I posted earlier this week that one of the few upsides of this economy is the cover it provides for newsrooms to make a bunch of necessary changes that everyone has known about, and postponed, for the last decade or so. Why does a media holding company need to pay for a White House correspondent or a film reviewer for each of its papers or magazines, instead of just funding one such reporter whose content can appear in all their outlets? Why does a small town paper need to bother with national or global news at all, since readers the world over can now get access to international and national information online, and even without the web, since the local paper can get that content from the wires? In the digital economy, it makes even more sense for news outlets to focus niches of expertise and aggregate the rest from other sites. But it means a permanent downsizing of newsrooms and that’s hard to do when the rest of the economy is growing. Still, even now that editors and publishers are ready to make these cuts, no one has figured out quite how the smaller newsroom will make money. Which brings us to the second upside of a recession for media–the willingness to take risks that comes when there’s really nothing left to lose. There’ve been a few recent stories highlighting directions the media could take:
–Walter Isaacson says we could charge iTunes-style for individual digital articles, but Mike Kinsley says no one would pay for that (Note that he doesn’t have an alternative, really)
–the NYT says it might try charging for select and archived content again
–Fox has a new ad model that charges buyers more per ad, but reduces the number of ads sold in total so viewers will have less incentive to forward through the shorter commercial breaks
None of these is perfect, but I applaud anyone who is willing to head scratch a bit about devising a solution. That’s why I was so thrilled to speak a few days ago with Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott. His hometown paper is on its last legs too, and Rep. McDermott has been inspired to try to save the American newspaper industry. His solution is the out-of-the-box idea no one IN media  really likes–that news just shouldn’t be a private sector enterprise to begin with, but a nonprofit venture funded either by the state or by charitable donations, or some combination of the two. McDermott is researching a bill for the House that would set up funds, akin to those that back NPR and PBS, to support nonprofit newspapers in American communities. Here’s what he had to say:
on newspapers as a public good: “I worry that we’re losing our democracy. I don’t know whether this is just generational, but if we lose newspapers [and] everyone is gonna get the news off the internet, then a whole slug of people is just off the game. If Jefferson was right and an educated electorate[is key], then you can’t have vast numbers of people without access. [Even if we expand access to broadband], you have to be more devoted to go in search of news on the web.”
on the downsides to digitization: “It used to be that Congress had roll call voting, and it took hours, and then they made it an electronic scoreboard, and now we can pass amendment in 15 minutes. Therefore we’re no longer inconveniencing people with new amendments, [which led to an] expansion of the number of those amendements that people insert. Now [there’s a] movement to vote from their offices. This isn’t a Congress, because Congress is a coming together. You can’t influence the opinion of others if you’re not in the same room. If I thought that investigative journalism was being preserved and just print costs were being cut, that would be fine. But the decision [about what to run online] is being made by accountants not professional editors.”
How much does news reporting really influence politics day-to-day?: “Without investigative reporting, I’m gonna get away with stuff. Gotta have somebody poking me in the eye with a sharp stick to find out what’s going on. Moreover, how are we gonna communicate with constituents? [The way things are going,] It’s all gonna be done by the president in uplifting (or not so uplifting) speeches? I just want to alert people to the change taking place—are we sure this is where we wanna be going?”
Is it the message or the medium?: “I get more engagement from constituents in web community meetings than I do in live ones, but I come from the city where every software maker has an office, the city which has highest reading and movie-going numbers per capita. I guess the way everybody twenty years younger than me is zipping things around on email, [it might be okay] if there was investigative journalism available on the web. “I myself read papers from Lebanon and India online, and I do my own winnowing process, and I have people that do it for me. Managing information has become such a process and many people have just given up or can’t afford to do it.â€
I have a few bones to pick with Rep. McDermott’s argument, but I’ll save them for tomorrow. I’d like to hear your takes first: is the notion of the news media as a private sector, for-profit enterprise fundamentally flawed or eternally doomed? are there downsides to state-subsidized media? could the NPR model ever translate to print? is it more logical to bankroll transitions to digitization or prop up the older technologies? If there’s any way to test the value of new media, it’s by sounding out some of these tough questions right here.
You’d think the above was a fairly simple statement, but apparently Jeff Jarvis, big shot of media commentators, does not understand it. He’s written a book called “What Would Google Do?” in which he takes Google’s business model and suggests that since they have been successful with it, everyone should run their companies–in all industries–this way. I haven’t read the book, but I know this is the argument, because Jarvis has taken his own advice and generated much of the book through suggestions from his blog readers this past year. You can watch him explain the idea here:
As readers of this blog will know, I am ambivalent about the emerging M.O. of online journalism. I think original reporting available to more people at lower cost is great news. I think editorializing from informed but partisan experts is a good thing in so much as it engages people to be active citizens even as it educates them. I think the trend of taking the link—the ability to connect disparate ideas—and using it as a license to eschew logic and connect anything you please is bad. I think the claim by link-evangelists that their denial of verifiable truth is more intellectually honest than the imperfect, but well-intentioned, search for objectivity that characterizes traditional print is the worst of all.
