Journalistic goods

46 min readSep 3, 2020

This essay tries to grasp what is the essence of a journalistic goods and what features of it are historically specific.

After reading this text, the reader is able to grasp what is the benefit of looking at the goods produced in journalism; what are their features and what have been their features previously; and how they might change in the future.

Journalistic goods contain intangible information

A few would object that a part of the value journalistic goods contain is in the form of information. But because there is a wide range of desires that many journalistic goods fulfill, it’s less clear what part of value extracted from tangible material and what from immaterial information. Journalistic products tend to have a physical container, such as a newspaper, television set or a mobile phone, but increasingly also this container is intangible and digital. While there still is a material basis for all the digital information in the forms of servers, fiber optic cables and power plants, a few would object that almost all of the actual value of digital journalism as perceived by the consumer is immaterial.

In other words, the value composition of the journalistic good has changed. The change started already with radio and television broadcasts, but during the broadcast era, a significant part of the news production in the media system was still made by newspapers and for print. Alex S. Jones in his book Losing the News in 2009 estimated that 85% of the actual news were provided by newspapers.

Only when the digitization of text to online and on-platform contexts happened, the basis of the previous journalistic business paradigm disappeared. This disappearance happened in multiple ways simultaneously, including but not limited to news gathering, delivery, consumption habits, and packaging. The nature of this transformation on journalism is still, after 20 years, unclear and the transformation is ongoing. Now the old structures exist, but their premises are rotten. It is this unfinished transformation that this text investigates to reveal something about the fundamental nature of journalistic goods.

The following paragraph contains necessary definitions to conduct clear and thorough argumentation in the rest of the text. First, I describe how journalism is currently defined, leaving a door open for a new, more non-historical definition based on the changes of the nature of the product. This new definition is one of the contributions of this text. Second, I explain what goods are and especially how intangible information goods differ from the other goods.

Journalism

Journalism is often explained as an activity that fulfills certain characteristics. Characteristics often mentioned as defining journalism mention that it is necessarily

Describing journalism as an activity that fulfills the aforementioned characteristics would be a sufficient description of the current adaptation of journalism. But that description would only function in this historically specific era. Furthermore, as there are indications that this historically specific era is transcending to something else both concerning journalism (as mentioned in the introduction) and more broadly (e.g. works by Manuel Castells, Carlota Perez, and even Yuval Noah Harari), the worth of such a time wise narrow definition of journalism is questionable.

This text aims to clarify such lists from the perspective of historical change and future opportunities of journalistic goods. It doesn’t define journalism without a linkage to a specific time (that would be impossible), but it aims to define the historical and static features that characterize the journalistic good, which is a medium for value conducted by journalism.

There are several benefits in looking especially at the characteristics of goods. Putting goods in the center allows one for once to transcend the journalist-centered understanding on news production and the user-centered perspective. Putting journalists in the center is problematic if journalism is not actually something that has to be done professionally, as is often suggested. Putting users in the center is likewise problematic, because journalism produces many different kinds of values for people in different roles, and for groups and societies as well. Nevertheless, both the intention (of the journalist) and the desire (of the user) can be considered to shape the features of goods. Furthermore, investigating goods highlights some values (such as reachability) and hinders others (such as power or diversity of journalists). It is thus not the only relevant perspective, but it is a relevant perspective nonetheless.

In addition to the ability of the focus on goods to influence all perspectives to journalism research, taking a view on such goods can also contribute to broader understanding on intangible goods. I highlight two important points of view. First, understanding how journalistic goods have changed and need to change opens up avenues to understand better how goods in general can and do change. Second, because journalism is an interesting societal operation that is partly public and partly private, changing the nature of journalistic goods can aid in understanding how the barriers between public goods and private goods behave in time.

Goods

Goods are items that satisfy human wants. They can be either transferable goods or services that are not transferable. Either way, they are “put together”, as the English mathematically oriented metaphor and synonym for good, a product, hints. And they are brought to the customer, as is apparent in the Finnish word tuote. “Tuo” means “to bring”.

Such naive explanations take one to the right direction but are clearly insufficient. Not everything that is “put together” is necessarily a product, and oftentimes the production and logistics to bring a product to the users is not clear cut. Similarly, it’s quite often difficult to identify where the goods are in the economic activity that includes a mutually beneficial interaction.

Is the journalistic good an individual online newspaper story that is put together from “raw facts” by a journalist or the whole website, curated by algorithms and a group of journalists. What about Facebook news feed that includes journalistic content?

The definition of the good depends on the perspective. For the user, it’s the object or system that satisfies their desire. For the producer/seller, it’s the object that is offered to the market and has a price. This causes some ambivalence to the term. Furthermore, if one defines a good either based on the packaging conducted by the producer or the desire from the user, the good can be very different in quite similar cases. If so defined, the good such as a subscription magazine can be considered to be the whole subscription period, annual magazines or website, while within a free online newspaper, the good is a story. And this still brushes aside the questions of products in TV and video: advertising in TV happens often between different programs, so is the product the whole channel or one TV show? Can the good be different for different markets?

Yes. The good indeed is a feature of the market (transaction), so it’s different for all beneficiaries. I shall return to this topic later. For now, despite this ambivalence, the term is necessary, because there needs to be a common denominator for the object of transaction, use and value.

Thus, a good is the medium of value. If working time is what creates the value of the good, a good is a manifestation of working time that is directly delivered in the case of services.

There are different kinds of goods. Most often, goods are considered to be rival and excludable. A cup of coffee is such a product. It’s rivalrous, because if I drink it, you cannot drink it. And it’s excludable, because it’s possible to keep you from accessing it if you haven’t paid for it.

When Nobelist Elinor Ostrom argued for differences between common-pool resources and public goods, she used a definition matrix that demonstrates that there are both nonrivalrous and non-excludable goods.

This framework is useful in understanding the change of journalistic goods. It is also too narrow a framework to fully understand special features of intangible information goods.

Intangible information goods

Information goods are commodities whose value comes from the information it contains. Information has important fundamental characteristics.

The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy increases, and thus information decreases. Nevertheless, the world we live in is full of increasing complexity and new information. Albeit all this ordering comes with a cost in increased entropy, clearly useful information grows in subsystems such as in libraries, cities, societies and even in the planet Earth.

1977 Nobel prize winner in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine demonstrated that information emerges naturally in the steady states of physical systems that are out of equilibrium. While this definition might sound complicated, it is crucial concerning the arguments made in this text. A simplified example helps to grasp the full meaning of the sentence. A person who is in equilibrium is dead. We eat and drink to stay out of equilibrium, producing both chaos and order along the way. And in fact, usually we produce first chaos and then information, similarly to a pan full of water that first starts to boil uncontrollably and then, if heat is kept on, a new strange order emerges. As Prigogine demonstrated, the steady state of out-of equilibrium systems minimizes the production of entropy. These kinds of chaotic systems self-organize spontaneously to states where there is order.

