Stephen Moss The Guardian
ACROSS the country, local newspapers are being cut to the bone or closed down. Is regional journalism doomed? And if it is, what does that mean for local democracy? Read more here
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/13/nonprofit_journalism/index.html
pare change for news
Is going nonprofit the best way for journalism to get by? Take the word of leading editors who already have their hand out.
By Katharine Mieszkowski (Salon)
Apr. 13, 2009 |
It’s the newspaper journalist’s worst nightmare: His own obituary has become front-page news. Today, the headlines in your local paper are as likely to be about the pitiable death throes of that very rag as the war in Afghanistan or the sorry state of the economy.
As newspaper newsrooms around the nation cut back or shutter, an urgent conversation is taking place about where the reporting that exposes corruption and holds public officials accountable will come from. What new models for financing professional journalism will spring up?
One topic that has shot to the top of journalism-biz charts is nonprofit funding. If serious news and investigative reporting will never earn a dollar in the bottom-line-driven media market, maybe it’s time for journalism to be supported by nonprofit institutions and enterprises. If this is the way forward, the path is lighted by experience, as nonprofit news organizations have been operating for years, and their ups and downs have plenty to teach us.
First, a brief recap of the bad news: From San Francisco to Detroit, Seattle to Boston, the ink-stained newspaper hack now has much in common with the American autoworker. In Colorado, the last issue of the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News went to the great recycling bin in the sky in February. As of March, the once mighty Seattle Post-Intelligencer exists only as seattlepi.com with a skeleton crew, and in Detroit the daily papers are now oxymoronically not delivered daily.
The Tribune Co., which owns the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, has filed for bankruptcy protection, while the New York Times, which bought the Boston Globe in 1993 for a cool $1.1 billion, recently threatened to close that paper down altogether.
In 2009 alone, more than 8,000 jobs have been lost through layoffs or buyouts at American newspapers, according to Paper Cuts, a blog that tracks the newspaper industry’s decline. No wonder there’s a blog called Newspaper Death Watch with no shortage of material to write about.
Like so many other industries, newspapers are reeling from the epic recession, which has hammered advertising spending. But their woes are hardly a temporary problem that would be solved by an uptick in economic fortunes. In recent years, newspapers have struggled to cope with increased costs for printing and distribution. At the same time, readers have flocked online to read the news free and to place classified ads on Craigslist without an entry in their checkbooks.
But newspapers have been driven to the brink by the expectation of making the kind of double-digit profits that large corporate owners demand, and by the financial shenanigans, including loading up on debt, that corporate ownership has brought. That’s why some observers, notably financial experts, believe the future of the news business is not business at all.
On the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst, argued that newspapers should operate through endowments, like universities. San Francisco investment banker Warren Hellman convened a meeting about possibly taking the San Francisco Chronicle nonprofit in an attempt to save it from extinction.
The challenge for nonprofit journalism is both daunting and exciting. Long before the current recession and radical cutbacks, many newspapers had lost their community watchdog function, no longer bothering with the expensive and time-consuming work of investigative reporting. A 2005 survey by Arizona State University of the 100 largest U.S. dailies found that 37 percent had no full-time investigative reporters, and the majority of the major dailies had two or fewer.
“The watchdog role is disappearing at the county, city and state level,” says Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, in Berkeley, Calif. He was the former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Center for Investigative Reporting signals one way forward for nonprofit journalism. Founded in 1977, it has a long history of collaborating with other news organizations, including Salon, to conduct and publish original reporting. Its annual budget is $2.5 million. Recent stories have included immigration sweeps, sex trafficking and the Mexican drug war. It funds reporting that finds a home in multiple outlets — on the Web, in print, and on TV and radio. And it’s now starting a California-focused reporting initiative to try to pick up the slack as Golden State newspapers shrink.
And it’s not all economic doom and 20-inch features on Lindsay Lohan at newspapers. Independent papers have shown that imaginative programs can support serious journalism. Rather than feed the bottom line of media conglomerates, the Anniston Star in Alabama, St. Petersburg Times in Florida, and the New Hampshire Union Leader in Manchester channel their profits into programs that train aspiring journalists at local schools and universities.
The talk of the journalism town, though, is Web sites. Recently the buzz has been about the Huffington Post, which recently launched an “Investigative Fund” with an initial budget of $1.75 million. More flush is ProPublica, founded in 2007 and edited by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. It’s underwritten mostly by the family foundation funded by billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler’s mortgage fortune, which has committed $10 million a year to the project. The newsroom consists of 28 journalists, producing stories given away free to other media outlets, including newspapers and Web sites. (Salon has published ProPublica stories.) Most recently, ProPublica used public records to post financial details about Obama administration officials online, including the skinny on the stock-option holdings of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and the book deal of Assistant Treasury Secretary Alan Krueger.
At the local level, small nonprofits are having a big impact. Fed up with the coverage provided by the San Diego Union-Tribune, retired venture-capitalist and philanthropist Buzz Woolley used his own money to start the Voice of San Diego in February 2005. Why would an established businessman put his own cash into fighting city hall with a laptop? “To have an operating civil society, the citizens need to have a certain level of information,” said Woolley with a conviction that could make a journalism school professor proud. “If they aren’t getting good information, we’re going to have a lot worse society, whether it’s info about the social system, environmental concerns or the function of government.”
With a budget of about $1 million a year, and a newsroom with fewer than a dozen journalists, the Voice of San Diego has gotten some big scoops. In May 2007, it caught the chief of police blatantly misrepresenting local crime statistics before the city council and on TV. The site has won multiple journalism awards, most recently one from Investigative Reporters and Editors for stories exposing scandals in the city’s two nonprofit redevelopment organizations, which led to a shake-up among officials at the agencies and a federal grand jury investigation. About 10 percent of the site’s revenues come from advertisements. In a strategy becoming common with online news sites, Voice of San Diego asks readers, or “members,” to donate. To date, 800 members have each made a donation to the site of $1,000 or less. The balance comes from philanthropists, including Woolley himself, and foundations.
