A judge has ruled that Apple is guilty of price-fixing in its attempt to get the major publishers to unite against Amazon’s discounting of e-books.

Now, that’s not a very helpful — and possibly not entirely accurate — explanation. If you want more, there’s a thread at Reddit that has some terrific explanations at various level of detail (e.g., this one), as well as bunches of questions asked and answered. And, of course, some digressions, hip shots, and smug wrongnesses.

There are certainly some helpful analyses and explanations from the mainstream: e.g., WSJ, Wired, Bloomberg. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to choose among those three and the Reddit comment I linked to above. But the Reddit thread is — at least to my taste — a better way to explore the issue: a variety of views expressed at appropriate lengths, with questions posed at various levels of sophistication, and with a conversation that goes where it wants to without a fear of dead ends.

Now, I’m aware that if you go to the Reddit thread, you’ll be appalled by how much there is wrong with it. Yeah, I’m not blind to it. But consider what an amazing emergent artifact that thread is. It combines in one flow “explainers” and analysis as good as you’ll find from professionals, Q&A, and a a social froth that you can easily ignore if it is not to your liking. This is what journalism looks like — one of the ways it looks — when the old constraints of space, authorial ownership, and editorial process are lifted, and a larger We gets our hands on it. Pretty fascinating.

Categories: journalism dw