This kind of order is created in all kinds of out of equilibrium systems, but it is not yet information. Only order that is stored in solids remains after the time that just passed and can be said to be information. If one would immediately freeze the boiling pan, the information regarding its new order would be saved. Indeed, information can only be stored in solids, such as atoms or electron states in hard drives and brains, stone tablets, bamboo leaves and printed papers. In this way, all intangible information goods have a physical basis.

This physical basis can be noticed when, for example, a lot of people try to access the same web page simultaneously, making the server too busy to serve them all. Nevertheless, most of the time intangible information goods can be copied endlessly and practically without cost. Thus, they are typically considered to be nonexclusive (it’s difficult to stop me from accessing information you want to tell me) and nonrival (we can both use the same piece of information). But throughout the history of the journalistic product, there have been successful attempts to make journalism more exclusive and even by establishing new norms, set up rivalrous features that prohibit the free consumption of journalistic goods. This chapter takes a look at these attempts to illustrate the conflicting nature of the journalistic business paradigm.

Goods, according to the Ostrom’s definition can be either rival such as food, cars and clothing, or nonrival such as parks or TV. Rivalrous goods are subtractable. This means that they are consumed by use: they have wear and tear. But what about products such as an online multiplayer game that are better when they are used more? Indeed, there are many intangible products that have negative subtractability. These “antirival” products improve from use. Let’s take a look at them shortly.

Furthermore, according to Ostrom and others, some goods are excludable and some are not. A television channel owner can block your access to satellite television, but a radio channel owner cannot block your access to FM radio streams, at least not without cryptography on both ends. Often the questions of excludability are not really physical barriers. Instead, they are questions of the legitimacy of the limitation. The freedom to roam laws in Finland legitimate all forests as non-excludable public goods. In some other countries it might be possible to build physical walls and use immaterial contracts to “protect” such forests.

Excludability has many features one of which is that excludable goods have limits in how they can be spread. If some digital goods are “viral”, these goods are “antiviral”: limiting access rights limits their reach. Or to put it in the other way: if a good is antiviral by nature, it makes sense to monetize via excludability. Similarly, non-excludable goods are not antiviral. Non-excludability does not guarantee virality, but it doesn’t diminish it either.

As we noticed, there are rival, nonrival and antirival goods. These goods do not only not care about if the copies are consumed, but they moreover might improve from every time they are used. According to Lawrence Lessig, open-source software code and natural language can have such properties. If I share a code I’ve written, anyone can use it and improve it. I can benefit by sharing it. The subtractability is not zero; it’s negative.

Could there similarly be antiviral, non-antiviral and viral goods? (Please notice I use both terms rival and viral)

Oftentimes, virality is a feature of the transaction or actors, so I want to emphasize that here I’m instead talking about the virality of the use of goods.

Using viral goods makes it more accessible for others. What does that mean? As I pointed out earlier, excludability is oftentimes more about the legitimacy of the exclusion than the actual physical barriers. This is also the case with virality. One simple case of how a goods can become viral is via change of norms. Consider Pokemon Go, where playing the game was clearly visible for bystanders on streets. This changed the norm that it was acceptable for adults to play such a game, thus reducing the barrier of use.

Regarding the table,

The more people have access to these goods, the cheaper it is to get them, but then there are less goods available. Some mushrooms such as chanterelles spread more near the natural paths the more people collect them.
The more people have access to these goods, the cheaper it is to get them. They are always available. A path from a village to a river gets easier to travel when people use it more, improving everyone’s access to water.
An online multiplayer game might be impossible to play alone but also not functional if there are more than eight players. Such a game is both antiviral and antirival. Pekka Nikander has called this category “Network goods”.
When the antirival good has no excludable barrier, it is a “symbiotic good” (again according to Pekka Nikander). An example of such a category is the scientific results that build on each other.
The more people have access to these goods, the cheaper it is to get them. Simultaneously, the more people use these goods, the more value they provide. They are always available. An autonomous Tesla car that learns to drive by itself by recording the driving and riding behavior of all the current drivers and riders would fulfill these conditions if it would also make ride sharing easier and cheaper.

As illustrated in the table above, there can be rivalrous, nonrivalrous and antirivalrous viral goods.

History of journalistic goods

Im Anfang war die Presse, und dann erschien die Welt, wrote Karl Kraus. In the beginning there was the press and only thereafter, the world.

Imagine the “newspaper” of ancient Rome, historical China and 16th century England. The stone or metal carved Acta Diurna one could find in a Roman street corner covered births, marriages, deaths, festivals, updates on agricultural yields and building projects, and contained financial records. Chinese Di-Bao was written to bamboo slips to be delivered to local government bureaucrats during the first millennia (more precise starting date of the publication remains a topic of academic dispute) and it continued in various forms until 1912. The gossip magazine Spectator and its predecessor Tattler were published thrice a week in 1600th century England. All of these three gazettes, separated by centuries and geographically and culturally diverse contexts, aimed to appear truthful, relevant for their readers and did create their own content by reporting about occurrences that plausibly could have happened.

Of course, Acta Diurna and Di-Bao were not the only ancient newspaper-like publications, but instead there were many similar products in different parts of the world. Furthermore, both Acta Diurna and Di-Bao are used as a category term for different kinds of publications. Acta’s include the more general Acta Diurna, but also special publications such as Acta Militaria, concerning military matters. Publishing of Di-Bao, on the other hand, spans over two millennia, so naturally there is a large number of variance in its shape and motivations.

Nevertheless, they demonstrated and dictated the modus operandi of journalism for centuries. This modus operandi was only supplemented by socio-technological changes that first enabled the penny press and then various kinds of broadcasting business models. Finally, journalism shaped by all these major changes encountered the internet and the almost complete digitization and immaterialisation of its previously tangible products.

History of journalistic goods as public goods

Information is nonrival, because we both can access the same piece of simple information if we can read it, watch it or hear it. Information is also often nonexclusive, because once I have a piece of information, it’s very difficult to stop me from sharing it with someone else. Due to this, information goods, much more often than coffee, timber or buildings, become public goods.

