Free. If there’s one word that divides people and raises hackles it’s ‘free’. Things do cost and we do want to get paid so how can free make financial sense? Like all contentious concepts, free has lost much of its meaning in its transition from economic idea to bête noir of traditional business. It is time to go back to the beginning and appreciate what ‘free’ involves and for whom it makes sense. I will be using Christopher Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price as a guide, which will take us to some unexpected places for those who think its argument is no more than its title.

***

The ability to charge directly for something depends on the relationship between scarcity and abundance. If you are producing something that is scarce you can price your product in a way that those operating in an abundant market cannot. If your company manufactures exclusive, unique sports cars you can demand a high price. But if, like most information businesses, you operate in competition with numerous content providers, you cannot charge scarcity prices (Free, p. 127). We might think that The Times offers something unique and can therefore price itself accordingly, but its news coverage is not sufficiently different from its numerous global competitors to justify its readers paying a markedly higher price.

For an information business in the digital economy, where information is formed through bits, and the cost of distributing bits is near zero, the ability to charge scarcity prices is further diminished. It is here the virtue of the web leads to an economic conundrum. The web has collapsed the costs of production and distribution for anything made up of digital files, thereby expanding the bounds of creativity, communication and collaboration. If maximizing the reach of information is the goal then the web is an indispensable and unavoidable tool. However, the digital capacity that so enhances circulation also undercuts the capacity of content providers to charge directly for their commodities. By largely removing the barriers to entry, the web has enabled the number of content creators to expand dramatically, thereby increasing competition and ending scarcity. At the same time, the end of those entry barriers makes paid content a difficult proposition. As Anderson argues, “if ‘price falls to the marginal cost’ is the law, then free is not just an option, it’s the inevitable endpoint” (Free, p. 173).

***

When we read that free is “the inevitable endpoint” it seems impossible to square the circle and reconcile this with of our starting point – that everything costs something and no body wants to work for nothing. But this is where we need to pay closer attention to the details of Anderson’s argument. Far from arguing that all things are given away and no one earns a penny, Anderson proposes that we stop fighting the disruptive powers of the Internet and find ways to harness its virtues so that creativity can be rewarded.

This means that free is not the business model. Aside from the fact that we are not searching for a single, universally applicable business model, Anderson makes clear that “the most interesting business models are in finding ways to make money around Free” (Free, p. 14). Throughout Anderson’s book he repeats the point that Free is not enough and cannot be pursued alone. Free always works in conjunction with Paid, has to be matched with Paid and should make Paid more profitable (Free, pp. 70, 153, 176, 240).

The close and necessary relationship between Free and Paid might surprise those who relied on reviews of Anderson’s book for their understanding of his argument. Perhaps the most prominent of Anderson’s critics – Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker – argued that “Free is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that ‘information wants to be free.’” Here we have a misreading based on a misunderstanding.

Like many, Gladwell only quotes half of this now infamous mantra. What this selective understanding always leaves out is that Brand – who founded the Whole Earth Catalogue and The WELL and was a significant figure in the early days of the web – identified the tension between the ease of distribution and its impact on value. Speaking at a 1984 hacker conference, Brand declared:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Few recall the beginning of this quote, so there is a chapter in Free exploring Brand’s statement, which Anderson says has become “probably the most important – and misunderstood – sentence of the Internet economy” (Free, p. 96). In a later conversation Brand demonstrated for Anderson what he meant:

The physical world analogy, [Brand] said is a pub. It provides a place for community and conversation, but it doesn’t charge for that. It just charges for the beer that lubricates it. ‘You find that something else to charge for…you always wind up charging for something different from the information’ (Free, p. 100)

The business models that evolve around the relationship between Free and Paid will therefore use indirect means for reward. This means that although Free looks like something novel and untested it effectively draws upon the established approach we know as cross subsidy.

What Free does do differently, however, is use the web’s ease of circulation and collaboration to create the probability that people might pay for something that is unique and considered relatively scarce. Although Free is not the business model, Anderson outlines some basic principles for any business model using Free as its starting point. These include:

• Build a community around free advice, content or information
• Collaborate with that community, getting feedback from them that enhances the free content or information being offered
• Offer different or special versions of the free content or information provided and let those with money buy them
• Build in a substantial profit margin to the limited products in order to pay for the production of both the abundant and scarce versions

This, then, is the much talked about “freemium” approach, where Free leads to payment for premium. It builds on the established idea of “versioning” whereby similar products in different versions are sold to different customers at different prices (Free, pp. 69, 165, 176). And it covers the full range of consumer psychology so that everyone from the person who wants something that is abundant for nothing, to the client prepared to pay for something similar but which is scarce, can be part of an information business’s constituency.

***

Does this approach work? The experience of the music industry says yes, and Anderson cites the oft-quoted Radiohead model in his book. For their album In Rainbows, Radiohead put it on-line prior to the standard CD release and gave fans the freedom to download then pay what they wanted. Zero was an option and some got it for free while others were prepared to hand over $20. In addition the band offered a deluxe box set at $80 each, and all of the 100,000 available sold quickly. The result was that Radiohead sold three million copies of the album across all formats (online, physical, deluxe), with the money made just from digital downloads prior to physical release exceeding the total from their previous album in all formats. Even more importantly, their subsequent concert tour was the biggest ever, and with the top bands now earning four times as much from events as from selling and licensing music, Radiohead reaped the rewards of extending their reach through free, on-line access to their music.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has distilled the experience of Radiohead and other bands such as Nine Inch Nails into a “formula” for a business model that echoes Anderson’s principles:

Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$)

Masnick’s report offers a dozen detailed examples of musicians and companies that have embraced this approach and generated handsome revenues that reward them for their creativity even though they are not being paid directly for their content.

This embrace even extends to benefiting from the file sharers who are pilloried for the revenue they supposedly steal from content producers (something that motivated the controversial Digital Economy Bill in the UK). Masnick argues that the music industry needs to give up on the pursuit of new copyright laws, licensing schemes and DRM because of the way they inhibit connections with fans. A number of studies demonstrate that the “pirates” spend much more on legal music than regular consumers, and in his book Remix, copyright specialist Lawrence Lessig argues the downturn in physical album or single sales is not attributable to illegal copying. As such, prohibitions on sharing music are designed to defend the traditional recording industry with its business models based on the control of distribution, but get in the way of expanding the overall music industry, which is thriving like never before.

Can this approach work for industries other than music? Again, the answer is yes. Evidence from the book world shows that releasing free e-book versions of titles generally leads to increased sales of physical copies. Photography is also well placed to benefit. Cory Doctorow has argued that the more copies there are in the digital era the more valuable the non-reproducible becomes. This means that as digital copies of images proliferate – making both the image and the photographer better known and creating a community of interest in the process – the more a small but significant number of people will pay for “talismanic items” like signed, limited edition prints. This was borne out by a recent remark from Ben Burdett, director of the Atlas Gallery in London: “we sell to people who fall for individual images, especially well known images people recognise. They sell most easily because when people see them, they know and love them already.”

***

Getting to grips with how Free works requires strategic thinking freed from its established ways. Some of the hype around the arrival of the iPad has come from those who see it as a chance to correct “the mistakes” publishers made in the early days of the web (see the Photo District News editorial from February 2010). But imagining that there could have been world where every reader or viewer paid publishers directly for all their on-line content betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Internet means for information industries. The web is an intrinsically open system, and new ventures would have emerged to provide quality information even if all the legacy companies had retreated behind pay walls from the outset.

Content creation has to be paid for, but in the digital world of information abundance that revenue is no longer going to come principally from direct payment. Free is part of a larger business strategy that leverages the web’s virtues for circulation and collaboration in pursuit of greater rewards, while recognising that we cannot (and should not) fight the impact of the Internet on distribution systems. Free does not mean giving everything away for nothing; it means creatively pursuing indirect mechanisms and cross subsidy to reap the benefits of the new media economy

This was written as a guest post for Fast Media Magazine, and appeared there on 12 May 2010.

Last year I wrote a series of posts on “revolutions in the media economy” (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) detailing the changing context for us all, including universities (the focus of part 4). I had begun to think through these issues last summer and my first take on them was aired at a June 2009 workshop on “Affirmative Critique” at Durham University that explored the work of Jane Bennett and William Connolly.

For the university, the new ecology of information means possible changes in the ethos of academic life, including the transformation of both teaching and academic publishing. For example, Jeff Jarvis, whose thinking has influenced mine over the last year, recently told a TED conference in New York that the lecture model is “bullshit.” Moreover, given the prominence now being accorded to “impact” in the future audit of UK academic research, we need to consider how we might rethink the creation and circulation of critical work produced in our universities.

