Many journalists are mad with Robert G Picard, a professor of media economics at Sweden’s Jonkoping University and a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. In a recent lecture, he gave at Oxford, Picard argues that journalists deserve low pay. Read excerpts from his lecture reproduced in the Christian Science Monitor and let me know what you think:

OXFORD, England – Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power and comforting the afflicted.

Actually, journalists deserve low pay.

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

Where does value come from?

Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself, but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.

Economic value is rooted in worth and exchange. It is created when finished products and services have more value – as determined by consumers – than the sum of the value of their components.

To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided when individuals identify with the publication’s perspectives or opinions, or when they’re empowered to express their own ideas.

These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. That’s because producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication and distribution severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exists.

The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labour of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.

The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don’t care about journalism – only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.

What are journalists worth?

Economic outcomes have traditionally held low priority for journalists. That’s got to change.

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process, three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively.

Accessing sources is crucial because information and knowledge do not exist as a natural resource that merely has to be harvested. It must be constructed by someone. The journalistic skill of identifying and reaching authorities or others who construct expertise traditionally gave journalists opportunities to report in ways that the general public could not.

Determining significance has been critical because journalists sort through an enormous amount of information to find the most significant and interesting items for consumers.

Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.

Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is “de-skilling” journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.

To create economic value, journalists and news organisations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labour above this level, they deserve low pay.

ACM now full member of int’l media rights body

The voice of Caribbean journalists has been considerably strengthened with the recent acceptance of the regional Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) to Full Membership in the Canada-based or International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEM) ACM president, Wesley Gibbings, presented the case for membership at the IFEX General Meeting in Oslo, Norway on June 1, 2009, which was attended by over 100 free expression groups.

IFEX, established in 1992 in Montréal, monitors, promotes and defends freedom of expression worldwide. The network has over 80 member organisations operating in more than 50 countries, the majority in the developing world and countries in transition.

Desmond Allen, aka The Spike, a 35-year veteran of journalism, is a former president of the Press Association of Jamaica and founding general secretary of the regional Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM).