be true."

Oh, and let's not forget our old-fashioned and hopelessly outdated pal - "there is no such thing as a free lunch."

Somebody, somewhere, always ends up paying the bill.