My colleague Stuart Elden, editor of the important geography journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, suggested I write a commentary for the journal based on my contribution to the workshop. This has now been published and you can access it here. The publishers have made it open access beyond their normal subscription pay wall (though in the first version of this post that link was not functioning properly).

In the commentary, I ask:

• What happens to the university when we move from mass production to the link economy?
• What does it mean to go from broadcasting to engagement?
• Why does academic publishing subscribe to pay walls?
• How can we really have an impact?

Embracing the dynamics of the social media revolution in the production and distribution of information generated through our work in universities would be a major political step towards opening up the academy and enhancing its impact. I don’t have the answers, but I hope I have posed some of the questions that will get us to think about this unavoidable challenge.

Photo credit: webtreats/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

The DEB will put in place a system to defend the position of established media groups (the recording giants of the music and film industries) and individuals who have become fabulously wealthy through their control of creative content (think Simon Cowell). It passed the House of Lords on Monday, and is already into its second reading in the Commons. The government is trying to get it far enough along that it becomes part of the legislative “wash up” as this parliament winds up before the election in May. The speed of its passage is preventing proper consideration and debate by the elected chamber, and is serving corporate interests over and above popular concerns.

The focus of the DEB is on those who illegally download digital files, and seeks to punish them in extraordinary ways – after a couple of warnings, internet service providers will be forced to cut the internet connection through which file sharing occurred, regardless of whether the individual, business, library, school or university providing that connection had anything to do with the download.  And to guard against future technological changes that might promote file sharing, the DEB cedes extraordinary powers to the Secretary of State (currently Lord Mandelson) to alter copyright law in any manner he/she sees fit. Unsurprisingly, ISPs and Internet companies are strongly opposed.

The best way to get a quick grasp of the issues is to watch this 9 minute video fronted by comedian and activist Mark Thomas (and note, in particular, Billy Bragg’s and Cory Doctorow’s observations):

What the DEB fundamentally misses is the way the web has transformed the creative landscape. The government should have spent more time reading the work of influential Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the man behind Creative Commons.

Lessig wants a workable system of copyright, but one that understands “the essence of practical reason in the digital age” is “if you don’t want your stuff stolen, make it easily available” (Remix, p. 46). He asks: “what should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distribution of ‘copies’ simply will not exist?” His answer – the response to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously, but to devise a system of copyright that does not criminalise normal behaviour. (Remix, xviii-xix).

The DEB is waging an unwinnable war on behalf of the established producers. Central to the government’s position is that downloading and file sharing threatens the established creative industries. But does it? In Lessig’s book Remix (pp. 302-303n) he cites some studies that demonstrate there is no statistically significant connection between downloading and a drop in commercial sales of films or music. One of these says that Internet piracy accounts for less than a quarter of the drop in music CD sales – meaning that three quarters of the decline comes from commercial reasons for which the established companies are responsible. The DEB defends the collapsing business models of the big players in the film and music industries while endangering the virtues of the web for new forms of creativity.

Proof of the government’s flawed motives is evident when you consider other aspects of the DEB. While keen to defend copyright for major entertainment corporations, the government has been equally willing to strip copyright protection from photographers. The provisions of the bill that deal with “orphan works” delegate to the Secretary of State the power to transfer the property right to copy to someone other than the original owner. While that may have merit when it comes to historical works where owners cannot easily be traced, the wholesale change to copyright it proposes has rightly drawn the ire of photographer’s groups.

The only explanation for the government’s contradictory approach to copyright in the DEB is the power of corporate interests who want to punish file sharers. Even if the DEB passes, it won’t succeed in ending illegal downloads. That doesn’t make such activity right, but, to go back to Lessig’s arguments, why seek to fight an unwinnable war that will result in numerous innocent casualties? Why defend corporate copyright but not the photographer’s? Parliament needs to have the time to ask these questions.

If you are concerned about the provisions and passage of the DEB, then write now to your local MP (go here) and make your concerns for creativity and democracy known. A campaign is underway.

Photo credit: Tennessee Wanderer (Flickr), used under a Creative Commons license

During a recent panel discussion in London on “the new ecology of photojournalism,” Ed Kashi remarked that despite all the gloom and doom we should realize that this is now a potential golden age for photojournalism. He didn’t underestimate the problems but he urged people to think about the prospects for new forms of visual journalism across multiple platforms to diverse communities.

I think Ed is spot on with his reasoned optimism, but to appreciate where this might lead us, we have to drive a stake through the heart of a prehistoric argument that has dominated the last few weeks of the year.

‘Parasites, thieves, and promiscuous behaviour’

Rupert Murdoch and his trusty lieutenants (Les Hinton of Dow Jones, James Harding of The Times and Robert Thompson of The Wall Street Journal) have launched a vicious rhetorical war against the free circulation of content on the internet, singling out Google and others for making aggregation and distribution possible.

This is part of a News Corporation effort to garner allies for their strategy to charge for news content. Plans to put their papers behind pay walls have been much trailed by Murdoch executives. The time it is taking to implement these proposals, combined with their unwillingness to follow through on their threats to block their content from Google’s view, demonstrates the purpose of these manoeuvres is to try and reshape the public debate, get as many other legacy media companies as possible to join them in similar strategies, and wring some business concessions from the successful new media companies in the process.

Murdoch’s protestations – which have been effectively countered by Eric Schmidt – have given some comfort to those in the photographic world who hope that the sight of a pay wall going up might mean the return a benevolent editorial paymaster. It’s time to put that dream to bed once and for all and face up to the challenges and potentials of the new era.

The problem with pay walls

What Murdoch and others are missing is the new ecology of the web and how that has changed things for good, in both senses. For those who want critical journalism in all its forms, the debate on pay walls is at best anachronistic and at worst counter-productive. We can see this in three different ways:

(i) Little money:

Building on the points in my first post of this series, we need to appreciate that even the most successful pay wall strategy will never fund investigative journalism. Pay walls are a form of subscription. But subscriptions have only ever generated about 20% of a newspaper company’s revenue. This means the most successful pay wall will never compensate for the collapse in advertising revenue.

Nonetheless, the idea that people paying for content is the holy grail of lost revenue is increasingly promoted by media organisations who are now more willing than ever to explore this option. It has become an almost theological commitment that users should pay. But this overlooks one very significant historical point – consumers have not previously paid for content. As Paul Graham argued, we have paid for the mode of distribution rather than the information being distributed:

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

This has been the case with newspapers too. Rupert Murdoch, now demanding customers stump up for his articles, had no qualms about selling at a loss by reducing the price of The Times to 10 pence a copy (or giving it away as a free item in bulks) during the British newspaper price wars of the 1990s. Having never priced his products in terms of the cost of content, now is an odd time for him to start.

It is possible that for highly specialized content consumers will be willing to pay something for access (see the conclusion to this debate). While recent surveys offer contradictory data on how much or how often people will pay, even the highest of these numbers offers no hope as a general solution to the economic crisis of distributing journalism (while the lowest condemns it as a flawed strategy). Corporate media debts are too vast to be eased by revenue from premium content, so we should not cling to the false hope that new money will fund the documentary stories that have long been under-resourced.

(ii) Who they block:

The second problem with the supposed pay wall solution emerges when we have a more nuanced understanding of web traffic to news sites. Companies like to make a big deal about the number of “unique users” visiting their URLs, and this summation of global clicks is an important indicator of reach.

But most visitors come quickly for something specific and leave equally as quickly. They aren’t reading “the paper” on-line, but searching for a specific piece of information, consuming it, and moving on. Indeed, although some surveys have reported higher numbers, the average time spent on a US news site in November 2009 ranged from just four minutes up to a high of 23 minutes.

If a news organization wants to extract commercial value from its online users, it needs to find a way to first attract large numbers and keep a proportion of these visitors on site for longer so that over time they become loyal. This means the target audience for such an economic strategy is much smaller. To illustrate this, consider the following metrics from the Daily Mail in the UK:

• 28.7 million unique users/month globally
• 8.9 million unique users/month from the UK
• Of the UK users 611,588 came to the web site every day
• Half of those UK daily users (c. 300,000) stayed for 20 minutes

So while the headline-grabbing number of 28 million unique users suggests a vast community of potential value around the Daily Mail, in fact their loyal on-line users number just 300,000, which is just 7% of their daily print readership.  (The Times editor recently confirmed a similar pattern on his site by contrasting 20 million uniques with the 500,000 who had developed a ‘genuine digital habit’.

