how to save newspapers vs why to save newspapers

Two views on the future of newsapers: First, from the Nation, John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney reprise their argument for public support of journalism:

In moments of crisis, our wisest leaders have always recognized the indispensible role of journalism in democracy. We are in such a crisis now. It is the character of the crisis, and the urgency of the moment, that should make Americans impatient with blanket condemnations of subsidies. State support is vital to higher education; on rare occasions professors have been harassed by governors or legislators over the content of their research or lectures. But only an extreme libertarian or a nihilist would argue to end all public support of higher education to eliminate the threat of this kind of government abuse. Likewise, the government does not tax church property or income, which is in effect a massive subsidy of organized religion. Yet the government has not favored particular religions or required people to hold religious views.

And now, for the other side, an oldie but goodie by Slate's Jack Shafer, who took on the McChesney-Nichols argument almost a year ago. (As an aside, look what happened to government-subsidize entities such as NEA and PBS):

Big love for newspapers has also been flowing in from academy/activist circles, a very unlikely source. Many in this orbit blame the press for not spotting our current financial predicament early enough and also believe that every reporter outside of the old Knight Ridder Washington bureau was complicit in the criminal conspiracy that made George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq possible. Bill Moyers encapsulated their view two years ago when he argued against the notion "that the dominant institutions of the press are guardians of democracy. They actually work to keep reality from us, whether it's the truth of money in politics, the social costs of 'free trade,' growing inequality, the resegregation of our public schools, or the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation."

Yet now, as newspapers attrite and collapse, some scholars are telling us that newspapers are a necessary component of democracy. Princeton University scholars Samuel Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido recently linked the Dec. 31, 2007, closure of the Cincinnati Post (circulation 27,000) to a local decline in vote turnout and office seekers, even though the Cincinnati Enquirer (circulation 200,000) survives. Media consolidation critics Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, who asked "Who'll Unplug the Big Media?" in The Nation a year ago, are back this week lamenting the demise of big newspaper journalism. They're calling for "tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions." I can't wait to hear the duo's pitch for a government subsidy to keep Rupert Murdoch's New York Post alive.

Shafer ends his piece with this: "All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them." For the record, McChesney was one of them. bk

one case for a public press

Two of the most talked about proposals for saving journalism are going not-for profit -- either supporting news orgs with philanthropic donations or with tax dollars. For each proposal, there are pros and cons, not the least of which is whether or not such support might constrain the credibility of the news-gathering process. (More on this to come.)

In this week's The Nation, William F. Baker, former president of WNET in New York, our largest PBS station, makes his case for a government-supported public media, making a comparison to Britain's BBC:

Total federal support for American public broadcast media in 2007 was about $480 million. That might seem sufficient or even impressive until you compare it with the BBC, which serves a nation with one-fifth the US population but which received the equivalent of $5.6 billion in government money in 2007. When it comes to public media, the United States is decisively outspent by the governments of most other major democracies. Japan, whose population is less than half the size of the United States', spent the equivalent of $6.8 billion for public broadcasting in 2007; Germany, with one-third the size, spent about $11 billion; and Canada, a tenth the size, spent $898 million. Even Denmark and Ireland, with populations smaller than New York City, far outspent the United States per capita, with respective budgets equivalent to $673 million and $296 million.

The amount the government now sets aside for public broadcast media is about what it costs the military to occupy Iraq for two and a half days. Taking into account the hundreds of billions lavished on the interim survival of our elite financial institutions, funding our news infrastructure won't be a hardship. Just a small fraction of the $45 billion--that's billion with a "b"--Citigroup alone has received since October 2008 would give NPR and PBS all the money they need.

Unlike the benefits that come from bailing out investment banks and insurance conglomerates, a stronger investment in public media would give all citizens a concrete and valuable service. Turn on cable TV news to find out about an event overseas, and you are likely to see a panel of well-coiffed pundits sitting in a studio in New York, Washington or Los Angeles debating what might be happening on the other side of the world. Switch to the same story on the BBC, and you are likely to see a correspondent on the ground where the event is actually taking place. The BBC's forty-one permanent foreign bureaus are more than twice the number maintained by ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS each. This isn't a difference of national character; it's simply a matter of money. For commercial TV, paying pundits is a lot cheaper than doing the real work of reporting. And for public media, chronically small budgets often make extensive original reporting too expensive, even for respected shows like NewsHour.

