Margo Kingston
Thursday, 1 September 2005 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eMargo Kingston goes it alone after falling out with Fairfax press. She has become disillusioned with big media and wants to restore respect to journalists. She is running an experiment to get a truly free press running on the net. I know it already exists, but she wants to do it in a way that produces an income for journalists.
http://margokingston.typepad.com/
She was interviewed on the Media Report on Radio National this morning.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/default.htm
(Transcript and downloadable audio will be up there tomorrow.)
On rethinking, she seems a little elitist. Granted that some people are better journalists than others, but it may be that the shift required is that the 'source' for news might not be able to be restricted to a few very able people anymore. Journalists, as a group, have betrayed the public. Regaining trust might be more difficult than divorcing from their previous owners.
I wonder what will be the fallout for the creative professions.
The net is wonderful and allows us to distribute our wares for free, but this undoes the major model for making an income. Up till now value and payment resulted from scarcity. If something was scarce it became valuable. If something was freely available everywhere then it was worth nothing. Intrinsic value is almost devoid of meaning in a monetary economy. How do you get money in a system that relies on scarcity if you are eliminating scarcity?
LiveJournal is one of the examples of how this can be done. LJ is free, yet many people choose to pay. (I do when I have surplus funds.) The open source movement has produced a lot of examples of free wares that generate money. It can be done. It is not easy to see how it can extend to all the creative professions though.
http://margokingston.typepad.com/
She was interviewed on the Media Report on Radio National this morning.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/mediarpt/default.htm
(Transcript and downloadable audio will be up there tomorrow.)
On rethinking, she seems a little elitist. Granted that some people are better journalists than others, but it may be that the shift required is that the 'source' for news might not be able to be restricted to a few very able people anymore. Journalists, as a group, have betrayed the public. Regaining trust might be more difficult than divorcing from their previous owners.
I wonder what will be the fallout for the creative professions.
The net is wonderful and allows us to distribute our wares for free, but this undoes the major model for making an income. Up till now value and payment resulted from scarcity. If something was scarce it became valuable. If something was freely available everywhere then it was worth nothing. Intrinsic value is almost devoid of meaning in a monetary economy. How do you get money in a system that relies on scarcity if you are eliminating scarcity?
LiveJournal is one of the examples of how this can be done. LJ is free, yet many people choose to pay. (I do when I have surplus funds.) The open source movement has produced a lot of examples of free wares that generate money. It can be done. It is not easy to see how it can extend to all the creative professions though.