The Future of Journalism Is Not in the Past

The question of "How to save Journalism?" is a front-burner issue,
as major metropolitan dailies, like the Rocky Mountain News and the
Philadelphia Inquirer, implode. Calls for bailouts in the tens of
billions of dollars have gone up, even from critics of the industry,
and some are calling for further relaxation of limits on media
ownership so newspapers and television stations can merge, presumably
to improve the financial prospects of both.

After excoriating the commercial mass media for decades, should we
spend huge sums of public money to prop it up or abandon our concern
about large mass media outlets and chains dominating local markets?

We need to step back and ask some tough questions. What do we mean
by "good" journalism and why should we "save" it? What is the problem
with the newspaper business? Will saving newspapers save journalism?
Will allowing mergers solve the economic problem or improve the quality
of content? What alternatives are available?

Why Does Journalism Need to Be Saved?

The premise of the effort to save newspapers is that journalism
provides a public function that needs to be preserved. "Good"
journalism is a public good because it creates value far beyond the
revenue stream it generates. The benefit to society is supposed to be
its function as a watchdog on both the public and private sectors --
disciplining waste, fraud and abuse -- and as a source of information
for the public about important issues of public policy. Because it is a
public good, commercial markets tend to under-produce it, so it needs
non-market support. In the United States the mass media has long been
subsidized, starting with low postal rates to support print media in
the 19th century and running through free exclusive licenses to use the
public airwaves to broadcast radio and TV in the 20th century.

What Is the Underlying Problem?

To deal with the crisis of journalism, we have to recognize key
characteristics of the future journalism space. The majority of
newspaper revenues come from local advertising. Newspaper advertising
revenues are driven by readership, which has been declining. However,
advertising revenues have been declining more rapidly than readership;
classified advertising has been declining more rapidly than general
advertising; and local newspaper advertising has been declining more
rapidly than national activity. Thus, there is a migration of revenue
to other media -- the Internet, local cable TV and direct mail -- that
deliver more targeted or more compelling advertising. In 2000, the
revenues of these three advertising media were just 12 percent larger
than newspaper advertising; by 2007 they were 82 percent larger.

The future is digital: text, not print; viral, not one-to-many; and,
in critical ways, more global and less local. For newspapers that means
that geography does not matter as much as it once did. Functional
specialization replaces geographic specialization.

Much of the journalism we lament losing is statewide, regional,
national and international. If an issue is not inherently local, such
as a school board election, it will have difficulty commanding
resources in the local media because "outsiders" can now use digital
distribution to aggregate a larger audience. Local papers will simply
not be able to compete in reporting on global, national or statewide
issues and they have begun to outsource that function.

Newspapers in medium to large cities that historically covered
local, statewide, regional, national and some global news are in the
worst shape because the new environment impacts their business model
most. In the digital age, they cannot maintain adequate advertising
revenue -- losing ground to cable and web-based alternatives to
classified ads -- to sustain adequate investment in such broad-based
reporting. They lose competitively in the national and global markets
to the big national newspapers and wire services.

Small town papers may fare better because they face less competition
in small local markets, but those local markets will not support the
journalism that covers statewide, regional, and global issues. Large
national and international papers and services may fare better, since
they can aggregate demand. It is the hole in the middle where the
impact is greatest.

Would the Proposals to "Save" Journalism by Saving Newspapers Work?

The assumption that subsidies or mergers will save journalism
economically in the face of the powerful underlying economic forces or
ensure the delivery of journalism's public good is dubious at best.

The commercial mass media newspaper model was failing to properly
fulfill its public function long before its economic model collapsed.
Any subsidy might push the economic day of reckoning off, but it will
not solve the long-term economic problem. The most successful
commercial papers are not necessarily the best. We could get more of
the same journalism we have had, maybe even lower quality, as
newspapers compete for more scarce advertising dollars.

Concentrating large media voices to shore up commercial media has
not been an economic panacea. The large multimedia chains and
cross-owned properties are having just as much trouble as stand-alone
entities, and mergers have tended to reduce the quality of journalism
in the past. The efficiencies that merging parties project will be
gained by shrinking the production of news. The amount of news produced
declines, but the number of journalists declines even more, squeezing
the remaining journalists. If advertising dollars continue to shrink
and attention continues to migrate to other media, cutting costs will
not replace lost revenue and the burden will be born by shrinking the
worst performing line of business, which is likely to be print
journalism. One thing is certain, with shrinking markets and
overstretched reporters, the quality of journalism (i.e. good
reporting), and the types of journalism that best represent the public
goods -- investigative journalism -- will decline. Thus, mergers
between newspapers and TV are not a solution for the crisis of
newspapers or the problems of journalism.

