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Just read an interesting item in the July 20, 2009 Fortune Magazine on page 60 entitled, "No Free Lunch" (not available online at the Fortune Magazine web site when this entry was written). It concerned the now famous Stewart Brand quote about the freedom of information.

In 1984 at the first "Hackers Conference," Stewart Brand, famous also for the Whole Earth Catalog, stated, "information wants to be free" which is widely quoted as a call for free distribution of all information. Brand's actual statement was, however, far more ambiguous. He actually said in fuller context, "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you just have these two fighting against each other."

In response, Steve Wozniak, the not so good dancer on Dancing with the Stars and co-founder of Apple Computer, replied to Brand that "Information should be free, but your time should not."

It seems like Wozniak captured more of the notional reality than Stewart Brand. While laws that protect intellectual property continue to create value in certain types of information and creative content, the reality is that this capture is less complete and shorter in duration than ever because of various technological tools.

As the value of information and creative content has itself declined, the value of interacting with the actual creator of the content seems to have gone up. For example, musicians are getting less and less value from their recorded music and more and more value from their live performances. The same trend also seems to impact on book authors and speaking engagements.

This dovetails nicely with Wozniak's comment that information should be free, but not ones time. While we may see a pull back in the years ahead from "free information" as we know it on the web today, the long term trend is pretty clear. Information and creative content are going to remain in a protected form that can be directly monetized for a shorter and shorter period of time.

The business and social cycle that turns most manufactured goods and most services into a commodity over time and which also tends to move most creative content over time into the public domain of free things is growing shorter and shorter. In contrast, the value of human input and attention measured as the time a person invests in a productive activity continues to exist at some level in the economic system and is likely to endure. In some sense, this reality is almost medieval and speaks to a time when the value of a guildsman or craftsman was at its highest. Of course, we have a completely different kind of guildsman today. All of the vocations that were performed by guildsman in medieval times are now performed by mechanical devices and a new type of guildsman is emerging with a different set of skills such as the design and development of software and web platforms.

As businessmen, we will over the long run have to adapt to this "retro-" reality. 

Erich P. Rapp.

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As Louisiana becomes a hub in the next few years for the development of software, mobile applications and web platforms, I am wondering what value can Louisiana digital interactive media developers bring to the industry. One area that desperately needs to be addressed is the news media and journalism.

It is no secret to anyone that is conscious that the industry that delivers news to the public is struggling to find a profitable business model in the digital media age. Where is this industry heading and can developers in Louisiana add value to the evolution.

Perhaps, the Politico.com web site and the story behind it present a glimpse of the business techniques that will govern the future of journalism and news delivery.

The first and foremost Politico.com business concept that stands out to me is volume of content and extreme detail about a relatively narrow (at least for a newspaper) subject. It's hard to imagine any traditional media source providing as much detailed and essentially real time data about politics in Washington DC. While the Federal Register provides a great deal of detail about federal action, its not anything close to "real time" and it is completely devoid of the human component. Politico is the federal register of politics using a Twitter model without the 140 character limit and a huge mix of gossipy human stuff. No one but a reporter at Politico could possibly want to know this much about politics in Washington DC. 

And yet, I am told that Politico is profitable and widely read. That is more than the New York Times can say at least as to the profitable part. All of this suggests that no matter how much detail one provides about politics in Washington DC, there is at least some audience for it. It also suggests that if you can place an enormous amount of entertaining (at least to someone) political information in a digital setting at a low enough cost , the business can pay for itself with advertising. The delivery of news has a "long tail" component. 

The August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine contains an article entitled, Politico's Washington Coup which describes the Politico story in some detail. If you want a sense of the future of journalism, this article is a good read.

This may hold some promise for local newspapers. The key to the future for local newspapers may be more information. Adding more stories in a digital format does not cost as much as adding more pages for more stories in a printed newspaper. The specialty for the local paper is local news. Local news is as to your local newspaper as Washington politics is as to Politico. It seems like the local newspapers need to go more local with everything, e.g., more local business news, more local society and social event news, and more local entertainment news. Change the emphasis from the AP news feed to everything local with the names of as many local people printed in the newspaper as possible.

Digital interactive media developers in Louisiana need to partner with traditional media organizations to build a better news delivery device using Louisiana's digital media tax credits incentive program.

Erich P Rapp.

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Digital Interactive Media including Twitter and YouTube are fueling and energizing a popular uprising in Iran. While traditional media operations face official steps attempting to thwart their reporting in Iran, the enormous number of informal social media "journalists" are shooting video of protests from their cell phones that is then posted on YouTube and Twitter and posting reports about protests in real time on Twitter. These activities seem to be energizing the uprising in Iran. Wow!!! Digital Interactive Media in the form of social media networks has come of age. 

Critics keep suggesting that Twitter may never make any money, but imagine how one would feel if their web platform was supporting a popular uprising against an illegitimate government that is part of a repressive regime. Money may not be everything. Congratulations to the owners of Twitter. Their web platform may facilitate the reform of the Iranian government that many years of United States government pressure has failed to do.

Some of the related stories can be found at Iran's Twitter Revolution on the Nation web site and also on the New York Times web site in the article entitled, In Iran, Iron Cleric, Now Blinking. These events in Iran are a huge step forward for the role and relevance of digital interactive media in the form of social media networks. It is a revolution - - - In this case, literally.

Erich P Rapp.

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The future of journalism is online interactive and hyperlocal. Printed newspapers across the United States are under extraordinary financial pressure. Some industry experts expect that a large U.S. city will be without a major daily printed newspaper within the next few months.

This leaves the old news media industry wondering how online news outlets will profitably deliver the news to the public. Recent years have seen a rise in blogging, but this vehicle seems short of professional text based journalism that the public expects. In many instances, blogging is either a democratization of editorial writing or alternatively a filtering or re-posting of professional journalism found in the existing major news sources. Blogging alone does not seem to be a substitute for professional text based journalism. Instead, blogging seems more like an enhancement or extension of the reach of professional text based journalism.

The New York Times published an article by Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone on Sunday April 12, 2009 entitled, Hyperlocal web sites deliver news without newspapers. The article concerns a number of web sites focused on publishing content on events at the neighborhood level in an effort to access the solely local advertising dollar. Such sites have achieved limited success so far, but experimentation with variations on them continues. The hyperlocal news report delivered online at relatively low cost seems like the "Long Tail" of journalism, and this hyperlocal aspect of news delivery will likely be important in the evolution of any future text based online news delivery model.  

Regardless of the final direction of  text based news delivery in the future. It seems likely that an online model will eventually overtake the printed newspaper as the primary delivery mechanism for such professional journalism.

Erich P. Rapp.

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