Jeff Jarvis is an optimist.
Musing about how we are chosing to get our information, he looks at ownership, distribution and trust.

I’m writing this post — grappling with perhaps the most fundamental truth of my brief blogging career — because I still hear big-media colleagues insisting — or perhaps they’re praying — that content is king, that owning content is where the value is, that equity will still grow from exclusivity.

But no: Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

Connecting the dots…

How Canadians chose information from The Globe and Mail:

Research indicates that television is the primary source of news for Canadians, followed by newspapers, radio and the Internet. But many experts believe the Internet may soon take priority over TV for news producers.

Canadian networks have embraced the Internet. Viewers now download 400,000 to 500,000 files a month from the 100 or so video clips CTV.ca posts daily, said Mark Sikstrom, CTV.ca’s executive producer. CTV.ca resumed streaming Newsnet, but now charges users $6.95 a month for a high bandwidth fee.

Canadian Broadcasting Corp., meanwhile, has about 120,000 audio and video clips available on-line. It has found that Internet news consumption tends to be high on weekdays when people at work check headlines and scores, while TV is popular in the late afternoon and evening, said Claude Galipeau, director of new media at CBC.