Andrew Donohue, 30, the Voice of San Diego editor, says that the best thing about being a nonprofit is the clear sense of mission. “When you step into our newsroom, the one thing you’re doing is public service journalism,” he says. “We measure our success solely in the impact and the quality of our stories. We don’t measure our success in hits.”
Without the legacy costs of printing and distributing a paper, not to mention ongoing union contracts, Voice of San Diego can operate more cheaply than a daily. But at the same time, the Voice of San Diego is not aspiring to be a substitute for the wide variety of coverage that a local newspaper would traditionally include, such as international news, national politics, sports, culture and the arts. The focus in this newsroom is to seek out and break news about local scandals, which you won’t find replicated the San Diego Union-Tribune.
In Minneapolis, MinnPost.com offers a mix of local reporting on politics, business and the arts, employing a staff of refugees from the declining local newspapers, as well as articles by local citizens. (MinnPost and Salon have co-published stories.) Joel Kramer, the editor and CEO of MinnPost, started the site two years ago as a nonprofit. “Quality journalism does not work as a consumer good anymore,” he says.
Kramer, who is the former editor, publisher and president of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, argues that the regional monopolies that newspapers used to enjoy have broken down. The big change, he explains, is that Mr. Newspaper Publisher can no longer kick back in his office with a cigar and establish ad rates. “The pricing power of publishers for advertising is dramatically deteriorated,” Kramer says. “That is the core issue, not whether readers love the stuff.”
In 2008, revenues from online advertising totaled a record $23.4 billion, about a 10 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Today, online advertising makes up just shy of 10 percent of all advertising. But with the Internet essentially giving everyone with a Web browser a printing press, there is now an ocean of places to advertise. “There are so many publishers that the value of any one publisher automatically goes down,” Kramer says. “It doesn’t mean that they all have equal value, but there is a tremendous oversupply of places to advertise.”
Can you blame a local newspaper exec for being nostalgic for the good old days when businesses had few choices but the newspaper to get the word out? Now, each newspaper looking for ad dollars must compete with search engines — like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — news aggregator sites, and even millions of bloggers. Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, like the Wall Street Journal, newspapers have failed to find ways to get readers to pay for stories online.
Kramer’s solution: Fund local journalism by getting readers to pay. Like Voice of San Diego, MinnPost invites readers to become members of a local nonprofit. Right now, MinnPost has about 1,350 members, paying from $10 to $20,000 for the privilege, although anyone can still read their stories for free. “My view is that unless readers begin to pay a substantial portion of the cost of public affairs journalism,” Kramer declares, “there will be a dramatic reduction in the amount of public affairs journalism being created.”
With both Kramer and his wife, Laurie, director of memberships, working pro bono, MinnPost’s budget is now about $1.2 million annually. About 75 to 80 percent of that goes to news. (That’s a much greater percentage than newspapers have traditionally been able to devote to news, since printing and distribution costs have accounted for large chunks of their budgets.) In 2009, MinnPost expects to cover 60 percent of its expenses from memberships, fundraising events, advertising and sponsorship, with the other 40 percent covered by foundations. The long-term goal is to be able to “keep the lights on” without any foundation support at all by 2012.
Jay Weiner is one of MinnPost’s star reporters. A former sportswriter, his relentless coverage of the Norm Coleman-Al Franken recount case at MinnPost won him the Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award for excellence in breaking news. The 54-year-old Weiner, who has been a full-time daily journalist for 31 years, took a buyout from the Minneapolis Star Tribune in June of 2007. At the newspaper, he made $80,000 a year with a pension, health insurance, vacations and overtime. Weiner, who has two kids in college, now makes $700 a week, working as many as 60 hours a week with no vacations, no overtime, no healthcare and no pension, on contract for MinnPost.
“Now I have to work 52 weeks a year to make $35,000 and pay for my own Internet access, phone, notebooks and pens,” he says. Yet even as he wonders how long he can continue to afford to do this gig, he revels in the excitement of working at a start-up news organization, not a shrinking newspaper.
“I am so happy to not be at the newspaper,” he says. “We’re growing, there is freedom, we’re all involved in a product that we really want to make as good as possible. Everybody has a certain amount of optimism that this can be something great.” For the moment, Weiner cobbles together other freelance projects on the side to supplement his income from MinnPost.
Chip Giller, the president and founder of Grist, has in the past 10 years built a leading source for environmental news online, mostly with funding from foundations. (Grist and Salon have collaborated on several projects over the years.) Grist now spends about $3 million a year and takes in about $650,000 from earned income like sponsorships, with the rest coming from foundations and individuals.
Giller, though, believes foundations aren’t the ultimate answer for journalism. “The nonprofit world can be a bridge to a bigger solution, but I don’t think that there’s enough dollars in the nonprofit world to support the infrastructure to do the kind of investigative journalism and bird-dogging and watchdogging that’s required for a vibrant society,” he says. Besides, due to the recession, foundations’ endowments are down around 40 percent, which makes them less likely to try to take on the role of funding news gathering, given their many other urgent priorities.
In late March, Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., proposed legislation called the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would help newspapers go nonprofit. While the papers would no longer be allowed to make political endorsements, they would operate much like public broadcasting with all the attendant tax benefits, including donations from readers.
