Im out in the sailboat reading a couple of newspapers from yesterday and the day before. A couple of different articles caught my eye. One of them is by Thomas E Patterson, media researcher at Harvard university. In the article, he talks about the future of the newspapers, or rather the production of news in general. Print media is in a crisis, more so in the US than in Sweden, but it is only a matter of time before we have the same situation here. One of his points is that quality news reporting is produced by the newspapers, and thus the newspaper crisis is really a crisis not so much for the papers but for the production of news in general and ultimately for our democracy.
Well – perhaps. But something tells me that a world of information liberty and low cost for production and distribution should tell a different story than that of LESS quality information. From a birds eye perspective it just doesn’t make sense that removing the need for expensive equipment and institutional organization should lower quality of the output. What WOULD have this effect is if the demand for such quality information is really much lower than what we have believed earlier, and that people have just read quality news because it was the only product available. If this is the case, lower quality news reporting will be the inevitable outcome. It’s just evolution. But I find that hard to believe. Sure, perhaps we’ll have a period of bad news reporting, people taking advantage of this, causing for example democracy trouble, but as long as we keep the internet free and uncensored, this pendulum will swing back. It always does. Sometimes violently. Let’s hope that this will not be the case, but I think the real danger isn’t the death of an outdated business model, but legislation threatening internet liberty, such as the the Swedish FRA- and IPRED-laws and the French HADOPI variety.