Everyone Is a Wire Service Now
Primary reporting is expensive and easily reused. The economics reward the second publisher more reliably than the first.
An original story costs weeks of a reporter's time, editorial review, and often legal review. A rewrite of that story costs forty minutes and captures a large share of the audience.
This asymmetry has always existed. What changed is the speed of the rewrite and the number of outlets doing it, which compresses the window in which the original publisher holds an advantage to something close to nothing.
The predictable response has been to produce less of what is expensive and more of what is cheap, which is why analysis, aggregation, and commentary have expanded while the number of people covering an institution full time has fallen.
There is no clean fix inside the current arrangement. Every proposal that has worked at any scale involves someone paying directly for the expensive part, which is a much harder sell than it should be for a product whose value only becomes obvious once it is gone.
Iris Nakamura writes for The 13th Bell on media. This piece was edited and fact checked before publication.
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