The following is a comment I posted on Standupkid’s Localtvnews blog, a response to the David Carr NYT column ‘Let’s invent an iTunes for News’. The comment ended up being so lengthy I thought I’d better reproduce it here:

The whole iTunes idea is flawed on so many levels: mainly as people are willing to pay for music because they play it over and over again. News is disposable. Also, an individual piece of music tends to be unique – but when an earthquake happens, it’s not like the only way you can find out what happens is by paying a dollar to download the article about it. Put another way, how much effort does it take to compose, rehearse and record a track? Now how much time does it take a journalist to write a standard article? Very little journalism has value approaching that of music and yes, perhaps we’d pay for it, but how would we find it? And how could we produce it often enough to be viable? (Note that most musicians do not make a living from their music – would an iTunes for news mean the same for journalists?). Continue reading →