If one were thinking about a pay wall to control access to content on a paper with these user numbers, where would it be built? Around all content so that each and every visitor had to pay to pass? Around content viewed a certain number of times so the daily visitors were forced to open their wallets? Or directed at those who stayed on site the longest?

Two recent posts by Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow brilliantly illustrated the counterproductive nature of this dilemma from their experience with local American papers.

As this graph from Kiesow’s Nahsua Telegraph in New Hampshire makes clear, if your advertising depends on reach, you don’t want to cut off the huge number of uniques on the left, some of whom might be transformed into loyal users if they have open access.  And the number of daily/loyal visitors on the right is too small to build a viable subscription model on.

All this shows a general pay wall for news content will slash the number of visitors and fail to generate even modest revenue for investigative journalism. This is not the counter-theological proposition that “all information should be free” (a view Jay Rosen recently found to be often proclaimed but little referenced by those in favour of pay walls). It is recognition of the harsh economic realities of the web’s ecology for news that too many traditional companies are failing to appreciate.

Some, though, are realizing that this disparity between the millions of casual users and the thousands of loyal readers points the way to a new strategy. A Fairfax executive in Australia recently remarked that transactions rather than advertising or content were the best on-line revenue streams. Crucially, transactions require news organisations to build a community around their brand and product, and then take a percentage of the transactions (hotel bookings, financial advice etc.) those community members conduct through the associations, links and relationships provided. Building a community based on the smaller, loyal audience is something a Daily Mirror executive outlined, while Slate has been shifting from the pursuit of a mass audience (7 million uniques) to a smaller, more engaged audience (target 500,000) because “one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader.”

(iii) How they limit public good:

Proponents of pay walls say consumers must contribute to the cost of journalism because it is a public good. We should debate the assumption that journalism per se is automatically a public good given “the media’s” patchy record for accountability in recent times. But even if we rather rashly accept that the majority of the fourth estate is critical of conventional wisdom and questioning of those in power, pay wall advocates have this argument upside down.

The public good of journalism in the age of the Internet comes from the vastly expanded possibilities of circulation and distribution. Clay Shirkey has argued this recently (see video here) by calling attention to how a 2002 Boston Globe investigation of child abuse by Catholic priests in the city travelled globally from its Massachusetts origins to the global community of Catholics, mobilising social groups along the way, and ending with the Church having to take action internationally (such as in the recent Irish government report on abuses in the Dublin Archdiocese).

Shirkey’s argument is that it was the forwarding of the original article, rather than just its publication, which enabled people to mobilise and force authorities to act. Circulation was what gave the story value as a public good. So while Murdoch and others see public re-use as a crime against civilization, both Shirkey (and Jay Rosen in his interview with Shirkey here, starting at 9:30) demonstrate that in the new ecology of the web this forwarding (or “super-distribution”) of information and its public re-use is the condition of possibility for the very democratic ethos and public virtue media proprietors say they are desperate to defend. If information gets forwarded to journalists to cross-check and challenge their stories it can make them better, and the journalists’ stories get forwarded to people who are the most relevant thereby enabling social action. For Shirkey, this is the public good of publishing on the web. Murdoch might regard it as ‘promiscuous’, but pay walls would prevent the expansive sharing that is at the base of this public good.

Towards the new futures of photojournalism

Here is my point for photographers – forget all the fuss around the Murdoch-inspired debate about paying for content that has dominated the last few weeks of this year. Perhaps News Corporation will make pay walls work for some of its titles, but they won’t be the economic saviour of any media company. Nobody should pin their career hopes on them enabling a rosy future that will replicate a lost and largely mythic past. A new subscription-funded editorial paymaster looking for photographers to assign is not going to emerge, and holding out for media conglomerates to deliver this will only stymie creative development.

However, Murdoch is not really trying to create a new revenue stream (let alone one for documentary work). He is trying to change the terms of the public debate on the web in order to “call time on free distribution.” But that is an even more impossible task, because free distribution is both the intrinsic architecture and great virtue of the web. Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the web, was recently asked why he put the web into the public domain as a free facility rather than a private enterprise. “Because otherwise it would not have worked,” he said. (Just watch the first two minutes of this video interview with Berners-Lee to appreciate this core value).

The successful visual journalist in the new media economy is therefore going to be someone who embraces the logic of the web’s ecology, using the ease of publication, distribution and circulation to construct and connect with a community of interest around their projects and their practice. Like the media players beginning to understand that developing and engaging a loyal community is more valuable than chasing a mass audience (while being open so those passers-by can become associates), photographers need to do the same. If people now understand they are publishers as well as producers this puts them in a new and potentially powerful position.

It won’t be easy (but when was photojournalism or documentary photography easy?), but the successful visual journalist will be someone who uses social media (in combination with the more traditional tools of books, exhibitions and portfolios) to activate partnerships with other interested parties to fund their stories, host their stories, circulate their stories, and engage with their stories. The social value of this is obvious, and this social value will be the basis for drawing economic value so the work can continue.

A good number of people (like Ed Kashi) are working this way now. Jonathan Worth has been pursuing a fascinating project based on his portraits of Cory Doctorow (read an interview with him here discussing this), and VII is promoting discussions around these themes.  In the last couple of weeks we have seen new digital magazine formats unveiled, and if developed these will be exciting platforms for visual work. What all these moves have in common is an embrace of the virtues of digital technology in an open web. Google has been one of the icons of the last decade, and while as a company it is far from perfect, its success marks the path for the future so long as we understand what is novel about the web.

Kyle Grayson has written a detailed and masterful post that summarises our research and details its conclusions. Along with Martin Coward, we are using our blogs to make the arguments available so that people can consider them in full, and Kyle’s post warrants sustained attention. A précis of our work underscores the points I made in my series on ‘revolutions in the media economy’ — we concluded that current modes of publishing and distributing academic research are hampered in their desire for impact by pay walls, an insufficient web presence, and a reluctance to embrace social media. We recommend open access publishing aided and abetted by social media technologies as a way of ensuring the widest distribution and greatest potential impact of the good work done in the academy.

The fundamental challenge is this: are those university managers in a position to effect change open to the transformations that flow from the trends we identified? We don’t have all the answers, but the questions are now unavoidable.

At the heart of these changes is the fact (which I will continue to repeat endlessly) that the link between information and its distribution has now been broken. The web has collapsed the cost of publishing, removed obstacles to creating new social groups and eliminated barriers to the formation of distributed networks. This means, as Shirkey argues, while social tools don’t create collective action, they have overcome the majority of obstacles to such action. We therefore live in a remarkable time where our ability to communicate, share, collaborate and act has expanded beyond the limits of traditional institutions.

No sector of society will escape these revolutions. The question is how they will react to them and develop with them. Now it is time to turn the focus to the institution I am formally associated with – the university, and the associated issue of academic publishing.

As sites central to the production and dissemination of knowledge, the modern university finds itself in the new media economy occupying a position with many parallels to the established newspaper or photo agency. This post will explore how these institutions are largely failing to grasp the opportunities arising from these revolutions. This is because university managers are wedded to some very traditional modes of distributing information – with ‘distribution’ incorporating both aspects of teaching and the bulk of academic publishing – that need to be challenged.

Of course, given the diversity in higher education, such generalisations always have exceptions. But drawing on my experience in Australia and the US, but coloured most obviously by the last decade working in the UK, I will argue that if we are to progress as these revolutions shake down, universities are going to have to grasp what flows from breaking the link between information and distribution.

What happens when we move from mass production to the link economy?

The forces of mass production have shaped universities. Knowledge is divided into disciplines, experts variously distribute content to audiences (often in lectures that resemble monks delivering sermons), and auditors judge their enterprise through measurements of supposed utility.

It is hardly surprising, then, having detailed how the new ecosystem of the link economy transforms the creation of value, Jeff Jarvis asked: “Who needs a university when we have Google?” (What Would Google Do, 210).

That is designed to take a professor’s breath away. In claiming that course work involves memorizing facts available through search, Jarvis ignores the many educators who have always been concerned with process rather than product in learning. But his question is a great one if we want to address how our institutions are going to adapt. For Jarvis the link economy makes five demands:

• Produce unique content with clear value
• Open up so you can be found; if you aren’t searchable you won’t be located;
• When you get links and audience, find ways to benefit from them;
• Use links to find new efficiencies; do what you do best and link to the rest;
• Find opportunities to create value atop this link layer

If you asked your average university administrator what this meant for them they would probably suggest nothing more than a web site redesign. Now, while I am one of the last people who would suggest universities should swallow whole the lessons from business studies (because wrong-headed attempts to do so are the cause of much anti-intellectualism in UK higher education at the moment), many of Jarvis’s principles should prompt us to think hard about what it means for universities in the 21^st century.

