Social welfare aspects of information with special reference to news.

The information society thesis, according to which economically advanced nations are undergoing transformation into post-industrial, information-based societies, can, with caveats, be taken as a premise. Essentially empirical or predictive, this influential set of claims quickly gives rise to major normative issues. The paper asks how, as part of a prospective normative theory of the information society, information may be shown to contribute to social goals in general and social welfare in particular. Given the diverse range of referents of the term 'information' in the context of the information society debate, the paper focuses on news as a form of information whose communication is widely held to be important to society. The problem is how to quantify or otherwise prove this intuition. It is suggested that a fusion of welfare economics and the economics of information may yield a solution. The paper is designed to be exploratory, offering a potential line of inquiry for the future research and policy agenda of information society studies.