From a who will pay for news piece in the business section of today’s New York Times:
How do you get consumers to pay for something they a have grown used to getting for free?
Some industries have pulled it off. Coca-Cola took tap water, filtered it and called it Dasani, and makes millions of dollars a year…“With bottled water, it’s a kind of snobbery and the percetion of healthiness that they have marketed,” said Priya Raghubir, professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
So, maybe news organization should try filtering their current news offerings to purify them of detritus and then selling the newly-processed product on snob appeal and healthiness (in a world of free-flowing “news,” ours is uniquely good for you)? ABC News goes Aquafina? And who would be the pricey artesian water — the Fiji— of news?
This is disturbing chiefly on the level that it undermines one of the most important ideas behind a free press: it's supposed to make information easily accessible to the public. The bottled water model, if taken a bit father, starts to look dangerous.
Part of Fuji's appeal as "designer" water is that it's too expensive for just anyone to afford. What happens if there are suddenly "designer" news sites? Reliable information that you have to pay through the nose for? The majority of the population -- who are right now suffering from the economy -- literally wouldn't be able to afford staying informed. And then what happens to our democracy, if reliable information is inaccessible to the majority, and only the already rich and powerful are well-informed?
#1 Posted by leems, CJR on Wed 8 Apr 2009 at 10:39 AM