Despite this, most journalism goods before the year 1833 had some properties of “club goods”. In other words, they were artificially scarce goods. In the oldest contexts, such as Di-Bao in China and Acta Diurna in Rome, ability and right to read was often limited to specific elites, creating a barrier for most people to participate in consuming news directly. Further, the economics of stone carving and writing text on bambu leafs and the economics of news gathering made the price point of publications so high that only public administration was able to produce such journalism in the ancient Rome and China, and only groups of people together or wealthy individuals were able to directly access journalism during the coffeehouse culture journalism in the later Stuart era England.

So most people were excluded from accessing the content in these gazettes. As mentioned, one reason was literacy: only a portion of the population in the respective societies of these gazettes could read. During different historical eras, at most 30% of Romans, and 45% of Chinese men and very few women could read. While estimates vary, and literacy rates were starting to grow in 16th century England, it’s safe to assume that they remained lower than their historical Roman and Chinese counterparts during the early years of that century. Reading and economics dictated access to the journalistic goods but that was of course not a limitation to access to information that the product contained. Instead, the time of delivery and the framing of the content happened via opinion leaders, who have managed to secure a power position in the information delivery chain. According to some estimates, while the circulation of the early periodicals in London was in the thousands, the information reached a very large part of the adult population via circulating the same paper in on average tens of hands, and via discussions that the published paper had started.

Nevertheless, the access to the journalistic goods was valuable precisely because it offered those with access the ability to share the information to those who were merely listening whatever way they pleased, or not share them at all. Value of the club good journalism is the information disparity it creates between the club members and the others.

Indeed, the second reason why the readership was limited is the protected nature of delivery of these publications. Di-Bao was strictly delivered only to state bureaucrats, and information was only rarely delivered onward to the local population in full. Acta Diurna, while meant to be read to the general population, was still first delivered to the local scribe, who held the property value in information that they possessed until telling the contents of it to the people nearby. This is not unlike what happened in the coffee shops in London in the 16th century, when the Tattler and Spectator were delivered for the most part to the news hungry coffee drinkers.

No matter if the actual product was made from stone, bamboo or paper, the goods had very low subtractability concerning their time of use. Information was quickly separated from its physical container, copied if needed and most of the time lost its value before the goods turned into dust. Thus, these journalistic goods were generally nonrival. The contents could be read multiple times by different people, and information that was contained in them was shared freely by spoken word once it was out of the “club”.

But at the same time the access to these goods was limited to the club members, aristocrats, or bureaucrats. They were artificially scarce products that had some excludable properties but were non-rivalrous. They were also needed: the fact that Di-Bao and Acta Diurna emerged in the largest Ancient societies hints that these information products were not a historical anomaly but instead a helpful feature to maintain coherence in sufficiently complex societies.

The club good era ended when the actual club culture in the coffeehouses in England ended. But it didn’t happen automatically. To enable the substitutional penny paper business model, the publishers, most notably Benjamin Day, had to accelerate the decline of the coffeehouse culture, which was already waning due to evolution of the club scene, unsuccessful business enterprises, and colonial policies supporting tea instead of coffee.

Indeed, the fact that the high price of coffee to tea might have contributed greatly to the changing nature of the information products is further evidence to the argument that I’m building regarding the complexities of self-supporting patterns in business paradigms. The background of supporting tea for coffee is that the British East Indian Company needed markets for their new product. Tea houses supported all genders and created a culture which was different and more diverse from the coffeehouses.

Most importantly, however, the coffeehouse proprietors got greedy. They made an effort to gain a monopoly on newspapers, making the coffeehouse newspaper the only form of available print news. This proposal was met with harsh criticism and ridicule, essentially discrediting coffeehouse goers’ social standing. After the proposal was overruled, the influence of the coffeehouses in the British public life began to reduce.

The club good journalism was also attacked from above: the rise of the exclusive club declined the popularity of the coffeehouses. Literacy clubs soared. Concerning coffeehouses, the social norms that had once supported all walks of life to join together in arguing and listening news in coffeehouses was met with snobbery by those who considered themselves separated from the rest of the lot by their special intelligence and status. Some coffeehouses started to charge more than one penny for visits, further creating a separation between the folk and those with a higher standing.

Time was ripe for a new kind of “private” journalistic good. Benjamin Day and other penny press publishers had the idea that by reducing the price point of the good they could create a product that used public information but which was consumed in private, thus changing the whole nature of the information products and enabling previously unseen scale, profitability and consumption culture.

A very special setting of business and social configurations was required to enable the private consumption of journalism. The growth of the urban population, the concept of freedom of speech, less reliance on the party politics, and the emergence of an informed public in the US contributed to the fruitful business environment.

The business configuration with which the penny press gained a foothold in the market is actually glaringly similar to many platform business models of the 2010s. By reducing the price point from six cents to one cent, Benjamin Day of the Sun and others like him were able to massively increase the local demand. Following a technological innovation that significantly reduced the price to print, the price structure of the newspaper emphasized delivery (a sparse circulation means large cost of delivery per paper) and production (small circulation means large cost of content production per paper). Thus, a logical idea was to reduce the price point to the lowest possible point to increase the density of the delivery network and grow the audience as large as possible. A similar rationale is behind the low price points (and worker rights struggles) in taxi and food delivery businesses, both of which require a dense network of service providers to offer fast delivery.

The business model demonstrated by Benjamin Day was perfected by many modern newspapers. But similarly to nonrival products that can get congested, causing rivalrous behaviors in their use like websites under heavy traffic, rival products can get commodified to the point where they are essentially nonrival. Instead of being consumed for a clear purpose, they become parts of the daily rituals and habits. This is what started to happen to newspapers, when the technological change in broadcasting emerged, accelerating the move from private information goods to public goods (that were still consumed in privacy).

Since the 1930s, a technological change in the form of various means of broadcasting (radio, television, internet) started to shape products in the media environment towards public goods. Outside the US, these products were mostly publicly funded. This was understandable, as the commodification of the newspaper had demonstrated that everyone should be entitled to news. Because there was no direct way to charge “pennies” from the listeners of the radio programs except via increasing the prices of the radio, it was natural that the business model was at first based on collective purchasing.

As a thought experiment, one can wonder how the roll-out of radios had looked like around the world if the price of the programming had been inserted in the price of the radio. This would have slowed down the penetration of radios in the general populace, and incentivised the producers to compete only with prices, incentivising programs of inferior quality. This problem exists within public broadcasters, but less so in the advertisement based broadcast media that rely on gathering a large group of people to follow their programs.

Public broadcasts came with a cost on journalism. While journalists were quick to build various kinds of firewalls between the funder and the producers in the democratic countries, there was always the suspicion that the funder might desire to cut down funding when the journalistic programs touched too sensitive topics. It’s because of this that the subscription, purchase and advertisement funded newspapers maintained a role in the journalistic media system. Their niche role was to set the agenda that the broadcast media could echo.

