172172
6
Journalism Is Dead! Long Live Journalism?
“Journalism is dead! Long live journalism!” So goes the mantra of the new
conventional wisdom. The bad news is that the Internet has taken the economic
basis away from commercial journalism, especially newspapers, and
left the rotting carcass for all to see. The Internet is providing intense competition
for advertising, which has traditionally bankrolled most of the news
media. In 2000, daily newspapers received nearly $20 billion from classifieds;
in 2011 the figure was $5 billion. A free ad on Craigslist generally gets
more responses. Display advertising fell from around $30 billion to $15 billion
in the same period. Combined newspaper advertising revenues were
cut in half from 2003 to 2011.1
In 2011 newspapers still received 25 percent
of all advertising expenditures despite getting only 7 percent of consumers’
media time. by all accounts, the industry remains in free fall.2
The Internet has also taken away readers, who can find online for free
much of the journalism they might want. A large and growing number of
Americans, especially younger ones, get their news from comedy programs.3
A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that computer tablets were booming
among traditional newspaper readers, and 59 percent of the respondents
said the tablet had replaced “what they used to get” from a newspaper.4
And
as the content of newspapers gets skimpier, the product becomes that much
more unappealing, making it that much more difficult to get people to subscribe
to cover the lost advertising revenues. A 2011 survey determined that
only 28 percent of American adults thought it would have a major impact
on them if their local newspaper disappeared; 39 percent said it would have
no impact whatsoever.5
by any reckoning, this onetime ubiquitous medium
is in its death spiral.
It is not just newspapers, though they are being hit hardest; all commercial
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 173
news media are in varying stages of decay. but newspapers are by far the most
important, because they are where the vast majority of original reporting is
done, and no other media have emerged to replace them. harvard’s Alex S.
Jones estimates that 85 percent of all professionally reported news originates
with daily newspapers, and he notes that he has seen credible sources place
that figure closer to 95 percent.6
Commercial radio news barely exists at all,
and much of what remains on commercial television can be called news
only by a loose definition of the term.
but fear not, we are told. here’s the good news: The same Internet that
has slain the news media will provide ample journalism eventually, in an
almost certainly superior form. In no other area have the celebrants been
so emphatic.7
Jeff Jarvis asserts, “Thanks to the web . . . journalism will not
only survive but prosper and grow far beyond its present limitations.”8
All
we need to do is get out of the way and let free markets work their magic on
revolutionary technologies.
Clay Shirky wrote in his influential 2009 essay, “Newspapers and Thinking
the unthinkable,” that “this is what real revolutions are like,” adding,
“the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” Shirky
counsels patience. “Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the
time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem
as minor at launch as Craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”
he adds, “In the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping
special cases. . . . Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is
going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper,
but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us
the journalism we need.”9
yochai benkler suggests that the new journalism will be so radically different
from the old that traditional concerns about resource support are no
longer of pressing importance. We can have a leaner journalism, and it will
still be much better, thanks to the Internet. he writes: “Like other information
goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial
model—be it the monopoly city paper, IbM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft,
or britannica—to a networked model that integrates a wider range
of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale
and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already
see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided
in the networked public sphere.”10
Likewise, Shirky, in a major address on
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174 digital disconnect
the state of the news media at harvard in 2011, basically ignored the issue of
resources and economic support.11
The enthusiasm of the celebrants for the Internet as the basis for journalism’s
revitalization is understandable, for four putative reasons. First, there
are an exponentially greater number of people who are able to participate as
journalists online because barriers to entry are all but eliminated. “We are all
journalists, now,” as the saying goes.12
Second, newly christened journalists,
like everyone else, can have access to the world’s information at a second’s
notice, far beyond what anyone could have accessed in the past. All they
need to do is develop their skills at surfing the Web. Third, journalists will
be able to collaborate and draw from the intelligence and labor of countless
others in a networked environment, so that the whole will be far greater than
the sum of its parts. Fourth, the Internet dramatically lowers the cost of production
and effectively eliminates the cost of distribution, so a journalist can
have a digital readership in the tens of millions with barely any budget at all.
So while the Internet might undermine the viability of the existing commercial
news media, unless they change, it will also provide a far more glorious
and democratic replacement. All that needs to be done is to keep the
government censors at bay, and even the censors will have a very difficult
time wrestling this magical technology to the ground.
This is an intoxicating prospect. There are numerous great journalists,
like Glenn Greenwald, whose work exists only because of the factors above.
Concerned citizens can locate a treasure trove of information online. The
Arab Spring demonstrates that the powers-that-be face an unprecedented
threat to their existence from aroused and empowered populations. For the
most exuberant among us, the newest wave of technologies may have already
ushered in the next glorious period. “There’s no longer any need to imagine
a media world where you create, aggregate and share freely and find credible,
relevant news and information by using recommendations from peers
you trust,” Rory O’Connor writes, “because that world is already here.”13
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler write that “the free flow of information
enabled by cell phones replaces the need for a free press.”14
Perhaps no issue is of greater importance to the future than how accurate
these hopeful perspectives prove to be. Two matters are beyond debate: First,
journalism in the manner I described it in chapter 3 is mandatory, not only
so people can participate in the central political and communication policy
issues outlined in this book, but also so there can be a democratic society
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 175
wherein individual liberties are meaningful. Second, current journalism is
in decline and disarray. If there are any doubts about the second point, the
evidence presented below should eliminate them. We are in a political crisis
of existential dimensions.
Two outstanding questions arise. First, will the Internet, the profit motive,
citizens, and assorted nonprofit groups combine in some manner to generate
a higher grade of journalism sufficient to empower self-government? I
argue herein, drawing from the foundation I provided in chapter 3, that the
celebrants have either greatly undervalued the importance of having independent
competing institutions and resources to do journalism—especially
living wages for reporters—or they have overestimated the capacity of the
market to produce such a system, or both. Moreover, the celebrants tend to
be naive about the endemic problem of commercialism for democratic journalism,
in the form of both private ownership and advertising support. As I
assess the state of journalism in the united States today, it becomes evident
that the Internet is not the cause of journalism’s problems. Digital technology
has only greatly accelerated and made permanent trends produced by
commercialism that were apparent before the World Wide Web, Craigslist,
Google, or Facebook existed.
I then look at the various efforts at generating digital journalism by the
traditional news media, entrepreneurs, citizen journalists (a colloquial term
for unpaid journalists), and nonprofit organizations. Although I find scant
evidence that what is occurring online today could plausibly generate a
popular journalism sufficient for a free and self-governing society, the notion
that the Internet could provide the basis for a radically improved democratic
journalism is another matter altogether. There I believe the celebrants are
clearly on to something very big.
This leads to the second outstanding question: if the market, philanthropy,
and new technologies are inadequate, how can we have a journalism
system sufficient for a free and self-governing society? I return to the point
first made in chapters 2 and 3: the solution to the problem of generating
sufficient journalism begins with the recognition that it is a public good.
Journalism is something society requires but that the market cannot generate
in sufficient quantity or quality. The market is incapable of solving the
problem, no matter how fantastic the technologies. Advertising disguised the
public-good nature of journalism for the past 125 years, but now that it has
found superior options, the truth is plain to see. That means that any realistic
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176 digital disconnect
notion of a credible Fourth Estate will require explicit public policies and
extensive public investments, or what are also termed subsidies. I look at the
enormous and striking role of journalism subsidies in American history—especially
in the “pre-advertising” era—as well as the continued importance
of public investments in journalism in the most democratic nations in the
world today. I conclude by assessing what a powerful digital free press might
look like.
Farewell to Journalism?
The notion that journalism was in severe crisis became common by 2006 or
2007, then escalated into a major theme following the economic collapse
of 2008–9, when hundreds of newspapers and magazines shut their doors.
Optimists hoped the economic recovery would put commercial journalism
back on solid footing and allow breathing space for a successful transition
to the Internet; instead newspaper layoffs increased by 30 percent in 2011
compared to 2010.15
The next recession could devastate the remaining commercial
news media.
In 2012 the President’s Council of Economic Advisers described the
newspaper industry as “the nation’s fastest-shrinking industry.”16
A survey
of two hundred possible careers by CareerCast.com listed “newspaper reporter”
as the fifth worst job one could have in terms of making a living. The
worst job? A lumberjack. broadcast journalists hardly fared better, ranking
as the ninth worst job.17
Some sense of the collapse: in 2012 the legendary
Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister properties sold for just 10 percent of what
they sold for in 2006.18
Speaking of Philadelphia, consider the findings of the Project for Excellence
in Journalism in 2006 on the changes in Philadelphia’s journalism
over the preceding three decades:
There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia,
for instance, as in 1980. The number of newspaper reporters
there has fallen from 500 to 220. The pattern at the suburban papers
around the city has been similar, though not as extreme. The local TV
stations, with the exception of Fox, have cut back on traditional news
coverage. The five AM radio stations that used to cover news have been
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 177
reduced to two. As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46
reporters covering the city. Today it has 24.19
As bad as it seemed at the time, 2006 looks like a golden age for journalists
compared to today. In 2010–12, I visited two dozen American cities to discuss
the state of journalism. In virtually every city I would ask veteran news
professionals what was the percentage of paid journalists in their community
working for all media compared to the 1980s. The general response, after
serious contemplation, was in the 40 to 50 percent range, with several cities
considerably less than that. In June 2012, in one fell swoop, Advance Publications
eliminated over one half of the remaining editorial positions—some
four hundred jobs—at three newspapers that served three of the four largest
cities in Alabama.20
Such drastic layoffs have become so common that they
are barely news stories any longer—or maybe there just aren’t people left to
cover them.
A familiar story came when I visited Peoria, Illinois, in 2011 and learned
that the once highly regarded Peoria Journal-Star had its editorial staff slashed
in half since 2007 when Gatehouse Media had purchased it. This led to
political controversy as the mayor and city council realized that the citizens
of Peoria had far less chance to understand what was going on in their community.
