The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could
leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is
not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader
day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we
speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and
with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to
self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in
the United States.

After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have
begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry.
Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The
Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as
we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of
extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as
having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible
to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer
have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will
employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that
still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the
remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink.

Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away
advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has
demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the
ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch,
the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully
inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will
continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

Let's begin with the crisis. In a nutshell, media corporations, after
running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering
and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping
ship. The country's great regional dailies--the Chicago Tribune,
the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the
Philadelphia Inquirer--are in bankruptcy. Denver's Rocky
Mountain News recently closed down, ending daily newspaper
competition in that city. The owners of the San Francisco
Chronicle, reportedly losing $1 million a week, are threatening to
shutter the paper, leaving a major city without a major daily newspaper.
Big dailies in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the
Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger) are reportedly
near the point of folding, and smaller dailies like the Baltimore
Examiner have already closed. The 101-year-old Christian Science
Monitor, in recent years an essential source of international news
and analysis, is folding its daily print edition. The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer is scuttling its print edition and downsizing
from a news staff of 165 to about twenty for its online-only
incarnation. Whole newspaper chains--such as Lee Enterprises, the owner
of large and medium-size publications that for decades have defined
debates in Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin--are struggling as the value of
stock shares falls below the price of a single daily paper. And the
New York Times needed an emergency injection of hundreds of
millions of dollars by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay
afloat.

Those are the headlines. Arguably uglier is the death-by-small-cuts of
newspapers that are still functioning. Layoffs of reporters and closings
of bureaus mean that even if newspapers survive, they have precious few
resources for actually doing journalism. Job cuts during the first
months of this year--300 at the Los Angeles Times, 205 at the
Miami Herald, 156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150
at the Kansas City Star, 128 at the Sacramento Bee, 100 at
the Providence Journal, 100 at the Hartford Courant,
ninety at the San Diego Union-Tribune, thirty at the Wall
Street Journal and on and on--suggest that this year will see far
more positions eliminated than in 2008, when almost 16,000 were lost.
Even Doonesbury's Rick Redfern has been laid off from his job at
the Washington Post.

The toll is daunting. As former Washington Post executive editor
Leonard Downie Jr. and Post associate editor Robert Kaiser have
observed, "A great news organization is difficult to build and
tragically easy to disassemble." That disassembling is now in full
swing. As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down,
whole sectors of our civic life go dark. Newspapers that long ago closed
their foreign bureaus and eliminated their crack investigative
operations are shuttering at warp speed what remains of city hall,
statehouse and Washington bureaus. The Cox chain, publisher of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin
American-Statesman and fifteen other papers, will padlock its DC
bureau on April 1--a move that follows the closures of the respected
Washington bureaus of Advance Publications (the Newark
Star-Ledger, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and others); Copley
Newspapers and its flagship San Diego Union-Tribune; as well as
those of the once great regional dailies of Des Moines, Hartford,
Houston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Toledo.

Mired in debt and facing massive losses, the managers of corporate
newspaper firms seek to right the sinking ship by cutting costs, leading
remaining newspaper readers to ask why they are bothering to pay for
publications that are pale shadows of themselves. It is the daily
newspaper death dance-cum- funeral march.

But it is not just newspapers that are in crisis; it is the institution
of journalism itself. By any measure, journalism is missing from most
commercial radio. TV news operations have become celebrity- and
weather-obsessed "profit centers" rather than the journalistic icons of
the Murrow and Cronkite eras. Cable channels "fill the gap" with
numberless pundits and "business reporters," who got everything about
the last decade wrong but now complain that the government doesn't know
how to set things right. Cable news is defensible only because of the
occasional newspaper reporter moonlighting as a talking head. But what
happens when the last reporter stops collecting a newspaper paycheck and
goes into PR or lobbying? She'll leave cable an empty vessel and take
the public's right to know anything more than a rhetorical flourish with
her.

The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on "old media"
to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to
stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios,
no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small
number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift
their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old
media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia
and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help
democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled
journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing
investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its
revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.

So this is where we stand: much of local and state government, whole
federal departments and agencies, American activities around the world,
the world itself--vast areas of great public concern--are either
neglected or on the verge of neglect. Politicians and administrators
will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public
accountability. We are entering historically uncharted territory in
America, a country that from its founding has valued the press not
merely as a watchdog but as the essential nurturer of an informed
citizenry. The collapse of journalism and the democratic infrastructure
it sustains is not a development that anyone, except perhaps corrupt
politicians and the interests they serve, looks forward to. Such a
crisis demands solutions equal to the task. So what are they?

Regrettably the loud discussion of the collapse of journalism has been
far stronger in describing the symptoms than in providing remedies. With
the frank acknowledgment that the old commercial system has failed and
will not return, there has been a flurry of modest proposals to address
the immodest crisis. These range from schemes to further consolidate
news gathering at the local level to pleas for donations from news
consumers and hopes that hard-pressed philanthropists and foundations
will decide to go into the news business. And they range from
ineffectual to improbable to undesirable. Walter Isaacson has proposed
that newspapers come up with a plan to charge readers "micropayments"
for online content. Even if such a system were practically possible, the
last thing we should do is erect electronic walls that block the
openness and democratic genius of the Internet.

