The Paper Boys

There's a series of interesting interviews at the Irish Left Review (plug, plug) with the folk involved in the Paper Round project, examining the state of the Irish press. I particularly liked this observation from Copernicus, citing A Tiny Revolution:

People are under the impression that the product of a newsprint organisation is the newspaper it puts out and sells to the public. Hence, you state above that its function is to provide the public with information and that the paper’s customer is the person who buys the paper to get that information. That is, after all, the constitutional position and the reason constitutional privileges in respect of defamation law are afforded to the press.

However, the real product of a newsprint organisation (or any private media organisation) is its audience. Access to this audience is sold to advertisers who are the real customers of the media organisation. So the function of a media organisation isn’t to provide information to citizens, it’s to build an audience with its content and to sell access to that audience to its advertisers.

Couldn't have put it better myself. YOU are the product.