There have been some practical reflections on the implications of Jarvis’s arguments for universities, and we are starting to see assessments of how the internet will disturb education and make a virtual college possible, and even radical demands for the end of the university as we know it.

I think Jarvis’s challenges demand more than even that. Thinking of research and scholarship in terms of ‘producing unique content with clear value’ makes sense so long as value includes cultural and social value and is not simply economic, and the idea of ‘creating value atop this link layer’ opens up creative possibilities for developing the idea of ‘curation’ (discussed in the second post of this series) in relation to how educators will use their expertise to enhance the process through which students engage with information.

What does it mean to go from broadcasting to engagement?

Opening up in the link economy also means altering the ethos of teaching, moving it away from the broadcast structure of the lecture to new modes of student engagement. Professors will cease to be people who ‘profess’ and become people who curate flows of information, establishing the conditions of possibility for critical collaboration.

Earlier this year Don Tapscott argued this move away from distributing knowledge through the broadcast lecture would lead to the demise of the university because there was an inevitable clash between such lectures and “the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.” The claim that ‘growing up digital’ leads to a ‘net generation’ with some new, naturalised approach to learning is dubious, not least because schools and families share much in common with the traditional approach of universities.

Tapscott’s claims drew some hostile responses from academics, students and parents who were invested in various elements of the broadcast model. A provost from Georgetown typified the complacency of some by responding to the desire for universities to be “places to learn, not to teach” with the claim; “Always have been. Still are. Hanging in there.” The ‘death of newspapers’ would suggest such confidence in things continuing as before can be fatally misplaced in the new media economy.

Of course not all university teaching proceeds by broadcast, and of course there are many who strive for engagement now. Nonetheless MIT’s recent move to small group teaching for its physics courses shows how persistent and popular the lecture as a mode of distribution has been.

The important work of Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropology professor, demonstrates how the new structures of digital information can address common student complaints about the broadcast model (See further debate on this here). Wesch agrees that there are many educators who hope to subvert the system, but a combination of the physical learning spaces and the social structures of evaluation, promotion and tenure mean that too many efforts at engagement are constrained by the limits of the traditional institutions. Some proof of this is evident at my university, where the new “learning centre” is dominated by two huge “fixed tiered seat lecture theatres” holding hundreds at a time.

The new ecology of the web and its impact on the structure of information requires a fundamental rethink of pedagogy. However, this rethink does not mean that education inevitably migrates on-line. Students are often initially against change because they feel it is a step towards a virtual process with no personal contact.  What is needed, as Wesch argues, are ways to leverage the social media environment for a pedagogical process that is open, collaborative, linked, distributed, and above all else, engaging.

Why does academic publishing subscribe to pay walls?

If lectures are teaching’s mode of distribution, then journal articles and books are the primary way academic research is circulated. But if the link between information and distribution is being broken, we have to ask whether the article and the book are the best means to achieve the desired end.

As the author of many articles and a number of books, I am far from being opposed to them as delivery vehicles. The book, however, has long been under pressure (see the 2002 report by the Modern Language Association on “The Future of Scholarly Publishing”). Universities that once subsidised their own presses have cut back, libraries who are the principal purchasers have slashed budgets, meaning that the vast majority of research monographs containing original work will sell a few hundred copies at best. (I once heard a photographer bemoan the fact his expensive book had sold “only” 7,000 copies – if only the bulk of academics could complain about such numbers!). The result is that getting research published via the book route has become more difficult.

Digital publishing might be one way to address this dilemma, but the question of reputations and how they are judged then looms large. The monograph remains important for how academics are judged by their peers for promotion. Having a book released by a university press is regarded as prestigious and a path to success, so opting to go with blurb or Lulu is thought of as a form of vanity publishing and not (yet) professionally possible. The social structures would need to change, but there is no reason why digital publication cannot also be edited and peer reviewed just like traditional presses.

While books are favoured in some fields, in the social sciences journal articles are increasingly the preferred mode of delivery. (In geography in the UK, more than 85% of assessed research outputs were journal articles). But with these articles a perverse business model is at work. Academics do the research and write the article. They then submit it to a journal that is edited by other academics, which sends the paper to fellow academics for review. Neither of those roles is paid directly; the tasks are regarded as part of one’s professional commitments. If the reviews are good and the article is published, it appears in a volume that is then purchased by an academic who is an individual subscriber or a university library that is an institutional subscriber, or it might come as part of membership to a professional association that has subsidised its publication. If a company owns the journal title published in this way, the profits are predominantly theirs.

If newspapers had operated this way there would be no crisis in journalism – if media companies could get content for free and then sell it back to the people who produced it in the first place the return to investment ratio would have been phenomenal. With individual subscriptions of £25-50/year, and institutional subscriptions often ten times that, journals have become lucrative enterprises for many commercial publishers, hence the proliferation of more and more specialised titles.

In the terms of the current debate about the ‘death of the newspaper’ – where this series of posts began – this means that academic publishing operates a system of comprehensive and very high pay walls, behind which nearly all original research is corralled.

If the desire is for that research to have an impact on the wider community, these pay walls are an intrusive barrier. If someone outside academia wanted an individual article that was found via search, the payment demanded would be anything but ‘micro’ – I’ve just Googled one of my articles on war photography, and I see the university press publisher of the journal would charge £20/$30 for this single item! (It’s good, but there are limits…and I wouldn’t see any of that money anyway.)

The doubly perverse nature of this stems from the fact that university managers are requiring academics to publish in these pay wall-protected journals in the name of ‘impact’, at the same time as demanding that the research in those articles has a wider reach beyond the bounds of the academic community.

The particular understanding of impact here is the ‘impact factor’, which measures the number of citations to articles published by a given journal over two years. Taking the total number of references to articles in one journal made by articles in other journals, divided by the number of articles published in the first journal, gives a number that is ‘the factor’. For example, the highest impact factor in a human geography journal in 2008 was 3.967. That journal published 60 articles in 2006-07, and those articles were cited elsewhere 238 times.

What is immediately obvious are the very small numbers we are dealing with – 60 articles being referenced 238 times over two years. Citation is a subset of readership, so this does not report the total number of people who read an article without citing it. But even if the readership is substantially higher, that comes from a limited community – those who have access to the journals behind the pay wall. Numbers detailing online usage of academic journals are hard to come by, but the one statistic I have seen (from another major human geography journal) revealed that in a year this publication had 80,000 global users – which in terms of web traffic is pretty small, but hardly surprising given the way this content is blocked-off from a wider audience.

The emphasis placed on journal impact factor as a measure of a journal’s importance has been regularly criticized, even by research scientists who are sometimes seen as favouring quantitative measures (see here, here and here. These objections note how the statistics can be manipulated, but most importantly they reveal that although the impact factor has become an indirect scale of quality, playing a big part in career evaluations, it does not square with the judgements of quality that peer review panels make.

Journal impact factor is not the only quantitative measure of how academic research circulates. The delightfully named “Publish or Perish,” which is free software from Harzing.com, uses Google Scholar to provide data. But whatever measure or package is used none can get around the fact they are only measuring some form of significance within a tightly restricted community.

How can we really have an impact?

To drive academic research into journals behind pay walls contradicts the growing emphasis, especially in the UK, on such research having significance beyond the university. There is much that is disturbing about this government-inspired effort (which, as one newspaper headline put it recently, is designed to weed out “pointless” studies). It depends either on a remarkably narrow understanding of “impact” that makes economic value primary, or it depends on a extremely vague sense of impact (e.g. contributions to “quality of life”) that will be impossible to specify in the quantitative terms so badly desired by the auditors.

The problem with this bean-counting approach is also that it relies on a ‘broadcast model’ not dissimilar to the relationship between the student and the lecture. Researchers are supposed to, prior to their work, complete an “Impact Summary and Impact Plan” detailing who will benefit and how. This implies the one-way transmission of known findings to a passive audience, something that is underpinned by an extensive university bureaucracy tasked with enabling “knowledge transfer” and “public engagement” (usually understood as involving the mainstream media). This bureaucracy is designed to extract academic research from the subscription silo to which the demand for journal publication has condemned it. When you factor in the enormous amount of time it takes to satisfy such bureaucratic demands, combined with the long-lead times of academic publication (1-2 years), then everything is stacked against the stated goal of impact in the broadest sense being achieved.

