the profession that wants to destroy itself

There are many oddities on the Internet, but to me, one of the most consistently and deeply bizarre is the attitude that most professional Internet journalists, pundits, and bloggers have towards the ability of their own profession to fund itself. Professional bloggers who are explicitly contemptuous of any attempts to monetize what they do are legion. It's certainly the consensus opinion, and like most opinions on the blogosphere, it is enforced with the usual mix of a smug attitude connoting the savvy of the person holding the opinion and a lack of any actual argument that transcends that attitude. The Cool Kid Crew decided that any attempts to monetize the profession, in contrast to any attempts to enrich themselves individually, are to be derided, because there are the old media dinosaurs on the one hand and the sexy young Internet revolutionaries on the other hand. End of story.

I'm speaking of the New York Times and its latest efforts to monetize journalism and punditry on the Internet. Its last experiment, Times Select, was of course an endless whipping boy for the savvy set. Never mind that Times Select and this new paywall are precisely the kind of experimentation that desperately needs to happen if Internet media is going to remain as a professional, moneymaking venture. The cult has decreed that all such attempts are subject to mockery, and that's all that matters. The age old formula of providing a product or service to the public and then paying for it worked. The new new hotness-- the Web 2.0 synergistic outside the box new media Wikified Innanet utopia way-- of providing a product or service and then giving it away for free doesn't work. Ad revenues are not replacing the revenue from media that used to get paid for, and that's to say nothing of the growing number of people using ad-block technology. What is the mechanism through which this profession is going to perpetuate itself as a profession? Anyone? I'm not in professional media, so the question isn't that personal for me. But I do have old-fashioned ideas about the need for demos in democracy, and I don't think we can have a purely amateur media that does what we need the media to do.

It's really pretty incredible. It's a perfect storm of the many little dysfunctions of the blogosphere as a culture: the fetish for the counter intuitive, the child's belief in Internet utopia, the preference for what is savvy over what is responsible or true, the refusal to follow the logic of one's own arguments to their natural ends, and above all, the hatred for everyone else involved in journalism or punditry.

I can't decide if its mostly fun or mostly sad to see people cheer the demise of their own profession, all while wrapping it up in the ceaseless rhetoric of new media triumphalism.