Peter B. Kann, a Pulitzer-wining former CEO of Dow Jones Co., argues that there is a high price to pay for high quality and that online revenue is hardly up to the task.
His post on Wall Street Journal has a motive: The owner of the Journal is about to set loose more firewalls to require users to pay for content. Kann is arguing that, without some additional revenue, the good work can't continue.
He laments: "There are hundreds upon hundreds of online sites and blogs that claim to provide news, but virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers, which is to invest in professional staffs dispersed around a community and across the country or the globe to cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events."
In his view, the nature of quality requires a quantity of revenue. "So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public."
His post on Wall Street Journal has a motive: The owner of the Journal is about to set loose more firewalls to require users to pay for content. Kann is arguing that, without some additional revenue, the good work can't continue.
He laments: "There are hundreds upon hundreds of online sites and blogs that claim to provide news, but virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers, which is to invest in professional staffs dispersed around a community and across the country or the globe to cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events."
In his view, the nature of quality requires a quantity of revenue. "So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public."
