Google has taught the world that great things can be free. More than any other company, Google’s existential and commercial constitution holds that information should be free to Internet readers, in exchange for some amount of advertising revenue.

But even Google cannot give us a free lunch.  The costs of this Google-culture shift are appearing, and they are heavy.  Newspapers across the country are imploding as they fail to replace lost subscription, classifieds, and print advertising revenue with online eyeballs dollars.  Efforts to impose subscription fees on Internet readers have met with protest, scorn, or reader disappearance.

It’s not all Google’s fault.  Newspapers–and TV and radio–have been slow to change.  Cross-linking among sites, which generates strong search engine ranking, has come only lately to newspaper webpages.  Traditional news media have likewise only recently started to make their pages “persistent”–so that they stay up on the web permanently–which adds to search visibility over time.  (Both of these “rules” of Internet life were created, basically, by Google.)

But the expectation that “information must be free” is an article of faith among the Internet generation.  This is a fatal problem for journalism.  Someone has to pay reporters and editors.  Online advertising revenue isn’t enough: according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, half of newspaper readers reach their content via the web, but newspapers generate less than 10% of their revenue from the Internet.  That’s a formula for impending doom.  The media industry is laying off heavily.  According to the News Cycle blog, over the past 16 months, 27,000 newspaper employees have lost their jobs.  When the economy comes back, some advertising revenue will return, but most of the papers will be gone, and the higher advertising rates won’t be sufficient to bring them back.

True, bloggers and amateur journalists are filling some of the void (see the citation in the previous paragraph).  But it doesn’t take a genius to observe that bloggers are simply not subject to the same tenets that the formal editorial process demands.  Moreover, the economic threat of liability for libelous publications has long imposed on professional outlets incentives to get their stories right.  By contrast, nearly all bloggers have small enough incomes to be judgment proof, or they are anonymous, so the barrier to suing them is much higher.  The net result is a lower quality of reporting and fact-finding.

Not all the papers will die.  The top five in the US will most likely thrive.  This may guarantee excellent coverage of New York, LA, Washington, Chicago, Wall Street, national politics, business, and global affairs.  Very local police blotters may continue to blot.  But who will cover Newark, St. Louis, Boston with regularity and care?  What about the smaller cities?  Who will gather sources and data for small stories that later make up the infrastructure supporting the larger, trendline stories that reach across towns, states, and decades?

Hope springs eternal.  The new website True/Slant is intelligently mashing up economic features of traditional publishing, Digg, Arts & Letters Daily, and pay-for-play blogging to seek revenues.  The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post are creatively tying long-term subscription revenue to technology hardware purchases in a deal struck with Amazon for discounted Kindles.  David Carr recently suggested in the New York Times that the SEC should hire out-of-work investigative journalists to boost their fact-finding powers.   News-gathering agencies seem to be considering, at long last, endowing themselves with long-term foundation-style support.  Maybe enhanced feature sets like very-first-look breaking news feeds and searchable archive access will yield unexpected sources of revenue: Walter Isaacson has suggested that readers should pay for pieces that are costly to report.  Americans find ways to fill vacuums, so there’s always reason for optimism, but, at scale, good reporting needs to be financially incentivized, and we haven’t yet found solutions.

And what happens if the reporting doesn’t get done?  The quality of information will decline over time.  The relatively good information gathered, analyzed, and published by professional organizations will be replaced with relatively bad information from unedited and consequence-free sources.  Google will continue to do what it does best: find and present massive amounts of data to consumers hungry for information.  But Google will, increasingly, be finding speculation, innuendo, sloppy reporting, and falsehood.  It will not be finding the truth.

We’ll be seeing more stories like this.

How does the minute-to-minute upkeep of electronic activity assist and hurt us?  A main empirical question for the coming few years.

Congresswoman Linda Sanchez of California is showing leadership on the issues of cyber-bullying and -victimization.  Reputation.com applauds Congresswoman Sanchez and her co-sponsors for demonstrating their interest in opening the debate on the topic of Internet abuse.  We fully support the rights of all Americans to free speech, as guaranteed by our Constitution. We also observe that the rights to be private and free from abuse (i.e. free from intrusion on your rights, including through forms of abuse that have never been protected by the Constitution) have long been protected by our institutions, laws, and mores.  Lawmakers must strike the right balance between these essential values.  The bill sponsored by Congresswoman Sanchez (H.R. 6123) may be the first federal attempt to examine the question whether the congressional laws now governing the web — enacted chiefly in the mid- to late-1990s — are still the right fit for the Internet.  Though the shape of this bill may not be the one we’d envision (there are good reasons to believe the wording and scope of this bill are less than ideal), it deserves attention as a signal that lawmakers are becoming increasingly aware of the immaturity and possible inadequacy of the legislation in this space.  It is critically important not to overreach in creating law in this area, but it is also important not to imagine that the status quo (without emendation through, perhaps modest judicial interpretation or modest legislation) is absolutely perfect.