The dilemma from the public good's point of view is the fact that
the political importance of the commercial mass media has always
exceeded their economic significance and economic resources are
shifting more rapidly than political influence. Newspaper and
television are still the mass market media and carry substantial
political clout. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on national
advertising during the recent presidential election and the role that
newspaper endorsements play, especially in early primaries, are
reminders of the clout of the commercial mass media. The counterbalance
to the commercial mass media has not fully developed, either
economically, to sustain "good" journalism," or politically, to blunt
the power of traditional commercial outlets.

At this key moment, we should not prop up the incumbent media, or
give in to its demands to concentrate, which will extend a model that
is irretrievably broken, economically and politically. We should focus
public policy and citizen action on building the alternatives.

Are New Models Emerging for a Changed Information Environment?

The commercial newspaper market in the 21st century media
environment leaves substantial gaps in coverage that need to be filled.
The digital age has witnessed an explosion of alternative media and
citizen expression that did not exist in the age of 20th century mass
media.

The cacophony of the blogosphere is dizzying and overwhelmingly
opinion, but it is a vast improvement over a public sphere dominated by
corporate media. Traditional media have begun to utilize this
communications mechanism, with reporters blogging and bloggers
reporting on traditional media web sites, but it is the independent,
citizen and community media that provide the seeds of an alternative
journalism.

These alternatives tend to be structured viral communications, in
which a light touch of hierarchy can go a long way. The examples are
well known, beyond blogging, which tends to be the least organized form
of expression. We find things like Wikis, online posts, collaborative
production and distribution in peer-to-peer networks, opens source
software, crowd sourcing, and new forms of copyright, like the Creative
Commons, etc.

The critical challenge for these outlets is to become trusted
intermediaries. The critical challenge for society is to figure out how
to tap into the immense energy of the public sphere in cyberspace while
preserving key journalistic attributes someplace within a much-expanded
public sphere. To build trust the new journalism will have to produce a
steady stream of output that readers find authoritative, correct and
useful. To ensure the quality of output, they will need to routinize
the roles of reporter and editor and find ways to ensure that the
reporters and editors have resources to do their jobs. If we equate
good journalism with careful reporting, editing and opportunity for
response, how do we map those basic characteristics of journalism into
the new media space?

We can debate whether those attributes are the key to "good"
journalism, but even if we take that as a given, it is the journalistic
functions that matter, not the form. We must be willing to recognize
other ways of performing traditional functions. How can contributed and
paid labor, professional and citizen mix? How much editorial control
could be applied without destroying the wiki essence? What models of
editorial oversight best balance the goal of quality content and
democratic input (lieutenants, councils, member rankings, member
voting)? What decision-making management structures and group processes
can promote progress toward completion of tasks, determine critical
tasks and screen acceptable solutions, not unlike the functions of
editorial boards and editors.

Some parts of the 20th century landscape can be mobilized in support
of the new journalism. Consumer Reports, a well-known nonprofit
journalistic enterprise, fearing a declining revenue stream from print
publishing, has transformed itself into a hugely successful mass online
subscription business. It has a trusted brand to build on, but there is
no reason that other nonprofit brands cannot be built in cyberspace to
support subscription models. Among the existing one-to-many media
distribution models, those that are closest to the emerging
citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels
on the TV side and low power FM on the radio side, have never been
properly funded, but they have grown on the basis of a direct
connection to the local community.

In other words, the participatory base of citizen and community
media, a tradition that existed in America before the industrialization
of the media and journalism in the past century, is a superior starting
point for building a new journalism.

Can Public Subsidies Speed the Transition to a Good Journalism Model?

Just as federal Recovery Act stimulus funds will support computer
centers and communications networks, a media stimulus package could
support new local news centers and news services. Just as IT health and
education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service
in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the
journalism space. Public subsidies can be directed to alternative forms
of media and journalism with the objective of establishing financially
viable new forms of production and distribution of journalistic
content.

No one can predict which models will succeed, but in the rapidly
changing environment, solutions that preserve the past are more likely
to fail or make matters worse. The outcome will be much better if we
confront the right and hard questions from the get-go in order to
arrive at a sustainable journalism that serves its function in society.
If we intend to build an institution of journalism as the four estate
in the 21st century, we need to build it from the fresh clay of
alternative media in cyberspace and the moment of the collapse of 20th
century journalism is the ideal time to start.

A more detailed analysis can be found here.