No, giving away the news doesn’t mean lower-quality journalism

gigaom reporting:

A Columbia Journalism Review columnist argues that a free or advertising-supported news model inevitably leads to lower-quality journalism. But there is no reason why ads can’t co-exist with high-quality reporting just as easily as they can subsidize pageview-driven clickbait, despite the CJR’s claims to the contrary.

Amid all the heated debates over whether paywalls and subscription models are the solution to the ongoing disruption of traditional media, one argument resurfaces again and again — namely, that a free or advertising-supported news model is inherently incompatible with high-quality journalism. Dean Starkman, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, has made this point in the past and reiterates it in a recent post entitled “Facing up to the high cost of free news.” In a nutshell, Starkman tries to make the case that because advertising is based on volume, it encourages low-quality clickbait, whereas subscription models are more compatible with high-quality investigative journalism. But is this true?
Starkman first tackled this idea a few weeks ago, with a post that described how ad-supported media almost inevitably results in what he and others have called “hamster wheel” journalism — that is, a steady stream of click-driven ephemera and cheap pageview-boosting tactics rather than quality reporting. Although the CJR writer maintains in his latest post that he is only raising the question rather than drawing a direct line between the two, it is pretty obvious that he believes the “free” news model is a road to perdition, journalistically speaking:
http://gigaom.com/2012/10/10/no-giving-away-the-news-doesnt-mean-lower-quality-journalism/