Somehow I had missed the perfectly respectable, safe-for-work New York magazine story in 2009 about the porn industry’s Internet-driven woes and, allegedly, what the news industry could learn from them. Much thanks to JimRomenesko.com for helping me find it, because how often do people in mainstream journalism get a chance to learn about porn and be able to say with a straight face that it’s work-related research?
The quick summary: While porn initially benefitted from the Internet, over time the improving technology, bandwidth and cameras have meant that free or extremely cheap amateur video is blowing up the revenue stream.
And although the 2009 article indicates that what I guess you’d call porn industry officials felt they had some ideas for dealing with the downturn, a new article in The Atlantic indicates the problem continues unabated:
“What holds for journalism in this case holds for sex. In both cases, the competition is so broad that customers are likely to go elsewhere rather than pay. There are, obviously, exceptions in the case of newspapers — the Wall Street Journal has a profitable paywall, and the New York Times appears to be having some early success with its own.”
While I think there’s a certain amount of fun in the porn/journalism comparison, it’s a fundamentally flawed comparison. You will never find 12-year-old boys huddling in one friend’s room with the door closed to pass around a copy of the New York Times that one of them snuck from under his father’s mattress. Sex is a biological pursuit of primitive urges. Seeking out writing and information is an intellectual pursuit (partisan froth aside). Journalism may have a better chance of finding a niche of people willing to embrace paying for worthwhile presentation of worthwhile information. In other words, as The Atlantic’s article put it, I think people do have slightly higher standards for their news than for their porn. Slightly.
Newsroom With A View 
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