September 27, 2009
Quality Reporting Doesn't Come Cheap
As former Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann writes in The Journal's Opinion Section September 26, 2009, Imagine yourself the proprietor of a venerable and profitable business whose success is based on the quality of your distinctive product, the brand loyalty of your customers, and the fair price they are willing to pay for the value you provide.
Then you hire some bright young managers who develop a new and improved version of your product that can be distributed faster and accessed more conveniently than the old one. The new version — essentially a repackaging since core components are the same — appeals to traditional and new customers. No mystery there, since unlike the older version, for which you still charge, the new one is given away for free.
Newspaper proprietors, seduced by the allure of a new distribution medium called the Internet, gave young Web disciples license to take their preciously crafted product — news — and repackage it with all manner of bells and whistles from interactivity to instant updates to historical archives and then give it away for free to the very same people and more who still were expected to pay for the traditional product on sheets of inky newsprint. Something was wrong with the logic.