Later, when most of the broadcast media was funded via advertisement incomes, this role remained. It only started to diminish in the early years of the Internet, and it had been eroding ever since — while not in large part being supplemented by anything else.

Lastly, the journalistic product on platforms is a public good. Algorithmic spreading and paywalls notwithstanding, it’s nonexcludable and nonrival.

The business model for purely on-platform journalism is based on advertisements, which causes a so-called double ad problem. The platform is also basing its business model on advertisement, and by definition it 1) knows better who to advertise what and 2) can show it’s advertisement before the content producers advertisements. Due to these reasons, the advertisement income of content producers is completely in the hands of the platforms. This income form content production is always small compared to the income of content delivery on platforms.

The increased number of paywalls is an indication of the fact that most media companies are not especially fond of journalism products as public goods. For years, they have been trying to innovate various kinds of club goods and private goods in journalism, at times successfully but mostly to no good.

Because of all the issues with on-platform journalism and emerging success of paywalls in leading newspapers, it might have seemed that the future of the journalistic product lies within walled garden club goods of premium priced social media platforms. However, these success stories are anomalies, and while some of the largest companies might become relatively profitable, their profitability is based on creation of elite audiences and only giving the rest simply bread crumbs by graciously opening up the paywalls during national emergencies. There is a large market and need for journalism outside these elite club goods.

Thus, instead of trying to find the future of journalism in excludability of the goods, a better direction might be to look at the antirivalrous nature of the information products. Perhaps it offers a way out from the current, internally deprecated and rotten but still externally standing journalism business paradigm.

Long history of periodicity

For the most of the time, the ancient publications such as Acta Diurna and Di-Bao were periodical. However, periodicity meant very different things for each of them and at least during the Tang Dynasty, Di-Bao was not periodical but was published on an as-needed-basis. On the other hand, Acta Diurna was by the orders of Julius Caesar published daily. The Latin word Acta means ‘the things that have been done’, or more simply, ‘events’. Diurna, on the other hand, means “daily”. Thus, the Acta Diurna means published ‘daily events’. And breaking the habit of British periodicals that were published once a week, the Tattler was published thrice a week. All of the publications discussed timely events, but their definition of what was timely varied greatly. Di-Bao concentrated on the daily life of the emperor, and included for example military, political and court matters on its pages. Due to the long range of travelling sometimes required to deliver Di-Bao, its content could be said to be in general less time-sensitive than Acta Diurna’s, which concerned for the most part local affairs. Yet still, it was also shared widely across the Empire. Tattler, being more concerned about gossip around the coffeehouses, was very timely.

During the early days of journalism, periodicity was more about production than delivery. It was simply easier to nudge bureaucrats to produce one item on set intervals. Nevertheless, the penny press publishers realized that periodicity allowed for creating a property value for information if the consumption of the product has rival features and can be sold exclusively. A buyer that considers their purchase a private property might be inclined to not to share their purchase with strangers. If this is the case, then the contents of the information product can be anything — the only requirement is that the contents relate to some social object which is important to readers. Then, all the potential readers need to read the paper to make sure there is nothing that they should know!

This trick is a necessary feature of periodical journalism goods, because events in the world are often not periodical. Only way to make people buy the paper every day is to create value not in information but in information parity, using, if necessary, irrelevant information. If I know that the newspaper does not contain anything newsworthy, I have an information power over someone who has not read the paper today. Thus, the sales process that involved paper boys selling each paper with its headline emphasized timeliness. Timeliness became first a strategy and then the only strategy to guarantee relevancy, and periodicity became a marketing strategy to maintain large circulation of a daily newspaper that contained mostly irrelevant but entertaining news.

This periodicity changed but its logic remained in the broadcast media. Programs supplemented dailies and weeklies, still scheduled tightly according to the channel broadcasting availability. The journalistic content (news) started to gain more and more space when the channel numbers grew, and finally there were 24 hour news channels with constant streams of breaking news. These channels were still periodical, creating property value in information via filling out the cognitive space of the followers, essentially utilizing the same strategy that had made penny press so successful. The 24 hour constant news cycle, aiming to fill the time resource of the consumers, is also present in the online world. A user goes to a social media platform or online news sites most often to check if anything has happened. Something has always happened, but rarely it’s relevant. This has been the only successful strategy to create a profitable business with the nonexcludable and nonrival general information that is provided by the media companies.

Objectivity as a solution to accuracy in the penny press

While those who worked for Cesar or emperors guaranteed that information was somewhat accurate, they had no motivation to consider that it should be objective. Lack of objectivity worked especially because the products were club goods: both the creators and the primary receivers of information were “on the same side”. Despite this, the club good mechanisms only provided a short temporal benefit for those who had the right to access the information first or, in the case of the coffeehouses, were willing to pay for it. The excludability of these club goods was temporal and illusionatory.

The decline of the coffeehouse era in journalism created demand for the penny press, changing journalism practices and culture of news consumption. As Andie Tucher writes in “Froth and Scum”,

“The penny press, like every institution ever nurtured by the human mind, grew sloppily, capriciously, along convoluted paths that often surprised its own progenitors. it was divided in a time of rapid and often blind change, by newspapermen who were unsure exactly what they were creating. They did not set out to invent a mass medium; they did not sit down and create an ideal called objective journalism. They did invent a medium that was appealing enough to grow massive, a medium whose continuing commercial success was often abetted by developing stratagem that has come to be known as objectivity.”

Objectivity was a marketing strategy that protected the press from accusations of taking sides. Combined with periodicity, it provided a means for another strategy for accuracy: corrections. Knowing that mistakes of yesterday would be corrected today provided an aura of truth over the journalists.

Later, in the public and advertisement funded broadcast journalism, the appearance of truthfulness was guaranteed with two distinct strategies. First, most media companies based their claim of accuracy on the concept of objectivity and corrections. Second, media companies relied on journalistic logic in the way that if they discussed a daily event, and everyone else was also talking about the same event, that event must have something to do with truth.

In newspapers and broadcast TV journalism today, corrections play an important part in guaranteeing truthfulness. Although they are much more frequent in text-based journalism, there are procedures to do corrections also in the less fact-heavy television and radio programs. However, they are rarely used. And further, because the periodicity in on-platform journalism is detached from single publisher and time (instead being bound to single platform and cognitive space), there is no technical mechanism implemented to do corrections. One can edit the online web-page, but very few people would come back to read it again the day after. Furthermore, it’s not feasible to ask the same people to like or retweet a correction to a story. Platforms could implement such a mechanism, but they have so far been not interested in doing so, instead focusing on their regulation to tackle the completely false stories and fake publishers.

