FREE/Long Tail

Felix Salmon on why opinion should be free

Reuters columnist Felix Salmon on why his company shouldn’t buy Breakingviews, with its paywall-only model: “The genius of Reuters setting up a commentary team is that we can offer our content at a marginal cost of zero. Once the commentary is available on the wire, for the benefit of subscribers to the terminals, those subscribers want it made available as widely as possible for free — because that way it becomes maximally influential. (That’s my argument, anyway, we’ll see how much traction it gets.) In that sense, commentary is the opposite of news.”