Not Free

Couple of weeks ago, Newsweek published a list of What You Need to Know Now (or, I suppose, a couple of weeks ago). It's all, of course, totally counter-intuitive (they call them "unexpected truths"). The list is quite interesting: We Are All Hindus Now, Elections Aren't the Answer, It's Too Late to Stop Global Warming and so on.



I quite liked Paid Is the New Free (written by Daniel Gross, whose Slate stuff I always enjoy). It explodes the myth (if, indeed, myths can be "exploded") of everything online being gratis mahala.

It's a nice dose of realism: working in publishing, I've lost count of the times I've seen print staff being asked to do online work "for free", seen online advertising space given away "as added value" (i.e. for free), and seen the internet treated as a copyright-free, payment-free Wild West. We're constantly being told that "Online Is The Future", but that "Content Is King"... and none of the bean-counters have yet figured out that you can't have one with the other. Newsweek seem to have figured it out. But I guess they had to.