The end of the journalists' monopoly

“It's 2010—time to get off of the Titanic and get onto the lifeboats,” Kevin Anderson, the Guardian’s digital research editor, told me. I wasn’t pleased. I thought: ”But the Titanic has an orchestra, a well-stocked bar, fine Egyptian cotton sheets. The lifeboats have nothing but freezing cold water.” I was at an event at the Frontline Club which sought to ask how the news industry will survive the next decade. Will the internet save it, or kill it? I came out convinced the internet will be good for journalism, but probably be bad for me, a journalist.

For news consumers, the internet rocks. Wikipedia allows us to find out everything about just about anything—no need to take the bus to the British Library. The best writing about the financial crisis hasn’t been from traditional journalists but rather in blogs from academics like Simon Johnson or traders like Barry Ritholtz. Riverbendblog may have been opinionated and occasionally inaccurate, but it gave a better picture of life in Baghdad in the dark days of 2005-06 than any western journalist could. Ten years ago we would not have heard these voices. Now they are omnipresent.



And that is why the internet is bad for us journalists. It used to be hard to get published. We used to have a limited number of newspapers, magazines, television stations. If you worked for one of them, you had a guaranteed audience, which meant your editors could pay you a decent wage, fly you halfway around the world and put you up in a nice hotel. Today the internet allows anyone with any interest to get his work into the public eye. Naturally, market share has splintered and industry profits are down.

Kevin Anderson continued: “You used to be able to charge monopoly rents. No more.” And it's undeniably true: the internet has removed barriers to entry and so democratised the industry. With YouTube, everybody can be a director. With Wordpress, everybody can be a pundit. When supply goes up, price goes down. Too bad for those of us who used to be directors or pundits. Probably good for the rest of the world.