So what should be done?

The first thing to say is that thinking through the issue of impact in its broadest sense must not involve questioning the legitimacy of research or scholarship on what at first glance might appear to be an obscure topic. It’s common for non-academics to have a swipe at people in “ivory towers” pursuing things not popularly understood. But who is to say, prior to its circulation, development and reception, what will become significant, how it will become significant and when it will be significant?

That said, we can guarantee obscurity for academic research by cutting it off from the collaborations and engagements taking place in the distributed, global conversation that the new information ecology of the web makes possible. It’s counter-productive for university managers to insist, especially in the name of impact as assumed quality, on research being published by restricted outlets.

None of this leads to the conclusion that we abolish book publishing or end academic journals. It is not an either/or choice. What it means, though, is we have to modify those modes of distribution so they can take advantage of what the web had done for publishing, and then connect them with other networks of communication, dissemination and engagement.

Some of this is already happening, as detailed by Michael Nielsen’s interesting account of the disruptions in scientific publication. Specialist blogs, video channels, web journals of visualised research, and new ways of managing and searching papers are all emerging as researchers explore the new distribution possibilities enabled by the web.

Some time ago academics moved against the restrictions of commercial journals by promoting “open access” alternatives. While successful in some areas, these initiatives failed to defeat the traditional system because they could not offer, as new start-ups, the same reputational economy of the established outlets. But a journal is just a means of distribution, with its research value coming from its editors and the peer review system. When those individuals and their practices are prepared to jump the pay wall and publish content free on the internet, then we will have the makings of true open access and the widest possible impact, without the need for any bureaucracy to make it so. And making research available in this way will feedback into changing the practice of teaching away from the broadcast model and towards an ethos of engagement.

This assumes ‘photojournalism’ is an accepted category of photographic practice.  It is an essentially contested category – there are a number of different accounts of what is or isn’t photojournalism, many photographers are happy to wear the label and may are not. I’ll call photojournalism the photographic practice where someone tells a story about some aspect of their world, where this story is compiled first using lens-based imaging technologies that have a relationship with that world. This encompasses what others call documentary or editorial photography, but excludes works of visual fiction produced with computer-generated images.

Of all the journalistic forms said to have died, none have had their demise declared more often than photojournalism. The recent Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan was previewed with articles lamenting a “dying field” because of the revolutions in the media economy, but such warnings have been frequent throughout the recent history of photojournalism (as in a 1999 editorial in The Digital Journalist, which was revisited in recent articles here and here).

Many of the concerns about the health of photojournalism have been well placed. The financial fragility of agencies like Eyedea and the liquidation of Grazia Neri show traditional business models are faltering badly.

This is the beginning of the end of a long decline. The traditional model of print distribution and direct editorial funding has been unravelling from the 1970s onwards, ever since weekly pictorial magazines like Life folded. This demonstrates photojournalism that required an editorial paymaster was in trouble long before the Internet was an issue or the global recession added to its woes.

How do photojournalists view the contemporary media revolutions?

As a community of practice photojournalism does not have a single voice with a consensus view. There are photographers attuned to the new media economy and working in new ways. But there have recently been a number of notable comments that indicate the world of photojournalism is paying minimal attention to contemporary debates about the revolutions in the media economy, or resorting to some commonly circulated but ill-founded views on how to proceed:

• The photographic press is yet to explore in any detail the impact of the media revolutions on its constituency. For example, Photo District News had a blog post in June 2009 that devoted a mere two hundred words to wondering (without discussing, let alone answering) “if the journalism business fails, who pays for photojournalism?” but it and similar organs are yet to offer more detailed accounts.

• One outlet that has offered a view is The Digital Journalist, which published two remarkable editorials in August and September 2009 – remarkable, that is, for containing some of the least considered commentary available. The August editorial held the Internet largely responsible for the current problems, made the mistake of conflating newspapers and journalism, and plumped for pay walls around news sites as the answer. In manner that would have befitted the East German regime in its dying days, it cried out – “Let us build that wall before it is too late.” It is very odd to see a major player parroting the same flawed arguments of the traditional media outlets that have done photographers no favours in recent years.

• The September editorial of The Digital Journalist then demanded that foundations hand over large sums of money to multimedia publications (including itself), who would then distribute those funds to individual photographers with “projects that deserve coverage.” I’m a fan of the named companies who are a big part of the future (or, more accurately, the present) of photojournalism, but are the foundations really likely to part with large wads of up-front cash? Importantly, why would we want a system of new gatekeepers, and what about the fact that many of those digital producers are already partnering with photographers and getting foundation funding for specific projects? These arguments and proposals seem fundamentally out of touch with what is or likely to happen.

• In an interview with John Temple, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Cheryl Diaz Myer endorsed paying for on-line content (“I’m a fan of micropayments for the web”). In a demonstration of how unfounded examples gain an aura of truth simply by being repeated, Diaz argued that if the news media followed the iTunes model or the Financial Times subscription system then things would be better – ignoring the arguments cited in my first post of this series that demonstrate Apple’s model cannot be copied because music is a different commodity to news, and that the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are atypical news outlets that distribute economically valuable information.

• Leo Hsu’s foto8 post on “The End of Newspapers” takes a novel tack on the debate by asking, “Without newspapers, without the received standards of print publications, what expectations will we have of photographs and their ability to speak “truth”? In the wake of renewed concerns about photographic manipulation (which I have discussed here) Hsu is worried about how norms that contest fabrication will be governed. It is an interesting argument with respect to the veracity of images, but its assumptions about newspapers repeat the common mistake of seeing information and its mode of distribution as the same thing. It is the community of practice around photojournalism that establishes and governs standards, and that is independent of any particular mode of distribution, as the on-line debates about manipulation this year clearly demonstrate. Most importantly, contra Hsu, it is the practice of journalism and not the institution of newspapers that have, in some moments, sustained democracy. We must not confuse the two and their different roles.

There have been some good analyses of the new media economies from within photojournalism – Aric Mayer’s review of the publishing crisis and the crisis in editorial photography come to mind – but overall there needs to be a better recognition in the field of what is going on and what it means.

What inspiration can photojournalism take from the media revolutions?

Many of the recent debates within photojournalism have concerned the coverage of issues and the aesthetics of that coverage. In the wake of the last two World Press Photo competitions there have been insightful and provocative comments on how photojournalism pictures the world by Stephen Mayes and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which prompted some heated feedback (see here for the comments on Mayes lecture and here for a response to Broomberg and Chanarin). Mayes observation that his years as secretary of the World Press Photo jury led him to regard the submissions to the contest as primarily “romantic” – that is, “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized” – chimed with other critiques, such as Jörg Colberg’s thoughts on the visual language of photojournalism, which prompted an extensive discussion on the Magnum blog.

These are vital debates even if there is no single resolution. My concern here, however, is with how the revolutions in the new media economy provide photojournalism with new opportunities for the future. These opportunities are made clear by thinking about what the changing structure of information does for photojournalism, and this changing structure of information will undoubtedly assist photojournalism in responding to the concerns about aesthetics and coverage of issues. Inspired by the themes of my previous post, we can say at the outset:

• The web is where it is at. Photographers must not ignore the full range of outlets (print media, books, exhibitions etc) but the Internet is the only platform with a growing audience for news stories

• To be on the web means producing multimedia stories. ‘Multimedia’ can mean many things, from simple photo galleries through to stand alone topic sites with stills, audio, video and text together, but it is the combination of sound and image which offers the basis for the most compelling form for storytelling

To say as much is to state the blindingly obvious. Photographers have been using the Internet for years, but what is at stake here is something more than having a shop window on the web. It involves seeing oneself as a publisher of content and a participant in a distributed story, the form of which helps reshape the content of the story. Rather than just producing a single image or small series of images to be sold into another person’s story, multimedia on the web has numerous advantages for visual storytellers:

• It allows photographers to focus on a story, and produce more content with greater control over how those pictures are presented

• While the meaning of visual stories can’t be controlled, they can be directed through the construction of a narrative that draws on sound and text as well as photographs and video

• It potentially overcomes restrictions on getting longer and more complex stories published for a global audience, especially younger generations who do not consume traditional media

• It is an effective response to the conceptual challenge of how to provide context for a photograph

• It can overcomes photojournalism’s objectification of people by giving subjects their own voice

This gels with the changing nature of the atomic unit of the news media discussed in the previous post. Running parallel to a shift from ‘article’ to ‘topic’ will be the move from ‘single picture’ or ‘photo essay’ to ‘visual story’ as part of the multi-dimensional narratives that make up a ‘topic’. Moreover, the visual story will be set in context, linked, updated and distributed across the web.

