The superhighway of information has a toll

[Commentary] Newspapers and other news publishers are increasingly targeting smaller, more affluent audiences, impelled not by governments, but by their own economics. For years, digital news conformed to one section of the 1984 prophecy of the technology guru Stewart Brand – that “information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower.” Now, it is relying on his other, lesser-known maxim – that “information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

As paywalls go up, and advertising yields continue to fall, publishers have pinned their hopes on subscriptions. I don’t see why publishers have an ethical duty not to charge for the content they originate. Free news is a recent phenomenon. Newspaper publishers always charged readers, albeit a small amount compared with the cost of newsgathering. Furthermore, nothing will change the fact that people have access to far more information than before the internet. News cannot be patented – once information is uncovered, it spreads rapidly across Twitter and Facebook, and is repeated by rivals and aggregators. Should we be worried? The risk is that news will become slanted in the interests of corporations and the wealthy. So far, there isn’t much sign of that. The news organizations best placed to prosper from the shift – Bloomberg, Reuters, the FT, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist – have high standards. Indeed, the shift towards subscriptions could raise editorial standards, rather than lowering them. Free sites that need to boost page views to gain advertising have an incentive to go downmarket with more gossip and celebrity news; the ones that rely more on subscriptions have the reverse incentive. But the fading era of advertising-subsidized newspapers and free-to-air television was at least democratic. At relatively low cost, everyone could be well informed. In the future, the information superhighway will have both fast and slow lanes.