Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom.

The article posted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had so much good material in it.  Below are several excerpts I pulled out, along with my thoughts (in blue) on the findings. 

If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models.
I wonder if the new freedom that audience members have been granted to communicate with each other more readily via the internet, etc has kept the newsmakers in check?  If more people have access to the news, and are talking about it, it functions as a checks & balances for newsmakers.

The most important thing about the relationship between advertising and journalism is that there isn’t one. The link between advertiser and publisher isn’t a partnership, it’s a sales transaction, one in which the publisher has (or had) the upper hand. The essential source of advertiser subsidy is lack of choice; so long as businesses have to rely on publishers to get seen, publishers can use the proceeds to pay for journalism, regardless of advertiser preference. 


The American public has never paid full freight for the news gathering done in our name. It has always been underwritten by sources other than the readers, listeners or viewers.
What do they mean - "done in our name"?  I understand that a lot of the news is paid for by sponsors, holding companies, etc.  If the news adopted a model where the public funds the news creation - would it change?

The internet wrecks vertical integration, because everyone pays for the infrastructure, then everyone gets to use it. The audience remains more than willing to pay for reproduction and distribution, but now we pay Dell for computers, Canon for printers, and Verizon for delivery, rather than paying Conde Nast, Hearst or Tribune Co. for all those services in a bundle.
So instead of spending money to have the paper delivered each day, we spend money on the hardware and products like computers that we use to get the news.  Why would this wreck vertical integration.  Couldn't you still target people based on interest? 

When people want to read on paper, we are increasingly printing it ourselves, at a miniature press three feet away, on demand, rather than paying someone else to print it, 20 miles away, yesterday.
I wonder how many people are printing out articles?  As mentioned in class last week, I once read a study that talked about how most people learned to learn using paper - books, worksheets, etc. This means that for them to fully absorb information it is best if it is printed out.  I wonder if this will change in the coming decades, since children these days are doing so much learning on computers at such a young age.  

Publishers also typically engage in horizontal integration, bundling hard news with horoscopes, gossip, recipes, sports. Simple inertia meant anyone who had tuned into a broadcast or picked up a publication for one particular story would keep watching or reading whatever else was in the bundle....The web wrecks horizontal integration. Prior to the web, having a dozen good-but-not-great stories in one bundle used to be enough to keep someone from hunting for the dozen best stories in a dozen different publications. 
So the web is not good for vertical or horizontal integration.  This is because people can pick and choose the information they want to access, and have so many more options for media consumption.

The spread of social media has created a new category of ads that are tied to media without subsidizing the creation of content.
I take this to mean that ads on the internet, directly benefit the provider or host of the news information - which can just be a platform that sources news media from multiple different sources.  Thus the ad revenue doesnt directly influence the reporter out in the field.  It can influence the type our quality of stories a platform can buy/publish, but not necessarily the actual reporting.  

The article has lot of great information - hope to read some more of it later.