Mediasaurs

I've not really read any Michael Crichton (RIP 4 November 2008) so I can't say whether I am a fan or not but I was fairly impressed by just how prescient his article Mediasaurus was (via Techdirt). Most of what he said is now pretty much established fact (outside the media industry)- the only exception being his suggestion that people will become more prepared to pay for information:

More and more, people understand that they pay for information. Online databases
charge by the minute. As the link between payment and information becomes more
explicit, consumers will naturally want better information. They'll demand it,
and they'll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be - I would argue there
already is - a market for extremely high-quality information, what quality experts
would call "six-sigma information."

Actually, more or less the reverse has happened. Information is an infinitely reproducible good which means the price of information tends to zero (as the cost of distribution goes down). That doesn't mean the cost of assembling the information goes down. This is as true of high quality information as it is of low quality information.

The tricky part of getting good information is finding it.

The short answer here is that Google and wikipedia have made whole classes of information readily discoverable- the cost of discovery is cheap. So if the information is free somewhere that becomes the price of the information everywhere. Without a price fixing mechanism and collusion competition forces the price of information to zero.

Aside from that relatively minor quibble he's got a pretty impressive hit rate given that he wrote the article in 1993. The funny part is the media companies still don't seem to have got it.