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The other day in a post about Yahoo! (YHOO) I unloaded on some of the reporting that has gone on at large publications on the Yahoo "deal."
I have to get a few other thoughts off my chest.
I'm not a journalist. I didn't go to J-School. But I respect that most journalists I've interacted really take their "craft" seriously. They value ethics. They tend to be bright.
But 95+% of them seem to only "report" the news, rather than give opinions or do investigative reporting.
However, I've got news for you -- breaking -- in this mobile world reporting is a commodity.
Not all of it. I've said before that the kind of reporting Kara Swisher does at AllThingsD is valued-added. She has sources. She breaks news. She makes astute observations. That's additive.
But the lion's share of "reporting" today is just cutting and pasting someone else's "news" and rebroadcasting it on your platform. Why would I ever pay for that form of news? It's noise.
What also annoys me about journalists -- and we've seen this in spades through this Yahoo! drama over the past 2 months -- is that they seem obsessed with "scoops." There seems to be no higher honor in the journalistic profession than being recognized for getting a "scoop." And God save the other journalists who fails to recognize - and more importantly - credit a fellow journalist for his or her hard fought scoop.
The problem with "scoops" is that they show a basic problem with business journalism today. "Scoops" matter really only to other journalists - not to the readers (with rare exceptions - and Kara Swisher falls into this category often). Most of the "scoops" in this Yahoo! story have been meaningless 48 hours after they "break." Yet, they get played up as so important at the time they're released.
Journalists care about "scoops" but readers don't.
If the New York Times or Wall Street Journal want me to pay them for their business "scoops" -- forget it. I'll stick with my free Twitter stream and the 1,400 other free websites that will publish your scoop within 2 minutes.
What would I pay for? This is just me, but I would pay for original and reliably good thoughts, opinions, ideas. There is so much noise out there today, that original thought really stands out.
I'd also pay for investigative journalism. 60 Minutes stuff - although I'd prefer longer-form. The old page one detailed stories from the Wall Street Journal. I'd pay to hear what some journalist thought after a 3 month study of Green Mountain Coffee (GMCR) before David Einhorn does.
If the Wall Street Journal was 90% business opinion and investigative journalism, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. Hear that, Rupert?
[Jackson was long YHOO at the time of writing]