But Kramer doubts his nonprofit model could save the big newspapers. “I don’t think that if the New York Times or the Boston Globe went nonprofit tomorrow they could sustain the size newsroom that the old model did,” he says. “I don’t think that the nonprofit model will get you there. I think it can create a lot of small success stories, but there is no way our model will support hundreds of journalists. It’s just not going to happen.”
Is there anything else this former editor of a big city daily, and now the CEO and editor of a nonprofit news site, would like to add? “Yeah, tell people to send us money.”
And,
Read All About It
The future of the news media. Part One. We leave the gloom aside and concentrate on potential new ways of funding and providing news. Our guests: David Cohn, Adrian Holovaty and Joshua Karp.
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
David Cohn: I think the most important thing right now for journalism is to try different experiments, simply because we’re in such an interesting time during the web, there are no real rules that you need to follow. It’s more about experimenting to figure out how we can sustain journalism as a practice.
Antony Funnell: Yes, the future of the news media is our focus on Future Tense today. Hello, and welcome.
Now if you’re tired of hearing journalists bleating on about the state of the news business, don’t worry, stay with us because we’ll try as much as we can to focus on the positives. Initiatives where people are looking to the future and experimenting with new ways of funding and delivering the news.
So let’s start with a venture called Spot.Us.
David Cohn: Spot.Us is community funded reporting, and the idea is that we distribute the cost of hiring an investigative journalist to do a local story. So if you have 50 people for example in Oakland, who want to investigate the Oakland Police Department, and are all willing to give $15 or $20 each, that’s enough to then hire a journalist who will spend a month or two doing just that on their behalf.
Antony Funnell: That’s David Cohn, the creator of Spot.Us, a not-for-profit experiment in getting the reading public directly involved in supporting news that’s relevant to them.
The project, which began last November, is being funded by several bodies, including the Knight Foundation, and it’s focused on the Bay area of San Francisco.
You can check it out by going to the link on our website.
Now what makes it different from other so-called citizen journalism sites or projects is that it’s seeking to get people directly involved in the funding of news, not just the reporting.
David Cohn: The stories can come from either citizens themselves, they can create what we call Tips, and they can say, ‘I want someone to look into the environmental degradation by the river near my house, and I’d be willing to give $10’, and they can share that around and their friends can also say, ‘Yes, I want that to be investigated as well’.
Or a journalist, a freelance reporter can come in and say, ‘Here’s my story idea: I want to investigate this river’, and if the people in that area agree that it is a story that needs to be looked into, they can go from there. So really, it’s a marketplace where citizens and journalists can come to meet and figure out what stories really need that professional reporting.
Antony Funnell: And what sort of detail do people have to provide in order for you to take up the story, and to start trying to find people to fund it?
David Cohn: On Spot.Us, we start off with the journalist who eventually will create a pitch, and in that pitch they have to give an explanation of what the deliverables are going to be, you know, what specifically they’re going to produce, whether it’s video or just 1,000 words of text. They give a video of themselves talking to the camera, explaining who they are and what the story’s going to be. They also have to give their background as a journalist, ‘I’ve been a reporter for five years’, or ten years or whatever is the case may be, and they also explain how their reporting is going to help, how they’re going to shed light on whatever topic it is they’re going to be reporting on.
Antony Funnell: And are they kept up to date, if their pitch is successful, as to how that story is going, how the investigation’s going?
David Cohn: Yes, they are. So right now that isn’t as public as I want it to be – the site is relatively young — but at Spot.Us we believe that journalism is a process, not a product, so when we end up funding a reporter, the reporter gives updates on their reporting, so for example, that Oakland pitch I gave you was actually a real case. We actually did get about 50 people to donate about $1,000 and we’re currently investigating the Oakland Police Department. And roughly every other week I get an email from that reporter and then I send that out to all the funders. In the future we want that to actually be like a blog, right, so that the reporter can literally say ‘Here is the reporting I’ve done in the last few weeks; here’s what I’ve learned about the Oakland Police Department’, and so they can sort of view that reporting in public.
Antony Funnell: And how do you determine beforehand how much money you’re going to need to raise to fund the journalism? Because surely investigative stories, you know, the amount of money that you might need might change over the course of the story.
David Cohn: And you know, this is some of the really interesting parts of Spot.Us, because we’re really trying to figure out this marketplace while we’re just starting out. To begin with, we’ve created four different categories of reporting. So there’s like quick hit stories, there’s beat reports, there’s enterprise reporting and investigative reporting, and each one of those, we sort of give criteria of what types of stories fit into each, and each category has its own sort of metrics of how much we can fund-raise for this. Does that make sense?
Antony Funnell: It does. What would happen in a situation where a story was pitched, it was determined to be a good story, you set out to raise funding for the investigation of that story, but you don’t quite meet the goal, so you only get three-quarters of the amount that you actually need to investigate that story.
David Cohn: One of two things. The reporter at any time can accept however much we raised, so if the original goal was — I’m just throwing out numbers — if the original goal was $500 and we raised $250, or half, the reporter can say, ‘You know what, that’s OK, I’ll take the $250 and I’ll still do the same amount of work that I originally said I was going to do.’ Or if the reporter decides that it’s really something that they can’t do for that much money, they can say, ‘I can’t do this’, and the money actually goes back to the original donors in the forms of credit. In the future, what we would really have, or what we would ideally have, is a situation where nobody’s credit cards are actually charged unless we get to a certain amount that is reasonable for the reporter, but right now credit cards are charged instantly, but we’ll give back the money in the form of credit. So in the end, you’re going to fund a story.
Antony Funnell: Am I right in saying that the stories are then published on your site, but they are available for other publications, or other organisations, to pick them up and run with them?