Instead of considering how to implement corrections, platforms have been testing different new tactics to create the appearance of truthfulness to journalism that is published on-platforms. These tactics include “verified” logos and dedicated news feeds. However, if the authority of truthfulness is not owned by the content creators, the perception of accuracy is always on the edge of falling apart. Furthermore, if the platform is able to dictate what is truthful and what is not, the traditional competitive advantage of professional publishing is all but gone. The appearance of truthfulness should not be based on the preferences of the content deliverer but instead it should be redesigned to be a part of the content creation process, as it once was. Currently, however, this is not the case.

Professionalism was a strategy to guarantee originality

While already Acta Diurna and Di-Bao used specialised scribes and bureaucrats to do journalism, the broad resources of the penny press newspapers allowed truly the journalistic profession to evolve. Importantly, compared to the ancient periodicals, the penny press market was fierce in its competition for original news. This shaped the profession in ways that is apparent even this day.

Originality is not something that the consumers of news care about. But they did care about quality, and the less there were intermediaries, the more responsibility to the accuracy and relevancy of the content of the news could be put to the original information gatherer. Thus, throughout the history of news, journalists have considered it important to give the impression that the news originates from their own work.

This impression is often nothing more than optics. For example, the impression of originality in the broadcast news media is provided with a peculiar trick. Because most of the agenda setting came from outside the single newsroom to allow for the collective strategy of truthfulness via filling the media space with similar topics, most content isn’t actually original. Scoops are replaced with “Breaking news”, source of which could have well been a neighboring TV channel. But while the information came through intermediaries, the content packaging originates from the channels themselves: the channels have their own voices and faces reading texts that are rewritten by their own journalists; they demonstrate that they were there where the event happened, scattering journalists around the neighborhoods and the world and using green screens if necessary.

Some scholars such as Jay Rosen have mistakenly claimed that journalism is actually about this impression of “being there where things happen”. I would disagree. Information can be collected in many ways, and being at the scene (while often useful) is but one strategy. More than an information collection strategy, it was always a strategy to convince the consumer that the content produced was original — especially when it really wasn’t.

Regarding the value of originality, on-platform content creators should vary that platforms in other industries have already moved to that part of the value chain despite still allowing on-platform companies to operate. For example, Amazon produces their own goods and sells their own books, while allowing small producers and antique stores to sell on the platform, and Ant financial provides many banks digital tools to give out loans and other financial services while being the biggest loan provider in the world. It’s not inconceivable that Facebook would put up not just editors, but newsrooms. This opportunity is especially tempting to purely algorithmic platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram Reels.

Timeliness and relevance in magazines, newspapers and broadcasting

During the emergence of the penny press, a new, market based approach to estimate the relevancy of the content was adopted. This was indeed required from the business perspective, as the paper needed to be sold every day. It soon became clear that the audience that was ready to pay a cent for their news but not six cents was interested in other topics than what could have been anticipated based on the habits of the old paying public. Entertainment, sports and crime became much more central to journalistic practices.

When the journalism was based on the delivery of the material goods such as Acta Diurna, Di-Bao, Tattler, New York Times and the Time magazine, the most important differentiation in the markets was done between the relevance of content and timeliness of delivery. It was very expensive to deliver a newspaper which was concerned about the daily topics to cities further away. On the other hand, it did not make much sense to deliver a broadly focused news to a broad audience, say, once a week. Thus, magazines differentiated by finding niches that people were interested in (that were relevant to people) in a large geographical area, while newspapers found their niche in the broad and timely commentary of their imminent neighborhoods. Journalistic goods were either timely or relevant. And more precisely, regarding newspapers, timeliness was actually the very strategy to remain relevant.

This differentiation has been less important after broadcast media. Television can be both relevant in content (niche) and timely. The Internet can be even more so, and so much so that it could be claimed that it’s impossible to succeed in the online journalism business if one doesn’t have both broad reach and relevant content.

After timeliness was no longer a sufficient condition for relevance, new definitions for it were needed. Public broadcasters broadly had a different take to relevance than advertisement funded broadcasters, who were mostly interested in the number of listeners or watchers. Public broadcasters have tried to develop various models of inclusion and representation to make the case that they create their contents for everyone. Still, they were always under similar market pressures than the advertisement funded media, because naturally they had to demonstrate their importance to their funders, and the vague metrics of representation were always much weaker than the hard numbers of people demonstrably enjoying their shows.

In any case, journalistic stories have a crisis of relevance on platforms. Understandably, most relevant content regarding people concerns their immediate family and friends, local neighborhoods and topics of immediate interest, often picked based on a desired identity and affiliation. Mass media focused journalism struggles to deliver, instead focusing even more on the immediate according to the relevancy-as-timely strategy. The end result is a global news culture that could be at best described hysterical, shouting shocking warnings from the outskirts of interest of normal people. Journalistic content producers should rediscover relevancy, understanding that what is relevant depends on the role of the person consuming news.

Learnings from history

Based on the learnings from Acta Diurna, Di-Bao, Tattler and Spectator, the penny press, New York Times and other modern newspapers, magazines, radio and TV broadcast journalism, online journalism, on-platform journalism and new media innovations such as Tiktok, it’s possible to summarize that

Information goods easily become public goods, but it’s possible to manipulate the excludability and rivalry of journalistic products.
Periodicity is a marketing strategy that had multiple positive impacts on the journalism business paradigm. Most importantly, periodicity creates property value in irrelevant information. But because events are not periodical, it’s possible to imagine journalism that doesn’t subscribe to this strategy.
Objectivity has been a strategy in guaranteeing accuracy. It’s a problematic strategy nowadays, and social media platforms have been trying to find alternative ways to create the perception of accuracy.
Professionality is a strategy to guarantee quality and originality. Quality can be guaranteed with other strategies as well, e.g. using algorithmic filtering to find the most interesting videos from a very large group of amateur producers, as is done in Tiktok.
Timeliness of news has been the most important strategy for making sure that the content is relevant for users. Nevertheless, it’s not a necessary condition. Relevant information can be information that is delivered at the right time, which is not always “as quick as possible”.

What implications do these learnings have concerning the future of journalistic goods?

Journalistic goods now

The role of the technological disruption in journalism has been overstated. While the media has been changing due to technology, the history of the journalistic goods actually isn’t full of radical disruptions due to technology. For the most part, the new business paradigms have only been implemented to work on the side of the old models when the old ways have clearly been deprecated and there has been a massive crave for new forms of journalism. What follows is a realization: the question “how to save media companies?” and the question “how to save journalism?” might have completely different answers. Still, some conditions for the shape of journalism can be drawn from the previous chapter.

