Visit Your Local PBS Station PBS Home PBS Home Programs A-Z TV Schedules Watch Video Support PBS Shop PBS Search PBS

markets

Underwritten by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.

Read more about Idea Lab »

Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.

Learn more about the Knight News Challenge »
Benjamin Melançon

Markets Fail News

Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information. Valuable news is a public good. All right, if you care about journalism, you already believed that. But news is also a public good in the sense economists use the term: once one person comes into possession of it, everybody can have it. Expensive...

more »

Featured Comment

It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.

Michelle
Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

Monthly Archives

Get Idea Lab via E-mail

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner