Public Support
Giving up on the news business
Posted on 19. Oct, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.
Before reaching their dangerous conclusion – recommending government supported journalism in a report called the Reconstruction of American Journalism – former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie and Columbia journalism prof Michael Schudson make some basic and, I believe, profoundly mistaken assumptions, namely: “That journalism is now at risk, along with the advertising-supported economic foundations of newspapers.”
Just because newspapers put themselves at risk, it does not follow that journalism is at risk. Newspapers no longer own journalism. As too often happens in this discussion, they focus only on the revenue side of the business ledger of news – advertising falling from monopolistic heights – and not on the cost side and the efficiency new technology – and thus collaboration – that technology allows.
As Downie and Schudson themselves point out in their Washington Post op-ed, there is now a flourishing of new outlets and means of gathering and sharing news.
Journalists leaving newspapers have started online local news sites in many cities and towns. Others have started nonprofit local investigative reporting projects and community news services at nearby universities, as well as national and statewide nonprofit investigative reporting organizations. Still others are working with local residents to produce neighborhood news blogs. Newspapers themselves are collaborating with other news media, including some of the startups and bloggers, to supplement their smaller reporting staffs. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers but also freelancers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smart phones….
That is a basis for a new ecosystem of journalism, one we begin to outline in our Knight Foundation-funded New Business Models for News Project. We believe there is a sustainable and profitable future for news and they only way to confirm that is to try to build it but that will not happen if we declare surrender and defeat in the hope that the market can support the news a community needs.
Downie and Schudson give up on news as a business and, in their consequent desperation, make this drastic proposal:
American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting — as society has, at much greater expense, for public education, health care, scientific advancement and cultural preservation, through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy and government policy.
Collective responsibility. Socialized journalism. This is the ultimate in broccoli journalism: You are not only forced to read what journalists say is good for you but you are now forced to pay for it through taxation.
They make other suggestions with which I have no complaint: Journalism students should report not just for their professors but for the ecosystem and we see that beginning. If philanthropists want to do more to support news, I’m not going to burn their checks – but they are no white knights riding in to save the day. Public broadcasting can do more local reporting and we see movement in that direction from especially NPR and also public TV – though I would be loath to think that we should have government mandate of that. And we want more transparency; I belong to that religion.
All this comes from that dire assumption that journalism is dying with newspapers. That is not and certainly need not be the case. I disagree with Downie and Schudson’s key assumption: There is no crisis. When you start there, you don’t just reconstruct the past of journalism but see the possibilities to build a new journalism.
: Even The New York Times’ David Carr is somewhat incredulous.
: Mulling over the full report on my train ride in this morning, I realized that my problem with it is this: Downie and Schudson are addressing the business problem of news without doing reporting on the business.
The report is a cogent, comprehensive, well-documented summary of broadly held conventional thinking on the history and current state of journalism in America, but it is all stated from the journalistic perspective – no surprise coming from two distinguished journalists.
If this were handed in to me as a term paper in my class, I’d give it back for more reporting and rethinking. I’d tell the students that they made huge assumptions about the business state of journalism – both on the revenue and cost sides of the P&L – without giving me reporting on that. I’d advise them to look at the true cost of the accountability journalism they cherish, at the inefficiency of the business today as it produces commodity news, at whether there is sufficient advertising revenue to cover the journalism that matters once news organizations rid themselves of their inefficiency, at verifying the public demand for the kind of journalism they think the public needs, and at the issues journalism has had with trust and quality. Then, if they still came to the same conclusions – which I doubt – I’d urge them to get more balanced reporting on the risks behind each of their recommendations, particularly involving government subsidies, direct funding, and mandates on journalism. I think they did half the story, the half we’ve already heard (and which they quite ably summarize again). They should have given us the business story since that is what they really wanted to address. I wish they had.
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Charity or Collaboration?
Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.
The New York Times has accepted free stories from ProPublica. It has endorsed a journalist getting help from the public via Spot.US to underwrite a story that might appear at NYTimes.com. And Poynter’s Bill Mitchell says the paper is even wondering about foundation support for its work (but for perspective, I suspect one could safely say The Times is wondering about any possible economic model of support).
All this is being viewed as charity: giving The Times gifts directly or indirectly to produce journalism in its pages, physical or digital.
I think that’s looking at it – and at The Times – the wrong way. I prefer to think of it as a few of many possible forms of collaboration to create journalism that may or may not appear in the paper (and to which it may or may not link). I prefer to think of the paper as the organizer of networks of journalism.