At the same time that Gatehouse was claiming dire circumstances
forced it to slash budgets to the bone, it paid out $1.4 million in executive
bonuses and $800,000 to its CEO.21
Jim Romenesko noted that corporate
CEOs at nine of the largest newspaper-owning firms had compensation
packages in 2011 ranging from $3 million to $25 million each—with the
average around $9.5 million—and in nearly every case corporate revenues
and earnings had fallen.22
Perhaps the only good news is that the journalism
crisis has yet to reach the boardroom. That is hardly consolation for anyone
else. “I don’t know anybody from my profession,” a former Seattle Times
reporter said in 2011, “who isn’t heartbroken, devastated, terrified, scared,
enraged, despondent, bereft.”23
As bad as it is, all signs point to it getting
even worse, if that is possible. “Most newspapers are in a place right now that
they are going to have to make big cuts somewhere and big seams are bound
to show up at some point,” a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute
said in July 2012.24
It is hard to avoid what seems like the obvious conclusion: corporations
and investors no longer find journalism a profitable investment.25
If anything,
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178 digital disconnect
they are stripping what remains for parts and milking monopoly franchises
until they run dry. That leads to an immediate problem for a society that has
entrusted its news media to the private sector: a 2011 FCC study on the crisis
in journalism concluded that “the independent watchdog function that the
Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism—going so far as to call it crucial
to a healthy democracy—is at risk.”26
In addition, “the falling value and failing business models of many American
newspapers,” as David Carr of the New York Times puts it, is leading to a
situation in which “moneyed interests buy papers and use them to prosecute
a political and commercial agenda.” Carr cites San Diego as exhibit A; the
U-T San Diego (formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune) was purchased in
November 2011 by right-wing billionaire Douglas F. Manchester, whose
anti–gay rights politics gained him notoriety. “We make no apologies,” Manchester’s
chief executive states. “We are very consistent—pro-conservative,
pro-business, pro-military.” The newspaper also has a tendency to equate
what is good for San Diego’s future with what is good for Manchester’s net
worth. “There is a very real fear here,” a San Diego journalist said in 2012,
that the U-T San Diego “will not be advocating for the public’s good, but
the owner’s good instead.”27
David Sirota has chronicled the return of monopoly
press lords and their effect on communities ranging from San Diego
and Denver to Chicago and Philadelphia: “Private newspaper owners have
vaulted themselves into a historically unique position, which enables them
to sculpt the news to serve their personal interests while circumventing the
costs that come with true adversarial journalism.”28
It was this type of journalism
that produced the crisis that led to the rise of professional journalism
a century ago. The system is unraveling.
Let’s look more closely at what the crisis means in terms of actual reporting.
The point is not to romanticize what is being lost; as discussed in
chapter 3, u.S. professional journalism even at its peak in the late 1960s and
1970s had significant flaws. Many of the problems with journalism today can
still be attributed to some of the weaknesses of the professional code, such
as reliance upon official sources to set the boundaries of legitimate debate.
That being said, it also had its virtues, not the least of which was a relatively
serious commitment to covering much of public life, from small communities
to major cities and the world. There was “a firewall between the news divisions
and the corporate structure,” veteran broadcast journalist Dan Rather
recalls from the 1960s and 1970s. “That’s all gone now. Out the window.”
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 179
The flip side of corporatization of the news, to Rather, is the “trivialization”
of the content. An increasing portion of news has gone over to inexpensive-tocover
entertainment, celebrity, gossip, crime, and lifestyle journalism—“soft
news.” Commercial values have increasingly permeated—or, to old-timers
like Rather, subverted—the professional code.29
A study on the crisis was released by the Pew Center for the People and
the Press in 2010; it examined in exhaustive detail the “media ecology” of
the city of baltimore for one week in 2009.30
The object was to determine
how, in this changing media moment, “original” news stories were being
generated, and by whom. They tracked old media and new, newspapers,
radio, television, websites, blogs, social media, even Twitter tweets from the
police department.
Despite the proliferation of media, the researchers observed that “much
of the ‘news’ people receive contained no original reporting. Fully eight out
of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published
information.” And where did the “original” reporting come from? More than
95 percent of original news stories were still generated by old media, particularly
the Baltimore Sun newspaper. It gets worse: The Sun’s production of
original news stories was down more than 30 percent from ten years ago and
a whopping 73 percent from twenty years ago.
back in the 1980s and 1990s, ben bagdikian chronicled the declining
numbers of independent news media due to the wave upon wave of mergers
and acquisitions and the entrance of large conglomerates as central players.
he warned of the dire consequences for journalism and democracy caused
by media monopoly. Internet celebrants consigned bagdikian and other oldmedia
fuddy-duddies to history’s dustbin; they believed that the last thing
anyone had to worry about now was a lack of distinct voices or competition.
how ironic then that the Internet appears to have all but finished off the job
that the market began. by 2012, the newspaper industry was “half as big as it
was seven years ago,” according to Carr of the New York Times. “Quite a few
of the mid-size regional and metropolitan dailies that form the core of the
industry have gone off a cliff.”31
In the Internet era, the New York Times probably plays a much larger
role in national and international journalism than it ever did in previous
generations, despite its own significant cutbacks.32
It does so because most
of the other major news media have abandoned their networks of national
and international bureaus altogether.33
As a recent history of the Times from
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180 digital disconnect
1999–2009 concludes, it has become “the worst newspaper in the world—
except for all others.”34
Dan Rather counted in his research between forty and fifty independent
news media organizations that had the resources and a commitment to cover
politics at the national level in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of these businesses
did journalism as their exclusive or primary undertaking. That world is long
gone, as a handful of conglomerates dominate the few remaining national
newsrooms, and news is generally a small part of a broader corporate empire.
As Rather put it in 2012:
Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal or a progressive, a Democrat
or a Republican, everybody can be and should be concerned about
this: the constant consolidation of media, particularly national distribution
of media . . . few companies—no more than six, my count is
four—now control more than 80 percent of the true national distribution
of news. These large corporations, they have things they need
from the power structure in Washington, whether it’s Republican or
Democrat, and of course the people in Washington have things they
want [in] the news to be reported. To put it bluntly, very big business
is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do
with what the average person sees, hears, and reads than most people
know.35
Rather’s words are particularly striking in light of the conclusion of chapter
5: if the news media are to be the institution that protects the public
from the collusion of very big business and the government, especially the
very big national security state, its current industrial structure seems to be
precisely the opposite of what is needed.
The shrinkage has had devastating implications for political journalism.
The numbers of foreign bureaus and correspondents, Washington bureaus
and correspondents, statehouse bureaus and correspondents, down to the
local city hall, have all been severely slashed, and in some cases the coverage
barely exists any longer.36
In an era of ever greater corruption, the watchdog
is no longer on the beat. Some of the biggest political scandals in Washington
in the past decade—the ones that brought down Jack Abramoff, Tom
DeLay, and Randy “Duke” Cunningham—were all started by a daily newspaper
reporter’s investigation. Those paid reporting positions are now gone,
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 181
and those reporters no longer draw a paycheck to do such work. This means
the next generation of corrupt politicians will have much less difficulty as
they fatten their bank accounts while providing their services to the highest
bidder. Throughout the nation, most government activity is taking place in
the dark compared to just one or two decades ago.
Everywhere it is the same: far fewer journalists attempting to cover more
and more.37
It’s like an NFL team trying to stop the Green bay Packers with
only two players lined up on the defensive side of the line of scrimmage.
broadcast journalism hardly has any players either. by 2012 it was common
practice for competing broadcast stations to pool their news resources and
provide the same news on different channels in the same market. This practice
is of dubious legality but takes place in at least 83 of 210 television
markets; it allows stations to slash their labor costs. As the FCC observes, the
remaining reporters and editors “are spending more time on reactive stories
and less on labor-intensive ‘enterprise’ pieces.” Television reporters “who
once just reported the news now have many other tasks, and more newscasts
to feed, so they have less time to research their stories.”38
For a chilling account of what the loss of journalism means, consider the
explosion that killed twenty-nine West Virginia coal miners in 2010. Following
the disaster, the Washington Post and New York Times did exposés and
discovered that the mine had had 1,342 safety violations in the preceding five
years, 50 in the previous month alone. This was big news. “The problem,”
the FCC notes, “is that these stories were published after the disaster, not
before—even though many of the records had been there for inspection.”39
Josh Stearns perceptively writes that “we are entering an era of ‘hindsight
journalism,’ where some of the most important stories of our time emerge
after the fact. This kind of journalism shines a spotlight on critical issues, but
serves as more of an autopsy than an antiseptic. It dissects issues like specimens,
instead of shining a light on problems before or as they emerge.”40
It is especially disastrous at the local level, where smaller news media
and newsrooms have been wiped out in a manner reminiscent of a plague.
Research affirms that there is “an explicit relationship between local and
community news, local democracy, community cohesion, and civic engagement.”
When people living in a community no longer have credible news
that covers their community and draws it together, the American system is
suddenly on quicksand.41
In 2012 the New Orleans Times-Picayune became
the first major daily newspaper to restrict publication to three days a week.
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182 digital disconnect
What does that mean for the roughly one third of New Orleans residents
who have no Internet access?42
The Los Angeles Times is now the primary
news medium for eighty-eight municipalities and 10 million people, but its
metro staff has been cut in half since 2000. The staff “is spread thinner
and there are fewer people on any given area,” Metro editor David Lauter
laments. “We’re not there every day, or even every week or every month.
unfortunately, nobody else is either.”43
Consider the farcical nature of American elections. Local elections, indeed
nearly all non-presidential elections, barely get any news coverage, and
what coverage they do get is generally inane, often driven by the TV ads and
comprised of assessments of PR strategies, gaffes, and polling results. As for
the presidential election, its coverage is generally endless and meaningless.
Those with the most money to purchase the most ads can dominate political
discourse. how can people effectively participate in electoral politics if they
have little idea about the candidates, not to mention the issues? The logical
course is to opt out, rather than be drowned in a pool of slime, spin, clichés,
and idiocy. Where does that leave governance?
In a nation like the united States, the poor and marginalized are hardest
hit. They are the least attractive group commercially, so labor news and news
aimed at the bottom third or half of the population began to decline decades
ago. Communities of color, which have traditionally gotten short shrift in the
mainstream commercial news media, have seen many of the hard-won gains
in diversifying newsrooms wiped out in the past five years. A 2012 American
Society of News Editors report stated, “Across all market sizes, minority
newsroom employment is still substantially lower than the percentage of
minorities in the markets those newsrooms serve.”44
The Pew Center conducted a comprehensive analysis of the sources for
original news stories in its 2009 study of baltimore. It determined that fully
86 percent originated with official sources and press releases. A generation
earlier, PR accounted for more like 40 to 50 percent of news content. These
stories were presented as news based on the labor and judgment of professional
journalists, but they generally presented the PR position without any
alteration. As the Pew study concludes, “the official version of events is becoming
more important. We found official press releases often appear word
for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”45
So there may not be much journalism, but there still is plenty of “news.”
On the surface, it can seem as though we are inundated with endless news.
