A. Leonard

related links:

Salon.com_tech
Free Software Project

Andrew Leonard: Nominating Expert Net Vision / Net Excellence

You are technology and business editor of salon.com, one of the most renowned magazines on culture and politics on the Internet. But the financial situation is not so great: more advertisement, 'Salon.premium' with 'better' content than the free salon.com etc. And salon is not the only magazine. Will the Web be soon free of 'free quality content'?

Leonard: 'Free quality content' has always been kind of a misnomer. Someone has to be paying for quality to be produced, somewhere down the line, whether it be advertisers or readers directly. I think it's been pretty definitively established that there is no business model for purely advertising-supported content -- particularly in a media recession like the one that we are going through now.

But we also aren't going to be moving to a completely 'premium' model either. Right now, we're finding that mix of both premium and free servers readers and Salon well, and I'd be careful against saying whether one is 'better' than the other. Just because our news and politics stories are premium and our tech and biz stories are free doesn't mean that our news and politics is better than tech and biz. It just means that we made a decision that a: people were more likely to pay for news and politics, and b: advertisers were more likely to buy ads in tech and biz.

I don't know how it will all play out, but one way or another, I think there will be a lot of freely accessible content on the Web, though quality may ultimately decline if neither advertisers nor readers are willing to pony up the cash.

Is there an alternative? What is your vision of content on the Internet?

Leonard: User-generated content is always an alternative and will always be around and growing. Mailing lists, discussion groups, etc. -- the Net is very good at transmitting information and that's not going to go away. So I wouldn't be an alarmist. The question remains, will high quality, edited, independent journalism prosper on the Net? My 'vision' is that it will, but it's going to take a lot of hard work.

You have been working on Salon's Free Software Project, conceived as a radical innovation in online-journalism. What's the difference to traditional online journalism?

Leonard: Alas, the Free Software Project has been a victim of the dot-com downturn. Salon could not afford to have me work full-time on it, and promoted me to editor of the tech & biz section, which is more than a full time job.

I like the phrase 'traditional online journalism' -- heh -- five years ago, there was no such thing! The difference between the FSP and Salon's normal fare was that we really sought reader feedback and tried to incorporate that into the ongoing story.

Could 'open-source thinking' generate a whole new life style?

Leonard: Open-source thinking is spreading into all kinds of places, particular in the new world of bioinformatics. I think as far as life style, though, it takes a progressive attitude to understand that collectively we are all better off when we cooperate than if we act only as selfish individuals. We have a long way to go before open-source thinking is mainstream.

At Prix Ars Electronica you are nominating expert in the subfield 'magazines, net journalism, e-publishing, forums, and news services. What special quality must have a site so that you will suggest it to the Jury?

It must be consistently interesting! Nothing more, nothing less.




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