Thinking that way, then when The Local, the hyperlocal blog at The Times, asked for a volunteer to cover a meeting it wasn’t planning to cover, you could say that it was asking for a charitable act. I’d rather say The Times was opening up to collaboration.
And let’s say that a local blogger covers the meeting and reports on it on her own blog and The Local takes advantage of that by aggregating, curating, quoting, and/or linking to that report. The net result is the same but that’s not charity. It’s cooperation.
Go one step farther: Say that The Times lends a video or sound recorder to that blogger so she can better report on the meeting and provide more coverage to her and The Local’s readers. Is that support an act of charity to the blogger? No, it’s collaboration. (By the way, this will be happening when CUNY provides equipment and training to members of the communities in The Local’s footprint as part of a Carnegie Corporation grant we just received.)
When we define The Times solely as a commercial institution that produces and controls an asset – the news – then any provision of money or effort to it appears to be charity.
But when we define the news as the creation of a larger ecosystem and The Times as just one member of it, then help – money, effort, equipment, training – instead appears to be collaboration.
And once one looks at the ecosystem through the lens of collaboration, then many other things are possible: then The Times (or any other member) could organize many members to work together to produce journalism no one of them could do alone. Then we start to account for the value of the work of the entire news ecosystem not based solely on the size of the staff of the last newsroom standing in the community; we open up to volunteer and entrepreneurial effort that can expand the scope of journalism far, far past what that one newsroom could do.
So I say that The Times and other papers opening up to the work of others supported by others is not an act of begging and charity if it is one bit of evidence of opening up to collaboration.
Now having said all that, I’m aware of the issues that are raised by giving of any sort and Clark Hoyt’s and Bill Mitchell’s columns address many of them: the potential for influence from the donor leading the list. There can also be tax questions (only a gift to a 501c3 is a charitable deducation and when is value received by a for-profit company taxable income?). There are labor delicacies when volunteer take on the work formerly done by staffers (there’s one of the reasons that professional journalists sneer at citizen journalism; it’s not always about high standards but instead about self-interest).
Still, I say it’s important to open up journalism and its institutions and players to many kinds of collaboration in a new ecosystem. That cooperation should extend to the commercial – revenue – side of the equation as well, as advertising and ecommerce networks enable each member of the ecosystem to gain more value together than they could alone. This is a key assumption of our work at the CUNY New Business Models for News Project.
One more caution: As we debate and explore the opportunities for charitable and volunteer support of journalism, it is important – critical – that we not declare surrender against the hope that journalism can be sustained in profitable enterprises. This is the keystone of our NewBizNews work at CUNY. We will estimate how much charitable support is possible in a market and what it can buy. We will also emphasize the importance of including volunteer effort in viewing the value of the ecosystem. But we also stipulate that none of that – not foundations, not the goodwill work of bloggers and neighbors – will support the level of reporting and journalism a community needs. And we believe that the market will support journalism – even the growth of journalism – commercially. We are working on models to examine how both the revenue and efficiency of enterprises in the ecosystem – news organizations to bloggers – can be optimized (we’ll be putting out models as we get closer to our first August deadline).
: LATER: Include in this discussion HuffingtonPost’s charitably supported investigative arm; the new Texas Tribune supported by VC John Thornton and friends; and a new philanthropically supported investigative unit in the U.K. They are not the future of journalism; they are part of it.
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Leonard Witt Interviews John Yemma from Christian Science Monitor
Posted on 17. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Both of these gentlemen attended the New Business Models for News Summit. Leonard Witt was in the “Public Support for Journalism” working group with myself while John Yemma was a roaming journalist.
Before the conference Yemma had alluded to CMS making some sweeping changes but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. Sure enough the next week they gutted the paper program. Their print edition is now limited to once a week while the rest of their work will live online.
Newsroom cuts are still on the table but Yemma sounds as though this leaner newsroom can still get the job done. In hindsight I wish we had put Yemma in the Newsroom Efficiencies working group.
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Charges to the groups
Posted on 13. Oct, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis.
After presentations on network models and new structures for news companies plus a lightening round of presentation by entrepreneurs and executives who are executing new models, we will form into Aspen-Institute-like groups (without the sylvan scenery) to tackle five assignments in the afternoon. Their rappateurs and leaders will report back to the entire group with discussion (before our reception). These assignments may overlap – e.g., a network could be intertwined with a new newsroom structure and a new corporate structure with new ad models. Here are the assignments; please leave comments to amend, correct, amplify, redirect….
