The way to save news is not to create monopolistic monocultures

Link: Some Rationalization May Finally Be Coming for Newsroom Intermediaries, by Richard J. Tofel in Second Rough DraftIn his latest post, Dick Tofel talks about a need for consolidation in organizations that support newsrooms (and, in fact, in newsrooms themselves).“Devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior service. And in circumstances where competing services are roughly equivalent, mere duplication can also be inefficient—and, as noted above, may place an administrative burden on already over-stressed client newsrooms. Time is one of the scarcest resources of all.”I’m worried.This isn’t a criticism of Dick Tofel: he calls out the benefits of competition and the difficulty of determining winners in a market. But I do think there are two more things to consider.The first is that I don’t believe any…