Why Going Digital Won't Save Journalism -- At Least Not Yet.

Robert McChesney in Sunday's Salon on the news media meltdown:  "...The Internet does not alleviate the tensions between commercial­ism and journalism; it magnifies them."

It doesn't do a whole lot for journalistic integrity either.  If the current crisis in the news media has to do with making enough money to pay the journalists to do the work, going digital not only exacerbates the problem, but tarnishes the product as well.  McChesney exposes several recent attempts to make money online -- and why they've failed, at least when it comes to the true purpose of journalism.  Here's a taste:

The latest hope is that the rapid emergence of mobile communication will open up new ways to monetize content. But the point of professional journalism in its idealized form was to insulate the news from commercialism, marketing, and political pressures and to produce the necessary information for citizens to understand and participate effectively in their societies. In theory, some people were not privileged over others as legitimate consumers of journalism. That is why it was democratic. It was a public service with an am­biguous relationship with commercialism; hence the professional firewall. Journalists made their judgment calls based on professional education and training, not commercial considerations. That is why people could trust it. The core problem with all these efforts to make journalism pay online is that they accelerate the commercialization of journalism, degrading its integrity and its function as a public service. The cure may be worse than the disease.

 What's at stake is not just media corporations' bottom lines -- or even reporter's paychecks.  It's democracy itself.  bk

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

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