Egnaro TV

This is the title of an interview on Salon.com with Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired. First off, it's hard for me to take anything Anderson says too seriously given his magazine was once the tome of the digital generation and is now mostly a pile of ads targeted at upper class business guys and stories trying to sell them on stuff and the latest business trends. To be fair, wired.com is still one of the best sites out there with a load of diverse content. Back to the point of this post…

I'm pretty sure Anderson has no idea what he's talking about after reading this interview. He opens the interview saying "I don't use the word 'media'" and then as @Heather_R points out, uses it 6 times in the interview. When asked if he miss the existance of major newspapers Anderson says no because he doesn't go to them to get his news, he goes to Twitter, preferring to just look at content filtered by those he follows. Where does that content his fellow tweeters post come from though? From major news outlets mostly. And this is the thing that irks me most about people declaring that we don't need major news organizations and trained journalists anymore.

While the average blogger/tweeter/photographer does a great job at getting news tidbits out to the world in near real-time rarely do they do the sort of follow-up investigation into the stories that a journalist would. Nor do they have the experience or historical knowledge of related stories to help put their words into context. When's the last time your neighbour hopped on a flight to Iraq to blog about the war and post some pictures to Flickr – and Joe the Plumber doesn't count? True, some of the best reports are those coming from the citizens in a region, like the recent turmoil in Iran but there is still a place and a need for our reporters to cover these stories too. An Iranian blogger can't help us understand what role the Canadian government could play in a situation.

Once Anderson is done delcaring the irrelevance of current forms of news reporting – while still hinting that he actually reads this stuff but is really just too lazy to source it himself – he moves on to "free", also the title of his new book. There's a tie here to my post yesterday. Anderson is all too keen to tell you about how great it is that he's giving away a digital version of his book for free but then acknowledges that he has to charge for the hardcover and audio cassette versions. What he doesn't acknowledge is that the digital version costs money too. Hosting digital files and transmitting them through the tubes isn't free, therefore his book sales are in some way subsidizing the free version. I'm also sure Anderson doesn't live in an abandoned shack in the woods and has bills to pay. Being the editor at Wired probably affords him some play room to do work and not get paid for it but writing a book is no quick task and I'm sure he, like anyone else, wants to be compensated for his time. 

By the time I was done reading this interview I realized that Chris Anderson really has very little to contribute. His support of 'free' everything is really just a description of the current wild state of the web while he clearly acknowledges we need new business models but offers nothing in the way of suggestions at what those might be. Anderson declares that "free is the force of gravity", a force we can't fight, that once people get some thing free they will always want it free. Yet this is clearly not true. At the start of the decade millions of people were downloading pirated music all around the world and P2P was the way of the future. What we've seen since then is the emergance of iTunes, eMusic, Pandora, Last.fm and a host of other great sources for music online. Filling the demand for music, these services are seeing huge success and shock of all shocks, people are paying for music again! (Read more on this trend over at Mark Evans' blog)

It sure seems easy to declare that "free" is the future and that "media" and "journalism" are dying when you work for one of the largest ad supported magazines and websites in the world. The only thing that Anderson gets right is that the traditional web banner is broken. It doesn't deliver enough value. We need to figure this out so we can start seeing the kind of spending on the web that we use to see in print.