The historical analysis of journalistic products reveals that while some features of journalistic products have remained the same through the ages, some other features have changed. Based on the previous chapter, there are some general features of journalistic products. These features make the distinction between what is journalism and what is not. From Acta Diurna to Buzzfeed, and even before, journalism has been aiming towards accuracy, relevancy and originality. It has not always been periodical nor has the excludability or nonrival features of the product remained constant.

Despite being often included in the descriptions of journalism itself, periodicity and privatized consumption (excludable, rival goods) are actually marketing strategies. It most likely would have been impossible to establish a functional news industry without them, but both of these interlinked features are historically specific.

On the other hand, relevancy, truthfulness and originality have always been at the core of the promise of journalistic products. These promises have not always been followed through, though, so a sensitive definition of journalistic product would emphasize the appearance of truthfulness, relevancy and originality. Oftentimes, the appearance of relevancy was guaranteed with the timeliness of information and using periodicity and privacy of consumption as strategies to make irrelevant information appear relevant. But these features are not carved in stone like Acta Diurnas.

Problems with objectivity

Objectivity became a part of the journalistic discourse only after the first world war. As demonstrated in the examples, many historical publications worked perfectly well under heavy censorship, using a one-sided, monotonous voice. When the penny press introduced the concept of objectivity, it did so to circumvent the problem of authority that previously had guaranteed accuracy. However, during the next century, the whole concept of objectivity has fallen into a trap when the more complex, postmodernist understanding of socially constructed truth emerged.

Despite the problems that objectivity now faces, journalism cannot function without a link to the truth. This is so even if truth is understood as nothing more than one way to distinguish an information offering. In other words, it could be just a brand — a perception — and what is meant by “truth” can be not objective knowledge but reinforcements of beliefs. Yet still, it’s needed.

Truth is the most important separator of journalistic information to other forms of information. But the threat of relativism looms this separator. Journalism can be either a tool to reinforce different truths (whatever truths the consumer wants to be reinforced) or a tool to tell and share socially important facts. There is a conflict between these goals: the cohesion of the democratic society is in danger if journalism functions as a separator of audiences, as a filter bubble or simply serves merely the people with immediate dopamine rush without any other moral obligations.

This is where the core paradox of journalism lies. On the one hand, journalism should be produced and delivered outside public and private interests. And on the other hand, it should take into account both public (as in social) and private (as in personal) needs. A successful journalism system would operate beyond both market pressures and public funding. The second best alternative, the current system, worked quite well when both market driven and publicly funded journalism operated in full capacity. Several developments have eroded the effectiveness of this public-private model. For example, social media platforms have diminished the public control on fair delivery and ability to get advertisement income. Further, digitization of information has made it more difficult to maintain property value in information, turning journalistic content into public goods. This has forced media companies to rely fully on advertisements or create most of their contents solely for elite audiences. Regarding private and public needs for information, the situation itself has not changed: these demands are not irreconcilable but neither do they fit easily together. However, advertisement and publicity driven media prioritizes private needs over public needs, and that creates problematic incentives for the long term survival of the current media system.

Digital information has a simple solution to the question of trustworthiness: transparency. When a process is fully transparent, there is no need for trustworthiness. In this sense, transparency is the opposite of trustworthiness.

For journalism, digital transparency means that trustworthiness is no longer a meaningful objective. Why would I trust you if I’m not allowed to see what you have done? Instead of trustworthiness or objectivity, the value of journalism should be based on the accuracy of the transparent information gathering and processing.

To sum up, what is nowadays understood as objectivity, is actually a need for accuracy. During times when the existence of competing narratives were obvious, a journalist could claim to be accurate if all mainstream narratives regarding a topic are discussed. This strategy has a severe pitfall: the competing narratives are inclined to push their explanations further and further from even the subjective realities. In the emergence of multiple competing truths, accurate information means more and more often self-correcting information.

Problems with timeliness

Journalism is often defined as timely or current information production. And clearly journalistic activity prioritizes current information and the pace of reporting on current events. But what does it even mean to be “timely” or consider oneself with “current events”? This is the feature of journalism that is most easily intuitively grasped, and yet it’s most poorly defined.

As mentioned, timeliness is a strategy for relevancy: it is one way to be relevant. But there’s a difference between what events just happened and what information is new for the receiver. One needs to know much more than what is currently happening to be able to function in the world.

Journalism is timely only on the surface level. Actually most content is not only periodical, but also scheduled. The content that can be scheduled is traditionally called “soft news”, and it includes all kinds of information about how one should live and what one should know. Soft news is widely consumed because the information in them is relevant for people. Further, while many don’t consider soft news part of journalism, drawing the line becomes very blurry if they are excluded. A preferable approach is thus to establish journalism on the ground of relevancy and accuracy instead of trying to come up with a clear boundary for “current” or “new”.

Research on news values or criteria has maintained that timeliness is but one of the criteria on relevancy. I maintain that not only is it just one of the criteria, it should also be considered only a possible criteria of journalism. The purpose for insisting this is that in digital journalism it’s much easier than before to create personalized information updates for a wide range of information needs. Thus, there is less need to guarantee that the news is timely to make sure everyone in the audience grasps it as relevant, and actually it might make sense to deliver some pieces of information only when they are needed. A “how to drill” article should be attached to a drill, not to broadcast schedules.

Focusing on timeliness has caused several unintended consequences for journalistic practices. Being first with news is part of the journalistic ethos and the goal shapes the organisational identity. But one has to ask, what is the purpose of being first in on-platform journalism, when all news can be instantly copied without the cost of gathering and packaging information, faster than the consumers find them on the competing platforms. The fact that news is no longer sold on the street corners with a many hour delay to writing them (at that time it indeed was the most relevant piece of news that gathered the audience) but instead compete on the limited cognitive capability of the consumer means that timeliness is much less important than before. Algorithms in social media do prioritize timeliness, though, and people have such a large craving for real, current news on important events that when the event is ongoing, speed does have a value. Nevertheless, the idea that the whole journalistic endeavor should be shrank to concern only current information is harmful for broad consideration of the role and behavior of truthful and relevant information products in the society.

Ergo, providing new information is merely one way of providing relevant information. Although this is a very sound strategy considering that it’s difficult to know if the other kinds of information are redundant or already possessed, a definition for journalistic information goods should allow for all kinds of relevant information to be included.

Problems with professionalism

Journalism is often distinguished from other forms of information creation by the fact that it’s created by “journalists”, similarly to defining art based on the fact that some objects are in museums and galleries and some are not. This again is not a helpful distinction and should be replaced with a condition of originality of the created information product.

