Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do": Books, Magazines, and Newspapers: Dealing with Information Overload

[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]

Opinion Articles: With opinion articles as with music, we’ll soon have many more options than most consumers will want to slog through. There’s something valuable-as well as limiting-in the fact that your daily paper offers four op-ed pieces rather than forty thousand.

But as I noted in the music discussion, information overload isn’t a new phenomenon. There are far more books than any consumer can personally browse, and yet we’re quite happy with this, and don’t clamor for less selection. We generally prefer to go to bigger bookstores rather than smaller ones, even though smaller ones have done some extra preselection for us.

True, we partly rely on the screening done by publishers, who’ll at least have rejected the total garbage, but we also rely on reviewers, word-of-mouth, our familiarity with particular writers and artists, the possibility of browsing, and advertising. These mechanisms will still exist for the new media, even if publisher selection doesn’t. People will still read reviews and hear about good items from friends. People will also be familiar with existing popular columnists and existing organizations that are starting newsletters.

Moreover, electronic distribution can make possible new selection devices. One particularly useful new service—similar to the custom-mix radio I discussed above—would be a subscription that delivers a different column every day, perhaps selected by general topic or political perspective. Thus, together with my daily William F. Buckley, Libertarian Report, and Column Left/Column Right on the First Amendment, I could also download a different center-to-right-wing column every day, and twice a week random (but well-regarded) columns from all points on the spectrum.

When I find a column I really like, I might subscribe to it, or order a few more days’ worth to see if I really like it. The service could be even cheaper than normal subscriptions, because the columnists would probably be willing to waive their royalties for the exposure the service would provide. The service might be cheaper still, or free but for the cost of paper, if the service takes advertising, or takes money from the columnists in exchange for reprinting the columns. This latter approach will create a potential conflict of interest, as well as a barrier for poor columnists (though not a very high one); but there’ll probably be both free and pay services, with the pay services touting their independence, much as Consumer Reports and Ms. magazine-which don’t accept advertising-do today.

Books: In the book market, reviewers will play an even more critical role than they do today. Moreover, as with music, their recommendations will have more influence because they’ll be easily available when the customer is buying the book. Electronic bookstores will let customers select only those books that were professionally reviewed, or books reviewed by particular reviewers (or reviewing businesses)—for instance, “new Science Fiction books that got positive reviews from reviewer X, Y, or Z.”

A writer will, instead of sending a manuscript to a publisher, send it to several reviewing services specializing in the field. Most reviewing services probably won’t write full-length reviews; instead, they’ll give the book a grade and maybe a one-paragraph summary and critique for the good ones. They might also compare the book to others by well-established authors (e.g., “people who like Larry McMurtry would probably like this one”).

The services might charge the author for their efforts. Rates would start at a minimum that compensates for the reviewer’s time—perhaps as little as a few hundred dollars—and would rise as the service becomes more and more popular and can thus charge extra for its name.

In a sense the reviewing market will reinvent part of today’s publishing business and lead to some of the costs associated with it. Publishers perform an important screening function, which someone will still have to perform. Publishers also perform an important editing function, and there may well be editing services or freelance editors, who’ll ask for either a fee or a royalty (which may not be possible for books that seem unlikely to succeed).

Thus, there’ll still be organizations with the power to sink a book—here, reviewers rather than publishers—and there’ll still be up-front costs-reviewing and editing fees rather than printing costs. But the costs will be much lower, and the reviewers will be more diverse, will represent more tastes, and will be better able to serve niche markets.

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