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 183
Increasingly, though, it is unfiltered public relations generated surreptitiously
by corporations and governments in a manner that would make Walter
Lippmann—whose vision guided the creation of professional journalism
in the 1920s—roll in his grave. In 1960 there was less than one PR agent for
every working journalist, a ratio of 0.75 to 1. by 1990 the ratio was just over
2 to 1. In 2012, the ratio stood at 4 PR people for every working journalist. At
the current rates of change, the ratio may well be 6 to 1 within a few years.46
because there are far fewer reporters to investigate the spin and press releases,
the likelihood that they get presented as legitimate news has become
much greater.47
“As a direct result of changing media platforms,” one 2011
media industry assessment of the future of journalism put it, “PR pros are
now a part of the media in a way they have never been before.”48
Is it a surprise that Gallup found that Americans’ confidence in television
news dropped to an all-time low in 2012 and is not even half of what it was
less than two decades earlier?49
Or that there has understandably been an
increase in the number of people, to nearly one in five, who state they have
gone “newsless”—not even glancing at Internet headlines—for the day before
the poll? Who could blame them? by 2009 nearly a third of Americans
aged eighteen to twenty-four years were thus self-described.50
Forty years ago,
young Americans followed the news at the same rate as their parents and
grandparents.
Note that the decline of journalism was well established long before the
Internet had any effect.51
The big change came in the late 1970s and 1980s,
when large corporate chains accelerated their long-term trend of gobbling
up daily newspapers and becoming conglomerates, sometimes with broadcast
stations and networks under the same umbrella as newspaper empires.
Family owners sold for a variety of reasons, and corporations came in to
milk the cash cow. The corporations paid top dollar to get these profit machines,
and they were dedicated to maximizing their return. They quickly
determined that one way to increase profits even more was to slice into the
editorial budget; in a monopoly there is little pressure to do otherwise, and
with the money flowing, who worries about the long-term implications?52
It was then, when they were still swimming in profits, that managers
began to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by
cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. by the late 1980s and early
1990s, prominent mainstream journalists and editors like Jim Squires, Penn
Kimball, John McManus, and Doug underwood were criticizing the news
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184 digital disconnect
industry or leaving it in disgust because of the contempt corporate management
displayed toward journalism.53
by the end of the century, the trickle
out was more like an exodus.
The 1990s were a period of tremendous profitability for newspapers and
broadcast networks, as well as rapid growth for the economy. It was also a
decade of considerable population growth. The Internet had become a big
deal on Wall Street but had yet to do much more than hypothetical damage
to journalism business models. yet from 1992 to 2002, the editorial side was
reduced by six thousand broadcast and newspaper jobs.54
by the end of the
1990s, the number of foreign correspondents working for American newspapers
and television networks had already been greatly reduced, as had the
number of investigative reporters.55
At the dawn of the new century, editors
and observers were vocal, at times almost apoplectic, in their alarm at the
policies that were devastating newsrooms.56
In 2001 a team of leading journalists
and scholars concluded, “Newspapers are increasingly a reflection of
what the advertisers tell the newspapers some of us want, which is what the
financial markets tell the newspapers they want.”57
It was already clear that
this was a recipe for disaster.58
This is the actual history of journalism under really existing capitalism.
Celebrants who think the market will rejuvenate journalism online and produce
better results have yet to come to terms with this record and explain
why digital commercial news media would be any different or better. Right
now it looks a whole lot worse.
Digital Journalism: Gold Mine or the Shaft?
The decline of journalism over the past generation, which has accelerated in
the last decade, would be a less pressing concern if the existing news media
were making a successful digital transition, or if the Internet was spawning a
credible replacement in the manner benkler envisions. The evidence provided
above suggests on balance that emerging digital news media are having
a negligible effect upon the crisis in journalism. It certainly is not due
to a lack of effort, as commercial news media have been obsessed with the
Internet since the 1990s; they understood that it was going to be the future.
For traditional news media, it has been a very rocky digital road. A 2012
report based on proprietary data and in-depth interviews with executives at
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 185
a dozen major news media companies found “the shift to replace losses in
print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more
difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue
to contract at alarming speed.” For every seven dollars of print advertising
lost there is only one new dollar of Internet ad revenues; the executives
said it “remains an uphill and existential struggle.”59
The newspaper industry’s
percentage of overall Internet advertising fell to 10 percent in 2011, an
all-time low; it had been 17 percent in 2003.60
“There’s no doubt we’re going
out of business right now,” one executive said.61
by all accounts, the “clock
continues to tick” for old media to find a way to survive online in the inexorable
transition to the Internet.62
It is both tragic and pathetic to see dedicated journalists obsessing over
how to keep their newsrooms alive. “We have to find a business model that
works—we have to,” Christian Science Monitor editor Marshall Ingwerson
told Nyu media scholar Rodney benson. “This is the word I hated but in
the last five years has become universal—we have to monetize. how do we
monetize what we do? Same as everybody else.”63
Journalists have been inundated
with lectures that they “require an embrace of new technologies
and a ruthless but necessary shedding of the old ways of doing business. It
should have happened already. It must happen now.”64
The assumption is that there has to be a way to make profits doing digital
journalism if journalists and owners simply wise up and get with the
program. Over the past few years, many American newspapers have been
purchased on the cheap by hedge funds—nearly a third of the twenty-five
largest dailies are now so owned—the subtext being that these business geniuses
can generate profits where dummkopf journalism industry types have
failed.65
As John Paton, the journalist-cum-CEO for a newspaper company
purchased by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund in 2011, put it: “We have
had 15 years to figure out the web and, as an industry, we newspaper people
are no good at it.”66
Apparently, neither are the hedge fund managers. David
Carr wrote in July 2012 that “hedge funds, which thought they had bought
in at the bottom, are scrambling for exits that don’t exist.”67
Few wish to consider the obvious question: what if it is simply impossible
to generate commercially viable popular journalism online, let alone journalism
adequate for a self-governing people? What then?
In the meantime, news media corporations work furiously to find their
digital Shangri-La. The primary course for traditional news media has
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186 digital disconnect
been to pursue digital advertising dollars, with disappointing results. Most
websites for publishers and broadcasters primarily run generic banner ads,
“among the least trusted sources of commercial information,” according to
consumer surveys.68
These are rapidly falling out of favor with advertisers.
Digital news sites have been laggards in “using technology that would customize
ads based on their users’ online behavior.”69
Moreover, as much as
80 percent of digital newspaper advertising is placed through networks that
take a 50 percent cut of the action. This means a paper’s revenues for a thousand
viewers (CPM in industry parlance) can be as little as 2 or 3 percent
of its CPM for print readers.70
Worse yet, as discussed in chapter 5, much of
local marketing—once the bread and butter of news media—as it goes digital
does not support media content sites or independent content sites of any
kind.71
“A consensus has emerged that website advertising,” a respected 2011
industry report said, “its rates driven down by massive available inventory,
will probably never sustain a comprehensive daily news report.”72
however, digital advertising provided newspapers over $3 billion in revenues
in 2011, far exceeding all other forms of Internet revenues. It is not
going to be abandoned even if no one expects it to grow very much.
With the possibility fading for digital advertising to serve as a panacea, attention
has returned to making people pay for their news online.73
This has
worked for a handful of prominent newspapers like the Wall Street Journal
and Financial Times, with well-heeled readers and specialized business content.
The New York Times has also done well, enrolling nearly four hundred
thousand subscribers since it introduced its pay system in 2011. The Washington
Post, on the other hand, dismisses paywalls as “backwards-looking.”
CEO Don Graham claims they can work only for papers like the Times
and the Journal that have paid circulation spread across the nation.74
Paywalls
have been a flop otherwise, and a study of three dozen papers that attempted
to do so found only 1 percent of users opted to pay.75
Nevertheless,
by 2012 some 20 percent of America’s 1,400 daily newspapers were planning
to charge for digital access, and some firms, such as Gannett, claimed they
were generating significant revenue.76
They are inspired by the success of
dailies doing so in places like Finland and Slovakia.77
The key, apparently, is
to be able to offer a lot of content at a low price—ideally by numerous newspapers
combined—which might be easier in a small nation with a distinct
language than in the united States, where English-language material grows
like kudzu online. Whether there is an endgame is unclear—subscribers
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 187
have never provided sufficient revenues for news media—and it appears as
much an act of desperation as vision. Of course, there is no time to be concerned
with the externality that paywalls invariably cut many people off from
access to the news, with all that suggests about their undemocratic character.
The latest hope is that the rapid emergence of mobile communication
will open up new ways to monetize content. by 2012 a clear majority of
Americans are getting some local news on their cell phones, and that number
is growing. best of all, the mobile world is increasingly proprietary, so
there might be sufficient artificial scarcity to encourage people eventually to
pay for news apps. Rupert Murdoch announced his iPad-only newspaper,
The Daily, in 2011, and by 2012 the price had been lowered, some content
was being offered for free, and it had been extended to smartphones.
With a hundred thousand subscribers paying a couple dollars per month,
“it’s going to need more than that to move from interesting experiment to
profitable.”78
The news app idea still has a long way to go before it can be
realistic. In 2011, 11 percent of the American adult population had a news
app, but nearly 90 percent of them got the app for free. Only 1 percent of
the adult population paid for one. There is little reason yet for thinking news
apps could get anywhere close to supporting the network of newsrooms that
once dotted the landscape. It did not help the case that News Corporation
laid off 29 percent of The Daily’s full-time staff in 2012. but it may be the
last best hope.79
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.
There was one set of news for everyone. 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.
So it is that top editors at the venerable Washington Post “have embraced
the view that studying [Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to
determine where to focus the paper’s resources.”80
They are desperate to
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188 digital disconnect
find the content that will appeal to desired consumers and to the advertisers
who wish to reach affluent consumers. In this relationship, advertisers hold
all the trump cards, and the news media have little leverage. In the emerging
era of “smart” advertising, this means shaping the content to meet the
Internet profiles of desired users, even personalizing news stories alongside
personalized ads. The best stories for selling tend to be soft news. “The challenge,”
Joseph Turow writes, has been “trying to figure out how to carry
out editorial personalization in a way that wouldn’t cause audiences to freak
out.” he points out that all the logic of the system points to advertisers demanding
that they get sympathetic editorial mention as well. Research shows
that that makes for a far more successful sales pitch. As one frustrated editor
put it, “This crap may be groovy, but it still stinks.”81
Nothing much changes when one looks at the new companies that have
emerged to use the Internet as a battering ram to enter the news media industry.
