From the Editor in Chief: Not Free, But Relatively Inexpensive

Ihave many hats. For my day job, I hang out at NASA and try to figure out how to simplify building software for flying things. In my copious free time, I’m a journalist. This entitles me to do things like attend conferences as “press” (the power of the media being such that one is sometimes better treated than the paying attendees), write this column, and worry about how all this great Internet technology we’re creating is busily destroying the economics of academic publishing. A.J. Liebling once observed, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Liebling wrote for The New Yorker and was a pointed commentator on the press (newspapers) of his day. He was concerned that coverage of politics and news was concentrated in the hands of a few unscrupulous newspaper publishers. Liebling died before television came to dominate the shaping of popular opinion. Presumably, today he’d be concerned about the few large broadcast corporations’ control, although he wouldn’t be surprised about the extent to which these corporations are more concerned with preserving their continuing profit streams than actual politics, or how criticism of the government has become muted in service of those ends.