Quality or Crud: Are you willing to pay?

Anderson references a generation raised on free information.  And while, as a journalist, Anderson's article makes me bristle all over (despite a few very key points), I think that this statement he makes holds some truth: “a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste.” But as I shift through the thousands of opinion blog posts and cat videos on YouTube and the millions and millions of uploads of online content, I start to wonder…is the waste worth it? Are we just cluttering our minds and our devices with this flood of free information that has lost all usefulness and interest? We are angry that the perfect result doesn't come up to the top of our Google inquiry. But we demand endless free information. We get angry when we have to see an ad first.  At the same time, we refuse to pay for quality.  And then we expect the companies who provide it for free to be up to the caliber of subscription-based models. Because we are the greedy “generation raised on the free Web.”

I don’t want to beat a dead horse here.  We have had many discussions in this class that yes, “information wants to be free.” But, no journalists will not work for free. Yes, anyone can start a blog or publish online content. Yes, advertising supports it. Yes, companies can offer 24 news reporting and round the clock information. No, that does not mean all of the content out there will be quality or even true.

There is a lot I could say concerning the plight of poorly paid journalists and how sad poorly reported news makes me.  There is a lot I could say about this whole paragraph of Anderson’s on corporate tech companies who I feel robbed by: “Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this.” ...But I think we have discussed that enough.

I think that Anderson himself actually makes a point that I’m not sure he intended to make…or at least a point that I found more interesting and less infuriating than the rest of his article. “There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later.”

We may not want to pay for reputation, but at some point when we get tired of shift through pages of crap after pages of more crap online (excuse my french), we are willing to pay for quality.  At some point, that Spotify user pays for Premium. At some point, someone who wants to read real news pays for a subscription to the New York Times, or another reputable establishment. Because as great as I think community journalism could be, I do not believe that volunteer writers could ever produce the kind of journalism that changes laws, that affects people, that tells the whole truth, and that inspired me to be a journalist. 

And while information is not as hot of a commodity as it used to be because of it’s abundance, reputable and interesting information to cut through all the crap online IS scarce.  And I think that (to borrow Anderson’s own phrase) the long-tail of people who are willing to pay for quality of sit through that ad to get to the information they enjoy, trust or respect--the information that is worth it to them personally-- that will support the massive weight of the rest of the greedy “information generation.”

I agree with Malcolm Gladwell when he states that, "And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online." They are making money by charging for content. Gladwell also points out the flaws of many of the champions of "free," champions of our generation, like You Tube which has failed to make Google any money.

So I am not sure what the answer is.  But I surely am not going to work for free.  And I am surely not going to accept mediocre content...just because it is free.