“All these people who forecast the end of newspapers because of the
decline in advertising and users being unwilling to pay for content can’t
explain how the new Internet journalism websites are going to survive or
even thrive—since most of them, too, need paid ads and/or subscribers,”
said Greg Mitchell, the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. “I just don’t
get it.”82
The new commercial ventures range from “content farms” to apps to
major efforts to establish newsrooms and re-create a sense of news media
online. The content farms, like Demand Media and Associated Content,
have “embraced the attrition of the church-state boundary and turned it into
a business model.”83
These firms hire freelancers to produce articles quickly
and cheaply to respond to popular search terms, and then sell advertising
to appear next to the article. The needs of advertisers drive the entire pro-
cess.84
The key to commercial success is producing an immense amount of
material inexpensively; the leading content farms can generate thousands of
pieces of text and video on a daily basis.85
Pulse has emerged as one of the leading commercial news apps, with
13 million smartphone users who get it for free. Pulse aggregates other firms’
news and makes its money working with advertisers and merchants. It is
moving into “branded-content advertising,” by which ads get slotted next
to appropriate stories for individualized users. The outstanding question is
whether Pulse will generate a workable business model and then can establish
a monopoly position due to its scale and network effects, like Twitter. by
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 189
2012 it moved aggressively to provide local news—with the ability to place
advertising in real time that addresses one’s exact location—and become a
global operation; the service is already available in eight languages. Pulse
does not generate original news, and its founders concede that they don’t
know much about journalism.86
Nor do any of the other mobile aggregators
generate any original journalism,87
but some of their revenues will probably
end up in the hands of other news media and may eventually contribute to
paying actual journalists.
The journalism company that has made the greatest impact online has
been AOL, which was tenuously married to Time Warner for a decade until
it went independent again in 2009. AOL purchased Patch around then, to be
a “hyperlocal” digital news service, with branches in some 860 communities,
supported by advertising. In other words, it would be like a digital newspaper
but without the massive production expenses. A detailed and largely sympathetic
Columbia Journalism Review account of a Patch editor in upstate New
york described how the service logically focused on more affluent communities.
After months of keeping the editorial and commercial sides distinct, that
strategy was thrown overboard as the enterprise foundered; editors worked
with the ad staff, among other things “drumming up ad sales leads.” The
editors were then directed to favor content that would get people to the site
and also to cultivate “user-generated free content.” Patch lost $100 million in
2011, and is estimated to have lost another $150 million in 2012. As David
Carr puts it, Patch “is no closer to cracking the code.”88
While it may eventually
get into the black, it will do so at the expense of sacrificing much of the
journalistic vision it had at its launch.89
Patch is evolving toward the Huffington Post business model: rely on volunteer
labor, aggregate content from other media, emphasize sex and celebrities
to juice the traffic, and generate some of your own content if you can
afford to do so.90
As fate had it, AOL purchased the Huffington Post in 2011.
An internal memo on journalism from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong at the
time captured the commercial logic: he ordered the company’s editors to
evaluate all future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential,
edit quality and turnaround time.” All stories, he stressed, are to be evaluated
according to their “profitability consideration.”91
As one 2011 media industry
assessment of the future of journalism put it, this is “good news for public
relations professionals who are trying to pitch stories,” because “these sites
will be looking for more content to fill their pages.”92
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190 digital disconnect
Armstrong’s memo raises the question: What happens when a story—
like that of a distant war or the privatization of a local water utility—fails to
achieve proper “traffic potential, revenue potential”? What if no PR spinmeister
wants to push it and provide free content? Does it disappear off the
radar—and with it the ability of citizens to know what is being done in their
name but without their informed consent? That might be a smooth ride for
the CEOs, but it’s a clunker for a democratic society.
Two aspects of capitalism and the Internet loom large in digital journalism.
First, if anyone can make money doing online journalism, it will almost
certainly be as a very large, centralized operation, probably a monopoly or
close to it. The Internet has proven to be more effective at centralizing corporate
control than it has been at enhancing decentralization, at least in
news media. “We are probably far more centralized than we were in the
past,” one executive said.93
To some extent it is because human beings are capable of meaningfully
visiting only a small number of websites on a regular basis. The Google
search mechanism encourages concentration because sites that do not end
up on the first or second page of a search effectively do not exist. As Michael
Wolff puts it in Wired, “The top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of uS
pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.”94
by
2012, according to the Web traffic measurer Experian hitwise, 35 percent
of all Web visits now go to Google, Microsoft, yahoo!, and Facebook. (The
same firms get two thirds of online ad revenue.) And, ironically, as Matthew
hindman points out, personalization of websites “systematically advantages
the very largest websites over smaller ones.”95
A paradox of the Internet, John
Naughton writes, “is that a relatively small number of websites get most of
the links and attract the overwhelming volume of traffic.” If your site isn’t in
that elite group, it will likely be very small, and stay very small.96
As Matthew hindman’s research on journalism, news media, and political
websites demonstrates, what has emerged is a “power law” distribution
whereby a small number of political or news media websites get the vast majority
of traffic.97
They are dominated by the traditional giants with name recognition
and resources. There is a “long tail” of millions of websites that exist
but get little or no traffic, and only a small number of people have any idea
that they exist. Most of them wither, as their producers have little incentive
and resources to maintain them. There is also no effective “middle class” of
robust, moderate-size websites; that segment of the news media system has
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 191
been wiped out online, leading hindman to conclude that the online news
media are more concentrated than in the old news media world.
This seems to be the way of the digital world. because the returns are so
low and the marginal costs of adding new users are zero, profits are possible
only by having massive scale. The “best bet for making money,” The Economist
states, “is to pull in more readers for the same content.” And when a
player gets that large, there usually isn’t much room for anyone else. “There
will be fewer national news outlets” in the digital world.98
The grand irony of
the Internet is that what was once regarded as an agent of diversity, choice,
and competition has become an engine of monopoly. As to journalism, it is
unclear if anyone can make a go of it commercially, beyond material aimed
at the wealthy and the business community.
The second aspect of the capitalism-Internet nexus at the heart of the
online journalism business model is an understanding that the wages paid
to journalists can be slashed dramatically, while workloads can be increased
to levels never before seen. Armstrong’s memo states that all of AOL’s journalistic
employees will be required to produce “five to 10 stories per day.”
Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times captured the essence of this requirement
in his assessment of AOL’s 2011 purchase of the Huffington Post: “To
grasp the huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves
and commanded by pirates.” In the “new-media landscape,” he wrote, “it’s
already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the
tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.”99
With massive unemployment and dismal prospects, the extreme downward
pressure on wages and working conditions for journalists is the two-ton
elephant that just climbed into democracy’s bed. “In the new media,” Rutten
concludes, we find “many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial
capitalism—the sweatshop, the speedup, and piecework; huge profits
for the owners; desperation, drudgery, and exploitation for the workers. No
child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it . . .”100
David Watts
barton left the Sacramento Bee in 2007 to work at the Sacramento Press, a
hyperlocal digital news operation. In the Columbia Journalism Review, he
described the extreme difficulty of producing credible journalism based on
volunteer labor. “Editing costs money. Citizen journalists are cheap and
they can even be good. but even great journalists need some editing; citizen
journalists need a lot of it. . . . Without journalism jobs, we don’t have
journalism.”101
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192 digital disconnect
Commercial media’s attitude toward journalism labor became apparent
in the Journatic brouhaha following a whistleblower’s exposé aired on public
radio’s This American Life in the summer of 2012. Journatic is a shadowy
“hyperlocal content provider” that reportedly eschews publicity to the point
where its site contains code that lessens its appearance in Google search
results. It contracts with dozens of u.S. commercial news media to provide
local coverage, including Newsday, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and the Gatehouse newspaper chain. The Journatic business
model is premised on the idea that doing routine local news with actual
paid reporters is no longer a viable option for many American news media,
so it provides a discount alternative.
Journatic’s local coverage is provided by low-paid writers and freelancers
in the united States and, ironically enough, the Philippines, where Journatic
hires writers “able to commit to 250 pieces/week minimum” at 35 to
40 cents a piece. Journatic CEO brian Timpone says that the compensation
was “more than most places in the Philippines.” They produce stories under
bogus “American-sounding bylines” that make it seem as if they are based in
the local community running the stories. Part of the reason aliases are used
is that it would be suspicious to readers and other journalists if they saw the
number of articles a single writer produced, not to mention the importance
of maintaining the illusion that these are local reporters.
Not surprisingly, these stories are “little more than rewritten news releases,”
as the whistleblower put it. They also contain a considerable number
of errors, fabrications, and instances of plagiarism.102
but to the casual reader
of a Journatic client, it would seem the newspaper or website was chock-full
of original local material.
The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, invested in
Journatic in April 2012 and outsourced coverage for the Chicago area’s
ninety TribLocal websites and twenty-two weekly editions to it. TribLocal
laid off half of its forty staffers when it contracted with Journatic, and its
output tripled. When word got out, ninety members of the Chicago Tribune
newsroom presented a petition protesting Journatic’s role. On July 13 the
company indefinitely suspended use of Journatic in its papers, but the hyperlocal
content provider is still very much in action in other markets, waiting
for the bad publicity to blow over.
This is hardly the end of the story. A Pasadena publisher, James Macpherson,
stated he wanted to “defend the concept” of outsourcing, claiming
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 193
that “Journatic has done it quite shabbily.” his firm had begun outsourcing
journalism to India in 2007, but the program was postponed soon thereafter
as he was apparently ahead of his time. Macpherson uses Internet software
developed by Amazon in 2012 to contract with freelance reporters all over
the world and says, “I outsource virtually everything. I am primarily looking
for individuals who I can pay a lower rate to do a lot of work.” he concedes
there are limitations: “There is no way someone in Manila can possibly understand
what is happening in Pasadena.” but the economics are such that
Macpherson argues outsourcing is inevitable: “The real lesson of Journatic
is that outsourcing is not going to go away.”103
As journalism becomes increasingly rote, the logical question becomes
who needs human labor at all? StatSheet, a subsidiary of Automated Insights,
uses algorithms to turn numerical data into narrative articles for its
418 sports websites. Automated Insights now also computer-generates ten
thousand to twenty thousand articles per week for a real estate website, and
the emerging computer-generated content industry is convinced that algorithms
will become a key part of writing news stories in the near future. “I
am sure a journalist could do a better job writing an article than a machine,”
says a real estate agency CEO who contracted with Automated Insights, “but
what I’m looking for is quantity at a certain quality.”104
Who knows—maybe
we will someday look back at Journatic as a golden age of journalism.
In short, the Internet does not alleviate the tensions between commercialism
and journalism; it magnifies them. With labor severely underpaid or
unpaid, research concludes that the original journalism provided by the Internet
gravitates to what is easy and fun, tending to “focus on lifestyle topics,
such as entertainment, retail, and sports, not on hard news.”105
As traditional
journalism disintegrates, no models for making Web journalism—even bad
journalism—profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible
popular news media have been developed, and there is no reason to expect
any in the future.106
There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good
than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to
make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When managers
apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative
public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving,
hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard students
with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the
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194 digital disconnect
main impediment to “success.”107
No one has ever made profits doing quality
education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make
their money by not teaching.108
That’s why the elite managers send their
own children to nonprofit schools, generally private but sometimes public
in the affluent suburbs, while other children are hung out to dry in the marketplace.
