

Clay Shirky: Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom to Replace Newspapers - skmurphy
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/clay-shirky-let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-to-replace-newspapers-dont-build-a-paywall-around-a-public-good/

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skmurphy
Interesting exchange in the Q&A

Student: How does The Economist model fit into your thesis, I guess? Because
they’re actually growing, aren’t they?

Shirky: They are growing. So the one big asterisk to the value-of-sharing
model is financial news, because financial news is not valuable the larger the
audience is. It’s, in fact, valuable the smaller the audience is. I don’t want
my mom reading what I know about IBM until I get my trades in. And so, a
paywall damages general news and benefits financial news. And it is no
accident that the three great models of pay walls are The Wall Street Journal,
The Financial Times, and The Economist. Because although they have general
interest sections, they are all, at base, niche publications for traders and
business people.

