How to Save Journalism

The founders of the American experiment were even by their own measures
imperfect democrats. But they understood something about sustaining
democracy that their successors seem to have forgotten. Everyone agrees
that a free society requires a free press. But a free press without the
resources to compensate those who gather and analyze information, and to
distribute that information widely and in an easily accessible form, is
like a seed without water or sunlight. It was with this understanding
that Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and their contemporaries instituted
elaborate systems of postal and printing subsidies to assure that
freedom of the press would never be an empty promise; to that end they
guaranteed what Madison described as "a circulation of newspapers
through the entire body of the people...[that] is favorable to liberty."

Two centuries after Madison wrote those words, American news media are
being steered off the cliff by investors and corporate managers who
soured on their "properties" when the economic downturn dried up what
was left of their advertising bonanza. They are taking journalism with
them. Newsrooms are shrinking and disappearing altogether, along with
statehouse, Washington and foreign bureaus. And with them goes the
circulation of news and ideas that is indispensable to liberty. This is
a dire moment for democracy, and it requires a renewal of one of
America's oldest understandings: that a free people can govern
themselves only if they have access to independent information about the
issues of the day and the excesses of the powerful, and that it is the
duty of government to guarantee both the promise and the reality of a
free press.

When we recommended government subsidies last year in a Nation
cover article ("The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April
6), some publishers and pundits objected, forgetting their Jeffersonian
roots and arguing, with no sense of irony, that policies promoting
diversity and robust debate would foster totalitarianism. Even
well-intended Congressional hearings on the crisis avoided discussion of
this logical response.

But as 2009 wore on and the crisis extended--with the venerable
Christian Science Monitor and newspapers in Seattle and Ann Arbor
ceasing print publication to exist solely online, with papers in Denver,
Tucson and other cities closing altogether, and with talk of closures
from San Francisco to Boston--the urgency of the moment, and the
recognition that journalism would not be reborn on the Internet or saved
by foundation grants, made it harder to dismiss subsidies. By year's
end, the Columbia Journalism Review was highlighting a report by
Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson that proposed requiring
"broadcasters, Internet service providers, and telecom users to pay into
a fund that would be used to support local accountability journalism in
communities around the country." CJR called the idea a "radical
suggestion."

If the rather modest proposal by Downie and Schudson is "radical," then
it is merely a fraction of the radicalism of America's founding. And
like so many founding precepts, it is a radicalism that has long since
been accepted as common sense by the rest of the world. Now Americans
must re-embrace that common sense if we are to have journalism worthy of
the Republic's promise and sufficient to meet its needs. This is an
unavoidable reality. No reasonable case can be made that journalism will
rebound as the economy recovers from a recession that accelerated but
certainly did not cause the crisis confronting newspapers--or that a
"next big thing" will arrive as soon as news organizations develop good
Internet business plans. Many of the nation's largest papers are in
bankruptcy or teetering on the brink, and layoffs continue at an
alarming rate. The entirety of paid journalism, even its online variant,
is struggling. There are far fewer working journalists per 100,000
Americans today than existed one, two or three decades ago. At current
rates of decline, 2020 will make 2010 look like a golden age. When the
Federal Trade Commission held its unprecedented two-day conference on
the state of journalism in December, the operative term was "collapse."
Conversely, the ratio of PR flacks to working journalists has
skyrocketed, as spin replaces news.

The implications are clear: if our policy-makers do nothing, if
"business as usual" prevails, we face a future where there will be
relatively few paid journalists working in competing newsrooms with
editors, fact-checkers, travel budgets and institutional support. Vast
areas of public life and government activity will take place in the
dark--as is already the case in many statehouses across the country.
Independent and insightful coverage of the basic workings of local,
state and federal government, and of our many interventions and
occupations abroad, is disappearing as rapidly as the rainforests. The
political implications are dire. Just as a brown planet cannot renew
itself, so an uninformed electorate cannot renew democracy. Popular rule
doesn't work without an informed citizenry, and an informed citizenry
cannot exist without credible journalism.