Education is, in short, a public good. In digital news, the same
dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion.
Fighting for the Public Good
The severity of the crisis in journalism is difficult to ignore, especially for
those in politics who have seen the number of reporters following them diminish
rapidly. by 2008 many politicians were commenting on how difficult
it had become to get press coverage in their districts or on the issues they
cared about. On the campaign trail, u.S. senators who once had entourages
of reporters following them like they were heavyweight champions suddenly
found themselves traveling with one or two staffers and few others. by 2010
the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission had each created task forces to
study the crisis in journalism and propose solutions. The Democratic Caucus
in Congress established an informal inquiry too. hearings were held in
both the house and Senate. Nothing has resulted, but these inquiries were
unprecedented in American history.109
The lack of action was due in part to a lack of public outcry and pressure.
The extent of the crisis in journalism is underappreciated by most
Americans, including many serious news and political junkies. The primary
reason may well be the Internet itself. because many people envelop themselves
in their favored news sites and access so much material online, even
surfing out onto the “long tail,” the extent to which we are living in what
veteran editor Tom Stites terms a “news desert” has been obscured.110
Moreover,
using dissident websites, social media, and smartphones, activists have
sometimes “bypassed the gatekeepers” in what John Nichols calls a “next
media system.”111
Its value is striking during periods of public protest and
upheaval.
but the illusion that this constitutes satisfactory journalism is growing
thinner. Nothing demonstrates the situation better than the release by
WikiLeaks of an immense number of secret u.S. government documents
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 195
between 2009 and 2011. To some this was investigative journalism at its best,
and WikiLeaks had established how superior the Internet was as an information
source. It clearly threatened those in power, so this was exactly the sort
of Fourth Estate a free people needed. Thanks to the Internet, some claimed,
we were now truly free and had the power to hold leaders accountable.112
In fact, the WikiLeaks episode demonstrates precisely the opposite.
WikiLeaks was not a journalistic organization. It released secret documents
to the public, but the “documents languished online and only came to the
public’s attention when they were written up by professional journalists,” as
heather brooke put it. “Raw material alone wasn’t enough.”113
Journalism
had to give the material credibility, and journalists had to do the hard work of
vetting the material and analyzing it to find out what it meant. That required
paid, full-time journalists with institutional support. The united States has
too few of these, and those it has are too closely attached to the power structure,
so most of the material still has not been studied and summarized for a
popular audience—and it may never be in our lifetimes.
Moreover, there was no independent journalism to respond when the
u.S. government launched a successful PR and media blitz to discredit
WikiLeaks. Attention largely shifted from the content of these documents to
overblown and unsubstantiated claims that WikiLeaks was costing innocent
lives, and to a personal focus on WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Glenn
Greenwald was only slightly exaggerating when he stated that “there was
almost a full and complete consensus that WikiLeaks was satanic.” The onslaught
discredited and isolated WikiLeaks, despite the dramatic content that
could be found in the documents WikiLeaks had published. The point was
to get u.S. editors and reporters to think twice before opening the WikiLeaks
door. It worked.
Many journalists elsewhere rallied to defend basic principles about transparency
and speaking truth to power. The material they assessed and made
public energized a wave of global democratic movements, even contributing
to peaceful political revolutions. In the united States, nothing of the
kind occurred, and WikiLeaks has had no effect on democratizing our politics
or calling our leaders to account. The responses of u.S. journalists and
commentators to the WikiLeaks revelations were often indistinguishable
from those of the government spin doctors. Greenwald ended up defending
WikiLeaks on numerous broadcast news programs and discovered that his
on-air opponents were often working reporters: “There wasn’t even really
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196 digital disconnect
a pretense of separation between how journalists think and how political
functionaries think.”114
When the u.S. government and the Internet giants took steps to render
WikiLeaks ineffective, even though no one connected with it had been
charged with, or convicted of, any crime for its publishing activities, what
passes for u.S. journalism stood by meekly. how revealing that a news media
that almost never does investigative work on the national security state or its
relations with large corporations does not come to the defense of those who
have the courage to make such information public! As the Obama administration,
like those before it, has pursued extraordinary measures to limit
public access to information and to punish whistleblowers, a credible independent
news media in a free society would have led the charge to publicize
its secrecy and actively oppose it.115
All the signs suggest that WikiLeaks,
rather than being the harbinger of a new era, may have been the last gasp of
an old one.
This also touches on the limitations of blogs, which not long ago were
heralded as “little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the
press to more actors.”116
blogs provide commentary, sometimes expert commentary,
but they tend to rely upon others’ reporting upon which to comment.
Without a credible journalism, blogs have value only to the extent
they produce original research, which is difficult unless one can do it fulltime
with institutional support. Moreover, hindman’s research on online
media concentration applies just as much, if not more, to the blogosphere.
he found its traffic is highly concentrated in a handful of sites, operated by
people with astonishingly elite pedigrees.117
There is one exciting new hope for digital journalism that has emerged in
the past few years: online nonprofit news media. A number of outlets have
been created that are dedicated to doing journalism in the public interest.
What we have done “was out of seeing where the business model is headed,
off a cliff,” the editor of the Voice of San Diego told Nyu’s benson, “and if
we want to keep this public service alive we needed to fund it in a different
way.” “I say good riddance” to having to rely on advertising and generating
profits, the editor of the SF Public Press told benson. “It was a bad marriage
to begin with and it skewed coverage. And it foreclosed discussion of
people and communities who were not targets of advertising.”118
Founders
of these organizations see the gaping void in American journalism and wish
to fill it.
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 197
The great question, then, is whether this new wave of nonprofit news
media can rejuvenate American journalism and steer it away from the commercialism
that was eating at its foundations. If it can, public ennui and
governmental inaction are justified. yankee ingenuity will have licked the
problem. best of all, there will be little government or commercial involvement
with journalism; it will be a genuine public sphere.119
Some of these nonprofit ventures are local, like MinnPost and the aforementioned
Voice of San Diego, and some are national, like ProPublica,
which, in 2010, was the first digital news medium to win the Pulitzer Prize
for reporting. Many are staffed by superb journalists who once worked in
commercial news media. young and enthusiastic new journalists are entering
the field in this sector. A 2011 study by the Investigative Reporting
Workshop determined that the top seventy-five nonprofit news operations
had 1,300 employees and combined annual budgets totaling $135 million.
(This includes Consumer Reports, which accounts for nearly half the total
staff and one third of the budgets.)120
Since 2008, there has been a spike in
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) applications for nonprofit status from journalism
organizations, almost entirely for digital operations.121
“This sector
has absolutely ballooned,” I was told by Josh Stearns, the Free Press activist
who works in the area.122
how many of these new nonprofit digital news
ventures are there? “It’s scores, not dozens, maybe hundreds, probably a lot
more than anyone knows,” says the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton, who
monitors and encourages such activity for a living.123
Nevertheless, the impact of the nonprofit sector may be less than the sum
of its parts. “Investigative nonprofits,” as Newton put it, “are ‘punching above
their weight,’” meaning that “the total community reached is still not close
to the for-profits.”124
They are usually most successful when a mainstream
news organization picks up their work. That is often the approach of ProPublica,
which won the first of its two Pulitzers for a piece that ran in the
New York Times Magazine. In this scenario, the nonprofit sector is providing
a subsidy to commercial news media.
There is also a push for nonprofit activist groups—nongovernmental organizations,
or NGOs—to become direct producers of online journalism
in the areas where they have expertise.125
With the collapse of traditional
newsrooms, public interest NGOs are doing their own reporting so they can
pursue stories relating to their work. “What’s a nonprofit digital news operation?
Consumer Reports online?” asks Newton. “The highly ethical digital
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198 digital disconnect
info gathering part of human Rights Watch?”126
In 2011, for example, the
Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) produced award-winning exposés
of the secretive and corporate-dominated American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC). A few years earlier, the work might have been done by
traditional journalists, but there were simply too few left to take on that
assignment.
As exciting as it is to have NGOs get into the journalism business, we
should not romanticize the development and make a virtue out of a necessity.
In my experience, most of these groups would prefer that there be independent
journalism organizations doing the hard investigative work they are
being forced to do. It would allow them to use their very scarce resources for
their core research, advocacy, and service. Most important, it would give the
findings far more legitimacy and have greater public impact than when they
come from an interested party. In a world where most journalism emanates
from interested parties, it will be hard for NGOs to rise above the clatter that
the corporate-funded groups produce, because the latter have exponentially
greater resources. The work of the CMD on ALEC, for example, went mainstream
when it was picked up and pushed along by the New York Times a full
year after the CMD broke the story.127
The good news for both NGO journalists and the new sector of digital
nonprofit news media is that by dispensing with print, they lop off at least
30 percent of the costs of production and distribution for a traditional newspaper
or magazine.128
This is one of the factors that allows celebrants to wax
rhapsodic about the postmaterial nature of networked journalism. The bad
news is that losing 30 percent of costs still leaves this sector well under water.
These digital nonprofit news media are underfunded, and there is no reason
to think they will ever generate much more resources than they currently
have. To put this sector in context, it has, at most, a few thousand employees,
compared to the 120,000 full-time paid journalists our country had two decades
ago.129
Moreover, none of these ventures is pointed toward large-scale
growth. Even in the assessments of their most enthusiastic supporters, they
are far more likely to go under. In fact, this is probably about as good as it
gets, barring the sort of radical policy proposals I make in the next section.
Once one gets past the seventy-five largest nonprofit news organizations, one
is deep in the weeds of very small, marginal shops. “None has developed a
clear business model,” a Knight Foundation study concluded.130
Individual donations and foundation grants have been the basis of
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 199
revenues, but these have distinct limits and invite problems. Experience
with public broadcasting shows that people will pay, but there is an upper
limit that is far below the money needed. Individuals gave $730 million to
all public and community broadcasting stations in 2009. The total has not
grown as a percentage of public media revenues over the past decade, and
only a fraction of that went toward journalism.131
The SF Public Press made
a concerted effort to establish a “PbS model” for donations to support itself,
but the donations amount to only between 7 and 12 percent of its meager
$80,000 annual budget.132
Even if the donation approach were to become
viable, there is an additional concern: it tends to extend the privileges of the
upper-middle and upper classes into the digital future.
