Privacy comfort online

In the seat back pocket on one of the planes I was on this week was a discarded Time Magazine. Hmmm, I thought… something to look forward to after I finish reading my newspaper. I haven’t read an edition of Time Magazine in quite a while. When I finally pulled out the magazine I noted that the subscriber address printed on the bottom left of the front cover had been torn off. Interesting. Someone had finished reading through their edition of Time and desiring not to carry it any further had elected to leave it behind – appropriately sanitized for any personally identifiable information. It is, of course, exactly what I’d do. My wife, if she were there, would roll her eyes. I shred everything that comes into our house and goes back out again that has identifying marks that – I suppose- could be used to steal my identity. Many of those offers in the mail probably got there thanks to the magazine companies that re-marketed my subscription information. But, of course, throughout this week’s business trip I was passing around my credit card to strangers waiting on table at restaurants and bars, signing my name with no great concerns.

As arguments for privacy legislation continue to wend their way through Congress the santitized Time Magazine made me think how much nearer the edge of personal identification the outside media world lives and how, in comparison, online feels so much more private. There’s the irony, I suppose: that privacy online has the industry parading up and down the field in front of privacy advocates. Yet, online is not the privacy problem that disturbs me at home at night or makes me anxious about the things I leave on airplanes.

Content Becomes a Pauper

MediaPost’s “Around The Net” wrap-up alerts us to this lament by Douglas A. McIntyre at Time.com: “Content, Once King, becomes a Pauper.” The upshot is that the recession, but mostly the changing circumstances of digital media economy, have eroded the value of branded media content to such a low level that it may never recover. Even the accountants are piling on, insisting that major media companies write-down their content assets to reflect diminished value.

Yes, it’s true. The value of Time’s content and other mainstream media companies has been seriously diminished by the recession and the steady advance of the digital media economy. But it always strikes me how self-absorbed these expositors are, as if in the absence of value at Time Magazine, the value of content itself shall cease to exist.

In truth, content has always wanted to be free and has largely been free for some time now. Michael Kinsley, who thinks and writes about this issue as well as anyone, did so again this week in the New York Times where he observed that, “Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.”

It is time to see the value of content differently, and not as Time or many newspaper publishers would want to. The economics of content don’t support the industrial media mills of yesterday – or, frankly, the online portals of today (see also: the history of Yahoo!). The value of content today is in its ability to proliferate and find success in small numbers where advertising can comfortably support the cost to sustain a profitable business.