A Free Press vs a "Free" Press

Taylor Davidson asked me this morning what I thought of the TechCrunch "The end of hand crafted content" article. In essence, it argues that the digital media will evolve to be full of industrial scale crap content:

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

Mention is made of AOL, Google's inability to sort the spamverse from real websites (you really notice it at times like Xmas when you are searching for consumer goods) and Demand Media

My response - based on our research it will probably start to resemble TV more and more, not just that Ad supported content will race to the Entertainment bottom, jettisoning Education and Information in its wake - but also that, again like TV, paid markets will emerge that serve high quality content for those that want it. I found one of the commentators pretty much said what I would so, being lazy, here it is:

Yes, there will be much more noise to the signal with AOL’s idiotic policy, but bad writing is bad writing. People will neither spend much time deciphering poorly written copy, nor will they put much stock in information coming from a source with a reputation for getting its facts wrong. Because people do want quality content, fast food news won’t eat at your readership base, though it will clog up the search results.

Regarding search results, people who encounter worse and worse content when searching on a given search engine are likely to move on to the next one, so there is incentive to return “real food” results. If the search engines don’t solve the problem themselves, then curators like Reddit, Metafilter, BoingBoing, Slashdot, Hacker News, and Collected.info can take up the slack, since the job of curating content is that much more necessary to avoid fast food articles.

I see Fred Wilson is picking up a similar line of thought, in that if the current crop of content finding systems won't work, we will find ones that will:

social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t. it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.

Good heavens - a return to curation mayhap? But, as P T Barnum once noted, no one has ever lost money by underestimating the public taste, and that was 100 years ago, so some things are ever thus. The difference between a Free Press and a "Free" Press, over time, will be the difference between the media being fertile ground or full of sh*t. As it is today...

The one exception I see is the UK, where the publically funded BBC will ensure that a dive too far to the bottom will result in no customers at all - which of course is why so many commercial playesr are desperate to pull the BBC back from its position in online media