The Future of Newspapers: Posner [The Death of the Internet: PJ]

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week's news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

[PJ: With all due respect, this misdiagnoses the problem, which is that Craigslist took away the want ads that supported newspapers. And a major cost of print newspapers is printing and distribution, not journalist salaries. Get rid of the first two, and you can afford the journalists, if you can figure out a way to replace the want ads. It isn't free online content that is destroying newspapers. It's free want ads. And if they'd figured out how the Internet works, they could have prevented Craigslist, by offering it themselves. It's just too late to ask the world to pretend that the Internet wasn't invented yet. It was. Judge Posner's suggested relief would actually harm the Internet, and the damage would be not just massive but total. Linking is what happens on the Internet. It's foundational. His relief would replace the Internet with something else entirely, and if that is the solution, perhaps it's time to rethink. The Internet wasn't invented for money making. It's not all it's for. And if the newspapers want a non-destructive way to test Posner's theory of creating artificial demand, why not stop providing content online and provide it only in print? If he's right, they will prosper. If he's misdiagnosed the problem, then no harm is done to all of us who are not newspapers, which is the majority of the users of the Internet, who are not willing to shut the Internet down just so newspapers can make money.] - Becker-Posner Blog

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