The full text of her proposal may be viewed here.

And further information is available here.

M.P. McQueen has this interesting article on bloggers, media insurance, and civil lawsuits in the Wall Street Journal.  Shout-out to the Berkman Center at HLS, too.

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “information wants to be free” is an “expression that has come to be the unofficial motto of the free content movement.”  Much of what we do at Reputation.com has to do with this concept. Do we as a society and as individuals really want every type of information to be visible to anyone, at any time? Do we want our medical history, phone numbers, old addresses and private photos to be  as readily accessible as, say, who played third base for the Red Sox in 1912? (The answer to this question is found below).

I recently read a couple of books that, specifically speaking in one case and broadly speaking in another, illustrate the narrative of information’s wanting to be free (in the sense of freely available), and the potentially history-altering or life-changing consequences that may arrive when it is.

The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Hershel Shanks tells the story of the battle to wrest access over the Scrolls, discovered in the early 1950s, from an exclusionary group of scholars who more or less refused to publish or grant access to them for decades.  It also offers a precis of the potential religious and historical significance the scrolls, including possible redefinition of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.  Even though the Scrolls represented the most significant biblical archaeological find of the 20th century, the scholars who worked on deciphering them declined to publish their findings or even more than very narrowly disseminate facsimiles of the primary materials for a startlingly long time.  It was not till Shanks and a handful of others forced the hands of the scholars that the world finally was able to see the scrolls for themselves.  Now, thanks to their good efforts and the power of the Internet, together with the work of places like the Library of Congress, we can all see detailed images of the scrolls themselves, at any time, wherever we are in the world.

The publication of the primary material of scrolls has generated a massive bibliography and new fields of scholarship (including one called Qumran Studies, after the location of the scrolls’ discovery).  In this case, information really did want to be free, and it took the hard work of a dedicated group of people to make it free.

Still, it seems, there are persistent and, according to Shanks, apparently plausible rumors of other intact Dead Sea Scrolls that are circulating in private hands around the world.  The information bound up in these items, should they exist, needs to be set free through their publication, so that a more complete picture of this historical time can continue to be assembled.  Even more scrolls are expected to be lurking in caves around Qumran the entrances to which have been covered up by earthquake over the millennia.

Gunther Grass’s memoir Peeling the Onion gets at the theme of information freedom differently.  Grass, a Nobel prize winning German author, has been writing for more than half a century, during which time he has been an outspoken literary and activist left-of-center critic of Germany’s Nazi past, of its collective guilt, and of insufficient transparency and penance among the German people for their participation in the Holocaust and in the other crimes of the Third Reich.  In the mid-1980s, he attacked President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl for visiting a cemetery than included Waffen graves.  He was often described as–and seems to have been comfortable with the appellation–one of Germany’s chief moral authorities.

However, in 2006, it was revealed that Grass had himself been a member of the Waffen-SS.  He joined when he was 17.  Spiegel Online confirmed the basic facts of this story through the publication of several historical records.  Grass published Peeling the Onion that year.  While it purports to be a memoir of his life, or at least the first few decades of it, more or less up to the time he started writing The Tin Drum, one can’t help but get the feeling that he wrote it as an apologia pro sua Waffen vita.  In one long stretch of the book–the longest and most detailed piece of it, at least as my memory serves me as I write this–he makes himself out to be a coward (but only just) in World War II.  He runs away, he doesn’t know how to use a gun, he fears for his life, he soils himself, he spends time in a POW camp, etc..  It comes across, after all the nouns and verbs, as an attempt to explain away the significance of his fighting for the Reich and his subsequent decades of hiding it.  Was he really a Nazi?  This seems very unlikely.  But it did seem to me that, burdened by his secret and the gap between his public persona and his private history, and perhaps also worried that the information about his past would eventually want to be free, Grass set out to cast it in the most luminous and best-shaped bronze he could.

As a book, Peeling the Onion is also a powerful literary biography of a man who must be one of the most highly literate writers now living.  Grass gives us the source material from his life experiences of some of his brightly vivid major and minor characters.  I am guessing that the memoir will be used as some sort of key to unlock his novels and plays by Grass scholars for many years to come.  I also doubt that Grass’s past will obliterate entirely my own view of his writing (The Meeting at Telgte is outstanding). But in the end, I don’t think I will cherish this memoir.

Two books about information that, we might say, should be free.

(The answer to the question who played third base for Red Sox in 1912 is Larry Gardner. This is the kind of obscure piece of information that becomes immediately accessible on the Internet, through a single search on a major search engine.  I’ll be revisiting what we might call the Larry Gardner Theory of the Internet in future writings).