This is more than academic theory; it is how the Supreme Court has
interpreted the matter. As Justice Potter Stewart explained in 1974, the
framers believed the First Amendment mandated the existence of a Fourth
Estate because our experiment in constitutional democracy cannot succeed
without it. That is hardly a controversial position, nor one that is
necessarily left wing. It should be inviting to readers of the Wall
Street Journal and BusinessWeek, as markets cannot work
effectively or efficiently unless investors, managers, workers and
consumers have the credible information produced by serious journalism.
Moreover, political decisions about economic issues will respect Main
Street concerns only if citizens are kept abreast of the issues by
independent news media. American officials urged Asian economies during
the financial crisis of the late 1990s to develop independent media or
suffer from the corruption and stagnation of "crony capitalism." We need
to take a dose of our own medicine, and fast. Unfortunately,
misconceptions about the crisis and the proper relationship between
government and media warp the debate. Addressing these misconceptions,
and getting beyond them, will be the great challenge of 2010.

The most dangerous misconception has to do with journalism itself.
Journalism is a classic "public good"--something society needs and
people want but market forces are now incapable of generating in
sufficient quality or quantity. The institution should be understood the
way we understand universal public education, military defense, public
health and transportation infrastructure. The public-good nature of
journalism has been largely disguised for the past century because
advertising bankrolled much of the news, for better and for worse, in
its efforts to reach consumers. Those days are over, as advertisers no
longer need or seek to attach their appeals to journalism to connect
with target audiences. Indeed, to the extent commercial media can scrap
journalism standards to make the news "product" more attractive to
advertisers, the cure will be worse than the disease.

This takes us to the second great misconception: that the crisis in
journalism was created by the rise of the Internet and the current
recession. In fact, the crisis began in earnest in the 1970s and was
well under way by the 1990s. It owes far more to the phenomenon of media
corporations maximizing profits by turning newsrooms into "profit
centers," lowering quality and generally trivializing journalism. The
hollowing out of the news and alienation of younger news consumers was
largely disguised by the massive profits these firms recorded while they
were stripping newsrooms for parts. But that's no longer possible. The
Internet, by making news free online and steering advertisers elsewhere,
merely accelerated a long-term process and made it irreversible. Unless
we grasp the structural roots of the problem, we will fail to generate
viable structural solutions.

By ignoring the public-good nature of journalism and the roots of the
current crisis, too many contemporary observers continue to fantasize
that it is just a matter of time before a new generation of
entrepreneurs creates a financially viable model of journalism using
digital technologies. By this reasoning, all government needs to do is
clear the path with laxer regulations, perhaps some tax credits and a
lot of cheerleading. Even David Carr of the New York Times, who
has consistently recognized the point of retaining newsrooms and
journalism, falls into the trap of assuming that the "cabals of bright
young things" who are swarming New York might create a "fresh, ferocious
wave" of new media that will turn the Internet from killer of media into
savior. Carr's vision may work for entertainment media, but it is a
nonstarter for journalism. As Matthew Hindman's new book, The Myth of
Digital Democracy, convincingly demonstrates, the Internet is not
some "wild west" incubator, where a new and more democratic journalism
is being hatched. Internet traffic mostly gravitates to sites that
aggregate and reproduce existing journalism, and the web is dominated by
a handful of players, not unlike old media. Indeed, they are largely the
same players.

There is no business model or combination of business models that will
create a journalistic renaissance on the web. Even if the market and new
technologies were to eventually solve journalism's problems, the notion
that we must go without journalism for a decade or two while Wall Street
figures out how to make a buck strikes us, frankly, as suicidal.

There will be commercial news media in the future, and the right of
anyone to start a business that does journalism should remain
inviolable. But there is no evidence that the news media democracy
requires will be paid for by advertisers or subscribers. Nor will they
be supported by foundations or billionaires; there simply are not enough
to cover the massive need. And while it might be comforting to think we
can rely on tax-deductible citizen donations to fund the news media we
need, there is scant evidence enough money can be generated from this
source.

House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Henry Waxman was right when he
told December's FTC workshop on journalism, "This is a policy issue.
Government is going to have to be involved in one way or another."
Journalism, like other public goods, is going to require substantial
public subsidy if it is to exist at a level necessary for
self-government to succeed. The question, then, is not, Should there be
subsidies? but, How do we get subsidies right?"

To do that, policy-makers, journalists and citizens must take an honest
look at the history of journalism subsidies here and abroad, and they
cannot cling dogmatically to the Manichaean view that press subsidies
inexorably lead to tyranny.

Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they
have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson
and Madison through those of Andrew Jackson to the mid-nineteenth
century, enormous printing and postal subsidies were the order of the
day. The need for them was rarely questioned, which is perhaps one
reason they have been so easily overlooked. They were developed with the
intention of expanding the quantity, quality and range of
journalism--and they were astronomical by today's standards. If, for
example, the United States had devoted the same percentage of its GDP to
journalism subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we calculate that
the allocation would have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal
subsidy last year for all of public broadcasting, not just journalism,
was around $400 million.

