Intellectual Property Law

What is the Value of News?

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

Daily Kos posted a think piece this weekend. The essay argues that big media have, in effect, caused their own devaluation. That is, the "amateurish" state of news on the Web is not really due to the proliferation of bloggers or non-authority sources such as Wikipedia. This is the thesis advanced by Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur. Instead, the problem is that there has been a systematic attack on big news sources once considered reliable (CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, etc.) by forces such as talk radio and Fox News.

It's no coincidence that these latter are by and large right-wing, and Daily Kos is itself quite left-wing. However, that doesn't make the argument necessarily wrong. Just something more to think about.

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on April 14, 2008 (boomark / email).