Information

At a Hacker's conference in 1984, American writer Stewart Brand said 'Information wants to be free.' Brand is also the founder of the WELL, an early version of the internet.

Brand says that over time the cost of disseminating information continues to go down, but information is naturally expensive because of its value. What we characterized in class as being the demise of print journalism could possibly be seen as the rise of freer information. Anyone with an internet connection is able to connect to loads of news and information, which allows citizens who would have otherwise been at the mercy of one news organization to diversify and develop their own opinions about the information they consume.

OK. For those that feel the death of print news is tragic because you are going to miss that feeling of having a paper in your hand: do you think farmers miss that 'ole nostalgic feel' of spending 18 hours a day farming their fields with a horse driven plow? The newspaper is archaic when compared to the internet, and to be perfectly honest I can't believe it has even made it to 2010.

For some reason the 'death of newspapers' conversation is attached to the 'death of reading news' issue. People aren't reading newspapers because they understand the value of the internet. Morons aren't reading their news whatsoever because they would rather watch TV. (Says the guy who has CNN on his TV while posting to this blog).

Either way, I think newspapers are dying because they are printing newspapers. If a news organization stopped buying paper, ink, printers and stopped paying for delivery service, I bet they could save some money for more servers. But oh no!! Can America ever be the same without their classic and trusty paper boys?? Change is hard!! The same types of complaints were being made when slavery was coming to an end.

The changes that news organizations are going through aren't easy, change is hard, I guess. But it seems once things change, people have an impossible time of going back to the way they were. Which is why I'll never pay for a classified ad ever in my life. Thanks to Craigslist.

I think a lot can be learned from Craigslist, whether you're a news organization or just any individual. Their aim to stay small and not seek to maximize profits has drawn some scrutiny from the business community, but hasn't put them out of business.

"As it turns out if you're not in the business of maximizing profit, there's all kinds of functions that you no longer need like sales, marketing, business development, etc. The amount of revenue we make is absolutely insignificant compared to the money taken in by the other large sites, but it's certainly significant for a small company of 23 employees....It's just not attractive to trade away a service that means a lot to us in exchange for putting some extra zeros on our bank account that likely we would never have an actual use for. ''

Definitely doesn't sound like anything that would come out of Rupert Murdoch's mouth, now does it?

Maybe that's why newspapers are dying.

-Ryan Nofsinger