Traditional information distribution industries undergo an economic transformation with incredible hidden costs to the consumers.  Newspapers crumble as that for which they charged in hardcopy gets distributed electronically for considerably less, if for anything at all.  Consumers see the cost savings, but do we really appreciate the value being lost?

I heard Vernon Walters (1917 – 2002), Deputy Director of the CIA under Nixon and Reagan’s “roving ambassador,” among other things, discuss information flow.  He started with a somewhat off color joke crystallizing just how long we have been exchanging information.  Mr. Walters took an old Erma Bombeck joke a step further.  Erma was known to quip that motherhood was the second oldest profession, implying that prostitution was the first.

Mr. Walters embellished the joke by saying that before the transaction could take place, you had to know 1) where it was and 2) how much it cost, and that was information.  Sex and information share a similarity in that it is the only thing you can give away for free, but charge for later, as well.

And therein lies the underlying factor driving the crumbling of traditional information delivery models accelerated through technology enablement.  Sure, it gets more people into the business, but where’s the revenue stream to invest in infrastructure to insure the quality of the information as that information distribution network opens up to more entrants through this technology enablement.

Another way to look at this taught me by a mentor twenty years ago was to think of information and packaging as content and container.  (At that time it was in the context of the race for the wire to the consumer.  Cable?  Phone? Satelitte?, etc.)  The simple example used to crystallize this in my mind was this man talking about touring a potato chip factory.  Same chips poured into the bags, but some bags had high prices and others low ones.  Same content, different container.  Same engines but in Chevy, Buick, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile models as I had seen as a 10 year old touring a GM plant in Framingham, Massachusetts long since shuttered.  Same engine; different brand.

What did not vary in those analogies, however was the manufacturing process deployed for that content.  It may be hard to think of information as having to be manufactured, but that is a reality.  Facts must be found.  Facts must be checked.  Sources have to be vetted.  Care needs to be taken not to pollute facts with personal bias.  Stories must have facts and no opinion, but opinion pieces also need to be tested through editorial oversight to insure they are, indeed, based on facts.  Knowledge has to be aggregated to manufacture information.  It’s a process, and it needs training and oversight.  Good education does this, but how do we know this if not paying for the oversight to insure that is what took place before the author hit the send button?  My bio to the left may SAY this, but how do you know to TRUST this? 

 Information quality, then, in a free press comes from the public trust that it is, indeed, being manufactured correctly prior to distribution.  If the private sector harms the citizenry with poorly manufactured product, then the government intervenes.  It did this in the early 1900s based on poor meat processing practices at the heart of the Upton Sinclair book, The Jungle, spawning, as OEsheepdog noted in his comment, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1907.  I just fact checked that reference for you, the reader, in 15 seconds on google.  Twenty years ago that could have taken hours calling a library or phoning a friend.

I do research for a living, and I care about accurate information, but how do you know that?  Because I told you so?  I wrote this once as a one-time at the keyboard while watching Morning Joe on MSNBC before trying to start the work day.  I lost it because I timed out on the web, so I am racing to get the idea out before starting my work day late.  It’s on my mind.  Period.

This time I am writing it in word, first.  Lesson learned the hard way, yet again.

Others with zealous agendas may not do that.  How will you know?  If the content is what you want to hear, what will this do?  If it comes from a little known blog found through google, will the time be taken to check the source?  What if it is written by an individual derided as wearing a tin foil helmet in their parents’ basement?  What if it is from a whistle blower fired by a firm seeking to suppress information? 

Will you believe the whistle blower if you do not like what you hear?  Will you disbelieve the tin foil helmet guy if it is something you want to hear?

That’s what the editing function did in the traditional economic model of newsprint information distribution.  Threatened by free content, these entities operating from centuries old economic models threw up websites to compete against new economy pioneers such as Matt Drudge, thereby slitting their own throats.  Lacking cash flow, they had to strip cost from the operation.  Younger, cheaper, and therefore less self regulating reporters managed by fewer and fewer gray hairs.  More independents with potentially little to no training in how to research and likely not at all concerned with research as they are with voicing an ardently held opinion of their own.  The understandable hubris of youth unmentored. 

We all have soap boxes in Hyde Park now.  Are we whistle blowers or crack pots?

