The days when a select few broadcasters determined what should constitute as news, how news should be distributed, and who should receive news are long in the past. An aspect of today’s journalism has consumers deciding how news should be distributed, who should receive news and, most importantly to the professional journalist, for what compensation to the creator of the content.
Although the reason why many journalists choose to be journalists is the active, engaging, inspirational aspect of the profession, to put it plainly, it is nice to be able to feed yourself from time to time. With the emergence of digital information, ripping, remixing, and publishing information is easy for a consumer to carry out with only a few clicks of the mouse. Napster, one of the first file sharing programs to become popular and legal, basically offered free music to the consumer by ripping songs and albums off of the internet.
Advertisement for Napster on NASDAQ sign in Time Square (2004)
However, the producers are starting to catch on. Now Napster offers only a 7-day trial, after that it is $14.95 a month, money going to the people who created the content. Although Napster primarily concerns the exploitation of the music industry, the copyright infringement problem is involved. Edward Felton, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, sees the problem of infringement as the “irresistible force of changing technology hitting the immovable object of copyright policy”.
A study done by Felton found that 50 percent of the movie industry’s revenue in 2000 came from pre-recorded video. The shift from analog recording to digital was the reason for such a large percentage. With digital recording practices, audio, images, videos, and documents are all constructed by a sequence of digits, making it easy to reproduce. The internet itself is a digital database or network.
If the journalist is to be a producer, he must think like a consumer. As the line between producer and consumer thins with the progression of interactivity and Web 2.0, the journalist must remain professional. There will be times when he is jipped or not given credit for his work but he can not stoop down to the level of a “freeloader” if the profession is going to maintain its decency.
In the eyes of a journalist, the free-for-all is not good. It takes bread off our table. When information is ripped, remixed, and/or published by an unskilled person it is not legitimate. Not only can it be viewed as stealing but now the information is in the hands of someone untrained to the trade of journalism and can be further distributed in harmful ways.
Although perhaps a little extreme, Felton’s view on the VCR has some truth to it, or at least it provides the somber journalist with a laugh: “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”
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