David Cohn: That’s correct. But we see it as — the content is commissioned by the public so it’s owned by the public, and so we will give the content away via a creative commons licence to any publisher to re-use. The only exception to that is if a news organisation wants first publishing rights to it, because, you know, I understand some of them do, right, because they are in the business of buying and selling news. To get first publishing rights, they would have to re-fund the original donors. So if we raised $500 and a local newspaper wants first publishing rights, they would have to give $500 that would go directly back to the original funders so they could then invest that in another story.
Antony Funnell: Now this is one alternative business model I guess you could say for journalism of the future. Are there other models that you’ve looked at or you know about, that also interest you, that you think may have potential?
David Cohn: You know, I always say — I’m very open and upfront about this — you know, community funded reporting and Spot.Us is not a golden ticket, it’s not a silver bullet that is going to solve everything. And I don’t think that there is one. I do think that there are a lot of different types of models that can help figure out new revenue streams for journalism. Including around advertising although Spot.Us is particularly, I shouldn’t say anti-advertising, but Spot.Us is particularly trying to look outside of advertising. So there’s all kinds of different experiments going on and, truth be told; I have no idea which ones are going to work.
Antony Funnell: Now there has been some criticism of this concept of crowd-funded journalism, if you like, particularly the notion that people or organisations with agendas could pay for articles that support their particular point of view. What’s your view on that, and what sort of safeguards are there in that respect?
David Cohn: First and foremost, we actually limit how much any one person can donate. So if one person says, ‘I want to fund this entire investigation’, we actually don’t let them; they have to get a group of people, it has to be a community that says ‘This is an important story for us’.
Antony Funnell: And on Future Tense today we’re looking at possible future ways of funding and delivering journalism. I’m Antony Funnell.
Joshua Karp: I was hearing in the press about the demise of the newspaper industry. In the States, many of the largest media companies are in serious trouble, whether it’s The New York Times, or The Chicago Tribune, and there were press reports of the entire industry having a bad time. And so that made me start to think about newspapers. Also I was a student of the online world; I had a company that I had started before that I had sold, and it began to dawn on me that perhaps I could take some of the principles that work online and apply them to this industry that was in trouble. And that’s what sort of brought me thinking about ‘The Printed Blog’ and eventually to the point we’re at right now.
Antony Funnell: Well Joshua Karp is our next guest today and his venture ‘The Printed Blog’ is a classic case of what’s referred to as ‘reverse publishing’. The idea is that you take selective original material from the internet and turn that into newspaper copy.
I’ll let Joshua Karp speak for himself, but what’s interesting about this particular operation, and perhaps a little cheeky, is that you suddenly have a print publication operating with that very same aggregationist approach and philosophy which is usually associated with the online world.
Joshua Karp: We are aggregating the content that we find and now every few minutes a new blogger approaches us. In the very near future however, depending on where you pick up the paper, you will be able to decide what goes into your local version. So by neighbourhood, by community, each paper will be different, reflecting the topics that are interesting to that community.
Antony Funnell: Now that sounds fascinating, and you’ve launched this venture only this year; it’s an incredibly difficult time for the industry itself; what’s the business model for The Printed Blog?
Joshua Karp: Well the business model is similar to the newspaper business model which is if you provide interesting content perhaps somebody’s eyes will drift to an advertisement. But we approach it in a completely different fashion. Traditional newspapers are one size fits all. So you have one publication that is printed out 500,000 times, and distributed all across the city. We are not one size fits all, we are individual to the neighbourhood, and what that means is the advertising cost is a fraction of what you pay if you were distributing it to 500,000 people. So the business model is advertising and classifieds, but we are a fraction of the cost of traditional papers, and we are much more targeted. So in a down economy like we’re facing here in the US and around the world, it presents a much better return on investment for advertisers, and that gives us the ability to compete and get new advertising business.
Antony Funnell: But the material that you use in your newspaper, which comes from online blogs, is already available; is it hard to convince advertisers that they should advertise with your newspaper when that material is already up there, when people go and access it from another platform?
Joshua Karp: So far, no, it has not been difficult to convince advertisers. In fact they’ve been coming to us. We actually were able to sell ads before the first issue was even available. And I think the primary reason is when you look at something online, it’s about exploration, it’s about links, it’s about jumping from one topic to another related topic. When you read something in front of you, it’s about consuming, it’s about focusing on the article. It’s a different experience, and advertisers get a different result from a printed page than they do online.
Antony Funnell: Now I know you said that as this develops, people will be able to tailor what they want from the printed blog, but could you give us an idea of the sort of flavour of the printed version at the moment?
Joshua Karp: At the moment, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to show off the potential of the paper. So we have some bloggers that are nationally known, we have some bloggers who are working from their basement. We are looking for content across the board in a variety of areas, and we’re trying to reflect the flavour of the entire country, and of major metropolitan areas. When the paper is self-selected, it’s going to be quite a bit different; in Chicago and San Francisco and New York, for example, there are many local blogs, so the papers will skew more local. In the smaller cities there just aren’t that many people blogging, so the paper will skew more national or general in nature. But right now we’re trying to appeal to people living in the cities where we’re distributing and we’re trying to show off the power of pulling from a giant pool of terrific content.
Antony Funnell: One of the great advantages of blogs over traditional newspapers is that bloggers can have much more immediate and regular contact with readers. Sometimes as well, the comments that are there on blog sites are often as interesting, if not more interesting that the posts. How do you factor in the fact that you won’t have those comments involved?
Joshua Karp: Well a couple of things. One, when somebody goes from our paper to the web, and we have a link for every article and every photograph, they will go directly to the blog, they will not come to our website. We want to drive traffic to the blogger’s website. Also we intend on publishing twice a day, and it’s entirely possible that we will print comments that are left with the blogs as well. So it’s really about your neighbourhood and we can include comments and in some ways they’re more powerful or they’re powerful in a different way because it’s not anybody in the world that you’re interested in, it’s people who live in your neighbourhood, the people who are regulars at the restaurant down the street. And I think the comments will become more powerful when they’re from people who share the same living space that you do.