I feel compelled to summarize the above stances again in light of a recent article by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic Monthly. Hirschorn makes the case that the current financial crisis will speed up the (he says) inevitable bankruptcies of various print organizations, and takes up the NYT as an example. Read the rest of this entry »
…is how the recession feels to many in media. The industry was hard hit even when the U.S. economy was booming, barely scraping together enough ads to keep the lights on, so the current collapse is a serious kick when we’re already down.
A telling sign: in trying to devise a forecast for media in 2009, I went out in search of the full range of experts, but there was no diversity in their views. The most bullish and bearish of analysts agreed that there’s aways to fall. Read the story here.
One interesting trend that emerged in those interviews is what Paul Krugman calls depression economics: there’s a moment (a tipping point, to borrow another economist’s phrase) on the way down where all the basic structures atrophy and what used to be prudent policy suddenly becomes dangerously stupid. ex: In boom times, saving is good, but in depression economics you want everyone to spend above their income to jumpstart growth.
In media, the conventional wisdom is that moving towards an advertising-based revenue structure from a subscription-based revenue structure represents progress. On the web, advertising is the only viable revenue structure, since consumers have demonstrated again and again that they aren’t willing to pay for content. But even in print, the explosion of media and the expansion of media companies happened when they were able to bring their newstand cost down to a mass-accessible price, and cover their own production costs through advertising. So this is longstanding conventional wisdom. In depression economics, however, when everyone else is so hard hit they stop buying ads, it’s the entities with subscription streams that do best. Fuddy-duddies like The Discovery Channel are apparently poised to make the big gains while big names like Disney will lose out.
It’s a compelling example of why we need more experimentation around media business models–the best practice is far from set in stone.
Another interesting debate in class today, where I got a bit heated and yelled at some fellow classmates who were trashing news executives for “failing” to find a way to pay for what they see as the one true journalism–i.e. objective, general-interest and long-form. I tried to remind them that this model was a 20th century anomaly; for most of its history, journalism has been short, snappy, niche and opinionated. Why are we all hung up on mourning a fluke?
To that end, in addition to yelling at my classmates, I’m researching and writing about older media models that might serve as more relevant precedents: one model is the Victorian radical press, which I’ve described in today’s Columbia Journalism Review. This winter, I’ll be combing the 1830’s French press for another option. Where and when else should I be looking?
I’ve been sayingfor ages that the future of media is in a rapprochement between the best and biggest old media companies and the best and leanest of the new media startups. Another example to add to my trend list: Reuters and Politico announced a content-sharing deal this week.
This is especially good news because Reuters is a wire. On the one hand, the wires are having a hard time rejigging their revenue structure for the digital world. On the other hand, because they already specialize in being fast and scrappy, and in putting out raw content for others to reuse, wires are already suited to the content of web-style reporting.
Instead of supplying newspapers–who need to move away from trying to break headlines that readers can get online on Reuters’ own site–Reuters can supply blogs. Blogs like Politico DO need to be fast news-breakers but since the best ones are specialized they need content outside their focus area that Reuters can provide. Meanwhile Reuters drives a new generation of readers to its site (so it can monetize its own content directly, instead of just through subscribers). And it gets to outsource some of its political reporting to Politico’s staff.
I wish I could say ‘I rest my case’ about this but I think ’09 will see even more of these partnerships. And shamelessly enough, I am compelled to toot my horn when I’m proven right.
There’s no shortage of handwringing about the future of the newspaper industry these days and this blog has definitely contributed its fair share. But this item by John Gapper at the FT seems far more balanced than most of what I’ve read. Gapper’s argument is similar to the one I’ve made on this site:
1. We don’t need more than a few major news organizations covering national and international news. If the Miami Herald loses it’s D.C. bureau, it’s no big deal, because Floridians can get the WaPo online or the Herald can content-share with the WaPo on its own site.
2. Some things like weather and sports scores (ie pure information) can be done by any number of web start-ups and newspapers really don’t need to have staffs for this anymore.
3. City papers outside the national news hubs should stick to local news, and most of them are slowly going this way.
The innovation in Gapper’s article is the way he explains the current financial troubles of news media: no one should wring their hands for the NYTimes, even if they are starved for revenue right now, because AS the other city papers go more local, the market share of the NYT in national news will increase. The big guys will be just fine. It’s a nice silver lining in a dire newspaper economy and a well-written item I thought I should pass along.
