Matthew Ingram wrote a piece today that raises an issue that we’ve also become more and more aware of – the shoddy state of online news.. Matthew was talking about the way Techmeme attracts volumes of PR regurgitating clamp-ons to every story, and – in my opinion anyway – the stories themselves are increasingly “PR product pimp” driven – shiny gadgets etc rather than the harder analytics.

The above 4×4 matrix serves as an attempt to explain what seems to be the dynamic today, albeit a bit simply. Mainstream media has (had?) a combination of revenues from subscriptions through classifieds to pure Ad funding, which allowed them to run independent “hard” news as well as the good old PR pimps etc – and even there they typically used to put in at least some analysis and balance.

The Internet is different. The dream was that it would free up chained content providers and a utopian cornucopia of content would flow. The reality, as Matthew is articulating, is that there is a huge amount of crap, and its (probably) getting crapper. There are 2 main reasons for this we can see:

(i) Direct Economics – the money comes from Advertising and PR – but the Internet Ads are based on clicks or direct relevance – so they reward focus on stuff that (a) drives traffic and (b) drives purchasing behaviour. There is an extra cost to providing higher quality “hard” analysis, but the last thing a PR pimp wants is a good, hard, honest look at the shiny shiny thing they’re flogging. No, they want the mass clamp ons, the uncritical praise, the hype merchanting. Thats where the funding will go / is going, and those that pay the piper……. so even the “hard analysis” will increasingly be “Spinalysis”. You’ve seen it all before elsewhere, I know, but that just reinforces the proof.

(ii) “Indirect” Economics – In any market when there is little (or no) economic benefit to providing quality, cr*p drives out good quality products, and it gets even worse. This is a fairly well known economic law. In this case, as everything is near free if it is uncritical and on message, its clear that “hard” and “off message” stuff will wither on the newsvine

But, I hear you cry, what of the gentle readers – they will go elsewhere, to better, nicer content. To this I riposte that if that were true, we firstly wouldn’t have the current emerging situation and secondly who, precisely will pay for the right stuff?

So how does this trend get reversed?

- One way is to get “high end” advertising to sponsor a higher quality type of content, reaching higher quality people (ie fewer of them, but higher disposable income)

- Finding a way to attract subscription to desirable content. At the moment, the dilemma is no one will subscribe unless they know the quality is good, but to show people the goods before subscription risks copying and distribution by content piracy.

Given that the latter has proven extremely difficult to date, then the formers is probably the only viable option today except for very niche content, but even then many of those advertisers will want to steer clear of very contentious stories – the true independent hard edge stuff – hence, in this model, the sort of journalism that made the Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post etc famous is likely to be consigned to the Online Deadpool. The only other hopes are legislation and “forced subscription”

- Legislation that puts a floor on the level of cr*p players can sink to

- Ironically, tax funded services – such as the BBC – have a saviour role here, simply because they can afford to produce a higher quality online content than the “commercial” market can afford, they will potentially drive some of the cr*p out the market simply by giving a large enough bunch of users an alternative source.

Sadly of course, in many subjects people want prejudices confirmed rather than balanced reporting, so the forces pulling towards a race to the bottom are still fairly strong.

By the way, this is where I read Jeff Jarvis’s diatribe against the Ad Anti Trust with some amazement – as a newshound who is watching his industry being ripped apart by precisely these commercial dynamics I am somewhat surprised he is against an investigation into anticompetitive pressures and any attempts to force competition back into this market.