Interesting. bk

going ordinary: what we lose

Some time back, I read a piece in The Nation by Scott Sherman about how the Wall Street Journal had changed with its new ownership under Rupert Murdoch. Not surprisingly, the editorial perspectives of the two publications could be described as polar opposites.

And yet, Sherman has a keen appreciation for ways in which the Journal excelled:

At its best, in an epoch that future historians will view as a "golden age" for US newspapers, the Journal's front page excelled at various forms: explanatory reporting on politics, economics, science and social trends; deeply researched profiles of companies and executives; and investigative reporting. The Journal pursued General Motors, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum, Texas Instruments, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Apple and hundreds of other corporations, which inspired Ralph Nader to proclaim that, aside from its "Pleistocene" editorial page, the Journal was "the most effective muckraking daily paper in the country.... the main reporter in our country of corporate crime." (Nader's words prompted Robert Sherrill to read an entire year of the Journal's corporate crime coverage for a Nation cover story in 1997.)

Finally, there was a remarkable tradition of immersion journalism: Alex Kotlowitz spent twelve weeks with a teenage boy and his family in the Henry Horner housing project in Chicago; Judith Valente lived for two months, around the clock, with a family whose son was wasting away from AIDS; Tony Horwitz took a job at a poultry plant in Mississippi to document the brutal conditions inside. This is not to say that Page 1 was flawless or that the Kotlowitz-type narratives were dominant. But they were never absent from the medley, and staffers clearly recall the words of former managing editor Paul Steiger, who led the paper from 1991 to 2007: "Go find stories with moral force."

What Sherman laments is that the paper, under Murdoch, has become ordinary. As have so many newspapers -- many of them ordinary to begin with -- which have jettisoned all vestiges of distinguished journalism in the interests, perhaps necessarily, of the bottom line. As reporters scramble to do more with less, pages shrink, and online readers refuse to click past a screen-and-a-half, what we lose is narrative journalism, solid enterprise reporting, and features that allow a writer's voice to peep through.

Even some alt-weeklies, at the expense of losing readers, are jettisoning popular columnists with both a voice and a following in favor of generic junk -- written by ad reps, underpaid assistants or even readers.

I was reminded of all this last week when I listened to Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown discussing Gay Talese with NPR's Steve Inskeep. In discussing a recent interview with Talese in The Paris Review, she mourns the scarcity of narrative journalism in today's media, and mentions what Talese brought to the table: an obsessive curiosity along with an obsession with getting it right -- during a moment in time in journalism when writing was savored.

Talese, she said, never wanted to be a page one writer because then,he said, you have to stick with the news. He wanted to dominate the story, and, like all good narrative journalism, found the truth in the details. bk

obama and the news

Connect the dots (or the linx) on President Obama's press conference on Tuesday night, and the subsequent chatter. May tell us something we do -- or don't -- want to know regarding the news media deathwatch -- and suggest where we might go from here.

First, go here to read a piece from politico's Michael Calderon on how the president snubbed the print prom queens at Tuesday's conference.

Then, go here to read a piece in The Nation by Leslie Savan, who writes that, on the night of forementioned conference, "Barack Obama was up there playing ping-pong by himself." The point: dumb questions.

And finally, go here to see how the press gets bypassed altogether: the online town hall. bk

a stimulus package to save the news?

In this week's The Nation, Robert McChesney and John Nichols make a good case for government intervention to bail out a collapsing news industry. What's more, they offer concrete solutions. They call it a "free press 'infrastructure project' that is necessary to maintain an informed citizenry, and democracy itself. I like it.

Read the article -- it's long, but worth the time investment -- here.