And it harms the public discourse as we see from what passes as such in DC these days.  More noise, less thought.  More attack, less understanding.  Obama and McCain have both been victim to this around their citizenship eligibility to be president.  It bubbles up to the traditional information purveyors and crowds out other information.  Bad potato chips in the bag, and now we, the consumer, have to do our own quality control previously provided by the infrastructure around information creation funded by us through paying for what is now given away for free.

Editors in the private sector do this.  If our information gets believed to be far less accurate, then government may, indeed, have a reason to step in to insure quality as they did in the meat packing industry in the 1900s chronicled in The Jungle. 

That’s censorship.  The first amendment would not take kindly to that.  We did not trust government to do this for us, but now we the people do not want to pay for the quality control we do not want, with very good reason, government to provide for us.  The free press is the fundamental way to hold government accountable. 

Ben Bradlee pushing Woodward and Bernstein to get the facts straight was not censorship.  It was manufacturing quality control.  Was deep throat a tin foil helmeted crazy, or someone with real concern and knowledge?  Care and attention.

It sounds odd to talk about “manufacturing information,” but that is what gets done.  It is very much like market research where I have toiled since 1986.  Find the sources.  Make sure they are credible.  If sensitive, come at it from different, non threatening angles.  Piece it together.  Corroborate it through multiple sources.  Evaluate the person and their relation to the information. 

A CFO telling you a number is more accurate than his secretary telling you the number or a District Sales Rep telling you the number.  And so on and so on.  That is manufacturing quality control in information.  Newspapers do the same thing.  The new delivery mediums like Salon and Open Salon do as much as they can afford to do, but it is still far less.  They cannot afford it.

Good editorial oversight takes money.  It is part of what Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter made famous as “the value chain.”  How does the revenue generated get invested that gets reported in the income statement?  Cheaper information fees means having to reduce cost forcing you to pull things out of the value chain.  The Wall Street Journal closes its Boston Desk.  In short, who is checking the quality of the potato chips before they go into the bags?

But reduced entry barriers to entering the information business have value.  Governments cannot suppress people as easily as evidenced by what went on in Iran.  A young girl killed in a protest got out to the rest of the world, thereby enabling pressure on the Iranian government to be exerted from the global community.  A good thing.  People and governments in other countries might come to trust more OUR national concern there, to boot.  You can’t shoot a messenger when corroborated by multiple sources with different, perceived agendas.

And all enabled by technology stripping away barriers to entry on the delivery side.  A good thing.  But entry barriers also allowed for revenue that gets deployed in ways with a hidden value by insuring quality control.  Ben Bradlee did not do pro bono work.

From print information to web information like Salon.  From there to overseen blogs like Open Salon.  From there to Twitter.  Each step has less and less revenue sources, and therefore less quality control checks on information, putting more responsibility on us to sort through the potato chip sized information sources and only digest those of acceptable quality.  Bigger container, shoddier content.  Caveat Emptor, or let the buyer beware.  Or, in this case, let the consumer beware no lunch comes free, to paraphrase economist Milton Friedman. 

It is fascinating to evaluate.  Information delivery sits on very shifting sands right now.  How Salon and Open Salon evolves will be incredibly interesting to watch.  Will they survive, or will the shifting economics impose on them the same kinds of economic pressures seemingly rendering the newsprint model unsustainable?  Sure, I have my own opinions as to how to organize an information business, but people do not need to be told how to run their business.  I have my ideas, and I will be interested to see what happens.

Salon and Open Salon do well at this, obviously, at this point in time.  If Open Salon likes this and trusts this they might make note of it.  They may miss it entirely, too, in the flood of free information purveyors coming at them as the contributors increase.  Either way, it still is not one-on-one mentoring to enhance individuals and their ability to self-monitor their information manufacturing quality.  An Editor’s Pick is not the same as Ben Bradlee coaching and regulating Woodward and Bernstein.

The information industry undergoes incredible economic transformation.  It has its value, as noted by the Iran situation, and it has its weaknesses as noted by the chatter around Obama and McCain’s citizenship status.

Information, as Vernon Walters so presciently observed, is the oldest profession, and technology enablement is driving the economics back to that earliest of delivery models:  Human to human, but with greater available sources, and therefore greater need for self selection and wariness.  We have far less willingness to pay for Ben Bradlees to put their hidden seal of approval on what we read.