Bill Wasik, the senior editor of Harper’s Magazine, has a lot to say about the Internet’s impact on stories, on their digital life cycle, and about their evolving market value. He briefly touches on the monetization mystery of the written word in a short, 10-minute video on Big Think, in which he suggests that long “stuff” – as he calls the written word here – will have an easier time finding a market than all of the short snippets sprinkled throughout the millions and millions of conversations and observations taking place on the Internet.
Interesting to me was Wasik’s suggestion that technology, like Amazon’s Kindle, would help support and monetize longer format writing. He believes the Kindle will succeed in adding value back to the book-reading experience (and therefore to books themselves) because it gives readers a break from the ongoing distraction of the Internet, even while it relies on the latest digital technology to retrieve content.
With it’s access to more than 360,000 books, magazines, newspapers and blogs, the Kindle is untethered from the Internet, freeing users to replicate the kind relationship with the material that they used to have with their favorite paperback on a rainy day. Everything new is old again.
Even more intriguing was Wasik’s suggestion that the shorter “stuff,” newspaper articles, magazine articles and blogs, will only be monetized after enough of the good ones have failed, leaving readers in a lurch, desperate for good material. He is essentially arguing economics of scarcity; the less we have of something, the more we value it. I hope he’s right. I’m more of a cynic.
I don’t believe we will begin to value the “short stuff” until something tragic happens, some corporate or political scandal resulting in the unnecessary loss of human life. At that point, the public will want to know who to blame. When they find out, the next question will be: Why didn’t we know? The answer, of course, will be that there are no more investigative journalists to do the kind of reporting that would have brought the story, and the culprits, to light. Only in that “aha moment” will the public once again begin to develop a hunger for the kind of journalism that takes time, effort and money.
The Harper Magazine editorial board hit it right on the head, as far as I’m concerned:
• All information is not created equal.
• Expertise is invaluable and should be shared
I would finesse that second point, however, to read:
• Expertise is valuable, should be funded, and should be shared.
Get out your pocket books America, before it’s too late.