There are increasing numbers of photographers beginning to work in this way, as sites like Interactive Narratives or KobreGuide demonstrate. However, what I am trying to highlight here is more than a shift from taking stills to producing videos. It is about rethinking the capacity to tell stories in line with what Fred Ritchin calls a “new visual journalism,” which he outlined in greater detail here.

Ritchin has long been a leading proponent on these changes. Back in the early days of the web (1996) he produced what is still one of the most innovative multimedia stories, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” which was organized around Gilles Peress’ photography and published by the New York Times. Ritchin analysed this production in a significant essay called “Witnessing and the Web: An Argument for a New Photojournalism” and has recently developed these ideas in his important book After Photography where he outlines, conceptually and practically, a new practice called “hyperphotography.”

Hyperphotography is a “paradigm shift into another medium, or more precisely into an interactive, networked multimedia, which distances itself from conventional photography” (p. 70). For Ritchin this means “an entire photograph can…serve as a node, a hyperphotograph, an ambiguous, visual, uncaptioned, tantalizing segment of a developing conversation leading, if the reader is willing, to other photographs, other media, other ideas (p. 71). Far from being abstract, Ritchin’s concept has practical pointers on how information can be embedded in images, offering viewers the option of deciding which links they follow in a non-linear fashion.

This move from ‘photojournalism’ to ‘visual journalism,’ from ‘photography’ to ‘hyperphotography’ does not involve either giving up on the still image or abandoning the documentary function of photography. It might employ a variety of new media formats, such as those used by FLYP magazine or the In a City flipbook curated by DJ Clark for the British Council. Whatever its exact form, it uses the power of photography to help structure a multi-dimensional story that through its links, context and openness can be a strong form of evidence for the story it wishes to tell.

How are photojournalists going to get paid in these changing times?

We have to constantly revisit this conundrum, but each time we get back to this point we have to remember something very important.

We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.

That means, as mentioned in the previous posts, funding is increasingly going to be indirect. This was confirmed by Stephen Mayes of VII in a an interview headlined “Inventing Twenty-First Century Photojournalism.” Mayes began by stating “as long as any of us thinks that we’re going to make money from selling photographs, I think that we’re going to be in trouble.” Instead he proposed this shift:

[The biggest clients] have been the magazines and newspapers, and I still think that newspapers and magazines will continue to be incredibly important to our profession, but I think where previously we’ve seen magazines and newspapers as clients, I now see them very much as partners. At VII we’ll work with the magazines for distribution, but we’ll work with another party for funding, we may work another party for access and expertise, we may work with another party for technology. So what I find we’re doing increasingly is working on these multi-partnerships, amongst whom it’s hard to see who is the client.

Mayes’ thoughts were reasonably conventional in so far as magazines and newspapers were his primary distributors. Nonetheless, they attracted some outraged comments, with two people alleging that journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject. To which Mayes replied, “it amazes me how this question comes up only when discussing non-publishing partners as though the integrity of the news industry is somehow unquestionable. Like fish in water we often fail to recognize the constraints of our existing media…”

I couldn’t agree more. If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to this absolutism we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.

Nobody works in an ethically pure zone. VII has to face those issues with its sponsorship by Canon, anyone working with an NGO or foundation needs to confront them too, and in accepting a commission from a newspaper or on-line site the same applies. Negotiating those issues requires transparency and reflexivity. Operating in the networked world of social media is one way to achieve that openness and integrity.

In the end, creating unique, quality content in a myriad of multimedia formats is the best way to produce value. We know great imagery on the web can drive traffic to sites and around particular stories, and where there is traffic there will be networks, relationships and the opportunity to find ways to fund that content. This does not mean multimedia, visual journalism or hyperphotography will kill off books, exhibitions and the printed image. But those forms of distribution will comprise only a part of a successful photographers portfolio of activity in the new media economy.

Next…what the new media economy might mean for universities and academic publishing…

It’s worth repeating what I think should be the guiding light for any discussion the new media economy: “the social media revolution…is all about the separation of information from its means of distribution.”

Following this means understanding journalism as information and newspapers as the means of distribution. As such, the death of the latter does not equate to the death of the former. Richard Stacey put it more bluntly – “hitch your fortunes to the information and you will prosper, chain yourself to means of distribution and you will die.”

If we are focused on the nature of the information there are opportunities. If like many of the traditional media companies we are preoccupied with the means of distribution, then there is most certainly a crisis. How, then, can we think about the opportunities and what they mean for the structure of information in the new media economy?

The web changes everything

The revolution in the media economy has few certainties, but one thing is crystal clear when it comes to news coverage – the Internet is the only platform with an audience growing over time.

This growth comes from the new ways people consume information. While traditional sources such as newspapers, analogue TV and radio have declining audiences, the amount of time people spend reading, watching and listening is increasing.  This is driven by the way – as American data shows – “people are relying more heavily…on platforms that can deliver news when audiences want it rather than at appointed times, a sign of a growing ‘on demand’ news culture. People increasingly want the news they want when they want it.” And satisfying that desire can only be achieved digitally.

The revolution, though, involves much more than making information available in a variety of accessible digital formats, as a recent German manifesto on the challenge of the web made clear. (Interestingly, this manifesto was a direct response to the Hamburg Declaration in which traditional news organisation sought to tame the internet through new intellectual property rights to restrict fair use, make people pay for quotes and withhold the ability to link to content).

The web revolution changes the structure of the information that is being provided, and it changes the relationship between the producer and the consumer of that information. As an article in the Columbia Journalism Review recently noted, “the Internet is a medium in the word’s truest sense. It is something that exists in the between. It is connective tissue.” And far from undermining the institutions of democracy, these transformations could be the basis for a more democratic culture.

How is the structure of news information being transformed?

Traditional media deal with news as an information relay. On a daily cycle reporters gather information, construct a story (as an article or an item) before a fixed deadline, then transmit this to readers/viewers/listeners who some time later passively consume the information.

Of course, modern newspapers and television stations compress this cycle with their web versions, electronic comment facilities or rolling news networks, but the overall idea of a story as a discrete thing produced by a deadline remains. As the CJR declared:

News organizations have had trouble adapting to the digital world because they operate under a broadcast sensibility. They produce discrete bits of content—finished products meant for passive consumption.

On-line media changes all that. Some have argued that the “atomic unit” of news media is changing. Marissa Mayer of Google told a US Senate inquiry on the future of journalism “the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article.” This shift mirrored that in music when consumers moved from albums of music to individual downloads, and is driven by the fact that 80% of on-line users find their articles via search engines rather than through the home pages of particular sites.

The web’s challenge to traditional information structures might be more radical than a move from newspaper to article. The atomic unit might be no longer fixed in space as the article, the item, the page or the publication – it could be something that evolves over time via the post, the tweet, the link as a flow or wave of iterations that together produce a story that – like the world it is reporting on – is never finalised.

The changing nature of temporality means that a plural and inherently more democratic approach to news information is now possible. As Charlie Beckett argues, “with the death of the deadline comes multi-dimensional narratives.” Rather than the tired old formula of “he said, she said” journalism we can have competing perspective at the heart of every story.

This means journalism becomes a process rather than a product, and the developing topic rather than the finished story is the new fundament of reporting. As Jeff Jarvis argues, this requires much more than having a list of links to other people’s stuff at the bottom of an on-line article:

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something… It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

There are some small but important practicalities that can achieve this – such as media organizations treating stories as topics under a permanent URL, which Google’s Mayer recommended as a way of constructing a “living story.” With the recent introduction of Fast Flip, a new user interface (UI) for news that aggregates individual articles and web pages via subjects, Google is leading innovation in this area. As Scott Karp argues, this demonstrates once again how traditional media companies are failing to address challenges – new formats for presenting news – that should clearly by their concern:

Most publishers are focused on how to charge for news. But there’s very little talk about how to innovate the packaging of news, much less a new UI for news. There’s very little talk about how people consume news on the web, about the value of aggregating articles from multiple sources, about solving consumers’ problems rather than publishers’ problems.

Most importantly, rethinking the ‘atomic unit’ of information goes beyond any technological issue and changes the nature of reporting.

