mediaculture9eupdate

New Models for Journalism

“Now, like hundreds of other mid-career journalists who are walking away from media institutions across the country, I’m looking for other ways to tell the stories I care about. At the same time, the world of online news is maturing, looking for depth and context. I think the timing couldn’t be better.”

NANCY CLEELAND, ON WHY SHE WAS LEAVING THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, POSTED ON THE HUFFINGTON POST, 2007

In response to the challenges newspapers face, a number of journalists, economists, and citizens are calling for new business models for combatting newspapers’ decline. One avenue is developing new business ventures such as the online papers begun by former print reporters. Another idea is for wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale to buy and support papers, thereby better insulating their public service and watchdog operations from the high profit expectations of the marketplace. Another possibility might be to get Internet companies involved. Google, worried that a decline in quality journalism means fewer sites on which to post ads and earn online revenue, pledged $5 million to news foundations and companies to encourage innovation in digital journalism. Wealthy Internet companies like Microsoft and Google could expand into the news business and start producing content for both online and print papers. In fact, in March 2010 Yahoo! began hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company hired reporters from Politico.com, BusinessWeek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo, among others.

307

Additional ideas are coming from universities (where journalism school enrollments are actually increasing). For example, the dean of Columbia University’s Journalism School (started once upon a time with money bequeathed by nineteenth-century newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer) commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar. Their report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” focused on the lost circulation, advertising revenue, and news jobs and aimed to create a strategy for reporting that would hold public and government officials accountable.⁵⁵ After all, citizens in democracies require basic access to reports, data, and documentation in order to be well informed. Here is an overview of their recommendations, some of which have already been implemented:

POLITICO quickly became a reputable place for Washington insiders as well as the general population to go for political news and reporting, allowing the organization to thrive at a time when other papers were struggling. As editor in chief John Harris states on the site, Politico aims to be more than just a place for politics; it also “hope[s] to add to the conversation about what’s next for journalism.” What do you think its success means for the future of the news media?

News organizations “substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs” should be allowed to operate as nonprofit entities in order to take in tax-deductible contributions while still collecting ad and subscription revenues. For example, the Poynter Institute owns and operates the St. Petersburg Times, Florida’s largest newspaper. As a nonprofit, the St. Petersburg Times is protected from the unrealistic 16 to 20 percent profit margins that publicly held newspapers had been expected to earn in the 1980s and 1990s.
Public radio and TV, through federal reforms in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), should reorient their focus to “significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites.”
Operating their own news services or supporting regional news organizations, public and private universities “should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject and accountability news reporting as part of their educational mission.”
A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) collects from “telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers.”
Via use of the Internet, news services, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies should “increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments.”

As the journalism industry continues to reinvent itself and tries new avenues to ensure its future, not every “great” idea will work out. Some of the immediate backlash to this report raised questions about the government becoming involved with traditionally independent news media. What is important, however, is that newspapers continue to experiment with new ideas and business models so they can adapt and even thrive in the Internet age. (For more on the challenges facing journalism, see Chapter 14.)