From the piece:

... When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press. Bree Nordenson notes that when she informed famed journalist Tom Rosenstiel that her visionary 2007 Columbia Journalism Review article concerned the ways government could support the press, Rosenstiel "responded brusquely, 'Well, I'm not a big fan of government support.' I explained that I just wanted to put the possibility on the table. 'Well, I'd take it off the table,' he said."

We are sympathetic to that position. As writers, we have been routinely critical of government--Democratic and Republican--over the past three decades and antagonistic to those in power. Policies that would allow politicians to exercise even the slightest control over the news are, in our view, not only frightening but unacceptable. Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail.

And:

We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let's eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let's give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial "news hole," say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper--this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms--and for us citizens--to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.

None of these proposed subsidies favor or censor any particular viewpoint. The primary condition on media recipients of this stimulus subsidy would be a mild one: that they make at least 90 percent of their content immediately available free online. In this way, the subsidies would benefit citizens and taxpayers, expanding the public domain and providing the Internet with a rich vein of material available to all.

The above are just quick hits. Much more... bk

connect-the-dots on digital journalism

Right, I'm starting the new year by cleaning the proverbial closet.... and breaking a lot of blogging rules.

Nonetheless.

I have been intending to post these linx to several articles that, when taken together, might give us a little more insight as to where journalism is headed. Or maybe not. Good reads, anyhow.

Erin Rosa, who's been a reporter for five years, writes in Columbia Journalism Review, that she finds new media to be alive with new opportunities. She writes: "For young reporters like me, the Internet is the primary medium for news content, and it is already leading to a new and inclusive form of journalism rooted in public participation. Although cynics like to say that the craft is a dead end for both young reporters and veteran writers alike, I think it’s an exciting time to be a journalist."

Also from CJR comes this excellent enterprise piece by Bree Nordenson on the information overload that is the product of today's mediascape. Information is everywhere, ours for the asking. Corralling it, however, is one of the problems. As Nordenson tells us, rather than yielding an American public that is more informed, research has shown that in the face of too much information, the reverse is true.

From the piece: “The tragedy of the news media in the information age is that in their struggle to find a financial foothold, they have neglected to look hard enough at the larger implications of the new information landscape—and more generally, of modern life. How do people process information? How has media saturation affected news consumption? What must the news media do in order to fulfill their critical role of informing the public, as well as survive? If they were to address these questions head on, many news outlets would discover that their actions thus far—to increase the volume and frequency of production, sometimes frantically and mindlessly—have only made things more difficult for the consumer."

This one is for Lotta: A year-old media bistro interview with NYU journalism prof Adam Penenberg, who talks about achieving the balance between digital skills and journalism fundamentals, when it comes to j-school. In response to a question about how citizen journalism and blogging are changing journalism, he replies:

"Citizen journalism certainly has its place. After the bombings in Spain, witnesses posted pictures and blog entries within minutes. NY 1, our local news station, solicited pictures of a tornado that ran through Brooklyn, and posted some of them from their viewers. This is all a tremendous addition to journalism. But it won't replace journalists or journalism. Most blogging is analytical by nature. It is symbiotic to the news media it loves to hate. Without the news -- which someone has to go out and get -- there wouldn't be much material for bloggers to mull. So little blogging actually breaks news, it merely amplifies what already exists. I don't say this as a criticism. I think it's wonderful that news consumers can share their insights and criticisms of media with their own readerships. But bloggers won't replace journalists, just like TV news reporters didn't replace print journalists.

"It takes an enviable amount of skill and experience to write a truly good magazine feature or tight news article. They offer an experience you simply can't replicate on a blog. You can ask a bevy of people to act as citizen journalists to research a story, but that doesn't mean that the information will be good. And let's face it: few of us have the luxury of working for free. I can assure you that I do far better work when I am being paid than if I'm doing it pro bono. How about you?"

And finally, an oldie but goodie from Eric Alterman, writing in the Nation on the future of journalism in the digital age. The article predates jlinx -- he wrote the piece six months ago. It was pretty depressing at the time. Since then, things have only gotten worse.

Love his lead: "Spend some time on the "future of news" conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you'll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku."

Seppuku? Look it up. bk