“It’s so simple today, when I see my son doing … “. Which journalist hasn’t heard this sentence from one of his bosses, at the turn of the millennium, who confuses tool with craft, content with container, substance with form, production with distribution?
Until the end of the 20th century, the media industry did not have to ask itself the question of the economic model. But the digital revolution will soon sweep everything away. The migration of advertising to the web, the offer of “free” newspapers (by the media companies themselves!) have shaken up media economics as much as consumer habits.
The press bosses of the last century did not understand that the Internet and the convergence of digital tools were anything other than illusory gains in productivity. In the most foolish way, many managers persisted at the turn of the millennium in a strategy that went contrary to common sense: tomorrow, they thought, every journalist will know how to do everything: text, radio, television, photography. To the detriment of investigation and reporting, the very essence of information was considered too expensive.
Fifteen years later, due to savings and redundancy plans, the reliable media have been reduced to the bare essentials, thousands have disappeared. The result was a dizzying drop in the quality of information as thousands of professional journalists lost or left their jobs, replaced by the improvised online content of “citizen journalists”, blogs, opinions, sites spreading theories of suspicion or simply repeating the first two paragraphs of agency reports. All this free of charge.
Free of charge is an addictive drug whose withdrawal has become crucial. Real information costs money. Sending journalists into the field, recruiting gifted people, speaking languages, being capable of knowing areas at a level of expertise, capable of vulgarising and simply explaining complex issues to everyone, maintaining a newsroom, an infrastructure, premises, paying salaries, all of this costs money. Reliable and useful information costs money.
What models should be invented to restore viable information, useful to all, desirable information? No longer the crumbled information that drops randomly from algorithmic calculations on a Facebook page, but information chosen and shared by its audience, capable of feeding the democratic debate? Hundreds of avenues are being explored, ranging from the pure and simple abandonment of paper to online information, against payment or free of charge if one manages to find sponsors. The participatory model, shareholding and patronage work as well, but always in a rationale of inherent precariousness in this field. After all, in its history, the primary purpose of information has never been to make money. Information has never been profitable. But past models may have shown that a good source of information, a wide audience, can make (some) money or not lose too much. That is the price of information: priceless.