The experience of America's first century demonstrates that subsidies of
the sort we suggest pose no threat to democratic discourse; in fact,
they foster it. Postal subsidies historically applied to all newspapers,
regardless of viewpoint. Printing subsidies were spread among all major
parties and factions. Of course, some papers were rabidly partisan, even
irresponsible. But serious historians of the era are unanimous in
holding that the extraordinary and diverse print culture that resulted
from these subsidies built a foundation for the growth and consolidation
of American democracy. Subsidies made possible much of the abolitionist
press that led the fight against slavery.

Our research suggests that press subsidies may well have been the second
greatest expense of the federal budget of the early Republic, following
the military. This commitment to nurturing and sustaining a free press
was what was truly distinctive about America compared with European
nations that had little press subsidy, fewer newspapers and magazines
per capita, and far less democracy. This history was forgotten by the
late nineteenth century, when commercial interests realized that
newspaper publishing bankrolled by advertising was a goldmine,
especially in monopolistic markets. Huge subsidies continued to the
present, albeit at lower rates than during the first few generations of
the Republic. But today's direct and indirect subsidies--which include
postal subsidies, business tax deductions for advertising, subsidies for
journalism education, legal notices in papers, free monopoly licenses to
scarce and lucrative radio and TV channels, and lax enforcement of
anti-trust laws--have been pocketed by commercial interests even as they
and their minions have lectured us on the importance of keeping the
hands of government off the press. It was the hypocrisy of the current
system--with subsidies and government policies made ostensibly in the
public interest but actually carved out behind closed doors to benefit
powerful commercial interests--that fueled the extraordinary growth of
the media reform movement over the past decade.

The argument for restoring the democracy-sustaining subsidies of old--as
opposed to the corporation-sustaining ones of recent decades--need not
rest on models from two centuries ago. When the United States occupied
Germany and Japan after World War II, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur
instituted lavish subsidies to spawn a vibrant, independent press in
both nations. The generals recognized that a docile press had been the
handmaiden of fascism and that a stable democracy requires diverse and
competitive news media. They encouraged news media that questioned and
dissented, even at times criticized US occupation forces. They did not
gamble on the "free market" magically producing the desired outcome.

In moments of crisis, our wisest leaders have always recognized the
indispensible role of journalism in democracy. We are in such a crisis
now. It is the character of the crisis, and the urgency of the moment,
that should make Americans impatient with blanket condemnations of
subsidies. State support is vital to higher education; on rare occasions
professors have been harassed by governors or legislators over the
content of their research or lectures. But only an extreme libertarian
or a nihilist would argue to end all public support of higher education
to eliminate the threat of this kind of government abuse. Likewise, the
government does not tax church property or income, which is in effect a
massive subsidy of organized religion. Yet the government has not
favored particular religions or required people to hold religious views.

As for the notion that public broadcasting is a more propagandistic or
insidious force than commercial broadcasting because of the small
measure of direct state support it receives, the evidence suggests
otherwise. When the United States geared up to invade Iraq in 2002,
commercial broadcast news media, with only a few brave exceptions,
parroted Bush administration talking points for war that were easily
identified as lies. In contrast, public and community broadcast
coverage, while far from perfect, featured many more critical voices at
exactly the moment a democracy requires a feisty Fourth Estate. Not
surprisingly, public broadcasting is the most consistently trusted major
news source, with Americans telling pollsters it deserves far greater
public funding.

Perhaps the strongest contemporary case for journalism subsidies is
provided by other democracies. The evidence shows that subsidies do not
infringe on liberty or justice; they correlate with the indicators of a
good society. In The Economist's annual Democracy Index, which
evaluates nations on the basis of the functioning of government, civic
participation, civil liberties, political culture and pluralism, the six
top-ranked nations maintain some of the most generous journalism
subsidies on the planet. If the United States, No. 18 in the index,
spent the same per capita on public media and journalism subsidies as
Sweden and Norway, which rank 1 and 2, we would be spending as much as
$30 billion a year. Sweden and Norway are also in the top tier of the
pro-business Legatum Group's Prosperity Index, which measures health,
individual freedom, security, the quality of governance and
transparency, in addition to material wealth. The United States ranks
ninth.

