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THE DEATH OF ALPHA-BLOGGING

WOULD BRAD DE LONG BE BETTER OFF DOING SOMETHING ELSE?

Free Exchange, the Economist's economics blog, argues that top-class academic bloggers could probably make better use of their time producing original academic research, and leaving more dedicated bloggers to do the blogging about it ...

From FREE EXCHANGE

The interesting thing about the blogosphere is that a post
on tolerance within conservative publications for departures from
strict supply-siderism can, in just a few short hops, transform into a
discussion on the influence wielded by teachers' unions within the Democratic Party, and then into commentary on merit pay for journalists, before finally settling on
the importance of wealthy benefactors to the production of quality journalism in the English-speaking world. I don't doubt that were we to
examine all the sites which linked to the ones contributing to the
progression above, the universe of included topics would expand
considerably.

I'd like to turn for the moment to a comment by Matthew Yglesias, who writes that:

[I]t
really is noteworthy how much of the more prestigious journalism out
there is produced in a manner that's somewhat shielded from market
forces. The American Prospect, National Review, the Nation, Mother
Jones, the Washington Monthly, Harper's and Reason are all run as
non-profits. The New Republic, the Atlantic, and the Weekly Standard
are run as non-profitable "for profit" organizations. The Washington
Post (and Newsweek), the New York Times (and the Boston Globe), and
until recently the Wall Street Journal were profitable but controlled
by journalism-minded families willing to eschew some degree of
profit-maximization in order to pursue some larger goals. NPR and its
affiliates are a somewhat complicated non-profit arrangement. And among
prestigious foreign outlets with a substantial American audience you
see the BBC as a public broadcasting endeavor and the Guardian (and
affiliated publications) is run by the Scott Trust.

Why
is it so hard to make money running a newspaper or magazine? At least
part of the answer seems to be that for many publications, it no longer
makes financial sense to make oneself excludable by forgoing a website
or running a site with a subscription wall; the value of additional
readership directed to a publication through internet links is too
great.

At the same time, papers using a joint print subscription-free
web content model are subject to free riding; they cannot capture as
much of the surplus they produce as they previously could, when all
readers needed to purchase a copy of the publication. The internet is
turning business models on their heads; the incredibly low price of
journalism has fuelled demand to the point where time and not financial
constraints ration media consumption. Similarly, barriers to entry are
incredibly low. In the production of content, the principle opportunity
cost is likewise time, and not capital (though time is money, of
course).

These time constraints are currently wreaking havoc on the econoblogosphere, if you can believe it, and Dani Rodrik is worried:

Two
things happened in the last twenty-four hours which made me wonder if
some of the best economics blogs may be on their way out. First, an
economist with a very high-quality blog told me that he was not sure if
he had made the right decision by starting it. He said he worried about
coming up with new content on a daily basis, and that he may run out of
energy at some point. Then, Greg Mankiw declares that he is too busy to
be reading and filtering all the comments he gets on his site and turns
off the comments section. In a long post, he says the whole blog thing
is taking too much of his time, and intimates that he may not be doing
this for ever.

So if economists with high opportunity costs of
time start to get out, shall we have a lemons problem on our hands?
Will eventually the only prolific bloggers remain the ones that are not
worth reading?

Truly it would be a loss if prominent
economists ceased their blogging efforts. Not only would their direct
perspective vanish, but the cost to academic economists of not being on
the internet would plummet, deterring other notable thinkers from ever
testing the waters. All the same, I'm not sure Mr Rodrik has drawn the
correct analogy with the market for lemons. Rather, I would turn to
trusty old comparative advantage.

One suspects that an economist
like Greg Mankiw, or Dani Rodrik, or Brad DeLong has an absolute
advantage in nearly everything economics orientated, relative to
journeymen such as myself. But I think it's quite possible that their
advantage in blogging is not at all as great as their advantage in
producing world class research. There might then be gains from trade.
Very good economists could produce very good research, and tolerable
bloggers could analyse and blog about that research for those
interested in reading about economics, and all would benefit. In fact,
I believe that if one looks at the whole distribution of economics
bloggers and academic economists, the share of economics bloggers doing
academic economics is not that large, and the share of academic
economists blogging is smaller still.

Which isn't to say that I
wish any academic economists to leave off blogging--there is value in smart writing not meant for journal publication. I would simply hope that Mr Rodrik might have a bit more faith in the market, and in the humble collection of bloggers doing their best to write about it.

(This article was first published on Free Exchange, the economics blog at Economist.com)