Is this true?" Washington Post writer Jon Swartz asked his friend, Peter Lewis, in an alarmed email message. "I'm stupefied."
Lewis, the longtime technology reporter for The New York Times, has quietly given word that he is leaving the Times to join an all-but-unknown Internet start-up called ideaMarket. Jim Seymour, a prominent columnist for PC Magazine and its former editor, is doing the same. The announcements have left the world of mainstream journalism scratching its head and wondering: What are they thinking?
Seymour has had tantalizing job offers in the past: he was invited to run his own high tech mutual fund; he was offered a partnership in a venture capital firm. He turned those down. That's what makes his acceptance of this job - a quixotic bid to sell information in cyberspace - all the more surprising.
As founder Bill Gross describes it, ideaMarket wants to be the Nasdaq for intellectual property. With Seymour as CEO and Lewis as VP/editorial director, the company will elicit information from contributors - say, an article on how to implement stock-option plans, or software code, or musical outtakes from a recent pop album - edit it, rate its value, then peddle it over the Web. Brief descriptions of each item will help users decide whether to fork over money to access it. According to Gross, prices might range from a few cents to US$50 per item. Contributors will reap royalties of up to 50 percent.
That an ocean of information is already available online for free doesn't seem to bother either Lewis or Seymour. "We're going out and assembling what I think is going to be the world's most important source of information online," says Seymour.
"I think we can build a billion-dollar company here very fast," boasts Gross. Many will beg to differ. But as Lewis sees it, the future of journalism lies on the Internet - period. "Everybody's crossing over," he insists. "It's just that some people are jumping and others are being dragged. I've been arguing in my Times articles for a couple of years that we're entering an era in which all bets are off."
Will the marketplace of ideas shift from generalist mass media to a customized, pay-per-view online scheme? Who knows. But the line between journalism and commerce is already starting to blur as more writers take flight to seek their fortunes on the Internet. The only safe bet is that the exodus is likely to continue.
SCANS
Journalism Brain Drain?