Adrian Holovaty: EveryBlock is the site that I run here based out of Chicago, and what we do is provide local news for at the moment 11 American cities, and the unique, interesting thing about it is that it’s not local as in city-level sort of at that level, it’s block level, it’s address level, so we’re getting very, very granular in our coverage. Now what that means is that you can go to the site and enter an address, your address or the address of your workplace or wherever, and see the news right around you.
Antony Funnell: EveryBlock is the third and final experiment we’ll highlight today in our look at possible future models for journalism.
Like Spot.Us, it’s being initially funded by the Knight Foundation in the US, and like the others, you can find a link on the Future Tense website.
Now EveryBlock works on the idea that many traditional news organisations talk a lot about serving their local community, but fail to deliver.
Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, used to work for The Washington Post, among others, and he firmly believes there is a future market for journalism ventures that take the local news pitch seriously and treat it almost forensically.
Adrian Holovaty: So there are three basic types of information that we publish on EveryBlock. One is we catalogue all the existing mainstream media coverage, local community newspaper and television coverage, our local blogs, anyone on the internet who’s writing about your neighbourhood or specific places in your neighbourhood. So we do the work of figuring out which articles have to do with which geographic areas, and then we essentially act as an index. So you type in your address and you see everything that we’ve identified as near you. That’s the first part.
The second part is a very wide array of public records from crimes from the Police Department to restaurant inspections and building permits and business licences, so you can see which businesses are opening up in your neighbourhood. Everything from that to movie filming here in Chicago so you can see which movies or television shows have been filmed in your neighbourhood recently.
And then the third general bucket of information that we publish is an assortment of fun from across the web. So an example of that is photos from various photo-sharing sites on the internet, like Flickr, where you can geo-tag your photo. And that means you can say, ‘I took this photo at this exact point on the earth’, and then we hook into that and show you which photos have been taken in your neighbourhood. And we put real estate listings on there, property sales, reviews of local restaurants, all sorts of stuff. It’s basically this big cornucopia of everything that we’ve found that’s happened within a very close proximity of your house or your neighbourhood.
Antony Funnell: And what do you see as the benefit for a consumer in having that type of information, that is so narrowly focused in on their particular part of the world?
Adrian Holovaty: There’s a value in having all this in one place. So a lot of this for instance is already published in other places of course, we are aggregating to a large extent from existing content. But our philosophy is that you may not necessarily have read that tiny article on page 26 of your local newspaper that is incredibly relevant to you because it mentions a school, they talk about the school right across the street from your house or something like that. You might not have known that your local Police Department publishes crime data every day on its website. You might not think to check some of these photo sharing sites such as Flickr that let you search geographically but that’s not really presented as a news context. So our philosophy is that we will try to be a one-stop shop. Under your address you can sign up to get daily alerts of everything that we’ve found, and do that at the geographic level.
Antony Funnell: Now EveryBlock, as you mentioned, is now in a number of large US cities; have you been able to apply the same approach to the use of online data across all of those cities, or does it vary from city to city?
Adrian Holovaty: That’s a great question. It does vary from city to city, and that’s something we knew going in and it has been a very interesting problem to tackle. One Police Department, the Chicago Police Department, stores its data in a different format than the San Francisco Police Department, which is different from the New York City Police Department. Not only is the formatting of the data different but the nature of the data is also different. So for example in Chicago, the Police Department releases every incident, so that hundreds per day of — there was a pickpocketing here on this corner, or there was an aggravated assault over here — which is very, very good from an open data perspective. But in New York City on the other hand, they only release weekly reports that are in aggregates. So for instance one report might say, ‘In Precinct No.12, there were 2 homicides over the last week, there were 5 rapes, there were a certain number of aggravated assaults’, and that’s as granular as they get, which we don’t like because we can’t pinpoint them on the map. The best we can do is we can say was we know that in this week long time frame there were 2 homicides somewhere within this precinct, and that doesn’t get as granular as we would like.
So yes, every government treats this data differently. If there were a nationwide or worldwide database of crime, or building permits, that would be fantastic, but that’s not the reality, unfortunately.
Antony Funnell: Adrian Holovaty, from the Chicago-based ‘hyperlocal’ website called EveryBlock.
[Newspaper Song: Boobs, boobs, boobs on the front page…]
Antony Funnell: Now that’s not a strategy we’d necessarily endorse at Future Tense, although here in Australia the once august Fairfax newspaper group has been accused of adopting the sex sells approach to some of its online sites.
Each of the three projects we’re heard about today provide alternatives for the way news will be funded and distributed in the future. And there are plenty of other experiments with new models, but are the major traditional media groups, particularly the newspaper proprietors, paying any attention?
Well that’s a question I put to Joshua Karp from The Printed Blog. His answer was yes, but yes only to a point.
Joshua Karp: Well I don’t know for sure if anybody who’s watching us, but I do know that the response from the traditional mainstream media in what we’re doing has been overwhelming. It’s really kind of surprising to me how slow traditional media has been in looking at different ways to connect with their audience. It’s almost like there’s a fear, or there’s a desire to hold on to traditional methods as opposed to trying to engage the audience more. And it’s not just about taking a print publication and putting it online. The thing that newspapers are still holding on to is the idea of one-way communication: an editors sets a theme, a reporter covers a beat, they decide what the public should hear and that’s what they write.
