Slashdot highlights the ongoing problems with online registration for “old media” sites, such as the New York Times. They mention a Wired article on the subject (see also this article by the same author), which led me to this blog entry.
The basic idea is that people are avoiding registration sites, or using tools like BugMeNot to fake out the registration systems, both for privacy concerns and because people find it impossible to keep track of all the accounts. It’s certainly true for me, what with the three or four browsers I switch between, the three-plus systems I find myself on, and my annoying habit of busting my browser configuration on a regular basis. Why go through all this effort to read an occasional story linked from an interesting blog, especially when the blog will usually give me a helpful summary and thought-provoking commentary on its own?
In this article, Clay Shirky talks about classified ads, among other things. Classified ads are very local, but they can also benefit from efficiencies that come from centralization. On the Net, it’s easy to do both. The result: classified ads are starting to centralize, and local classified sections are likely to suffer.
News is the same way. All news is local, at least in the sense that it happens in one place. Yet it also benefits from centralization, for its own reasons. We want to pay attention to news in our own locality, and we also want someone to look at all the other localities and highlight the stuff most important to us.
In times past, you had to be a big company to do that, because you needed a broadcast license, or you had to pay for paper. Big Media still acts that way. In a sense, they have to, because it’s very difficult to scale down a big organization. So, they feel they have to extract value from their readers through things like registration and intrusive ads and so on, and they feel that the news is still somehow their domain, as if they create the news in some way that your neighbor whose aunt was in New York on September 11 doesn’t.
But if all news is local, why can’t we rely on local people to cover the stories? And if we don’t need big expensive broadcast licenses or bales of paper to act as aggregators and filters anymore, why do we need news organization cruft?
And it’s now, when people like me are thinking that we don’t need news organizations as much anymore, that these same news organizations are looking for new ways to exclude us. Why, I can’t gather. Will they be happiest when no one reads them anymore, because they can get the same thing better from people like InstaPundit? Somehow, I doubt it.