This brings us to foundations. As the newspaper meltdown unfolded early
in 2009, a movement was afoot to establish nonprofit newspapers and/or endowed
newspapers, to be supported by philanthropy. As the longtime head
of the Center for Public Integrity, Charles Lewis, put it, “It’s time for civil
society, especially the nation’s foundations and individuals of means, to collaborate
with journalists and experts who understand the changing economics
of journalism in an imaginative, visionary plan that would support our
precious existing nonprofit institutions and help to develop new ones.”133
Since 2005, Jan Schaffer of American university estimates that foundations
have donated at least $250 million to u.S. nonprofit journalism ventures.134
The problems with foundations as a form of support are threefold. First,
they do not have anywhere near enough money to bankroll even a large
chunk of journalism. They have a lot of other issues on their plates. The
Economist notes that foundations “can only be a partial solution to the woes
of newspapers.”135
Second, foundations are hardly value-free or neutral institutions. They
have their own pet causes and axes to grind, and they are often associated
with powerful people and institutions. Sometimes they will fund coverage
only of certain types of stories that they have an interest in. Foundations are
generally accustomed to having their grantees give them what they want.
Exceptions notwithstanding, they are not going to cut big checks and then
head off to the beach. In an environment where many nonprofit journalists
are wondering where their next meal is coming from, that gives foundations
extraordinary implicit or explicit power over the content—largely unaccountable
power.
Third, most foundations provide only limited-term support, often for
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200 digital disconnect
periods of three years or less, to new enterprises. Foundation boards and
directors like to spawn groups, not bankroll them in perpetuity. “It is worth
noting that many of these are start-ups within their first three years,” Stearns
said when chronicling the state of nonprofit news ventures. “Once the startup
funding disappears it is unclear how many will survive.”136
John bracken
of the Knight Foundation, the leading funder of nonprofit journalism, warns
start-ups that “we will not be providing perpetual support.”137
It is striking that the leading foundations involved in funding and studying
nonprofit news ventures apparently have no idea, after years of experience,
how these operations can ever become sustainable. Foundation officials are
reduced to recycling platitudes and buzzwords like those that hedge fund
managers are directing at old-fashioned newspaper people on the commercial
side. The Knight Foundation president said, “We’re interested in new
and different ways of doing things. . . . Folks who can be nimble and change
are going to do better in the future than those who are slow to change.”138
Jeff Jarvis told grantmakers in 2011 that digital nonprofit news media need
to focus on figuring out “which financial models work.” A 2011 Pew Research
Center report says the most “promising experiments in community
news” are “coming from people who embrace business entrepreneurship
and digital innovation.”139
Newton argues that “digital nonprofits need a diverse
revenue stream to survive.”140
he says the days of getting a grant and
concentrating on doing great journalism are over. Digital nonprofits must
spend “substantial amounts of money on such items as technology, sales
and marketing.”141
he believes digital nonprofit media should embrace the
use of unpaid labor: “The new digital models are different types, citizen/
volunteer/freelance/traditional/mixed.”142
In effect, this approach admits defeat and then tries to declare victory.143
It
clings desperately to the faith-based conviction that everything will somehow
eventually work out in the absence of any public policy intervention, while
conceding that there will be an indefinite period during which the resources
going to journalism are certain to decline precipitously. During that interregnum,
anywhere from one to five decades, we apparently will have to get
by on chewing gum and baling wire. Newton, to his credit, has pondered the
implications of this approach:
News, like life, finds a way. My long-term optimism is tinged with
worry about the current state of things. Eventually is not the same as
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 201
immediately. While we are waiting for the huge new age—two-way,
not one-way; digital, not industrial; networked, not broadcast—to take
hold, a lot of bad things are happening. Whenever traditional journalism
decreases, for example, public corruption increases. Sometimes I
wonder: how much corruption and confusion can one country take?144
Newton is right: this is a dubious strategy. In view of the immense problems
before us, it strikes me as tantamount to social suicide.
Perhaps the most sobering development of recent times concerns The
Guardian, arguably the best English-language newspaper in the world, with
an enormous online readership. As a report by The Economist’s More Intelligent
Life notes, “The Guardian has been having an astonishing run.”
Few newspapers have embraced the Internet with such fury and apparent
success. In terms of reach and impact, “the Guardian is doing better than
ever.” The success is due in part to The Guardian being a nonprofit, with a
singular devotion to journalism above all else. There are no investors weighing
their stake in The Guardian against other more profitable options. The
Scott Trust—established in the 1930s by the family owners—has been well
managed and has a “war chest” of roughly $250–300 million to cover operating
losses, though CEO Andrew Miller says that amount will cover at most
another three to five years. but even The Guardian cannot find a way to
break even without cutting resources or commercializing its operations beyond
the traditional role of advertising. both options undermine quality and
put the paper and its website on a downward spiral. Guardian employees are
aware of the dilemma; reporter Nick Davies says it is impossible to see how
investigative journalism can survive on the current trajectory. If an operation
like The Guardian, with its support structure, vast resources, enormous scale,
and popularity, cannot transition to the digital age and maintain quality—
and might not even survive—what hope is there for anyone else?145
In my view, we are better off admitting what is plainly obvious: there is
no business model that can give us the journalism a self-governing society
requires. What we need is a significant body of full-time paid journalists, covering
their communities, the nation, the world, in competition and collaboration
with other paid journalists. There need to be independent newsrooms
where journalists who are secure enough in their livelihoods to focus on
their work can collaborate and receive professional editing, fact-checking,
and assistance. There needs to be expertise, developed over years of trial
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202 digital disconnect
and error, in vital areas of specialty, and paid journalists accountable for
those beats. We need journalists trained in languages, history, and culture to
work international beats with the credentials to protect them from government
harassment. Great media institutions need to compete with other great
media institutions, giving citizens solid choices and distinct perspectives.
And all of this media must be digital, perhaps with an old-media overlay
during the interregnum. Digital technologies can make the system much
more accessible and economically cost-efficient, and it can allow a much
larger role for citizens to participate. That is what is so exciting about the
world benkler and the other celebrants envision. I can see a new and dramatically
superior caliber of journalism emerging as a result of the Internet.
It will be a journalism that will overcome the great limitations of professional
journalism as it has been practiced in the united States: among other
things, reliance upon the narrow range of opinion of people in power as the
legitimate parameters of political debate, with a bias toward seeing the world
through upper-class eyes. It will be a journalism that can truly open up our
politics in the manner democratic theory envisions.
however, for this to happen there must be major public investments,
and these funds must go to the development of a diverse and independent
nonprofit sector. The future of journalism otherwise will likely approach
what education would be like if all public investments were removed. With
no such investments, our education system would remain excellent for the
wealthy, who can afford private schools, mediocre for the upper-middle class,
and nonexistent or positively frightening for the increasingly impoverished
middle and working classes, the majority of the nation. To the extent it even
existed, it would depend upon volunteer labor. It would be a nightmare unsuitable
for any credible democratic or humane society. We wouldn’t accept
this model for public education. Nor should we for journalism.
but wait, don’t government subsidies for journalism violate everything
America stands for? Aren’t they an affront to the most elementary notions
of freedom and democracy? Isn’t it better to risk going down in flames as a
failed state than to open that Pandora’s box?
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 203
Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie . . . and Public Investments in
Journalism?
In 1787, as the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson
was ensconced in Paris as this young, undefined nation’s minister to
France. From afar he corresponded on the matter of what was required for
successful democratic governance. The formation of a free press was a central
concern. Jefferson wrote:
The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to
give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public
papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole
mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of
the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were
it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without
newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate
a moment to prefer the latter. but I should mean that every man
should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
For Jefferson, having the right to speak without government censorship is a
necessary but insufficient condition for a free press and therefore democracy,
which also demands that there be a literate public, a viable press system, and
easy access to this press by the people.
but why, exactly, was this such an obsession to Jefferson? In the same
letter, he praised Native American societies for being largely classless and
happy, and he criticizes European societies—like the France he was witnessing
firsthand on the eve of its revolution—in no uncertain terms for being
their opposite. Jefferson also highlighted the central role of the press in stark
class terms when he described its role in preventing exploitation and domination
of the poor by the rich:
Among [European societies], under pretence of governing they have
divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate.
This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit
of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe
upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they
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204 digital disconnect
become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and
Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems
to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions;
and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours
his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of
Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.146
In short, the press has the obligation to undermine the natural tendency of
propertied classes to dominate politics, open the doors to corruption, reduce
the masses to powerlessness, and eventually terminate self-government.
James Madison was every bit Jefferson’s equal in his passion for a free
press. Together they argued for it as a check on militarism, secrecy, corruption,
and empire. Near the end of his life, Madison famously observed, “A
popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring
it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will
forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors,
must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”147
They were not alone. In the early republic, with no controversy, the government
instituted massive postal and printing subsidies to found a viable
press system. There was no illusion that the private sector was up to the
task without these investments. The very thought would be unthinkable for
generations. For the first century of American history, most newspapers were
distributed by mail, and the Post Office’s delivery charge for newspapers was
very small. Newspapers constituted 90 to 95 percent of its weighted traffic,
yet provided only 10 to 12 percent of its revenues. The Post Office then was
by far the largest and most important branch of the federal government, with
80 percent of federal employees in 1860.148
In the haze of the past century of commercially driven news media, we
have lost sight of the fact that the American free-press tradition has two components.
First is the aspect everyone is familiar with, the idea that the government
should not exercise prior restraint or censor the press. The second,
every bit as important, is that it is the highest duty of the government to see
that a free press actually exists so there is something of value that cannot be
censored. Although this second component of the American free-press tradition
has been largely forgotten since the advent of the corporate-commercial
era of journalism, the u.S. Supreme Court, in all relevant cases, has asserted
its existence and preeminence. Justice Potter Stewart noted, “The Free Press
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 205
guarantee is, in effect, a structural part of the Constitution” (Stewart’s emphasis).
“The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press
was,” he added, “to create a fourth institution outside the Government as
an additional check on the three official branches.” Stewart concluded,
“Perhaps our liberties might survive without an independent established
press. but the Founders doubted it, and, in the year 1974, I think we can
all be thankful for their doubts.”149
In his opinion in the 1994 case Turner
Broadcasting System v. FCC, Reagan appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy
concluded, “Assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information
sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order.”150
how big were these public investments in journalism (or press subsidies)
in contemporary terms? In The Death and Life of American Journalism,
Nichols and I calculated that if the u.S. federal government subsidized journalism
today at the same level of GDP that it did in the 1840s, the government
would have to invest in the neighborhood of $30 billion to $35 billion
annually. In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote with
astonishment of the “incredibly large” number of periodicals in the united
States and concluded that the number of newspapers was in direct proportion
to how egalitarian and democratic the society was.151
The robust press
had little to do with free markets and everything to do with subsidies that
dramatically lowered the costs of publishing and provided additional revenues
from printing contracts. As late as the 1910s, when Postmaster General
Albert burleson questioned the need for newspaper and magazine postal
subsidies, he was roundly dismissed as someone who knew little about news
industry economics.152
To Americans of all political persuasions—and especially
to progressive political movements like the abolitionists, populists, and
suffragists—even during the most laissez-faire periods in American history,
the necessity of a large public investment in journalism was a given.