The evidence is also clear that huge journalism subsidies and strong
public media need not open the door to censorship or threaten private
and commercial media. Consider the annual evaluation from Freedom House,
the pro-private media organization that annually ranks international
press freedom. It has the keenest antennas for government infringement
of private press freedoms and routinely places nondemocratic and
communist nations in its lowest, "not free" category. (It ranks
Venezuela, for example--highly regarded by some on the democratic left
for its commitment to elections and an open society as well as its
wide-ranging adversarial media--as having a "not free" press.)
Strikingly, Freedom House ranks the heavy subsidizing nations of
Northern Europe in the top six spots on its 2008 list of nations with
the freest news media. The United States ties for twenty-first. Research
by communications professor Daniel Hallin demonstrates that increases
in subsidies in Northern Europe led not to a docile and uncritical news
media but to a "more adversarial press." In short, massive press
subsidies can promote democratic political cultures and systems.

But must Americans pay $30 billion a year to get the job done right?
Possibly not. Digital technologies have dramatically lowered production
and distribution costs. Still, the main source of great journalism is
compensated human labor, and, as the saying goes, you get what you pay
for. We're longtime advocates of citizen journalism and the blogosphere,
but our experience tells us that volunteer labor is insufficient to meet
America's journalism needs. The digital revolution has the capacity to
radically democratize and improve journalism, but only if there is a
foundation of newsrooms--all of which will be digital or have digital
components--with adequately paid staff who interact with and provide
material for the blogosphere.

The moral of the story is clear: journalism and press subsidies are the
price of civilization. To deliver this public good in sufficient measure
to sustain democracy, it must be treated as we treat national security.
No one would dare suggest that our military defense could be adequately
covered by volunteer labor, pledge drives, bake sales, silent auctions
and foundation grants. The same is true for journalism. Cautious
proponents of press subsidies think in terms of nickels and dimes, but
we need to think in terms of billions. Columbia Journalism School
professor Todd Gitlin got it right: "We're 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."

How can we best spawn a vibrant, independent and competitive press
without ceding government control over content? There are models,
historic and international, from which we can borrow. No
one-size-fits-all solution will suffice, since all forms of support have
biases built into them. But if citizens spend as much time considering
this issue as our corporate media executives and investors do trying to
privatize, wall off and commercialize the Internet, journalism and
democracy will win out.

In our new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, we
offer proposals for long-term subsidies to spawn independent digital
journalism. But we do not claim to have all the answers. What we
claim--what we know--is that it is now imperative that emergency
measures be proposed, debated and implemented. People need to see
tangible examples of "public good" interventions, or the discussion
about renewing journalism will amount to little more than fiddling while
Rome burns. The point now is to generate popular participation in and
support for a small-d democratic response.

The starting point could be a debate about "bailouts" to keep struggling
commercial news media, especially newspapers and magazines, afloat. As a
rule, we oppose bailing out or subsidizing commercial news media. We
believe subsidies should go primarily to nonprofit and noncommercial
media. We are not doctrinaire on this point and believe it should be
subject to debate, especially for short-term, emergency measures. If
subsidies do go to commercial interests, the public needs to get
something of substance in return. But the lion's share of subsidies must
go now and in the future to developing and expanding the nonprofit and
noncommercial sector. Journalism needs an institutional structure that
comports with its status as a public good.

What are we talking about? For starters, spending on public and
community broadcasting should increase dramatically, with the money
going primarily to journalism, especially on the local level. We never
thought one commercial newsroom was satisfactory for an entire
community; why should we regard it as acceptable to have a single
noncommercial newsroom serve an entire community? Let's also have
AmeriCorps put thousands of young people to work, perhaps as journalists
on start-up digital "publications" covering underserved communities
nationwide. This would quickly put unemployed journalists to work. Let's
also craft legislation to expedite the transition of failing daily
newspapers into solvent nonprofit or low-profit entities. It is healthy
for communities to have general news media that cover all the relevant
news and draw everyone together, in addition to specialized media.
Shifting newspapers from high-profit to low-profit or nonprofit
ownership allows them to keep publishing as they, and we, complete the
transit from old media to new.

Americans will embrace some of these ideas. They will reject others. The
point is to get a debate going, to put proposals forward, to think big
and to act with a sense of urgency. Let's assume, for the sake of
journalism and democracy, that there will be subsidies. Then all we must
do is put them to work in the same spirit and toward the same end as did
the founders.