There has always been news. Indeed, there seems to be an inherent need for people to want truthful and timely information. This result holds both in historical investigations and it has been also proven to be one of the few common features in anthropological studies regarding various tribes. Further, anyone can call themselves journalists. Professionals are oftentimes better at creating and packaging information to original formats and contents, but of course this cannot be said conclusively regarding all journalistic products.

Professional journalism is always a product of the current economic system. Unlike accuracy and relevance, around which is still possible to tie the concept of journalism, professionalism is historically specific arrangement for producing such messages. In the other words, it doesn’t make sense to redefine professionalism to fit into whatever definition of journalism might make sense in each historical setting.

There are many ways to create original products by assembling information to create product features that the parts do not have. A qualitative case study by the Knight Foundation shows how and why the Foundation has sought to change journalism by renegotiating its boundaries. Namely, by downplaying its own historical emphasis on professionalism, the foundation has embraced openness to outside influence — e.g., the wisdom of the crowd, citizen participation, and a broader definition of “news.”

Knight Foundation’s examples demonstrate why originality is a good condition for journalistic products: it rules out aggregation but accepts curation. Information scales: curating a book based on newspaper stories can be journalism. Even creation of a library can be defined as a journalistic act, if other conditions are fulfilled. This is a desirable feature for the definition of journalistic product, as it allows alternative means to fulfill the desire for journalism.

As Jay Rosen states, ’Journalism’ does not equal ’media’ does not equal ’press’. Rosen says that there are professionals, amateurs and pro-amateurs all doing journalism. Defining journalism as something that only journalists do is thus problematic. And on the other hand journalism clearly can be defined as an activity. More broadly, Hartley writes that “Journalism is the primary sense-making practice of modernity — -“. This sense-making “comes in many forms,” Fenton writes in the same book, “from the entertainment-driven and celebrity-laden to the more serious and politically focused”.

Originality, not professionalism, should be the defining characteristic of journalism.

Problems with periodical publishing

Periodical news shapes the way the audience processes information and structures the rules for discussion between readers and writers. Its outcome to media culture is significant: periodicity has created the mediated society, where media is consumed as a habit and every piece of information can be commodified to news products. It has also contributed to the fact that the media has a necessary bias to reinvent society, its words and meanings constantly.

From the economic perspective, the periodicity ensures that news gets old. This makes it possible to sell more news. Indeed, periodicity can be understood as planned obsolescence. While people do need some kind of time objects to make sense of the passing of time, such as seasons, wrinkles, kids that grow surprisingly fast and temples that last for millennia, there is no reason why news products should be time objects that provide such an understanding.

Nevertheless, even more crucial than to understand the underlying reasons for periodical news, is to ask if a news system that is built around such a core idea can even deliver what is required from it. Nowadays people access very little information that is not periodically produced: there is almost no mechanism to distinguish the importance of events from day to day. Does such a societal system fulfill the individual need for accurate and relevant information or does it optimally maintain the communicative fabric of the societies?

The early editors in the 17th century quickly learned how to manufacture subtractability to information goods by making news disposable. This is a feature of the news business model: periodicity was a method for holding the property on information. It was a requirement for the product to have this characteristic as long as the business model of newspapers was based on the value of current information. It was also a mechanism that allowed turning almost any information into news: if it’s in the paper, it’s news. News industry would not have developed without making products that were periodical. The planned obsolescence made sure that one would rarely pay for yesterday’s news, so the news company could sell today’s news.

News as we currently understand them are a feature of this business model. News is not natural (events are). Instead they are manufactured to fulfill the property yielding potential of the business model. Very peculiar features follow from this. For example, the cost of news is the same everyday despite the importance of events, and nowadays the price is often separated from the act of getting the information entirely. While price remains the same, the value of accurate, relevant information can differ significantly from person to person and from day to day. However, because the reader cannot know the value of the provided information before it’s read, readers have to buy the news (these days with their attention and time) everyday. Thus, readers are addicted to this never ending flow of news and “news”.

The frenetic standstill of ever increasing pace of periodical news has continued over to the online news of this day. Digital information goods can accumulate information. This accumulation happens e.g. in Wikipedia, where links to other content and constant revisions create value not only to the edited items themselves, but also to all the other items that are somehow linked. Such an antirival feature of information goods could be very beneficial in how these products create value to people and society, but the periodical nature of news makes it impossible to accumulate such information in journalism in a beneficial way. Because most information in periodical publishing is irrelevant, it typically subtracts value instead of accumulating it. In other words, the periodicity as a way of making information a property simultaneously makes it impossible to use the antirival features of information products.

New and permanent features of journalistic goods

Some of the features of the journalistic goods are constant and define the journalistic goods. These features include relevancy of the information to the user, accuracy as a goal and originality to make a distinction between information production and information delivery. Some other features of the journalistic goods, which might seem at first glance to be as solid parts of the product as the aforementioned features, are actually more fluid. These characteristics include timeliness of the content, periodicity of publishing, excludability of the offering and rivalrous consumption of the product.

Features of journalistic goods that by definition don’t change

Appearance of truthfulness
Relevancy
Originality

Features of journalistic goods that have not changed during the current business paradigm

Timeliness
Periodicity

Features of journalistic goods that have been constantly changing

Excludability
Rivalriousity

Any subcategory of products needs to have a set of distinguishing features. Some of these features are permanent. This means that they could be used to define the category despite its historically specific or current features. Permanent features of journalistic products are that they aim to be and prove to be 1) accurate, 2) relevant and 3) original.

There are historically specific interpretations of these permanent features and there are historically specific features that don’t necessarily come from defining features of the subcategory, but are inherited from current actualization of products in general. For example, journalistic goods often are but they don’t have to be periodical, nonexclusive and antirival.

Indeed, some intangible products in the digital age are viral and antirival, and these characteristics happen to be characteristics that make products successful during this era. This does not mean that there are no other, historically specific features that emerge in all or most journalistic products, as was evident considering professionalism, timeliness and objectivity of journalism of the industrial era. Successful industrial era journalistic products were often made by professionals, concerned current issues and aimed to be objective. However, I have suggested that instead of professionalism, products should at least be original, instead of timeliness, they should be relevant to the consumers, and more than to be objective, journalists should aim to create accurate representations of reality.

Original, relevant and accurate

Journalistic products are differentiated from other information products by being original, relevant and accurate. These key features describe the production of journalism (originality), consumption of journalism (relevance) and nature of the product (accuracy).

Originality is a necessary condition to focus the discussion regarding journalism to anything that assembles, not only delivers, something of value. There needs to be added value in putting information together in an original way for the outcome of the activity to be journalism.

