SPECIALIZATION, TRADE, AND COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS: InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds writes for Tech Central Station. This week's column compares and contrasts the economics of punditry with the economics of serious news.

"Professional punditry is in for some hard times: people have figured out that it's not that hard to do, and the supply of would-be pundits probably exceeds the demand. I know that I tend to turn to weblogs for insight and analysis far more often than I turn to the op-ed pages of the Times and the Post these days, and I think you'll see more people doing that over the next few years. "

The weblogs have also been the place of origin for the practice of "Fisking," which refers to the line-by-line rebuttal, or demolition, or making fun of, the works of the establishment pundit. There is a good deal of economics at work in here.

1. People have to pay less to get their point of view in the open today. Steven Landsburg, in his marvelous The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life, long ago noted that the information content of op-ed pages was likely to be low. "Most readers turn to the op-ed pages for entertainment, not enlightenment, and the writer's incentive is to supply what his readers demand."

2. Failures are not severely punished (a point Landsburg also makes): in fact, Robert Fisk's value to the Independent might be higher precisely because in order to fisk Fisk, one has to read the column.

3. An Instapundit reader pointed out a self-selection incentive at work: "Successful talk radio and Internet bloggers are conservative/libertarian because they represent the error signal in a negative feedback loop, correcting left wing bias." Perhaps so -- there isn't much mileage in sending a letter to the editor or posting a comment agreeing with everything. There also isn't much incentive for the big media echo chamber to change its ways. They comment, the blogosphere fisks, but the big media sites (particularly those with intrusive registration policies) still get the hits.

There is a testable hypothesis in Professor Reynolds's TCS column, "But actual information about what's happening is still mostly the province of professional journalism, and that's less likely to change. I can imagine a decentralized amateur news service (a sort of Slashdot on steroids)." That's a comparative advantage argument. To the extent that independent commentators can engage in independent commentary without being vetted by Big Media (that's the Professor's main point, "Unfortunately, this hasn't worked out very well. The move to analysis and punditry was driven, in no small part, by corporate pressures to cut costs, pressures that accompanied the consolidation and corporatization of the news media. But the very environment that produced those pressures made it harder to produce good, and interesting, opinion: the hard-drinking, wise-cracking Lou Grant archetype has been replaced by graduates from a very small number of elite schools who tend to play it safe and share the same views. That, plus the don't-offend mindset that always goes along with corporate life, doesn't make for interesting commentary: Amateurs, under no such constraints, can do better and already often do. So it may be necessary to reverse this trend, and for Big Media organizations to put a higher priority on actual reporting out of simple economic necessity)," he sees the same sort of echo chamber in media organizations that I have observed in university administrations. The media echo chamber is subject to market tests in a slightly different way, however, and the opportunity cost of producing punditry rather than news might in fact increase. Or if not, the "decentralized amateurs" might find their way around Big Media anyway. In some ways, the ability to participate in listservs, chat rooms, or publish web logs is similar to the ability to operate an amateur radio station, but without the licensing requirements and CQ codes.