Is news a commodity?

A free product is perceived to be of no value.

At a panel discussion organised by the University of Cardiff journalism school a few weeks ago, Mike Hogan, a former BBC man and course co-ordinator for media at the University, said a key issue that the industry had to grapple with was the commoditisation of news.

What got me thinking on this subject was a report of two CBS journalists who died last Monday in Baghdad. A CBS correspondent, Kimberly Dozier, too was badly injured in the incident. (I read the article first on Yahoo. Later on Google. Associated Press had filed the despatch.) Now here were three brave warzone reports, risking life and limb to bring news and developments to millions in their home countries or around the world.

They were surely getting remunerated for their efforts. And yet, as a consumer of this news, I paid nothing for the efforts that CBS or AP newspersons put into reporting the news.

No wonder people think of news as a product with no value. If this isn't commoditisation, what is it? And yet, let's look at it from the content deliverer, Yahoo's perspective. At an analysts' meet a few weeks ago, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said content and distribution would fail.

"You have to have technology," he is quoted saying. Semel then went on to say that Yahoo's fundamental business was selling advertising. "We license content from around the world and we sell advertising."

So, Semel licensed the story on the two reporters getting killed while advertising paid for it. How different is that from a newspaper ? Not much, except that there, you pay a small portion of the costs as well.

More likely that you are paying distribution costs, while the bulk of the cost of producing the newspaper is met through advertisements.

However on the internet, you and me, the final consumers, are getting it free. Only because there are no distribution costs, as such. Unless you were to include cost of access to internet. The problem is not in understanding the model, which seems pretty clear, but getting used to it.

But this model has its own problems as recent developments suggest. The likes of Yahoo have accused the BBC in the UK for "distorting the market".

Their charge: BBC pumps out free content because most of its revenue comes from license fees that every UK television owner shells out to the government "� which owns the BBC.

But if I am a UK resident, it's only fair that I get value for paying the government this fee. So, what's Yahoo's problem? Well, BBC Online is muscling into Yahoo territories like Flickr, a reasonably successful photo sharing site.

Yahoo and other media organisations are saying the BBC is flexing muscles enriched by involuntary licence fees, rather than by willing advertisers!

All boils down to who should pick up the tab "� the advertiser or the viewer/reader? I see the problem as more fundamental. Do consumers appreciate what they don't pay for? I would hazard a guess that it's a NO in most cases.

And since we don't pay for what we see on the internet, we don't appreciate it as much. Maybe the solution lies here. If you want people to truly value your product, you have to reintroduce a cost.

Call it technology licensing if you wish. Or cost of speedy dissemination. Or a fund for decent blokes (read journalists). Hopefully the content generators, including the likes of AP (for that matter us) can work this out with the aggregators and distributors.