Kevin Kelly, blogging his book The Technium in early 2008, argued that when copies become super abundant, the things that cannot be copied become scarce and valuable — so what you sell is whatever resists copying. He listed eight of them, which he called generatives: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.
This post walked the list through journalism. Immediacy was already proven by technology blogs such as Engadget and Gizmodo live-blogging keynotes. Personalisation was the contested one, resisted by editors who held that they knew best what the audience wanted, while the web moved the other way. Interpretation was named the value most likely to save journalism: having all the world’s information within reach leaves the sense-making undone. Authenticity was trust by another name — people pay for the real thing because they take it to be reliable. Accessibility meant news organisations were sitting on a goldmine of their own back catalogue if audiences could retrieve and keep it. Embodiment might be what keeps newspapers in business, since some readers will buy a physical object. Patronage was awkward for a profession that prizes independence, though independent journalists had already raised money online. Findability closed the list on the observation that unfound news is worthless, making distribution beyond a site’s own pages part of the strategy rather than a threat.
Kelly’s own conclusion was that the eight demand a new skill set: not distribution, not intellectual property law, and not hoarding, but “an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model”.