What hasn’t become integrated into the mainstream media is the idea that now it can be a two-way conversation, and that’s really a big part of what we’re trying to leverage, is the fact that technology, and relatively available technology, allows us to have a two-way conversation. People who are reading and consuming information, they can interact directly with those who are reporting it, and until the big media companies understand that, I think they’re going to have a difficult time. And frankly, it’s not all that hard to begin to do. If the Tribune Corporation which is a big publishing media company in the United States, if they were to take all of their feature stories that they were considering and just ask the people to prioritise them — what would they want to read — suddenly it goes from a one-way direction to a dialogue, and they could very quickly engage their readers in deciding what they should write about.
Antony Funnell: Okay, so they have an attitude problem, but how realistic is it to take the sorts of approaches we’ve heard about and apply them to a major media organisation? Could you, for instance, use David Cohn’s ‘crowd-funded’ approach to journalism and apply it on a larger scale? Or are the sorts of experiments that are going on in the online world necessarily always going to be side acts?
David Cohn: This is just numbers within the United States. The gift economy which is, you know, in terms of donations, and this is from 2006, was $300 billion, and it might be a little bit less maybe in 2009 because it’s harsh economic times, but $300 billion is very large. Of that, about 75% of that $300 billion was small donations, meaning individuals giving $10 or $20. So that’s about $225 billion, at least in 2006 numbers. And the majority of that goes to churches and schools. And I think those are obviously good causes. But I would argue that journalism is a public good. Journalism is a civic good that is worthy of people’s donations, and journalism in the past never required donations because it had this monopoly on the modes of communication and therefore it could subsidise itself through advertising. But if that’s not the case anymore, and we can still argue that journalism is a civic good or a public good, then it’s worthy of a percentage of that $228 billion. And even just 2% of that is a very large number that I think will fund serious investigative journalism that might otherwise go untold.
Antony Funnell: David Cohn from Spot.Us.
Now next week, we’ll continue our look at the future of the news business and we’ll examine whether some of the world’s biggest news organisations have lost faith in the idea that news online should be free. Is there a serious move back towards a pay-per-view model? Certainly Rupert Murdoch’s recent comments appear to suggest a possible change of heart.
And while the newspaper business in the United States may not be what it used to be, we’ll also take a reality check on the immediate future of some of its key players.
Jon Fine: I love newspapers, okay? I mean I read minimum two a day. If I don’t have The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in my hands by 11am, I get the shakes. I mean the newspaper, I don’t mean going online. But the newspaper business is an industrial, if not a pre-industrial process, you know, it starts with trees. You turn the trees into paper, you ship the paper thousands of miles, if not across an ocean, to a printing plant where stuff is transmitted to them, you know these huge machines grind, and groan and whirr and they spit out you know millions, thousands and thousands of copies and millions and millions of pages, then the trucks come again and they distribute that to you know places that sell them on the street, you know, coffee shops, convenience stores and then you know to individual subscribers.
I mean that’s a completely deranged business model in the 21st centur. And the problem for newspapers is that there’s still for all the problems, there’s still a great deal of revenue tied up in the very old ways. One reason why American newspapers are suffering so terribly is that the classified ads business is just completely drying up, and while it is completely drying up, I mean you know, they still get billions and billions and billions of dollars a year in revenue from that, you know, you can’t give that up. I mean you can’t just say ‘OK, we’re not going to produce the paper any more’, because if you’re a paper, that’s making any modicum of success happen, I mean then you’re just basically cutting off 80% to 90% of your revenue and you’re just not going to get it back.
Antony Funnell: That’s Business Week’s media columnist, John Fine, one of our guests next week on Future Tense.
And by the way, if you’re curious about the Newspaper Song we’ve played in today’s program, it’s from a satirical video clip that was put together by a musician named Jonathan Mann, utilising the acting and vocal talents of staff at a genuine newspaper, The East Bay Express in California.
As we’re fond of saying, there’s a link on our website, so head there for more information.
And that’s the program for another week. Remember we do post details of upcoming stories and issues well in advance; we also provide transcripts, and you can always subscribe to our Twitter feed if you so choose.
Thanks to producer Andrew Davies and our technical producer for this edition, Jim Ussher.
Guests
David Cohn
Creator of Spot.US
Joshua Karp
Founder and publisher, The Printed Blog
Adrian Holovaty
Journalist, web developer & founder of EveryBlock.
And,
Saturday Extra Forum: Future of mass quality journalism:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2009/2539281.htm#transcript
Transcript
Geraldine Doogue: Good morning, I’m Geraldine Doogue and a very big welcome to you all, listening at home and here. Those who’ve been able to join us live at the Eugene Goossens Hall at the ABC Ultimo Centre, as guests of Radio National Saturday Extra to discuss the future of mass quality journalism in Australia.
I just wanted to offer a few observations before we start, just to set a bit of context. Rupert Murdoch warned in his Boyer Lectures last year that the new technology would change the old media order that he loved, forever. The executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, said recently that concerns over how his employers funded the newsroom into the future was the one thing that kept him awake at night. And Paul Starr, who’s one of America’s most respected sociologists, said this (I thought it was a very good summary from him) because he believes ‘The crisis in newspapers is actually a crisis in American democracy, because the public goods they manufacture won’t be easy to replace. Public goods’, he said, ‘are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good, and yet, since the mid-19th century newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers, and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It’s true they’ve often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done, but whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.’
So what’s the state of play here in Australia? Do we need altogether new models to ensure that mass quality journalism remains viable? Or is this all too alarmist? That’s what we’d like to examine today, and we’ve gathered together a posse of journalists and columnists (I think that’s the correct collective noun) all pretty passionate about this topic:
Wendy Bacon has worked for various outlets and now teaches young journalists at the Centre for Independent Journalism.
Alan Kohler exemplifies a new style proprietor with his ‘Business Spectator’ and ‘Eureka Report’ model, and of course you can see him every night on the 7 o’clock News.