Federal press subsidies—e.g., postal subsidies and paid government
notices—have diminished in real terms to only a small fraction of their
nineteenth-century levels, though they remain to the present day. Public
broadcasting is the most visible investment by government in media, and it
receives approximately $1 billion in public support, but only a small portion
of that supports journalism. State and local governments, as well as public
universities, provide much of this public subsidy, with only about $400 million
coming from the federal government.
There are legitimate concerns about government control over the content
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206 digital disconnect
of journalism, and I reject any investments that would open the door to that
outcome. I also understand that a government with a massive military and
national security complex, like the united States, could be especially dangerous
with the keys to the newsroom, but we could fund real journalism
with some of the roughly $5 billion currently used annually by the Pentagon
for public relations.153
Moreover, the united States, for all of its flaws,
remains a democratic society in the conventional modern use of the term.
Our state is capable of being pushed to make progressive moves as well as
regressive ones.
This is a crucial distinction. Most opponents of press subsidies assume
that the places to look for comparison purposes are Nazi Germany, Stalin’s
Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Idi Amin’s uganda. If a dictatorship or authoritarian
regime subsidizes journalism, the “news” will be propaganda designed
to maintain an antidemocratic order. but that does not mean the same
outcome necessarily occurs when democratic nations institute press subsidies.
What happens when we look at nations with multiparty democracies,
advanced economies, the rule of law, electoral systems, and civil liberties?—
places like Germany, Canada, Japan, britain, Norway, Austria, the Netherlands,
Denmark, Finland, belgium, Sweden, France, and Switzerland.
For starters, all these nations are huge government investors in journalism
compared to the united States. If America subsidized public media at the
same per capita rate as nations with similar political economies, like Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand, u.S. public broadcasters would have a government
investment in the $7 billion to $10 billion range. If America subsidized
public media at the same rate as nations along the lines of Japan, France, or
Great britain, the total would be $16 billion to $25 billion; if at the same
rate as Germany, Norway, or Denmark, $30 billion to $35 billion.154
These estimates do not even factor in the extensive newspaper subsidies
that several democracies employ. If the u.S. federal government subsidized
newspapers at the same per capita rate as Norway, it would make a direct
outlay of approximately $3 billion annually. Sweden spends slightly less
per capita, but has extended the subsidies to digital newspapers. France
is the champion at newspaper subsidies. If a federal government subsidy
provided the portion of the overall revenues of the u.S. newspaper industry
that France does for its publishers, it would have spent at least $6 billion in
2008.155
I have had the privilege of traveling to many of these nations in recent
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 207
years, and my impression is that these nations are far from police states,
nor do their extensive public media systems and journalism subsidies evoke
comparisons to a sham democracy, let alone a one-party state. but appearances
can be deceiving, and one prefers harder evidence, from unimpeachable
sources that would not necessarily be inclined to endorse public press
investments.
I start with britain’s The Economist, a business magazine keenly in favor
of capitalism, deregulation, and privatization, unsympathetic toward large
public sectors, labor unions, or anything that smacks of socialism. Every year
The Economist produces a highly acclaimed Democracy Index, which ranks
all the nations of the world on the basis of how democratic they are. In 2011
only twenty-five nations qualified as democratic. The criteria are: electoral
process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation,
political culture, and civil liberties. The united States ranks nineteenth by
these criteria. Most of the eighteen nations ranking higher had government
media subsidies on a per capita basis at least ten or twenty times that of the
united States. The top four nations on the list—Norway, Iceland, Denmark,
and Sweden—include two of the top three per capita media subsidizers in
the world, and the other two are dramatically ahead of the united States.
These are the freest, most democratic nations on earth according to The
Economist, and they all have perfect or near-perfect scores on civil liberties.
The united States is tied for the lowest civil liberties score among the
twenty-five democracies, and on this issue trails twenty nations described as
“flawed democracies” in The Economist’s rankings.156
Although all of the Democracy Index criteria implicitly depend to a large
extent upon having a strong press system—and the report specifically discusses
press freedom as a crucial indicator of democracy—freedom of the
press itself is not one of the six measured variables. Is there a more direct
source on press freedom?
Fortunately, there is. The Democracy Index can be supplemented with
the research of Freedom house, an American organization created in the
1940s to oppose totalitarianism of the left and right, which with the coming
of the Cold War emphasized the threat of left-wing governments to freedom.
Freedom house is very much an establishment organization, with close ties
to prominent American political and economic figures. Every year it ranks
all the nations of the world on the basis of how free and effective their press
systems are. Its research is detailed and sophisticated, particularly concerned
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208 digital disconnect
with any government meddling whatsoever with private news media. For
that reason, all communist nations tend to rank in a virtual tie for dead last
as having the least free press systems in the world. Freedom house is second
to none when it comes to having sensitive antennae to detect government
meddling with the existence or prerogatives of private news media.
Freedom house hardly favors the home team. In 2011 it ranked the
united States as being tied with the Czech Republic as having the twentysecond
freest press system in the world. America is ranked so low because of
failures to protect sources and because of the massive economic cutbacks in
newsrooms that have been chronicled in this chapter.
Freedom house’s list is dominated by the democratic nations with the
very largest per capita journalism subsidies in the world. The top nations
listed by Freedom house are the same nations that top The Economist’s Democracy
Index, and all rank among the top per capita press subsidizers in
the world.157
In fact, the lists match to a remarkable extent. That should be
no surprise, as one would expect the nations with the freest and best press
systems to rank as the most democratic nations. What has been missing from
the narrative is that the nations with the freest press systems are also the nations
that make the greatest public investment in journalism and therefore
provide the basis for being strong democracies.158
Freedom house research underscores the fact that none of these successful
democracies permit the type of political meddling that is common in
u.S. public broadcasting, particularly by those politicians who want to eliminate
public broadcasting, with no sense of irony, because it has been “politi-
cized.”159
Matt Powers and Rodney benson conducted a thorough analysis
of media laws and policies in fourteen leading democracies and “found that
all of these countries have self-consciously sought to create an arm’s-length
relationship between public media outlets and any attempt at partisan political
meddling.”160
They conclude:
What matters for both public and private media are the procedures and
policies in place to assure both adequate funding and independence
from any single owner, funder or regulator. Inside corporate-owned
newsrooms, as profit pressures have increased, informal walls protecting
the editorial side from business interference have crumbled. In
contrast, the walls protecting public media are often made of firmer
stuff such as independent oversight boards and multiyear advance
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 209
funding to assure that no publicly funded media outlet will suffer from
political pressure or funding loss because of critical news coverage.161
“I’d like to think that this finding rather than our calculation of funding is the
major contribution of our study,” benson told me.162
Although no nation is perfect and even the best have limitations, these examples
consistently demonstrate that there are means to effectively prevent
governments from having undue influence over public media operations,
much as in the united States we have created mechanisms to prevent governors
and state legislatures from dictating faculty research and course syllabi
at public universities. In other democratic nations, public broadcasting systems
tend to be popular and are defended by political parties throughout the
political spectrum. Even in the united States, despite its paltry budgets and
spotty performance, public broadcasting routinely polls as one of the most
popular government programs.163
One other annual survey presents supporting evidence. Since 2002 Reporters
Without borders has produced a highly respected annual world press
freedom index that ranks all nations in terms of how freely journalists can
go about their work without direct or indirect attacks. The survey does not
address the quality of the journalism, but only how unconstrained journalists
are to cover their communities and beats without violence or harassment.
The united States plummeted to forty-seventh in the world in 2012, largely
because of the mushrooming practice of police arresting and sometimes
beating up journalists who dare to cover and report on public demonstrations.
As journalism weakens, the state has less fear of harassing members
of the Fourth Estate, who are seen as unduly interested in issues the state
prefers not to be covered. The dozen or so nations that scored well above the
rest of the world in terms of press freedom were pretty much the exact same
nations that dominated the other two lists, those that have the largest public
investments in journalism.164
Table 1 puts all these studies together.
Research also demonstrates that in those democratic nations with wellfunded
noncommercial broadcasting systems, political knowledge is higher
than in nations without them and the information gap between the rich and
the working class and poor is much smaller.165
Stephen Cushion’s recent
research confirms this pattern. he notes that public service broadcasters
tend to do far more election campaign reporting than their commercial
counterparts. One conclusion of Cushion’s is especially striking: those
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210 digital disconnect
nations with strong public broadcasting have more substantive campaign
coverage, i.e., news about policy that can help inform citizens about the
relative merits of a political party or a particular politician. Moreover, good
public broadcasting holds commercial broadcasters to higher standards than
they have in nations where public broadcasting lacks resources for campaign
coverage.166
Likewise, in a manner that recalls the u.S. postal subsidies of the nineteenth
century and that might baffle contemporary Americans cynical about
Press Freedom
(Reporters Without borders)
Freedom of Press
(Freedom house)
Democracy Index
(The Economist)
Funding for Public Media
Country Rank Country Rank Country Rank Country Rank
Per
capita
Finland 1 Finland 1 Norway 1 Norway 1 $130.39
Norway 2 Norway 2 Iceland 2 Denmark 2 $109.96
Estonia 3 Sweden 3 Denmark 3 Finland 3 $104.10
Netherlands 4 belgium 4 Sweden 4 united Kingdom 4 $88.61
Austria 5 Denmark 5 New Zealand 5 belgium 5 $74.00
Iceland 6 Luxembourg 6 Australia 6 Ireland 6 $61.28
Luxembourg 7 Netherlands 7 Switzerland 7 Japan 7 $57.31
Switzerland 8 Switzerland 8 Canada 8 Slovenia 8 $52.34
Cape Verde 9 Andorra 9 Finland 9 Netherlands 9 $49.50
Canada 10 Iceland 10 Netherlands 10 France 10 $45.62
Denmark 11 Liechtenstein 11 Luxembourg 11 Australia 11 $35.86
Sweden 12 St. Lucia 12 Ireland 12 New Zealand 12 $28.96
New Zealand 13 Ireland 13 Austria 13 Canada 13 $27.46
Czech Republic 14 Monaco 14 Germany 14 Germany 14 $27.21
Ireland 15 Palau 15 Malta 15 South Korea 15 $9.95
U.S. rank 47 U.S. rank 22 U.S. rank 19 U.S. spending $1.43
Table 1. Journalism funding and democracy
Sources: This table is reproduced from Josh Stearns, Adding It Up: Press Freedom, Democratic
Health, and Public Media Funding (Washington, DC: Free Press, Jan. 26, 2012), savethenews.org/
blog/12/01/26/adding-it-press-freedom-democratic-health-and-public-media-funding. The data are
from: “Press Freedom Index 2011–2012,” (Paris: Reporters Without borders, 2011), en.rsf.org/pressfreedom-index-2011–2012,
1043.html; Karin Deutsch Karlekar and Jennifer Dunham, Press Freedom
in 2011 (Washington, DC: Freedom house, 2011), freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTP%20
2012%20booklet.pdf (ties not represented here); “Democracy Index 2011,” The Economist, eiu.com/
democracyindex2011; and “Funding for Public Media,” Free Press, based on 2008 budget numbers,
freepress.net/public-media. I thank Josh Stearns for the data and Jamil Jonna for the formatting.
