Harlan Ellison can rant - Part 2

Although this opens up a giant can of worms in regard to creative piracy, napster and intellectual property, the free movement of information over the internet is also what's damaging the journalism industry so much right now. Yes, many newspapers had grown bloated newsroom staffs that were probably due for some cuts, but the massive layoffs that have been going on for the past few months, are also about how the product created by these newspapers is being distributed. There is massive overhead involved in sending reporters to cover everything from town hall meetings to wars in the Middle East, which is no great revelation. However, while so many blogger-cum-citizen-journalists are touting themselves as the future, many are reliant on links back to work of these reporters for their information. So should they pay royalties to the paper to link to content, the same way other media pays to license music? It would be nice, but is probably unrealistic.

There are those who will argue that the traffic driven to these sites is valuable to the papers because it allows them to justify online advertising...that's sort of true, except that the rates for online ads isn't a fraction of what print ads generate revenue wise, so we're back to square one...If the papers/magazines/etc start charging for online content they've given away for free, then everyone will get into a big uproar about the buying the cow when the milk used to be free, but if these publications can't figure out a way to continue providing adequate professional journalism without earnings reports that look like one of The Big Three, then how will we know what is going on at everything from City Council meetings to wars in the Middle East?

I don't want to demean bloggers as journalists here...there are some truly talented writers moving to online formats, especially for political coverage and entertainment, however, I don't think there's a blog yet with the budget to send qualified journalists to cover international issues. Plus, while numerous blogs have sprouted to cover things that are fun to talk about (culture, politics, etc), what blogger is going to step up and say 'yeah, I'll go cover the PTA meetings, the small town borough council meetings and all the other mundane events handled by a rookie general assignment reporter.' These aren't the places filled with issues that people necessarily want to discuss, but at the same time, it's important that those events remain covered because they are important to people on a local level.

The scary thing is that this issue is going to get very real for people pretty quickly, and some cities could be without a newspaper by 2010.