Many great speakers presented many great ideas at the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference in New York City earlier this week. However, some of these great ideas are myths that need to be debunked.

Leading off the list was a comment by Walker Jacobs, Senior Vice President of New Media Ad Sales for Turner Entertainment. In the Keynote Panel, The Media Moguls Address the Digital Content and Advertising Economy, he suggested that all of their content is paid content, the question is who is paying for it. This exposes an interesting myth that takes several different forms about the divide between paid content and truly free, user generated content.

One form of the myth is that the only good content is content that people get paid for. Other forms include the idea that free content is some new creation of the digital world and that people who share free content, perhaps even making money off of this are bad.

So, let’s look at some forms of free content. I don’t know if there were many academics in the audience that have published significant articles in peer reviewed journals. If so, I suspect most of them did not get paid for their content. I know that I have not been paid for articles I’ve written for peer reviewed scholarly journals. Related to this are the chapters that people write for books edited by others. Many of these chapters add significantly to the literature on one topic area or another, but again, it is typically the editors that get paid, and not the people creating the content. Again, I’ve had chapters published in a couple different books which I’ve not been paid for.

There is nothing new about free content being produced, and sold at a profit by book companies, editors, and journal publishers, and much of this content is very high value content.

Of course, all of this is based on a fairly narrow view of what it means to be paid. Free content producers are often paid in social capital; strokes or accolades. I remember years ago, when a friend of mine who wrote for the Wall Street Journal had her first article front paged on that newspaper. She had a party to celebrate. Accolades for financially remunerated articles and for articles where there is no financial remuneration can be a significant payment. I still get a little thrill when one of my blog posts gets front paged on a site where I had not been expecting such an honor.

This takes me to “The Ultimate Digital Content Debate: Paid or Free?” The first piece of free content about the debate at DPAC was from @scanlon_pittPG who tweeted, “Wow what an ego! ‘the debate about pay walls and journalism over’ because of myself and my partner Steven Brill #dpac4” Brill went on to defend his statement with the assertion that “People are realizing that advertising alone cannot support news”.

While Mr. Brill might be ‘realizing’ this, or at least attempting to realize a profit based on this assumption, it is unsupportable in many ways. First, it is based on a “but we’ve never done it that way before” assumption. I’m assuming you know those corporate meetings. Some young creative innovator comes in with a great idea and one of the large old egos sitting at the end of the table says, “But we’ve never done it that way before”. If the innovator is smart and lucky, he leaves the meeting, finds an angel investor and sets up a company to champion the new disruptive approach, taking down the large old egos.

Yes, it is true that in the past, newspapers have had to rely on both subscriptions and advertising to cover their costs. As an example, based on a 2008 10-Q filed by the New York Times corporation, 60% of their revenue came from advertising and 40% came from subscriptions. However, with print versions, there are costs of raw material, printing and distribution that are much more expensive than the cost of web hosting today. In addition, much of the cost of newspapers include significant interest payments covering the debt servicing of leveraged buyouts from corporate consolidation that wracked the market years ago as well as the payout needed to investors and the large salaries demanded by top executives. For a good example of this, look at the bankruptcy filing of the Journal Register Corporation which included a $1.7 million dollar incentive pay plan for 31 officers and key employees.

One needs to question whether a properly set up online news organization without the cost of printing, excessive corporate debt, and excessive executive compensation really does need subscription revenues to survive. Early successes of some online only local news sites give reason to believe that the assumption must be questioned.

Ignoring for a moment the issue above about whether there can be quality free content, @scanlon_pittPG tweets that Steve Brill believes “You should pay for content because reporters have families.” @scanlon_pittPG goes on to observe, “Nice, but that is NOT a business model.” This gets to a very important point. Just because it might cost money to produce something, doesn’t mean that it is valuable or that people are willing to pay, a point that @bjornjeffery made on Twitter.

Yet the place where Brill seems to cling most firmly to outdated notions is the idea that the role of a paid editor to organize and make sense is required. As I walked home from the DPAC conference, I saw news scrolling freely on the side of a building. It announced a report that the Coast Guard’s exercise on September 11th did not violate any policies, but may not have been a good idea anyway. The reason it may not have been a good idea is perhaps because of these paid editors that Brill lauds that decided to run unsubstantiated stories on September 11th, the same editors that decided the Balloon Boy hoax was more newsworthy that the general strike in Puerto Rico on the same day. Just because it costs money to produce something, doesn’t mean what is produced is valuable.

Now this is not to say that there is not some valuable journalism being done where the journalists deserve to get paid. Here in Connecticut, Ted Mann of the New London Day has recently been doing investigative reporting into the Governor’s use of polling help from a UConn professor that is outstanding. This sort of reporting does provide a value; a value that people who care about our state should be willing to support in one way or another. National Public Radio has long produced reporting that people are willing to support and Spot.Us is creating a new model for funding investigative reporting that needs to be considered.

There is a lot of valuable content that is being produced. Some gets paid for, some doesn’t. We need to explore new models to make sure that the most valuable content does get properly paid for. We need to change models so that the overhead in producing and distributing valuable content gets reduced. More efficient ways of selling and purchasing online advertising and data could be a great help. Ways of making this available to smaller publishers would be a great help. However, setting up more paywalls, and supporting overhead like Mr. Brill may just be a step in the wrong direction.

(Originally published at DigidayDaily.)