In the long ago days – say 25 years ago – news was a daily affair and it was consumed in tightly controlled, pre-packaged formats. People read their newspapers and watched the local and national nightly news. The truly committed also read a newsweekly or two and maybe even *gasp* the WSJ or NYT. What wasn’t reported in the newspaper on Thursday or on the nightly news that night just wasn’t news until Friday.

Everyone received the same news influx for almost no cost. TV news was over the air and free to anyone with an antenna and a TV set. Local papers averaged $0.25 to $0.50 per day off the shelf and less than $8.00/month on a subscription. Those crazy people who subscribed to Time or the WSJ, well, they were paying some bucks, but they were definitely not the majority of the news-consuming public. People didn’t pay to be informed. And “being informed” simply meant you’d been exposed to the same news stories that the rest of the people around you had consumed through the limited means possible. A news baseline existed for most of the population. So essentially, most people weren’t willing to pay to just ante into the knowledge game.

Nothing has changed, even though everything is different.

Think about that… cable news, the internet, blogging, citizen journalism, Twitter, real time news feeds: the methodology of delivery is different and the resources (time, talent, money) dedicated to gathering news are much expanded; but my local news is still available over the air for free and my local newspaper still costs a negligible amount. I may pay for access to the ‘net, but my news sources on it, Twitter, blogs, Google Reader… are all free. And I could go to the library or other public access point and get informed.

What have people always paid for? To be entertained. And I don’t mean any stupid hybridization like “infotainment” or “edutainment”. In a developed society, people EXPECT to be informed. It’s perceived as a right of the people and the mission of news gathering… like a higher purpose akin to medical care. Why would anyone pay for something they feel is a right? They won’t. With a few rare exceptions, this is why news subscription sites don’t work. Unless the news is specialized enough to be valuable as knowledge currency (insider information status as opposed to generally being informed), it’s not perceived as being worth paying for.

What I wonder is why magazines, who are already in the specialized information curation business, just in an expensive to produce and maintain print format, don’t continue their primary mission (entertainment) and CHARGE for the curation of their own and other’s quality, niche-specific information online. And why newspapers, who are in the public information business, in the same expensive to produce and maintain print format, keep trying to charge me to be generally informed online. If information curation is the next big thing on the internet, the people who’ve been doing it well for decades (think showbiz mags, home decor mags, cooking, parenting, yachting, golf… whatever) should be leading the way.

What do you think? Can magazine companies become curators and charge for content? Would you pay for quality niche-related content? Has that ship sailed… ?

photo credit: Flikr user Bruna Ferrara

image by eric skiff, flikr / used under creative commons 2.0 license

Social media allows good ideas to quickly surface. It also allows – encourages, even – idiocy to surface & spread. Launch a bad idea in a meeting and it will hang out there for a moment and then fall to the floor, with the other chaff, due to lack of support.

No one asks you about it, talks to the boss about it, tells their buddies about it… You hear crickets.
In social media, sometimes it’s the bad ideas that get talked about the most. They are shared & discussed… The opposite of what happens in the real world.

In offline sharing, gravity works as a filter… Good stuff rises, usually, because it takes effort to support it. No one invests effort into things, people or ideas they think are doomed to failure.
Online, gravity isn’t a good filter for ideas… It’s nearly effortless to retweet a link to something bad with a (LOL) or (what were they thinking?) addition. Since online gravity doesn’t pull at us with the same weight, we are willing to fight it for the bad, or worse, the just mediocre ideas.

The danger of living too long in a low-gravity environment has been proven by astronauts… Muscles atrophy, bones weaken. Don’t let the weak online gravity atrophy your mental muscle or your support system.