What does this mean for journalists and editors?

One of the fears flowing from the ‘death of newspapers’ and shift to on-line news platforms is that our capacity to sift important information from unsourced trivia will be lost. In typical fashion, commentators see the end of one thing (stories by authoritative reporters) leading inexorably to its polar opposite (rumours by amateur gossips). It’s dreadfully easy to come up with examples of trash on the Internet and argue that it is therefore an unreliable medium. But, apart from the fact that the traditional news outlets produce more than their fair share of rubbish, there is nothing automatic or inevitable about digital media dumbing down standards of inquiry or reporting. As Taylor Owens and David Eaves make clear in their excellent review of the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media (Missing The Link), the rise of blogging is a boon for good journalism, in part because of the way it makes fact-checking an open source phenomenon that draws on the wisdom of the crowd.

The new structures of distribution affect the structures of information, but they do so by changing rather than eliminating the role of the journalist and editor. This is because the number of people who can write and publish without being filtered out by the mainstream media (as in this blog) is increasing all the time. But even for full-time journalists and editors in established news organisations a change is coming, and understanding their role as being a “curator” is what marks this change.

Instead of thinking as journalists and editors as the privileged insiders revealing secrets in a one-way relationship to their audience, they become those whose experience and knowledge allows them to give context and order to an ever-developing topic. Mindy McAdams has listed seven different practices that might make up this process of curation. In addition to these will be commitment to real openness, in terms of encouraging a real-time dialogue with feedback from the audience, ensuring transparency about sources (without compromising confidents), and tapping into the power and wisdom of readers through “crowd sourcing” exercises (such as The Guardian’s encouragement of its readers to sort through the raw data of politician’s expense claims).

The role of transparency in this new structure of information is vital. Showing how you get the story, and linking to others who have different but relevant aspects of the topic, is the best way to establish credibility and legitimacy for this mode of reporting. Indeed, David Weinberger has gone as far to claim “transparency is the new objectivity.” In the past, media accuracy was achieved by a handful of editors and fact-checkers who verified data, but with thousands of interactive readers function as open source reviewers, this accuracy can only be enhanced through thoughtful curation.

What might a new media organisation look like?

These ideas can guide the structure of a new media organisation, and if we summarise the points above and blend in the thoughts of Emily Bell and Chris Brogan, with a dash of Jeff Jarvis, we get the following pointers:

• The future of journalism is networked not silo’d, it has to be distributed not static, everything is modular, linkable and fluid
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready, and it has to be appropriate for the platform, using any means available which, in the days of Audioboo, flip videos and social networking sties, is pretty much every way
• Stories are points in time, and won’t end at first publication, but become a flow of edits, links, updates, and extensions that together make a topic
• Journalists and editors work as curators, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff. Contributors come in many shapes: paid staff, partner, guest, and conversational
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities, and journalists and editors need the help of communities to build and engage audiences and to break stories
• To be effective and trusted information has to be transparent and open to engagement
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue. Value-add services are another source of funding
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand
• Above all else, produce unique content with clear value – that is, clear social as well as economic value

A final thought about how to fund it

Funding new media organisations remains, so to speak, the million-dollar question. But think about this slide from the Daily Telegraph’s digital editor Edward Roussel, presented at a CUNY conference last November:

It underlines the point from my previous post that if we think about funding in terms of paying for editorial content rather than the entirety of traditional media organisations, where the bulk of the cost goes on printing and distribution, we start with a much smaller need. If an existing news organisation like the New York Times was to be reshaped for a purely digital future, there would still be a major shake-up and much heartbreak, but it wouldn’t be the much-prophesied ‘end of journalism’. Because we are in a revolutionary moment no one knows how the media economy will shake down, but the outcome can be positive for the process of journalism.

Next – what all this might mean for photojournalism…

In a series of four posts, I want to consider the revolution that is reshaping the media economy through which we come to know about the wider world. This first post deals with the reasons for this upheaval and how it is changing the economics of news. Because of the ground to be covered in providing the context of these changes, this will be quite a lengthy discussion.

The second post will look at how the structure of information is changing in this new economy and what it means for the practice of journalism; the third post will ask what these transformation mean for photojournalism; and the fourth post will consider some of the implications for academic publishing. [Update: in December 2009 I added a fifth post on "the pay wall folly for photographers"].

What crisis?

In the US the transformation of the media economy has been mapped on Paper Cuts, which records company closures and job losses in journalism. With high profile newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and Seattle Post Intelligencer giving up print and moving on-line, and the Rocky Mountain News shutting for good after 150 years, the decline of traditional news outlets has been hard to miss. In the UK, the local and regional press has been equally hard hit, with half of that sector facing closure in the next few years. These changes may not be repeated globally, but it is clear the established outlets of the print media economy are vulnerable.

Structural changes or cyclical problems?

Because the upheaval in the print media has coincided with the international financial crisis of September 2008 onwards, we have to ask whether the global recession is to blame, or whether there are larger structural problems in the media economy that are now coming to the fore?

Newspapers have been in decline for a long time. In America, overall circulation (when adjusted for population growth) is “about half of what it was in 1946 and is declining rapidly”. That decline has been constant since the 1960s, when other media, especially television, overtook papers as the primary source of news. The decline in readership by age has been constant for all groups, but given younger generations have always used papers less, there is no prospect of this trend being arrested in the future.

The way papers have been in competition with other forms of media such as television shows that the impact of the Internet on newspapers is not a qualitatively new phenomenon, even though it might be an especially important development. These changes were obvious after the 2008 US presidential election:

For the first time, more Americans are getting their news online than from traditional ink and paper, although the popularity of television still eclipses all other forms of media. In an apparently sharp shift in habits…the number of consumers using the web as a main news source surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers. Television slipped from 74% to 70%.

These structural changes in audience behaviour intersected with changes in media ownership beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. City and regional papers in America were purchased by corporations trading on the stock market, which meant shareholders rather than readers became the primary concern of management. Balancing the books to ensure profit meant that journalism was cut, which in turn accelerated the decline in readership as people went elsewhere for news. In recent times, these corporate strategies have produced a further decline in journalism because servicing the massive debts undertaken to finance new acquisitions has required cost cutting on a grand scale.

The collapse of print advertising revenues during the current recession is regularly cited as a reason for the death of the newspaper. But as Nichols and McChesney have written, this revenue stream has been in long decline too:

Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion’s share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to ‘90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year [2008].

Long-term declines in audience and advertising, constant challenges from other media such as television, all hastened by debt-financed corporate strategies that put profit ahead of journalism, show that changes in the media economy will not be reversed even if the current global recession is followed by a period of renewed economic growth. They also show that the constant sniping at Google and craigslist for ‘killing journalism’ are way wide of the mark, even if both organizations have added to the current pressure on traditional news organizations.

Save newspapers or save journalism?

The current crisis in newspapers has led people to speculate at every opportunity about what strategy, product, technology or unknown revenue stream will “save journalism.” There are two things going on here that need unpacking, because how we approach this question conditions the sort of response we can imagine.

First, there is the assumption that journalism, as routinely practiced in traditional news organisations, is a public good essential to democracy because of its history of challenging authority. To put it mildly, this is viewing things through rose-tinted lenses. It’s easy to think that each and every news organisation is run by people who see Bernstein and Woodward’s pursuit of the Watergate scandal as a template for daily reporting. But recent history suggests that much reporting promotes the interests of those in power (think about The New York Times cozy coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which subsequently prompted an apology of sorts from the paper) or recycles PR material (see Nick Davies critique of “churnalism” in the UK, and the “10 ugly truths about modern journalism.”). For sure, we need critical journalism more than ever, and there are some good existing examples, but overall it is something to create as much as it is something to protect. With survey’s showing Americans barely trust what they read or see, journalism’s belief in its inherent social value is ill-founded and needs to be re-established.

It is important to note there that this faith in the assumed relationship between journalism and democracy comes in part from what Daniel Hallin calls the “high modernist” understanding of journalism as “objective” and “socially responsible.” This journalism ran from the end of World War II until the 1980s, when more partisan and ideological coverage emerged, yet it is now being resurrected as the essential ethos of journalism rather than a historically specific form of the practice. Equally, we should not forget that the idea of objectivity as the defining characteristic of journalism was also central to corporate strategies in the post-war period – the best way to maximise audiences for advertisers was to draw readers in via a promise of non-partisan reporting, because the advertisers’ clients did not want to be associated with controversy.  All of which underscores Hallin’s argument (revisited recently by Jay Rosen) that journalism in recent times has been less about fearless objectivity than producing the “sphere of consensus” for political debate.

