Notes on Nicholas Carr

I just caught up with an older Nicholas Carr post from February on the pos­si­bil­ity that micro­pay­ments might save the busi­ness side of jour­nal­ism. Carr says that, as things are now, micro­pay­ments aren’t the answer. Patience is.

He spends part of his essay debunk­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ties peo­ple have tried to draw between the suc­cess­ful iTunes store and pos­si­ble small-payment sys­tems for news. You can’t apply the iTunes men­tal­ity to news arti­cles, he writes, because buy­ing a song is far dif­fer­ent from buy­ing a bit of news.

Most news sto­ries, for one thing, are tran­si­tory, dis­pos­able things. That makes them very dif­fer­ent from songs, which we buy because we want to “own” them, to have the abil­ity to play them over and over again. We don’t want to own news sto­ries; we just want to read them or glance over them. Hawking sto­ries piece­meal is a harder sell than hawk­ing tunes; the has­sle fac­tor is more dif­fi­cult to overcome.

News sto­ries are fun­gi­ble, Carr writes, mean­ing basi­cally that one is as good as another. That’s not the case with music, and that unique­ness lends songs value that arti­cles do not have. On top of that, the news becomes out­dated very quickly, erod­ing most of its value.

As a side note, Patrick Thornton has some good money-related argu­ments against the iTunes model that put another nail in that cof­fin. For a dose of the other side, Marc Glasberg, CEO of the micropayment/subscription startup Icents has some hit-and-miss argu­ments for such a pay­ment sys­tem.

Micropayments may be out, but Carr believes that the days of peo­ple pay­ing for news are not gone. They are merely on a market-induced hiatus.

Right now, “sup­ply so far exceeds demand that the price of news has dropped to zero.” This, Carr says, is a dis­tor­tion in the news mar­ket, caused by the mas­sive impact of new online tech­nolo­gies. Carr writes:

Now here’s what a lot of peo­ple seem to for­get: Excess pro­duc­tion capac­ity goes away, par­tic­u­larly when that capac­ity con­sists not of cap­i­tal but of peo­ple. Supply and demand, even­tu­ally and often painfully, come back into some sort of bal­ance. Newspapers have, with good rea­son, been pulling their hair out over the demand side of the busi­ness, where a lot of their prod­uct has, for the time being, lost its mon­e­tary value. But the solu­tion to their dilemma actu­ally lies on the pro­duc­tion side: par­tic­u­larly, the rad­i­cal con­sol­i­da­tion and rad­i­cal reduc­tion of capacity.

Once the world of jour­nal­ism shrinks enough, it will become prof­itable again, Carr argues. Then the users had bet­ter watch out! The pro­duc­ers will regain their power and show us what’s what — by pry­ing open our wallets.

Carr dis­misses writ­ers like Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis, who argue that some­thing has changed sig­nif­i­cantly and irre­versibly about the way peo­ple find and con­sume news. For Carr, the cri­sis affect­ing the news busi­ness is a tem­po­rary affair, the good times will return. It’s just a mat­ter of time.

To say that things will recover from this mar­ket slump in more or less the same form as before the com­mu­ni­ca­tion rev­o­lu­tion is the same as say­ing that the acad­emy shook out the same way after the tran­si­tion from oral to lit­er­ate soci­ety. It’s the same as say­ing that books held the same power after they could be cheaply mass pro­duced as they did when they had to be labo­ri­ously copied by hand.

The Web is main­stream (to use a sexy phrase: it’s hit a tip­ping point), and its effect on the part of soci­ety that has access to it, and even on the peo­ple who don’t, is as fun­da­men­tal to our culture.

This is phi­los­o­phy, and it’s not directly applic­a­ble to jour­nal­ism, true. But we can’t ignore the immen­sity of the cur­rent com­mu­ni­ca­tions rev­o­lu­tion. And it’s naive to think that things will go back to the way they were with­out sig­nif­i­cant change.