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 211
the possibility of democratic governance, newspaper subsidies tend to be
directed to helping the smaller and more dissident newspapers, without ideological
bias, over the large successful commercial newspapers.167
Recent
research on the European press concludes that as journalism subsidies increase,
the overall reporting in those nations does not kowtow but in fact
grows more adversarial to the government in power.168
The point is not to romanticize other democratic nations or put them on
a pedestal. Journalism is in varying degrees of crisis in nations worldwide.
Resources for journalism are declining in other countries, too, even though
public investments provide a cushion.169
Moreover, the quality of journalism
is hardly guaranteed even with greater resources.170
Resources are simply a
necessary precondition for sufficient democratic journalism.
Public investments in journalism are compatible with a democratic society,
a flourishing uncensored private news media, and an adversarial journalism.
The evidence is clear: the problem of creating a viable free press system
in a democratic society is solvable. There may not be a perfect solution, but
there are good, workable ones. And in times like these, when the market is
collapsing, they are mandatory. The late James Carey—perhaps the dean of
American journalism scholars, and no fan of government involvement with
the press—said in 2002, “Alas, the press may have to rely upon a democratic
state to create the conditions necessary for a democratic press to flourish
and for journalists to be restored to their proper role as orchestrators of the
conversation of a democratic society.”171
In my other works, I have outlined a number of concrete suggestions
to spawn a democratic journalism—including an immediate expansion of
public, community, and student media. It is imperative that we develop a
heterogeneous system, with different structures and subsidy systems, and
significant nonprofit competition. There is little doubt that if Americans
spent one tenth as much time devising creative policy proposals and public
funding mechanisms as they do to trying to figure how to sell people stuff
online, we could have a boatload of brilliant propositions to consider. here
I will mention only one, because it pertains directly to how best to capture
the genius of the digital revolution and harness that potential for a credible
journalism system.
This idea was first developed by the economist Dean baker and his brother
Randy baker; Nichols and I have embellished their core concept and called
it the citizenship news voucher. The idea is simple: every American adult
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212 digital disconnect
gets a $200 voucher she can use to donate money to any nonprofit news
medium of her choice. She will indicate her choice on her tax return. If she
does not file a tax return, a simple form will be available to use. She can split
her $200 among several different qualifying nonprofit media. This program
would be purely voluntary, like the tax-form check-offs for funding elections
or protecting wildlife. A government agency, probably operating out of the
IRS, can be set up to allocate the funds and to determine eligibility according
to universal standards [like those granting 501(c)(3) nonprofit status] that
err on the side of expanding rather than constraining the number of serious
sources covering and commenting on the issues of the day.
This funding mechanism would apply to any nonprofit medium that does
exclusively media content. The medium could not be part of a larger organization
that has any nonmedia operations. Everything the medium produces
would have to be made available immediately by publication on the Internet,
free to all. It would not be covered by copyright and would enter the
public domain. The government would not evaluate the content to see that
the money is going toward journalism. My assumption is that these criteria
would effectively produce the desired result—and if there is some slippage,
so be it. Qualifying media ought not be permitted to accept advertising; this
is a sector that is to have a direct and primary relationship with its audience.
Qualifying media could accept tax-deductible donations from individuals or
foundations to supplement their income.
With advertising banned from this new Internet sector, the pool of advertising
that exists could be divvied up among newspapers and commercial
media, especially commercial broadcasters. This would give commercial
media a better crack at finding a workable business model. I would also
suggest that for a medium to receive funds, it should have to get commitments
for at least $20,000 worth of vouchers. This requirement would lessen
fraud and also force anyone wishing to establish a medium to be serious
enough to get at least a hundred people to sign on. (In other words, you
can’t just declare yourself a newspaper and deposit the voucher in your bank
account.) There will be some overhead and administration for the program,
but it would be minimal.
The voucher system would provide a way for the burgeoning yet starving
nonprofit digital news sector to become self-sufficient and have the funds to
hire a significant number of full-time paid workers. It could be as much as an
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 213
annual $30 billion to $40 billion shot in the arm. All those nonprofit digital
news operations would finally have a prayer of survival and growth, because
this is a policy that recognizes journalism for what it is—a public good.
Imagine a website in the blogosphere right now covering national politics,
producing some great content, getting hundreds of thousands of regular
visitors, but depending on low-paid or volunteer labor and praying for advertising
crumbs or donations for revenue. Now the site goes formally nonprofit,
stops obsessing over advertising, and appeals directly to its readers. Imagine
this outfit getting twenty thousand people to steer their vouchers into its accounts.
That is $4 million, enough to have a well-paid staff of fifty full-time
journalists, as well as ancillary staffers. Consider what a Web news service
could do with that. And then start thinking about how motivated the reporters
and editors would be to break big stories, maintain high quality, and keep
attracting the vouchers.
Or imagine that you live in a city with deplorable news coverage of your
community or neighborhood, as more and more Americans do. If someone
starts a local news outlet and gets a thousand people to give her group their
vouchers, that would provide a nice start-up budget of $200,000. For that
money, a group can have several reporters covering the turf and build a real
following.
Vouchers also would allow newcomers to enter the fray and hence encourage
innovation. A group could raise start-up funds from donations or
philanthropy, get under way, and then appeal directly for voucher support.
In this model, philanthropists would have much greater incentive to put
money into journalism because there would be a way for their grants to lead
to self-sustaining institutions. The voucher system would produce intense
competition because a medium cannot take its support for granted. It would
reward initiative and punish sloth. It would be democratic because rich and
poor would get the same voucher. And the government would have no control
over who’d get the money, whether left, right, or center. It would be
an enormous public investment, yet be a libertarian’s dream: people could
support whatever political viewpoints or organizations they preferred or do
nothing at all.
As Dean baker puts it, this is an economic model that recognizes that
old-fashioned media economics no longer work in the Internet era. you
can’t produce a digital product, take it to market, and sell it. And you can’t
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214 digital disconnect
get advertisers to bankroll your operation. The rational policy solution is to
give media producers—journalists, in this case—money up front and then
make what they produce available to all for free online. Embrace the digital
revolution; don’t try to fight it with electronic barbed wire, paywalls, hypercommercialism,
and spying on users. Citizenship news vouchers would fill
the Web with large amounts of professional-quality journalism and provide
a genuine independent journalism sector. Moreover, all the material developed
through the program can be used by commercial news media however
they see fit. They simply cannot monopolize it or restrict access to it. but if
they can add value, more power to them.
When Dean baker first broached this idea, well over a decade ago, it was
dismissed as utopian and absurd. After Nichols and I wrote about it in The
Death and Life of American Journalism, we visited officials connected to
both the FCC’s and the FTC’s formal panels that were studying the crisis in
journalism in 2010. Each of them had read the book closely. Each stated,
almost immediately upon meeting us, that the citizenship news voucher represented
exactly the sort of thinking that was necessary if there was going to
be much journalism going forward.172
In critical junctures, once unthinkable
ideas can become thinkable in a hurry.
Regrettably, this suggested reform, like many others, is not being considered.
After acknowledging its value, the FTC and FCC journalism officials
conceded that they could not endorse such a “radical” proposal for
fear that political attacks would destroy their work altogether. There are two
main reasons for this fear. First, there is the still-prevalent idea that “subsidies
are un-American but profits are all-American.” One can only hope that
this response is weakening due to the severity of the crisis and the mounting
evidence that public investments in journalism are not only compatible
with democracy, but mandatory for its survival. There has been some
movement, but nowhere near enough. In 2011 a comprehensive analysis
on the journalism crisis by Columbia faculty members still concluded that
“it is ultimately up to the commercial market to provide the economic basis
for journalism.”173
What Todd Gitlin said over three years ago is even more
urgent today: “We are rapidly running out of alternatives to public finance.
It’s time to move to the next level and entertain a grown-up debate among
concrete ideas.”174
The second factor is the more intransigent one and goes back to Jefferson’s
assessment of the situation in 1787. There is one group that definitely
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journalism is dead! long live journalism? 215
benefits from a lack of journalism and from information inequality: those
who dominate society. They do not wish to have their privileges or affairs
examined closely, either in politics or commerce—if the two are still separable.
The Wall Street banks, energy corporations, health insurance firms,
defense contractors, agribusinesses—powerful interests of all sorts—do not
want their operations or their cozy relations with the government exposed for
all to see, nor do the politicians who benefit from these relationships. These
are Jefferson’s wolves. None of them desires a journalism that will engage
the electorate and draw the poor and working class into the political system.
These powerful forces oppose anything that would open and enhance our
news media, and they will aggressively oppose any campaign for press subsidies
like public media or citizenship news vouchers. They might not say so
in public, but their actions speak louder than words. Journalism? No, thank
you.
Not all wealthy people are content with a world that lacks democratic
journalism. True free-market capitalism would even benefit from a strong
press system. but none of the rich have a material stake in pushing the cause,
so it founders. Our political system has become so corrupt that it is losing
the capacity to address problems that threaten its own existence. Instead, the
main issues placed before policy makers are making what seem like endless
cuts in social programs, lowering taxes on business and the wealthy, ignoring
necessary environmental protections, increasing “national security” spending,
and corporate deregulation.
As of 2013, it seems obvious that if the Internet is really reviving American
democracy, it’s taking a roundabout route. The hand of capital seems
heavier and heavier on the steering wheel, taking us to places way off the
democratic grid, and nowhere is the Internet’s failure clearer or the stakes
higher than in journalism.
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