Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple, speaking on Tuesday 1 June 2010 at the D8 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.:
“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press. Some of these newspapers and the news gathering editorial organizations are really important. I don’t want to see ourselves descend into a nation of bloggers, myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. So anything that we can do to help The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new methods of expression so that they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their news gathering organizations intact, I’m all for. What we have to do is to figure out a way for people to start paying for this hard-earned content and so this provides us with a potential opportunity that provides even more value than just a web page, and start to charge a little bit for that. I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charged traditionally for print, because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery. And to charge a reasonable price and to go for volume. Because I think people are willing to pay for content.”
Responding to Jobs, John Battelle of Federated Media points out correctly that the United States started out as a nation of bloggers — pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. But I believe Jobs is speaking about the need for trained news media. Half a dozen self-branded, self-monetizing bloggers and journalists per city cannot keep tabs on city, county and state government; health departments; the school board; the police, sheriff’s and state highway departments; municipal, local, state and federal courts; chemical plants; regional real-estate development, and other society-shaping organizations. A credible news source like The Economist requires a disciplined, well-trained community of journalists. As citizens, we need full-time professionals to monitor these processes on local, state, federal and global levels.
Video clip from the D8: All Things Digital conference.
Above, photograph of Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal and Steve Jobs of Apple from the Flickr photostream of Minami Kazuya.