Don't get us wrong. We are enthusiastic about many of the efforts to
promote original journalism online, such as ProPublica, Talking Points
Memo and the Huffington Post. We cheer on exciting local endeavors, such
as MinnPost in the Twin Cities--a nonprofit, five-day-a-week online
journal that covers Minnesota politics with support from major
foundations, wealthy families and roughly 900 member-donors contributing
$10 to $10,000. But even our friends at MinnPost acknowledge that their
project is not filling the void in a metro area that still has two
large, if struggling, daily newspapers. Just about every serious
journalist involved in an online project will readily concede that even
if these ventures pan out, we will still have a dreadfully
undernourished journalism system with considerably less news gathering
and reporting, especially at the local level.

For all their merits and flaws, these fixes are mere triage strategies.
They are not cures; in fact, if there is a risk in them, it is that they
might briefly discourage the needed reshaping of ownership models that
are destined to fail.

The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the
economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the
Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated
and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when
corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was
then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the
demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists
and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published
in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the
rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the
frequency with which "outsiders"--civil rights campaigners, antiwar
activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front
page.

As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and
editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the
contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print
advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper
revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to
'90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the
rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues
went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that
year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.

Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term
profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary
reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water
down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they
would undermine their raison d'etre and fail to cultivate younger
readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to
maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were
already heading due south.

We do not mean to suggest that '60s journalism was perfect or that we
should aim to return there. Even then journalism suffered from a
generally agreed-upon professional code that relied far too heavily on
official sources to set the news agenda and decide the range of debate
in our political culture. That weakness of journalism has been magnified
in the era of corporate control, leaving us with a situation most
commentators are loath to acknowledge: the quality of journalism in the
United States today is dreadful.

Of course, there are still tremendous journalists doing outstanding
work, but they battle a system increasingly pushing in the opposite
direction. (That is why some of the most powerful statements about our
current circumstances come in the form of books, like Naomi Klein's
The Shock Doctrine; or documentaries, like Michael Moore's
Bowling for Columbine; or beat reporting in magazines, like that
of Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh at TheNew Yorker.) The
news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies
masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of
corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected
before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and
inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real
economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where
the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and
Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the "Octomom."
They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life
and death.

No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would
almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today.
Older Americans have been giving up on old media too, if not as rapidly
and thoroughly as the young. If we are going to address the crisis in
journalism, we have to come up with solutions that provide us with
hard-hitting reporting that monitors people in power, that engages all
our people, not just the classes attractive to advertisers, and that
seeks to draw all Americans into public life. Going backward is not an
option; nor is it desirable. The old corporate media system choked on
its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have
to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to
that of the recent past.

We can do exactly that--but only if we recognize and embrace the
necessity of government intervention. Only government can implement
policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality
journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position. When
French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million
bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades
to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional
wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely
independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press. Bree
Nordenson notes that when she informed famed journalist Tom Rosenstiel
that her visionary 2007 Columbia Journalism Review article
concerned the ways government could support the press, Rosenstiel
"responded brusquely, 'Well, I'm not a big fan of government support.' I
explained that I just wanted to put the possibility on the table. 'Well,
I'd take it off the table,' he said."

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

Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only
to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the
notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the
Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have
entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say
that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the
news, then society cannot have news. Let's find a king and call it a
day.

The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth
Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted
considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a
vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal
subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive
newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication
of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and
variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the
1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and
periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an
accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of
public policy.

Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the
press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of
the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic.
First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the "Amendment rests on
the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information
from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the
public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." Black
argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract
private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice
Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that "assuring the public
has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental
purpose of the highest order."

But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history
or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering
journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media
system is anything but an independent "free market" institution. The
government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the
eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles
out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies,
including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses,
monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal
subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few
years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies
are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit
the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional
account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and
decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government
policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had
encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as
well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased
news media revenues.

The truth is that government policies and subsidies already define our
press system. The only question is whether they will be enlightened and
democratic, as in the early Republic, or corrupt and corrosive to
democracy, as has been the case in recent decades. The answer will be
determined in coming years as part of what is certain to be a bruising
battle: media companies and their lobbying groups will argue against the
"heavy hand of government" while defending existing subsidies. They will
propose more deregulation, hoping to capitalize on the crisis to remove
the last barriers to print, broadcast and digital consolidation in local
markets--creating media "company towns," where competition is
eliminated, along with journalism jobs, in pursuit of better returns for
investors. Enlightened elected officials, media unions and public
interest and community groups that recognize the role of robust
journalism are going to have to step up to argue for a real fix.

Fortunately, an increasing number of veteran journalists, scholars and
activists are beginning to grasp the historical significance of the
present moment and the central role of public policy. It was the late
James Carey, decorated University of Illinois and Columbia journalism
professor and no fan of government power, who saw this before almost
anyone else, writing 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 culture."

