Lunatic idea
by
Marcel Van Silfhout |
Everything is being copy-pasted for free in the World Wide Web
Hard to say if it’s bitter or funny, but the fact is, the slogan of the free journal, The Press (De Pers) couldn’t be more precise. It’s for free, but it’s not cheap. This sentence is the perfect satirical summary for the current economic misery. The deep wisdom behind this slogan is just a brilliant coincidence, but afterwards the free journal in The Netherlands indeed appeared not to be cheap at all. The Press is fully broke. Last week the paper disappeared. The idea that it’s possible to deliver quality journalism for free, was as dangerously lunatic as it was expensive. There ain’t no free lunch, as there isn’t a quality press for free either.
With a loss of about 60 million euro in five years, the end of ‘the experiment’ isn’t a surprise. Lars Anderson, a former journalist from The Press said it right when he made his painful, but adequate conclusion: “The downfall of this paper is the best what could have happened to journalism.” The experiment succeeded, the patient dead. Now, consider this: the patient wasn’t this paper, but the whole range of quality newspapers in Holland. As a matter of fact, quality journalism itself in The Netherlands was and still is at stake due to an unfair competition with free papers and free blogs which shamelessly copy paste all that’s fit to print.
At first The Press was only one out of four free papers in The Netherlands. Actually, it was the most adorable of them. Unlike the other three, this paper didn’t copypaste existing news from news agencies and so on, but delivered the real thing: original stories written by excellent journalists who are free to decide what they wanted to write about. The Press was a sympathetic rebellion trying to battle copycats and the passionless, superficial news industry with labour-intensive quality-journalism. But here’s the real drama: When even quality journalism can be delivered ‘for free’, what’s the media profession worth? What’s the message? Is journalism that cheap? Can we get it for free? Ah, why should we pay for the other papers? It will end up with this remark: ‘Why should we have journalists anyway?’
It’s exactly what journalist Anderson wrote in an opinion piece in a quality newspaper to digest the loss of his former job: “ Today, five years after launching The Press, the quality media still haven’t found a business model on how to earn money in a Web-based society. But one thing we do know: For free isn’t the answer, it undermines everything what decent journalism stands for. Please, in heaven’s name, let that awareness return in the world of journalism.”
This message should be heard even beyond the sector of journalism. At the start of the World Wide Web a parasite went into the blood vessels of our economy with the idea it’s all for free on the Web - books, films, music, whatever. People working in the creative sector were the first to pay the bitter price: They have less or even no income left for their creativity and ‘old-school’ crafts. Simply due to the fact that the World Wide Web has become a world of copy-pasting it all for free, digital perhaps, but still a brand new form of robbery.
The strange thing is, there are economic laws which have forbidden the dumping of cheap products in order to prevent someone destroying existing markets on purpose. But no one ever complains about this form of destruction. The ultimate form of dumping is to throw new shoes to the people for free. Who will pay for a new pair of shoes if this would happen?
In the past we had journalism and we had advertisements, living apart or next to each other as different branches in the same company. Today journalism merely has become ‘the other side of commercials, advertising and advertorials’. Now, in the midst of a devastating economic crisis, there is not much advertising left, leaving journalism behind as ‘something not paid for.’ The last remaining question is, who will pay the price for a world without journalists? That, of course, is the real thing. It will be a world we can’t comprehend, an indefinable misty ‘society’ with only worthless fact free if not flat earth news. You’d better ask yourself the question: Is this for free?
Oman Tribune
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