IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020 - 26

only offer a simple analogy that suggests that the constitutional imperative to share vital information about
public life quickly, completely, and
inexpensively causes what innovators call the monetization challenge
and what economists describe as
the public goods problem.2
Imagine for a moment a world
where pizza is free, and where the
same pizza pies can be endlessly
shared. Imagine further that in this
world there is a legal right, and societal imperative, to share pizza widely. Now in such a world, who would
invest in making pizzas, or in selling
them? The short answer: no one.
And in such a world, pizza would
soon vanish.
Journalism faces a similar situation because vital information
revealed by one journalist can be
immediately copied and shared
widely - by anyone, in any way.
Copying and sharing the gist, or
essence, of published news and
analysis is constitutionally protected and legally encouraged. The
practice is a civic imperative, which
lubricates self-governance and democratic choices by citizens. Thus
directly monetizing serious journalism is difficult if not impossible. The
term of art is "fair use," and the rational is that information relevant to
making public decisions are a "public good." Journalistic public goods
are also "nonrival," which means
they can be shared without losing
value or quality. One person's consumption, in short, doesn't prevent
or reduce consumption by another.
The success of the Huffington Post,
for instance, at repackaging the

2

James Hamilton, a communications professor at Stanford University, has made the most
sustained analysis of the economics of journalism and the public goods problem. See his All
the News that's Fit to Sell: How the Market
Transforms Information (2003, Princeton) [2]
and, more recently, Democracy's Detectives:
the Economics of Investigative Journalism
(Harvard, 2016) [3].

26

guts of stories from The New York
Times is well known - and well
illustrates the problem of monetizing public goods.
Perhaps an easier way of understanding the impossibility of directly
selling serious journalism to readers is to examine the "free rider"
problem. Consumers of news and
analysis are free riders by law and
custom. They benefit from a journalistic activity whether or not they
pay for it. The inability of journalists to recoup money from people
who benefit from good journalism
is common, embedded in the structure of journalism, and rarely if ever
noted or questioned. When a local
journalism organization exposes corruption at a city council, for
instance, and then the revelations
force the council to reform, everyone in the city benefits, not only the
people who paid the journalists to
produce the reporting that engendered reforms.
From a societal standpoint, that
journalism is a public good and that
citizens can freely "ride," or benefit
from the labors of journalists without compensating them, results
from smart policies by past political
leaders. The Constitution and American legal traditions support timely
and inexpensive sharing of relevant
information, news, and analysis.
But from the producer's standpoint, sharing can be devastating
economically. Directly -recouping
producer costs is difficult, if not
impossible, because of the constitutional mandate to freely share vital
information. And when information
is shared digitally over computer networks, the marginal cost of making
copies approaches zero; so sharing
widely, at scale, is essentially free.3

Within media production, the
public-goods problem is unique to
journalism. Just as no one insists
on a legal right to free pizza, no
one insists on a legal right to free
Showtime or HBO; or free movies
or music; or reproductions of paintings or photos. Neither can anyone
sell these artifacts without consent
of their creators (and, usually, only
after making payments). Outside of
journalism, tough and longstanding
protections secure the economic
interests of producers because no
"civic imperative" interferes with, or
prevents, monetization.

Accepting Quality Journalism
as a Public Good
Recognizing and accepting that
quality journalism is a public good
opens up new potential avenues
for support because most citizens
in the U.S. and around the world
accept that many essential services
can't be provided by the market and
thus deserve funding by government, directly or indirectly. So how
Americans pay for public goods -
such as schools, libraries, opera
companies, and police and fire services - provides a rough map on
how to preserve and sustain serious
journalism.
Because of my own studies of
the economic foundations of scientific, biomedical, and engineering
research, I find that the best models of public funding for journalism
could come from the political-economic sources of these technoscientific fields. Research is a
classic public good. Because it often
doesn't lead to immediate benefits,
the creators of research usually freely share their discoveries and knowledge; they cannot begin to "capture"
the full or even partial economic
benefits of scientific activity. As a
result, private actors greatly underinvest in science, if they invest at
all, and left to the market, money

3
The free-rider problem as a contributor to the
decline of journalism this century is at the heart
of Christopher Ali's "The Merits of Merit Goods:
Local Journalism and Public Policy in an Age of
Austerity" [4].

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

∕

SEPTEMBER 2020
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020