Campbell Reid used to edit The Australian, and he’s now charged with thinking about all of these weighty matters as group editorial director at News Limited; and
Dr John Hewson straddles the worlds of politics, media and business. So from personal experience I think he can give account of how the media is inextricably involved in our democracy for better or worse.
And our last guest I will invite to make his case first, because Eric Beecher has been one of the key advocates on this issue. He warns that we’re sitting on the cusp of shifts within the media world most of us haven’t grasped. Eric’s had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, editor, writer and proprietor. He owns Crikey.com and I’d ask him to tell us now if you say the existing model won’t last, Eric, why not? And what might replace it?
Eric Beecher: Thanks, Geraldine.
I’d actually like to sort of reply in the definition, because I think this is one of the problems. We talk about news, we talk about journalism, quality journalism, whatever that means, mass quality journalism. What I’m talking about, and my real concern relates to what I would describe as public trust journalism. And I think public trust journalism is an essential element of a functioning and informed democracy, and in its own way I think it’s just as important as the parliament or the judiciary.
What do I mean by public trust journalism? I’m talking about the journalism that applies scrutiny, analysis and accountability to governments and parliaments and politicians, public servants, judges, police, councils…and also and importantly, the recipients of public funding. I’m talking about investigative reporting, analysis and feature writing, commentary, opinions, editorials, campaigns, as well as day-to-day reporting of all the other tentacles of our democracy. And I would argue that without the existence of well-resourced public trust journalism, which I think is the arm of democracy that it attempts to keep the other arms honest and open and accountable, it’s far more likely that the custodians of democracy will be dishonest, deceptive, or will abuse their positions.
Public trust journalism is very costly to produce. In this country we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of journalists and editors and commentators, and reporters supported by costly infrastructure. Now historically in Australia, that work’s been undertaken by two groups: the public broadcasters, that’s ABC and SBS, and privately-owned newspapers. And I’ll be more specific about that. It’s really five public trust journalism outlets. The ABC, The Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Financial Review. The large amount, not all of it, but the large amount of the kind of resource-heavy public trust journalism in this country takes place at those five places. But I’m not saying it doesn’t take place elsewhere. It does. And through an accident of history and commerce, most of this journalism has been funded either by the government of the ABC but particularly, in most cases, by the highly lucrative newspaper classified advertising, the ‘rivers of gold’ that over the past three or four or five decades have made those four newspapers, and particularly three of them, very profitable. And they were able to fund this public trust journalism out of the profits from classified advertising.
Now the problem is that classified advertising in newspapers migrate in quite a fast rate to the internet, because the internet is a better mousetrap for classified advertising and it’s much cheaper. So the big question to me is, who is going to fund this kind of public trust journalism? And I just think that if we rely on the traditional funding sources, or if we rely on the good words of newspaper owners and publishers who keep saying, ‘Oh yes, we will support quality journalism and we’ll keep doing it, and trust us to do it.’ I think there’s a good chance that over the next few years that because the funding source from classified advertising is drying up, they will stop funding public trust journalism. And that process has already started. And I think it’s because it’s so vital to our democracy that there needs to be an alternative funding source. We should now look at public trust journalism in the way that we look at virtually all the other aspects of a functioning democracy like the parliament, and particularly like things like arts and culture funding, or the funding for museums, or indeed the funding for the ABC. We need to look for public funding, not ownership of newspapers but funding of public trust journalism, and we also need to look at philanthropy.
Geraldine Doogue: So I’m going to ask each of our guests to give about 2 or 3 minute responses. Campbell Reid, from News Limited, how do you hear this?
Campbell Reid: Thanks, Geraldine, thanks, Eric. Journalists are a doing a bunch, and there’s a trend in newspaper journalism in particular at the moment, and that is, we’re stampeding over ourselves to write our industry’s obituary, and are in danger of instead writing our suicide note. And I walked over here to the ABC from News Limited. On the way I had the opportunity to buy 30 newspapers, from the militant weekly newspaper to the Green Left Weekly, to News Limited’s free MX newspaper…there’s all of Australia’s main newspapers on sale, plus newspapers from Portugal, La Fiamma, the Italian newspaper, Chinese-language newspapers, an extraordinary array of newspapers. Between here and News Limited you could spend $100 and not buy the same one twice. So newspapers, particularly in this country, remain an extremely vibrant business and we make a mistake here in that we think the canary in the tunnel is the American newspaper business and while, sure, we both print newspapers, there are extremely well-documented and large differences between the American newspaper industry and the Australian newspaper industry.
Twenty million copies of paid newspapers are bought in Australia every week. That doesn’t take into account if you all think of the free newspapers that come over your fence. And I would say in response to Eric’s position, is that public trust journalism is what all of those newspapers do. When he ran through the list of political coverage and who gets access to public funds and so on, that’s what all newspapers do. And I think the fact that some of them do it with headlines that might make people slightly uncomfortable or in formats that we choose not to read, is not to diminish their role, and if you look at today’s front pages of the News Limited tabloids — and I’ve deliberately left aside The Australian from this — the Courier Mail in Brisbane is in the second day of a week-long series of investigations into the toll recreational drugs are taking on the families of Brisbane. The Daily Telegraph reveals a corruption inquiry of the top ranks of the Road and Transport Authority and in Adelaide, the newspaper is campaigning for safer restrictions on the driver’s licences of young people after a terribly horrific car accident.
All of those things, in my mind, fit into the definition of public trust journalism. In fact that’s what good newspapers do. I would change — let’s not talk about quality journalism or public trust journalism, let’s just talk about good journalism and that’s what good journalism is. If I can quote Mr Murdoch from that Boyer Lecture. He said, in talking of his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, ‘My father taught me something important that hasn’t diminished in value: hire editors who care about your readers’ interests and give him good honest reporting on issues that matter to him most.’