For some time, Lessig has been synonymous with the West Coast attitude to IP law. As the home of Silicon Valley, the engineers whose inventions are rewriting our economy, and with its laid back libertarian social ideals, California made a natural base for the free culture movement Lessig championed.
But Lessig didn’t start there; he started among the more moderate academe in Cambridge, and even did a stint amongst the uber-capitalists at U-Chicago. Since he left, Harvard has been working overtime to cultivate its own IP department and the big coup came in 2007, when they picked up Yochai Benkler from Yale.
Benkler is the anti-Lessig: just as committed to open source culture, but in the sense of free markets, not free lunch. To Benkler, a decentralized, deregulated web creates new opportunities for competition and new sources of profit. [Note that his book is called the Wealth of Networks after Adam Smith.] To Lessig, an open web is pure collaboration, a system with the power to undermine profit motive itself. At least that’s how his early work reads, though he recently tried to back down from this position in an interview on Charlie Rose (maybe this was initiation for his new job). Over the years, then, Benkler’s view came to symbolize the East Coast approach to IP law as much as Lessig was the California hippie.
Now Harvard wants to be innovative, so they’re trying to collect all the lights of IP law. Is this the new link economy at work, forcing opponents to collaborate? It’s likely that copyright law (which really sucks right now) will be rewritten in the next few years. And Lessig and Benkler are surely the people who will be called in to help pols draft new laws. Will working side by side affect the legal ideas these two develop?
In any case, I’ll be curious to see how the two of them interact at faculty lunches.
Been having some passionate debates at Columbia about the future of media, and particularly investigative journalism. In class the other day, I suggested that the best use of investigative journalism is on a local level–where you can actually get on the streets, gumshoe-style–and that most papers should focus on reporting what happens in their backyard. If local outlets don’t do that, no one else will, and communities will suffer.
I’m persona non grata in class now, because what I said smacks of New Yorker snobbery, as though I were claiming national news as the exclusive prerogative of my city’s papers (the Times, the WSJ) and those in other big media markets (the Washington Post). But I don’t consider the Times and the WSJ to be New York papers. These are international titles, and even when international news happens here (ie at the Stock Exchange or the UN), I don’t look at that as New York news. Real New York papers–the Post and the Daily News–report just on New York, and that’s as it should be.
An example: the Daily News won a Pulitzer last year for its coverage of the medical fallout 9/11 had on the emergency workers who spent time doing rescue work at Ground Zero. They’d have missed that one if they’d been busy with a national or international story. In other words, I’d be just as incensed if the Daily News got themselves a Pentagon reporter as I am when I hear about a Washington bureau for a local paper from the Midwest or the South.
The problem, as one of my classmates pointed out last night, is that very few people consume as much news as I do (most people have lives). So while I can read the WSJ, the WaPo and the Times for national and international information and then get local headlines from the NY1 TV station, many Americans want everything together. Going too local will reinforce the parochialism many foreigners find irksome about Americans.
It’s not that readers in cities outside New York and D.C. don’t deserve to hear about national news; it’s that their papers should not squander resources looking for it at the expense of local beats. That’s what wire services are for.
I’m not alone in looking for a news universe that is geographically segmented. Take a look at these readership figures for the top 5 visited news websites:
New York Times 707 764 000
USATODAY.com — 186,178,000
Washingtonpost.com — 163,844,000
Wall Street Journal Online — 107,333,000
The real crisis, then, is what to do about wire-style reporting as the Associated Press hurdles towards collapse. Someone needs to devise a system for national and international news to be fed to papers for whom it’s not, and should not be, the primary bread and butter. CNN is starting its own wire service, and there’s ProPublica, but there’s no guarantee these business models will work any better than the AP’s. I’d like to see more activity and experimentation in this field–are there projects out there I don’t know about?
He says he’s an “old Communist,” a la Gorbachev, trying to reform a system; the younger free culture radicals who quote him are Yelstins, who’ve taken his policies too far. Lessig says he doesn’t want to get rid of copyright because it still incentivizes some people to produce valuable content who wouldn’t do it for free. His hippie proteges think anyone who produces art for money is not worth society’s time. Now whenever I’ve read Lessig, I’ve always felt he falls on the radical side of the line. Either I was wrong, or he’s now changing tacks because he realizes the moderate approach has a better shot of reaching its goals.
He’s not alone. Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis says he doesn’t have it out for print media and media corporations at all and outlines a business model for how established news organizations can coexist with a gift economy of citizen-journalists. It’s a good plan and it strikes me as a deviation from the things Jarvis has written in the past; again I wonder if (as he claims) this is what he meant all along, or if he’s just getting practical at last.
Either way, it’s good to have people of Lessig’s and Jarvis’s clout advocating a middle-ground. Then again, Gorbachev tried to remind people to take it slow too…and it didn’t work out so great for him.