SERVICE FOR FREE ?????
In the Sunday business section of the Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus writes about Kodak beginning to charge their customers a fee for the service of on line photo storage. As he points out, to save the fee, consumers might consider storing their own photographs, something they could easily do. For me the take away was the word service. He uses the word service 10 times in reference to many other potential services that currently are free, but someday they conceivably could be offered for a fee.
The word service is what is at the heart of any fees charged on line. We are told we live in a service economy. What then is a service? You could clean your own home, cut your own lawn, do your own taxes etc. They are all services we willingly pay for. There are countless number of other things we could do on our own but choose to hire someone else because the time to do them could be better spent doing something else. Or so we conclude. And we don’t hesitate paying the going rate because we calculate the cost of doing them ourselves and conclude it is in our own best interest to pay someone else to do them. The thought of paying is never an issue.
So why would we hesitate to pay for the service of knowing what is going on in our world? I am referring to the news and information that is coming across our desks and into our homes from multiple sources and in a never ending stream. No one feels compelled to pay for news. It is free and virtually everywhere, so why pay?
Here are a few good reasons: Compare the various sources of news and information that are currently offering free on line news services. How long have they been in business? Who is doing the reporting? Is it reporting or is it opinionating? How many people are out in the field doing the reporting? What is the brand recognition for the reporting organization? How credible is it? For many of the sites the answers are totally unacceptable. For those news sites that are high quality and branded consider what your information flow would be if they, like Kodak, all decided to charge for the service of collecting, editing, styling and prioritizing the information, before it got to your desk.
The job of collecting information is an expensive, time consuming and in some cases a dangerous profession. For major news organizations collecting and distributing information for a subscription or newsstand fee has been going on for decades. Yet, since the Internet came along we all think news and news related information should be free. Why? Just because it has been. True, news is a commodity and once you know it, it is no longer news so why pay for it? But what is news and what news is valuable? The answer to that lies with the individual. What news do i want might be different from the news you want. We currently have many different sources of news that accommodate those personal interests, but what happens if they go away? Well we could find what we want on our own. After all the Internet has everything. True, but like all other services that require our time, do we really want to surf the net all day long looking for what we want and need to know, when there are editors working in credible news organizations willingly providing that service for us? The value equation of our time versus their time is not even close.
If the high value news sites all decided to charge for what we wanted, then we would pay. But it is important to realize in the “everything is free” era we now live in, it is not the end product we are paying for, it is the service of a well qualified, someone else doing it for us. And for a price.
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Informative, but not convincing. Something is missing, and what do not understand. But I will say frankly: - light and friendly thoughts
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Informative, but not convincing. Something is missing, and what do not understand. But I will say frankly: - light and benevolent thoughts.
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Отлично написано.
I would have added something of course, but in fact said and written about almost everything.
Восхитительно, добавил в букмаки.
VeryGood. Thanks!
The abundance of interesting articles on your website amazes me! Author - good luck and new interesting posts!
Fully agree with you, about a week ago wrote about the same in his blog!
Спасибо почитал.
I subscribed to the RSS feed, but the message for some reason in the form of some characters How to fix it?
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It is interesting, but still would like to know more about it. They like!
An interesting opportunity to learn something new and useful