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Yesterday London’s main daily newspaper, The Evening Standard, reduced its price from 50p to zero. Libby Purves, who hosts Radio 4’s excellent Midweek, used the opportunity to weigh in on the Free debate in yesterday’s Times:
Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh.
Full article: If the future’s worth having, it won’t be free
This is very much in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell’s book review in the New Yorker (where the illustration is from) of Chris Anderson’s book, Free.
Both Purves and Gladwell maintain that the advertising industry simply isn’t big enough to support expensive content such as investigative journalism. Anderson on the other hand maintains that in the future, most things will be free for the consumer and funded by advertising.
On both sides of the argument, the debate seems to be based more on dogma than data. Where is the emperical data that shows whether the ad industry can or cannot support a future of free? It would be refreshing if the debate would become more rigorous and scientific rather than being based on gut instict.
