One of the more prominent slogans under which the Cybervangelists have rallied in the past decade is "Information wants to be free." The arguments for it are compelling; the spread of knowledge is notoriously hard to prevent and in general costs of it have been steadily falling since the Renaissance.
However, despite what the those heralds would like to believe, there remains a very real cost of creating information. It takes time. It takes plane tickets and video cameras and food. These things have costs, and, until the Singularity strikes, they will continue to have costs.
People in the news business are having to subsist on ever shrinking budgets because of the death of advertising and the dwindling of their subscriber bases. Free web access to content is taking its toll. Even services that were designed to extract some revenue from online customers, like Hulu, are still not good enough. We are all witnesses to the slow, agonizing death spirals of the media.
There are many who applaud the death of these giants. They rightly point out the dangerous power that these behemoths toss around, as anyone who observes political debate in the United States well knows. But it is important to remember that there wasn't always a scary oligopoly over information like we have now. There used to be scores of quality news sources where now there are only a handful, perhaps two.
We see hundreds of news sources out there, sure. But how many of them are really good sources? Free of biases, able to gather information spanning wide categories, well-written, accountable. Like I said, a handful.
Here's the problem: while the "visionaries" were prophesying the Internet as a place where anyone could have access to anything for absolutely no cost besides bandwidth transit, they failed to take in to account that the web was freeloading off of the rest of the world. Newspapers and magazines could afford to put free content on the web because most of their readers had subscriptions or bought off of newsstands. Business was good, no harm in letting the people have a virtual version as well, right?
Unfortunately, it blew up in their faces. The Internet, as it turned out, was a really big deal. Seeing content available for free online, subscribers and especially newstand buyers bolted. Revenues plummeted and as a result, now even The New York Times is planning to charge readers for access to online content.
But this isn't going to work out well, either. The lion's share of readers will pick up and start grabbing all of their news from whatever sources remain free to browse, and the Times will continue to atrophy. At some point this trend will level off, but by that time it will be too late. All of the attraction that the Times had will be too expensive to maintain, and the glory days will be over.
People don't want to pay for what they used to get for free. It seems wrong, economically, and so they will leave. Most people are rather indiscriminate about their information sources, so the great objective giants of news and knowledge will wither and die. Within a decade or so, "truth" will be a very rare commodity indeed.