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In many cases, content with low appeal to advertisers still adds revenue to the overall website by leading more visitors to pages with higher appeal.

Papiravisenes annonseinntekter og opplagsinntekter står hver for rundt 50 prosent av totalinntektene, mens de digitale inntektene fordeler seg med 99-1 på annonseinntekter og opplagsinntekter.

A fundamental tenet of my Neo-Institutional school is that it doesn’t care about the institution for its own sake, only for the kind of reporting it produces. I can’t say the same for peer-production theorists and their networks.

The irony, though, is that in the second decade of the twenty-first century—thanks in no small part to FON thinkers, including, sad to say, Rosen—journalism is now enslaved to a new system of production. Publishing is now possible all the time and in limitless amounts, forever and ever, amen. And, given the market system, and the way the world is, that which is possible has quickly become imperative. Suddenly, the “god” of the old twenty-four-hour news cycle looks like lovely Aphrodite compared to the remorseless Ares that is the web “production routine.” And this new enslavement—trust me here—hurts readers far more even than it does the reporters who must do the blogging, tweeting, podcasting, commenting, and word-cloud formation until all hours of the day and night. This is why, IMHO, journalism is great these days at incremental news, not so good at stepping back and grabbing hold of the narrative. In some circles, this is frowned upon.

While Shirky says “nothing will work,” the fact is that it’s peer production that isn’t really working for news, while institutions still do.

While hacks fight geeks over who gets to be called a “journalist,” Rosen has it exactly right when he says the answer is: whoever does the work. “In journalism, real authority starts with reporting. Knowing your stuff, mastering your beat, being right on the facts, digging under the surface of things, calling around to find out what happened, verifying what you heard. ‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’ 

But we can see now that the news-as-cheap-commodity argument was all along an ideological one couched in economic terms. The idea that “information wants to be free” (a partial quote of Stewart Brand, who well understood information’s value) was a catechism, a rallying cry, voiced by a certain segment of the digital vanguard. Subscription services, “walls,” don’t fit into a networked vision. It’s worth pointing out that the commodity idea gained traction only because of the generalized collapse of news-business advertising models, a collapse that had nothing to do with editorial models. This isn’t to say that the content was good or not good, only that the collapsing ad model had nothing to do with it.

FON thinkers put forward the idea of news as a commodity, describing it variously as abundant, undifferentiated, and of low value. As a consequence, FON thinking assumes, it won’t ever command much of anything in a market where the costs of distribution are basically zero.

If the argument were that the cost of replicating the news has crashed to zero, that’s one thing. But FON thinkers go further. They assert that news (as opposed to, say, writing about news) is a commodity by its nature.

This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.

The common adversary is the telecom industry. It’s an industry being undermined by the technological change of mobile computing and its profits are up for grabs. Apple and Google have different approaches in implementing this change but in the end they dismantle and absorb profits from the same target.

As West put it, news organizations typically create a disconnect between the people who provide content and the people who discuss that content. This inhibits quality conversation.

According to the BBC, or an editor I talked to there, for people who go to the BBC News website, they on average read 2.5 stories. That’s what a typical visit is: read two or three stories, then go someplace else. Whereas for people who use the BBC iPad app, it’s about six and a half stories. There are similar numbers for National Public Radio, for The New York Times, and others. And this sort of deeper engagement is something news organizations really need to harness.

Whereas I think a lot of news organizations this year are going to start seeing that if they want to be the one source of news for their customers, or the primary source of news for their customers, they’re going to need to present more of the world and more of the online world, and that aggregation of pulling things together will be something they will buy into more.

That’s right. You’re no longer a “user”, a hateful term if ever one were invented, or a “visitor,” or a brother from another digital planet. Overnight, you’re a customer again.

And that’s logical, of course; the most common complaint against digital news being its chaotic nature (and, for that matter, the most commonly accepted assumption about it being that we need better filters to keep it coherent), topic-based journalism makes sense. But it also has a side effect: Because we choose, essentially, topic over time as journalism’s core ordering principle, we don’t generally think about time as an order unto itself. Newness, and nowness, become our default settings, and our default objectives. The “tyranny of recency,” Thompson calls it.