Second, there is the assumption that newspapers and journalism are the same thing. While we certainly want to save the good, critical, contextualising bits of journalism, we need to understand the difference between the practice of journalism and the particular modes of its delivery. Saving journalism is not the same as saving newspapers. As Robert Picard has argued:

Many…misunderstand the nature of journalism. It is not a business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead, journalism is an activity. It is a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed, and conveyed. The practices are influenced by the form of media and distribution platform, of course, as well as by financial arrangements that support the journalism. But one should not equate the two.

Journalism was synonymous with newspapers so long as there were no competing media. The advent of radio news in the 1920s and television news in the 1950s broke that link, but the current debate proceeds as though journalism cannot exist without traditional print media organisations. Yet the financial analysts Moody’s have called newspapers a business suffering “structural disconnect” given that only 14% of their operating costs are dedicated to content creation (i.e. journalism) while 70% of costs are consumed by printing, distribution and corporate functions. There is no doubt that legacy organisations like The Guardian or The Washington Post carry important cultural baggage when it comes to producing credible reporting, but their journalism can be delivered to audiences much more cheaply and effectively through a variety of media, as is now the case with web sites, podcasts and the like.

This highlights what is most significant about new technologies in the evolving media economy. As Richard Stacey has observed, “the social media revolution…is all about the separation of information from its means of distribution.” Journalism is the information and newspapers are the means of distribution. The death of the latter does not equate to the death of the former.

How do we fund the good stuff?

The Internet has solved the problem of distribution and collapsed the cost of printing (assuming widespread access to broadband, which is not something that can always be assumed), making almost everyone a potential media outlet. Plenty of people are making money from the web (especially pornographers), but how can this new technology of distribution be used to fund the public information we need? While good journalism has been under financial pressure for the past thirty years, how can the social media future be leveraged to support investigative work?

The first thing that is necessary in answering this is to resist the temptation (again) to look back on an allegedly golden age that has been lost. We have to recognise that news and probing journalism has never made money by itself in order to pay for itself. We should not, therefore, be judging the social media future for reporting via the flawed assumption that we are looking for a business model that will do what has never previously been done.

We have to recognise that the media in the twentieth century has always been corporate, and that journalism has always been funded indirectly. Oliviero Toscani once noted that editorial was “the advertising of advertising,” the content which drew in the readership to view the material the advertisers paid for, thereby indirectly subsidising that information. The idea of a newspaper as a publication containing everything from comics to sport scores to political analysis to clothing advertisements was simply a function of those ads requiring a large print format that was expensive. Clay Shirkey has put it succinctly by noting:

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The search for new business models for news is occupying the minds of people much more knowledgeable than me. However, from reading recent debates it is pretty clear that the new model will in fact be a series of diverse models producing revenue indirectly. As John Temple, the last editor of the Rocky Mountain News has declared, news organisations do not make money from news; news is the ‘brand’ for the organisation and the money comes from relationships and services only indirectly related to journalism.

When it comes to the question of how to ‘monetise’ journalism on the web, everyone is talking about “pay walls” – especially now that Rupert Murdoch has flagged his intention to introduce them on all his publications in the next year. However, a large number of commentators and publishers believe they are not the answer. Why are pay walls not the future solution to funding journalism?

This has been a raging debate in the last year – see this huge selection of recent articles and posts from a short time – but there are few if any examples of enterprises successfully restricting the openness of the web. This is because the Internet, and the link in particular, has fundamentally changed the structure of the information economy, enabling a distributed and collaborative conversation happening in different places at different times (think about the composition of this post and the links it employs, for example). If people using the web by following links come up against a pay wall – part of a site that demands a small payment or subscription for access to a piece of information – nine times out of ten they will go somewhere else where information is free and accessible. The result is that the information behind the pay wall is cut off from the audience and the developing conversation, and the author of that restricted information has had their public impact curtailed.

How do we know comprehensive pay walls don’t work for most news journalism? Take the web site that emerged in the wake of the Rocky Mountain News closing. InDenverTimes.com needed 50,000 subscribers paying only $5/month to support their operation. The RMN had 210,000 subscribers before it closed so this seemed reasonable – yet only 3,000 of those individuals were willing to go on-line and pay for the new site’s content. In contrast, think of how The New York Times ended its TimesSelect subscription in October 2007 and saw its web traffic increase by 40% as a result (thereby making its columnist’s views part of the public conversation and boosting advertising revenue through a larger audience).

Even if we leave aside the larger questions of participation in the new link economy, a rough analysis of a pay wall for Murdoch’s paper The Times suggests the economics don’t make sense. A common assumption for any business offering free versus paid versions is that only about 10% of the customer basis will migrate from the free to the paid. If 10% of Times readers were willing to pay, it is estimated they would generate between £4-8 million/year (excluding the administrative cost of running the on-line payment system). Given that the paper probably earns about £45 million in digital advertising, and that this amount would decline sharply with the lost audience who refuse to cross the paywall, thereby wiping out the revenue generated by the subscription if not much more, the value of the exercise seems dubious. And for a media company that has £445 million in revenue and £51 million in losses, the gain of £4 million+ seems hardly worth the effort even if there were no associated losses. On a different scale, a recent review of small-town American papers that have instituted some form of on-line charging, usually to protect print editions, shows mixed results, with declines in on-line audiences. It is therefore no wonder that most publishers “fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.”

Comprehensive pay walls might work if every single credible news organisation erected one at the same time, but that isn’t going to happen. In the UK The Guardian declared it will not follow Murdoch down the subscription route (partly because they recall the American audience they created while TimesSelect was in place), the BBC will always have news free for global users (albeit paid for by the indirect subscription of the license fee in Britain), and National Public Radio will continue to offer its 26 million listeners quality programming without direct payment (NPR’s executive director recently called the desire for pay walls a “mass delusion” of the media industry).

The desire to make pay walls a key strategy in the new media economy is historically odd given that news organisations have never relied on subscriptions for the majority of their revenues. As a rule only 20% of newspaper revenues have come from subscriptions with 80% from advertising. That means even if pay walls were somehow successful it would only ever be a very small success on the road to funding journalism. And as the only beneficial pay walls are likely to be small and partial – as part of a “freemium” strategy that leaves general news open to all while restricting access to premium content – the revenue they produce is likely to be even smaller.

A common response to this argument is to highlight the small number of successful instances of subscription, such as the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal or a consumer publication like Which in the UK. However, what these outlets have in common is that they offer subscribers sensitive information with financial benefits (often paid for by corporate expense accounts) or, in the case of Which, they provide impartiality through advertisement-free reports. And if someone argues that micropayments for individual news stories might be a better approach than a comprehensive pay wall then — aside from questioning the idea there can be an ‘iTunes for news’ — we should ask if this is a good scenario: would journalists like their proprietors to judge the quality of their work by the number of consumers who had purchased their writing? Would serious investigative journalism compete well in an environment where pageview bonuses (like those at Gawker) were in operation?

That leaves funding journalism back in the troubled world of advertising, which as noted above, has been declining in print media for a long time. In the early days of the on-line revolution, it was hoped the vast amount of web traffic (“unique users”) going to sites would provide the basis for a new advertising model for the Internet. In part this has occurred, and on-line advertising remains a growth area in percentage terms even during the current recession. The trouble is that the values of this advertising is small, perhaps one-tenth of the print sector it is replacing. Except for Google and its distributed mode of advertising, “print dollars are replaced by mere online dimes” [Jarvis, What Would Google Do, p.125].

So neither pay walls nor advertising are the answer; what then? As noted above, instead of a single business model for journalism emerging, we are going to see a series of diverse models producing revenue indirectly (see the example of one profitable blog, Techdirt, here). And that will bring journalism into line with other digital industries. Take music for example – it is rumoured that only 10% of U2’s revenue comes from its songs/albums. The bulk comes from concerts, merchandising, video games, advertising, sponsorship and any number of other sources. It’s going to take some creative accounting, but funding good investigative journalism will only be as difficult as it has always been, and largely achieved indirectly.

Next…what all this means for the structure of information and the practice of journalistic inquiry in the new media economy…

(These thoughts stem in large part from my presentations on ‘the political economy of multimedia’ made to the MA Photography programme at the Dalian College of Image Art, China, in June 2008 and July 2009. I am indebted to Dave Clark for making those presentations possible, and for our on-going conversation on these issues.)