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Opening Arguments

News without profit?

There's an intriguing article by Gary Kamiya at salon.com. If newspapers die, he writes, reporting dies and, along with it, our shared vision of life. The world will become a less-known and therefore more dangerous place. His suggested remedy:

This bleak situation has given rise to a once-unthinkable notion: removing the news from market forces altogether by subsidizing it. In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, two business analysts suggested turning newspapers into "nonprofit, endowed institutions -- like colleges and universities."

Most journalists probably find something vaguely creepy about this idea; it's a little too high-minded, abstract and self-congratulatory to fit with their self-image as regular Joes and Jills. There are also legitimate concerns whether foundations or other public supporters would influence editorial content or direction. But the alternative is disturbing.

A world without primary reporting will be literally less human. Talking to actual, live human beings, as opposed to reading documents or commentary or what they say online, has an innately moderating effect on one's approach. A good reporter sees issues in greater complexity because humans are complex.

This isn't as outlandish as it seems at first. As long as we're not talking about government subsidies, there aren't any First Amendment or Compromising the Watchdog issues. Many opinion journals are the products of think tanks that are subsidized by the people who believe in a cause. The Christian Science Monitor has been possible because of subsidies from that church. What would be required are insitutions and endowments that believe it is important to preserve what would be lost if newspapers perish. I'm not sure right now who they might be.

Comments

tim zank
Tue, 02/17/2009 - 1:08pm

Leo, why is it necessarily so, that if newspapers (the print version) actually "die" that "journalists" would cease to exist as well? Wouldn't they simply report to & from a different business model? The information will still be distributed albeit via an electronic platform, no?

If I'm not mistaken there are two major reasons newspapers are failing, those being:

1. People won't buy a product they don't like or agree with (NY Times-LA Times-etc. all the obscenely left leaning rags)

2. The information people want is readily available from other sources (TV-internet-radio) for free.

I would think the "journalism" industry would adapt to a new form of delivery, wouldn't they?

Leo Morris
Tue, 02/17/2009 - 1:16pm

The problem is that the new forms of delivery don't deliver (so far, at least) the kind of money that can sustain a staff. But you are right that the biggest mistake we ever made was putting our product online for free and simultaneously telling people they should keep spending money for the same thing in the much slower print product. How dumb was that?

tim zank
Tue, 02/17/2009 - 2:17pm

Hindsight is always 20-20, eh? ....Seems to me though, If and when the print version did cease, at that time the well capitalized organizations could make the segue to an online forum, multiple pages and sections again, and the advertisers would follow, if in fact the readers were still loyal to their "brand" or "style" of news and reportage.

Andrew Jarosh
Tue, 02/17/2009 - 9:17pm

It wasn't dumb to offer news content online for free. What was dumb was to continue charging for a print newspaper. Instead, it should have been made free as well, giving people two mediums to get news from.
There are papers that distribute for free; Village Voice in NYC is just one example that comes to mind. The landscaped is dotted with free weekly newspapers.
AJ

gadfly
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 12:55am

Time Magazine proposes an EZ Pass system on the net that changes miniscule amounts for time or articles accessed on electronic newspapers and 'zines . . .much in the way that iTunes works.

The technology is here, but "pay per view" hasn't been a big winner among internet users (already paying to hook up to the web) for such sites as WSJ and Consumers Report.

Encrypted sites that restrict access or forbid copy or print without paying is another idea as is the publishing of newspapers for electronic readers such as Amazon's Kindle.

As consumers shift to the internet for buying, advertising rates will rise on the net, so constructing a newspaper funded largely by web ads is probably the first evolution to occur. The Detroit Free Press and The Christian Science Monitor are on this path now.

Of course we all know that New York will never let the Times die . . . else the fish market folks will have no wrapping paper.

gadfly
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 1:09am

Leo,

To your point, the Time article gives his anecdote :

"Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"

Steven T.
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 1:37am

It's ridiculous. There is no reason for newspapers to die other than that they become victims of their own squeamishness and inability to differentiate unflinching truth from sensationalism and/or hype.

PLAYBOY magazine is worried about dying -- only because the editors can't envision a near-future in which Americans prefer photos without the anti-realistic touch-ups.

Newspapers take a lesson. You don't have to stoop to "True Detective" tabloidism, but you should stop flinching at, Bowdlerizing, and generally homogenizing the world's most important daily news stories.

If the presently established newspaper enterprises insist on dying, I guarantee a clearer-eyed, unflinching and doggedly objective younger generation will instantly launch successful organs to fill the gap. But why bother an unnecessary print revolution? The current papers can decide, at any moment, to print "all the news without airbrushing" in an instant and recapture the entire local news market once again. It is high time to print stories with the freckles intact. We want to read them that way, complete and unexpurgated.

MRev. Kenneth White, Jnr.
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 3:38am

The only remaining saving factor to the traditional print media is this, the traditional print media provides a permanent record that cannot be destroyed unless someone physically burns down every library and newspaper across the Country. There has to come a point where either citizen journalist/bloggers adopt a rule regarding retconning or post production editing and stand up for what they originally posted.

The rules that I follow on F6 is a starting pointe:

1. Once a post is published, it may be corrected or edited up to 48 hours after. Previously I had done so at up to 72 hours.
2. After that initial 48 hours, there must be a separate entry on that same post or another post to update a story or correct any misinformation on the original post.
3. Anytime I am disagreeing or contesting an assertion made by another source/organization, my preview and thesis are stated then their documentation/publication must be provided at least as an excerpt, for balance, then I get to rip it to shreds, even if done by paragraph or pointe/counterpointe format.

Now all we need to do is find some way for the libraries to start archiving blogs and we might achieve a permanent record aka reputable news market status. But what would be even cooler is if the local newspapers would
1. actually give credit to the blogs they quote;
2. work along side citizen journalist to improve the market

All together now:
"But that is too Utopian! What about market shares?"

Even for this Libertarian, to think it could happen any time this decade or next, is regarded wishful and left as a pipe dream.

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