Relevance is a necessary “market condition” for journalistic information products. There can be many sources for relevance, e.g. need for self-actualisation, societal norms and pressures, or usefulness. People perceive relevance in different ways in different roles. But in any case people won’t be interested in irrelevant information: the attention span of each individual is limited and needs for information vast. Relevance is the condition for the consumption of information. If the information is not relevant, the motivation for consumption of it is not sufficient to define it as journalism.

Accuracy is the third feature that separates journalism from other information products. There’s a layer of trust or trustworthiness that characterizes journalism and makes the journalistic information useful in specific contexts. A good story can be useful for many, for example to gain social acceptance, but a true story can help to avoid danger or seize an opportunity. Acting due to false information will lead astray. It’s crucial for people to be able to make a distinction between the two. Accuracy is the feature of journalism that characterizes the nature of the information in the journalistic good.

All these three features of journalism are nonbinary. It’s rare that information that the journalist encounters is completely original, and at least the meaning that the journalist gives to any event is shaped by other ideas and events encountered earlier. A piece of information can be more or less relevant to a consumer. If it’s relevant enough, consumers are willing to spend time and sometimes even money to study it. And factual accuracy, expressed in words that twist in meaning, regarding a world which is fluid and constantly reinterpreted, is at best a shadow casted on the cave wall. But there is no need to give up on truth: there is something that can be called a reality, and more accurate information describes it in more actionable and precise ways than information that is not accurate. Information goods indeed can be more or less journalistic.

What is interesting is that the changing characteristics of the historically specific time we are currently living create conditions that are partly at odds with both the previous time specific features of journalism and with the general features of journalism. Understanding these conflicts help understanding the changes that the journalistic product is undergoing.

There are two characteristics of digital information products that one should pay attention to. While journalistic products have lately been nonrival, information products can be antirival. And while journalistic products were often considered nonexclusive, information products can be viral. Redefining these two features — exclusiveness and rivalrousness — have also previously been the source of innovation for journalistic products and business models.

Antirival goods

Antirival is a feature of some information products in the digital age. It refers to the feature of information products where their value increases due to use. There can be journalism without it being antirival, but to compete against other information products in the digital age, journalism should try to be antirival whenever it can. Moreover, journalism can help in creation of common and shared understanding more easily when it’s products are antirival.

Instead of wearing out, antirival digital products can benefit from use. In digital platform markets, superior competitive advantage comes from positive feedback loops (network effects) that derive from this product feature. However, business models that benefit from antirivalrous goods cannot be based on creating property value on irrelevant information via periodical publishing, because there is no added value in accumulating irrelevant information. Instead, the value of information parity comes from taking away accumulated information benefits from someone.

Thus, periodicity inhibits the antirival properties of journalistic goods. But this doesn’t have to be so. Digital information goods could function differently.

When the cost of newsreading to the reader is the time spent, news from more interesting events begin to be more profitable. A massively important change was the shift from clicks to reading time. But due to the periodical nature of news production, media companies are actually fighting against this change and trying to do whatever they can to make all the “news” on their website as interesting as possible. News is fragmented from the events, decontextualised from their contexts and the reader is nudged to wonder what piece of information is actually relevant. The curse of periodicals continues even though the incentives are now aligned to disrupt the whole production model.

Instead of purposely decontextualising news from the slowly changing understanding, they could accumulate understanding about the contexts. Instead of a constant stream of manufactured content, digital information could be delivered only if it impacts on a relevant context or fulfills a personally set news criteria. And most importantly, instead of enabling only a business model based on planned obsolescence, digital information could enable new antirival business models for journalistic products that produce “gains of trade” between multisided markets.

The news product was based on a business model that nowadays is not the most efficient one in delivering accurate, relevant information. A common mistake in considering news is to think that the most important things get most attention when the opposite might be true! The powerful have a lot of resources to not be in the news.

Nor does this old business model prevail in creating the fabric of the current society, when it’s compared to the possibilities of the business models that benefit from the antirival features of information products. Periodical news decontextualise events, encourage conflicts and reinvent the societies even when this is not necessary.

Nevertheless, antirival news products can only work if they are not (fully) periodical. They need to be able to accumulate some assets. Accumulating a timeline of accurate understanding of any context should provide value both for individuals and for the society. Journalism would be better off if it didn’t have regular publication schedules, and digital information products make such schedules more and more difficult to maintain.

This all is supported by the development of the journalistic business model. The business model used to be a linear pipeline that provided value from production, via distribution to consumption.

But the digital journalism business model has set up feedback mechanisms between all these parts. The users now have a direct link to production, both via clicks and behavioral analysis conducted by the content producers, and as citizens, demanding more vocally than before the features and contents that they desire.

Value can accumulate via network effects

The antirival properties of information goods are realised through this feedback mechanism. If the consumption makes further production cheaper or increases the value of new products produced, the product has antirival properties.

*Antirival properties of journalistic information goods come from the value accumulation of the produce-distribute-use loop*

Viral

It’s difficult to stop people from accessing information. But is it possible to make information constantly more accessible, or even make it easier for people to access information than to not access it? Yes! By creating the feedback mechanism between distribution and consumption, platforms are able to reduce the transaction costs and even create negative transaction costs, i.e. making it more costly for people to not consume a piece of content. One can feel this mechanism functioning on Facebook. It’s not only the dopamine injected from clicks, but also the social pressure that guides one’s behavior and changes the internal accounting so that it really does make sense to check out what your friends think about whatever.

This feedback mechanism allows for viral properties of the intangible information products.

Virality is the behavior of information products that are antiexcludable. While the value of use of an information product increases due to antirival features, this does not necessarily mean that the product automatically reaches a larger audience. Instead, the growing audience can just as easily decrease the availability of the product.

Such product features do not need to be independent from other product features. I have demonstrated that the interlinkages of product features have previously been important denominators of successful product paradigms. Furthermore, there are numerous conflicts between the permanent and the historically specific features I have been introducing. These conflicts alter the shape and type of successful journalistic products.

Synthesis

Accuracy, originality and relevance are features of the journalistic product that are provided to the product in different phases of value chain. Antirival and viral properties are properties of the product that emerge from the feedback loops between these product features.

Thus, journalism in the digital economy can be successful if it

Produces goods with accuracy
Distributes original goods
Helps users use relevant goods
Improves products based on what is considered relevant, accumulating more value for each new product
Utilizes virality that helps in distributing the right goods to right consumers

This simple model should be used as a baseline when designing winning platforms for journalism. In the next text, I shall investigate this business model in more detail.