10 January 2010 — Jazz Versus Metal
Largely due to Rupert Murdoch, the past year has seen more and more people talking about the idea of making newspapers charge for access to online content. I think that there are many reasonable points to be made on both sides, and I'm not really here to weigh in on the issue as a whole, but there are a couple of points I've been thinking about.
To me, the concept of free really breaks down into two separate ideas: something that doesn't charge for use, but uses adverstising to help pay for the running of the website (or newspaper or whatever); versus something that, for lack of a better description, hides its costs from the user. That is, a website that doesn't ask anything of the reader in return. As much as we are used to saying that ad-supported content is free, I think that it's fair to make the distinction, as really the reader is having to pay a price - just a different sort.
Traditional newspapers have always been semi-free, in that the vast majority of the money required to print them comes from advertising, rather than the price the reader has to pay. At the moment, online newspapers are ad-supported, but otherwise free, though this may change. On the other hand, most blogs are completely free, though most very popular blogs have a small advertising presence. As great as they are, would anyone pay directly just to access, say, Kottke, or Daringfireball (two blogs that aren't entirely free, as they feature some advertising)?
The reason why I'm asking this is because newspapers, in their attempt to make their online versions more appealing to an internet audience, tend to feature a lot of blogs themselves, with articles like this one, from the New York Times, about the similarities between Jazz and Metal. As soon as I read this piece it made me angry, but it took me a while to really work out why. It's a reasonable piece, albeit fairly small in scope, and its angle is one that, while not surprising to many Jazz or Metal fans, may be interesting to the casual reader. But it disappointed me, largely because the author seemed uninterested in any sort of research. I wish that he'd interviewed some of the artists he'd mentioned, because he would no doubt have found that, while the audiences may be very different, Jazz artists are often big fans of Metal (possibly vice-versa, but I don't know nearly as many Metal musicians to make a judgement). To me, this sort of light research would have turned the article into something genuinely interesting, and much more insightful.
However, as a blog post, it was no more lightweight than anything on any other blog, such as this. So why the anger? I think because it was a blog attached to the New York Times. It made me wonder, if readers are going to have to start paying to access newspaper content, aren't they going to expect to be of a higher calibre than that found in free - or mostly free - blogs? Or is this the kind of stuff that will always be free, and we'll just have to pay for actual journalism? If that's the case, is that another nail in the coffin of quality arts journalism?