People like to obtain information as entertainment, as a pure consumer good. Conceptually, one might think that an individual would assign a value to each news item in the set mentioned above. If we consider all the people in a specific market, then, there is a distribution of total consumer value over the set of news items.
In addition to the information we like to obtain, there is the information that we ought to obtain. As citizens we might not like to read about foreign affairs and economic affairs, but with that information we are better voters, better investors, better economic actors, etc. Again, for any individual we might consider a distribution of "investment" values over the set of news items, and for the population of a media market, a distribution of total investment value.
I suspect that we overspend on information as entertainment and underspend on information as investment. Such decisions are partly the result of our monkey nature, but are also cultural. One would hope for cultural change that increases our willingness to spend on investment news and perhaps also to decrease our willingness to spend on entertainment news. Our education systems, including not only schools but all the means of lifelong learning, ought to help us to make that cultural change.
There are real costs involved in the creation of information. It is more expensive to make a news story about the war in Afghanistan than it is to make a news story about a local press conference.
There are sources willing to subsidize the distribution of information. Advertizers for example, are willing to subidize the distribution of information about their products. For any individual subsidizer, there is a distribution of willingness to pay for the set of news items. For a given market, there is a distribution of total willingness to pay.
Conceptually, then, each story in the set of stories can be characterized by a value which is the sum of the entertainment value plus the investment value plus the subsidy value minus the cost of creating the story.
A successful newspaper, magazine, television station, etc. bundles a set of items such that the total willingness to pay exceeds the total cost of production and dissemination of the news.
The Internet now changes the size of markets and the costs of dissemination of information. It also changes the bundling. We can Google a specific item and obtain it from cyberspace rather than scan the newspaper for the item or wait for it to arrive from the evening news. We get advertizements attached to our emails so the subsidies are changing.
One aspect of media regulation is to help encourage the creation and dissemination of information people need to know rather than merely information that they want to know. Similarly, an aspect of professionalism in journalism is standing up for the dissemination of information people ought to know rather than letting the medium be swamped by information people want to know.
The institutionalization of these cultural systems to assure we get the information we need and ought to know will take a while. Lets hope that that institutionalization survives and overcomes the institutionalization of systems that pander to what we want to know but don't need to know.
If one looks at the relative coverage of Michael Jackson versus the Iraq war, it is not clear that the right institutions are winnong. And Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is the most trusted news source in the United States!
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