Time to reconsider the value of products that journalists produce

One of obstacles for principle of economics applying to the news media industry will be a unique characteristic of products that journalists produce. That is a public good. In economic principle, as an individual consumes the product, the availability of the product should be reduced. 

However, news contents are not affected by the consumption of others. The price of news contents is inelastic to the demand. At the same time, so many substitutes exist, negatively affecting price elasticity. If news media industry only relies on the competitive market principle, the diversity of voices, which is a backbone for the democratic society, will disappear.Therefore, in the news media sector, the government couldn’t help to intervene with the news industry through regulations. Maybe, the reason that the study of media economics is not dominant in journalism and communication studies contributes to this unique characteristic of new media. 

However, journalists as well as media managers cannot entirely blame the characteristic of a public good as a culprit of the collapse of news media and expect some subsidies from the government. The reason why they cannot blame the characteristic of news media is that journalists neglect the importance of how their news articles benefit the public in a practical sense. They may have been sitting in a cozy spot for a long time with an arrogant way of thought that ‘We (journalists) lead, and you (the public) follow’.