Michael Wolff, the author of Burn Rate (a notorious and bitchy account of life as the founder of an unsuccessful Internet startup) and an excellent and highly experienced journalist, writes in the latest Vanity Fair about newser.com, a news startup which is apparently endeavouring to create a new paradigm in news and in which Wolff has a stake and is involved.
Here's another quirky advantage of the Internet (or, depending, serious disadvantage) and Internet news: people are willing to work for less and, even, for free. That's one result of the Internet's utopianism, that you're doing something of higher purpose, and of the myth of sweat equity, that you're working for future, fabulous riches (which sometimes you are).
Oddly, talking about the plasticity of the Internet, about the possibilities for utopia and riches, actually makes things happen. Somehow something comes into existence. While Google and its creepy form of corporatism dominate this Web era, there are now, given off-the-shelf "solutions" (meaning cheap equipment and cheap, pre-written software), more garage and dorm-room operations than there have ever been (one of which, perhaps sooner rather than later, will challenge Google). Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg's dorm-room companions continue to sue him over the ownership of Facebook because they claim it grew out of more than just idle dorm-room chat. (For the purposes of full disclosure: my financial interest in my hypothetical newspaper is about the same as that of Zuckerberg's roommates in Facebook—I will settle, if big money is made, for a small retirement home on the beach in East Hampton.)
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