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Eric Schmidt’s 5-10 year view on news
I think there's a continuum from scarce to infinite, so at some point you have to draw a line and say everything on the left is free and everything on the right is increasingly valuable. I would think this line depends on your funding situation, the ease of adoption of your product, etc.
I'm David Cohn - the director of spot.us. We are still in the early stages and won't be ready until the fall, but wanted to thank you for interest in what we are doing. It certainly will be interesting to explore how we can pay for quality content with the model of "community funded reporting."
After we launch in full in the fall - we will find out more. IT certainly is an issue that needs to be explored and figured out.
Onward!!!!
The idea for spot.us is that if the group of funders is diverse enough - then the journalist is not beholden to any one of them. Take our recently funded SF Election Truthiness Campaign: wiki.spot.us/election
It was funded by 73 different people. I'm sure some of those people have their political bias' - but because it was a diverse group the reporter was literally commissioned by the public - and is responsible only to report in as straightforward a manner as possible.
As for journalism being an unglamorous job. That might be true. Guess what - it's a job. All jobs can suck at times. Spot.Us isn't trying to turn journalism into a day at the park. We imagine that most of the pitches are going to come from recently laid-off journalists. These people know exactly how unglamorous journalism can be.
Big ask - given the evidence of the past where this is dominated by special interest groups, I'm dubious that this will change much.
The issue with Mike's hypothesis on Techdirt is he doesn't work through the implication of re-setting the overall market size if the infinite good is set to zero.