- David Winer Image via Wikipedia
David Winer (inventor of RSS, weblogs, podcasting, outlining, Rex Longobardorum, Dux Austriae, et Imperator Romanorum) revives his older idea of turning big corporate news sites into news services of a different kind, which would focus on the broadest coverage of sources and trends, rather than on filtering reality according to editoral whims. Does this mean that newpapers should become franchises, just like McDonalds?
Let us start with David Winer’s argument.
I say that nothing appears on the pages of the NYT until a reporter at the Times has an epiphany about it. Saul says: “And isn’t that what the Times is supposed to be?”
To which I resond: Emphatically, no. The Times is supposed to capture the events of our times. Hence its name. If it had been meant to capture the epiphanies of a few reporters, it might have been called “Our Epiphanies” and the motto might be “All the things that occur to us, when they occur to us, and not a moment before.”
The conversation, mentioned on the Scripting news and debated in a podcast with Jay Rose and Saul Hansell, raises a different question, which I would call it “the intellectual commerce” question. Specifically, the question asks which model should media follow: the wholesale/franchise or the retail one? Should vertically newspapers be integrated or distributed/virtual news organizations?
What Winer is suggesting is that the Times should ultimately (and at the end of an evolutionary process) go wholesale. It should cease being a retail shop and even less a supermarket. Now, what should it be? A franchise like Pizza Hut? Journalists should work in networked packs, supported by the NYT organization with logos, some web-site support and design, ad sales, and a wire service ? The only problem with this model is that many journalists would not like this very much. Job security, prestige and ability to stand up to big governmental and corporate interests would simply vanish. (I can see the the headlines already “Should journalism jobs be listed next to short-order cook positions wanted?” There is power (and resilience) in aggregating many individual actors into an organizational monolith.
On the other hand, what Winer proposes would make a lot of economic sense but in a different way. His ideas would be in tune with Coase‘s argument about the nature of the firm, with a caveat. Yes, it is true that when transaction costs for gathering and spreading the news drop to such a degree that the competition nips at the heels of MSM, it is time for this media to re-engineer corporate news and divest of middle management and ancillary services… However, this is not to say that they need or should divest or core competencies, which are related to producing a certain type of news, which guarantee a certain type of trust and most important a standard of quality.