We have to ask where we want to end up, after the reforms have been
implemented. In our view we need to have competing independent newsrooms
of well-paid journalists in every state and in every major community.
This is not about newspapers or even broadcast media; it entails all
media and accepts that we may be headed into an era when nearly all of
our communication will be digital. Ideally this will be a pluralistic
system, where there will be different institutional structures.
Varieties of nonprofit media will have to play a much larger role,
though not a monopolistic one.

We recognize and embrace the need for a system in which there will be a
range of perspectives from left to right, alongside some media more
intent on maintaining a less explicitly ideological stance. We must have
a system that prohibits state censorship and that minimizes commercial
control over journalistic values and pursuits. The right of any person
to start his or her own medium, commercial or nonprofit, at any time is
inviolable. From this foundation we can envision a thriving, digital
citizen's journalism complementing and probably merging with
professional journalism. What will the mix be? It would vary, with more
not-for-profit and subsidized media in rural and low-income areas, more
for-profit media in wealthier ones. The first order of any government
intervention would be to assure that no state or region would be without
quality local, state, national or international journalism.

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

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

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

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

What should be done about the disconnect between young people and
journalism? Have the government allocate funds so every middle school,
high school and college has a well-funded student newspaper and a
low-power FM radio station, all of them with substantial websites. We
need to get young people accustomed to producing journalism and to
appreciating what differentiates good journalism from the other stuff.

The essential component for the immediate stimulus should be an
exponential expansion of funding for public and community broadcasting,
with the requirement that most of the funds be used for journalism,
especially at the local level, and that all programming be available for
free online. Other democracies outspend the United States by whopping
margins per capita on public media: Canada sixteen times more; Germany
twenty times more; Japan forty-three times more; Britain sixty times
more; Finland and Denmark seventy-five times more. These investments
have produced dramatically more detailed and incisive international
reporting, as well as programming to serve young people, women,
linguistic and ethnic minorities and regions that might otherwise be
neglected by for-profit media.

Perhaps in the past the paucity of public media in the United States
could be justified by the enormous corporate media presence. But as the
corporate sector shrivels we need something to replace it, and fast.
Public and community broadcasters are in a position to be just that, and
to keep alive the practice of news gathering in countless communities
across the nation. Indeed, if a regional daily like the San Francisco
Chronicle fails this year, why not try a federally funded
experiment: maintain the newsroom as a digital extension of the local
public broadcasting system?

Currently the government spends less than $450 million annually on
public media. (To put matters in perspective, it spends several times
that much on Pentagon public relations designed, among other things, to
encourage favorable press coverage of the wars that the vast majority of
Americans oppose.) Based on what other highly democratic and free
countries do, the allocation from the government should be closer to $10
billion. All totaled, the suggestions we make here for subscription
subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public
broadcasting have a price tag in the range of $60 billion over the next
three years.

This is a substantial amount of money. In normal times it might be too
much to ask. But in a time of national crisis, when an informed and
engaged citizenry is America's best hope, $20 billion a year is chicken
feed for building what would essentially be a bridge across which
journalism might pass from dying old media to the promise of something
new. Think of it as a free press "infrastructure project" that is
necessary to maintain an informed citizenry, and democracy itself. It
would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of
providing an economic stimulus. If these journalists (and the tens of
thousands of production and distribution workers associated with
newspapers) are not put to work through the programs we propose, their
knowledge and expertise will be lost. They will be unemployed, and their
unemployment will contribute to further stagnation and economic
decline--especially in big cities where newspapers are major employers.

These proposals are a good start, but then the really hard work begins.
We have to come up with a plan to convert failing newspapers into
journalistic entities with the express purpose of assuring that fully
staffed, functioning and, ideally, competing newsrooms continue to
operate in communities across the country. The only way to do this is by
using tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert
the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions that are
ready to compete and communicate in the decades to come. To get from
here to there, and especially to make possible multiple competing
newsrooms in larger communities, policy-makers should be open to
commercial ownership, municipal ownership, staff ownership or
independent nonprofit ownership. Ideally the next media system will have
a combination of the above; and the government should be prepared to
rewrite rules and regulations and to use its largesse to aid a variety
of sound initiatives.

We confess that we do not have all the answers. Neither, we have
discovered, does anyone else. The fatal flaw in so many sincere but
doomed responses to the current crisis is that they try to do the
impossible, to create a system using varying doses of foundation grants,
do-gooder capitalism, citizen donations, volunteer labor, the
anticipation of a miraculous increase in advertising manna and/or a
sudden--and in our view unimaginable--reversal on the part of Americans
who have thus far shown no inclination to pay for online content. At
best, these are piecemeal proposals when we are in dire need of building
an entire edifice. The money from these sources is insufficient to
address the crisis in journalism.

We have to open the door to enlightened public policies and subsidies.
We need our members of Congress and our leading scholars to approach
this matter with the same urgency with which they would approach the
threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change. We
need an organized citizenry demanding the institutions that make
self-government possible. Only then can we, like our founders, build a
free press. The technologies and the economic challenges are, of course,
more complex than in the 1790s, but the answer is the same: the
democratic state, the government, must create the conditions for
sustaining the journalism that can provide the people with the
information they need to be their own governors.