* Networks – Define network models that would work today: Who is in them, what kind of relationships the members have, what value and benefit each party recognizes, how they are supported….
What kinds of networks: ad, content, promotional, national, hyperlocal, niche?
How can networks protect journalism? More important, how can they expand the reach of journalism even as journalistic organizations shrink?
Networks alone are not the salvation of journalism – there is, of course, no single salvation. But we contend that the network model has not been explored and experimented with enough. Glam (whose CEO, Samir Arora will present in the morning) gives us one example. Forbes, also in attendance, has started blog ad networks. What are more aggressive network models? Perhaps the group would like to take one or two examples and build them out. For example, how could a collaborative and curated network of contributers form a local news and advertising network? How could a niche network about, say, the environment be organized to maximize quality and revenue?
* Newsrooms - Create a model for a new (and smaller and more efficient) newsroom: size, functions, job descriptions, relationships with the community, financial relationships, cost.
This task can start with finding new efficiencies (are there any TV critics left?).
But it should go beyond that to re-envision the newsroom and its role. What is the value of the newsroom in the future? What are the core functions of a newsroom? What new roles are there – curation, education, organization? How does it operate? Is there still a room (and why?)? What is produced by staff vs. freelancers vs. members of a network vs. outsiders (e.g., bloggers)?
There are a few ways to tackle and present this. Perhaps the group might want to produce a spreadsheet laying out a hypothetical newsroom staff today and tomorrow, with job descriptions and numbers. Perhaps the group might also want to map coverage and look at who would be doing what in a new newsroom structure.
Our belief is that too often, newsroom managers are stuck with quick decisions to make cuts as budgets worsen without the opportunity to plan the future of the newsroom, training staff for new tasks and skills, finding and creating relationships with outsiders to collaborate, redefining the product and the newsroom with it. The group should act as if it has that opportunity to think strategically.
* News organizations - Present one or more new models for a news company. Where is its value? What are its key functions? What are its relationships with other functions (e.g., distribution, ad sales, marketing)? Is it even a company or is it a network or a consortium or a cooperative?
Edward Roussel and Dave Morgan will present their proposals in the morning. Perhaps the group would like to jump off those and put flesh on their skeletons, or perhaps it will want to create entirely new models. It would be wonderful for the group to return with some prospective structures for news organizations – both reworked versions of incumbents and entirely new, from-scratch news organizations.
Note that we do not intend this to be a replay of the discussion we often have about funding and ownership and their impact – that is, the impact of the public market, the hopes put in the idea of private ownership (well, until recently) or charitable support. Let’s put that to the side and instead act as if we own or are starting a news organization and can structure it however we like to maximize sustainability.
* Revenue - Define best prospects for revenue to pursue as companies, networks, or the industry as a whole and what is needed to do that.
This, of course, is the most important task, the one upon which all others hang. Unfortunately, we bring the least suggestions to the task. If any of us had the key to unlock this secret, we’d be on the other side of that door already, eh?
The group may want to define where the value is in news today. It may want to define and explore new opportunities for revenue. It may want to seek ways to maximize value and look at what is needed to accomplish that – e.g., new measurements, new models.
What are new models for advertising? How can networks bring greater value? Is there any scarcity anymore? Are there side-door revenue opportunities other than advertising (e.g., sales of data on knowledge of constituents)?
* Public support – Define the best opportunities for public support (from readers and foundations). Be realistic.
As our funder for this conference will be quick to remind participants, foundations are not the salvation of journalism. There isn’t enough money. It’s not sustainable. Frankly, we debated having a session on this topic at the summit just because too many hopes are hung on wishes for white knights who’ll never come. But we decided that there are opportunities for the public to support certain functions of journalism and there are new models to do that – e.g., Spot.us and NewAssignment.net – and so we are convening a group on the topic. But we will urge that group to be harshly pragmatic.
The group may want to start asking what elements of journalism would be the most likely for public support – investigative, beat, collaborative projects.
We suggest the group look at the cost of creating such journalism today. And how much should it cost?
What sources of funding might there be? So far, most foundation support is national. How could local journalism be aided?
What should the relationship of public v. private journalism be – that is, how should a for-profit newspaper in a town relate to not-for-profit efforts?
Perhaps the group may want to suggest pilot projects in this area.