I’m not pretending that like the executives at The New York Times, we at News Limited aren’t lying awake at night thinking about how we get ourselves through not only this economic downturn but a structural downturn, structural revolution I should say, in the way information is consumed, but can I say this to you: that as we wrestle with these problems at News Limited, we’ll give up on a lot of things in order to keep our business afloat, but the last thing we’ll give up on is good journalism, because without that, without that bond between the reader and the newspaper, there simply is no newspaper.
And as for philanthropy, the great Australian taxpayer is an extraordinary philanthropist, and the money that they spend each year funding the ABC and the SBS, I think is just about as much philanthropy as journalism deserves, frankly.
Geraldine Doogue: Thank you, Campbell.
John Hewson, are newspapers our civic alarm systems, our eyes on the state, and is that in danger?
John Hewson: Mixed views about a lot of this. I think Eric’s right when he says they failed to keep pace with the alternatives that have emerged with technology, particularly on the internet, as a source, for example, of news and comment. But I also think their product is deteriorating, and you can use the word ‘public trust’. I think public trust in newspapers is waning, and waning quite significantly. There are a lot of reasons for this.
One I think is that we now have almost every story in every newspaper with a byline on it. So we no longer get the facts per se, but we get somebody’s view of the facts, which includes all their prejudices and biases and agendas that they’re running, and so on. And you see that increasingly. You could take a political comment there and say in the run-up to the last election, for the first time that I can remember, there are many journalists who actually publicly identified their support for particular sides rather than just reporting on the sides. It wasn’t objective comment, it was specifically focused comment. And I think that with search engines like Google, it helps the lazy journalist enormously; everyone becomes an instant expert with Google, and so you get a sameness about the information that gets repeated over and over again in some of these stories.
So I think that myself, public trust is waning. I think while it’s nice to create the impression that newspapers and newspaper proprietors are keen to foster public debate and widespread public debate. I have particular experiences for example, one when I became leader of the opposition, I went around to all the editors of the major newspapers just to introduce myself. Some I knew, some I didn’t know. And one in particular said to me, ‘You’ve got to understand that we run an agenda here. If you happen to coincide with that agenda, we’ll give you a run; if you don’t, we’ll thump you.’ And that was largely true. That was the way it worked.
I was very disappointed, because when I did run on his agenda, I didn’t get the support I thought I needed, and when I got a thump, it was much harder than I imagined I’d get. So I think there are a lot of elements here that are leading to a decline in trust, certainly in the terms of the major daily newspapers. I think people tend to believe their community newspapers and what they read in those, a lot more than they do believe in what they read in national dailies.
As to the solution, I’m not convinced of public funding. You have the debate about public funding of elections which doesn’t happen, and I think there are limits to the taxpayers’ philanthropy in these things. But I do think that new technology, particularly the internet, is providing very substantial, more accurate and reliable alternatives, in terms of either reporting of the news, or giving you informed comment on the news.
Geraldine Doogue: I suppose the question would be though, do politicians care about these small outlets? Have they got anything like an economy of scale, or a critical mass is what I really mean, such that they bother people who are trying to curry favour and parlay themselves into positions of power, or are they nice but trivial?
John Hewson: Politicians vary. I’ve seen politicians who get up at 5 o’clock every morning and read every word about themselves and react accordingly. I saw Malcolm Fraser earn a lot of government by responding to editorials in the newspaper in the Cabinet. On the other side there were people like me who never bothered to read anything written about himself because I thought it would influence your reaction.
I think they do worry about their media coverage seriously, and I do think that they are concerned I guess that quite often serious issues don’t get the attention they need, and sensationalism has taken over, and I think that that’s another element of the declining public trust, is that there’s a tremendous focus on sensationalism and the headline and getting attention is what sells newspapers as it’s said, not necessarily what people really want to hear.
Geraldine Doogue: OK. Thank you very much indeed for that perspective from the world of politics.
Wendy Bacon, you’re training the next generation of journalists. Do they think they’ve got an industry to go to?
Wendy Bacon: I think they do and I think what’s more they’re out in it quite often doing work experience at all these papers we’re talking about. But also I think they’re getting in a way I think that we’ve got to be careful not to position ourselves too much at the centre of the story, because this story came home to me when I’ve got two people living in my household who are both going to university now. I notice that The Sydney Morning Herald wasn’t getting unwrapped any more, but I haven’t noticed that they’re actually less informed than I was when I was 18, in fact they’ve got the BBC there, they may have the ABC. I think we’ve got to be very careful not to confuse the fact that technologies are shifting and therefore the audiences, to some extent, walking with the fact that quality is all going downhill. And in a way I agree with Campbell Reid that I wouldn’t say it’s as that if I read the newspapers and put myself as the reader there, I actually find lots of stories that I want to read, we can just use one example: this week the Joel Fitzgibbon story that has really, I think it’s certainly the talk of people, it’s been picked up in the radio, all the way that media sort of has a viral effect I think that stories can still have.
But what I’d like to talk about is the whole idea of the non-profit. I very much agree with the idea of journalism in the public trust, and for the public. And I think we’ve always had a situation in Australia where we’ve had too narrow a range of outlets; we haven’t dealt with our problem of the concentration of the media. Interestingly, back in 1991 was the parliamentary inquiry that recommended subsidies for smaller types of media, which was not acted on at the time. It is something that’s been acted on in places like Scandinavia, and I think they’ve got a healthier media because of it.
But I think there’s lot of optimistic things happening in journalism. First of all I’ve always thought that the internet is the natural medium for investigative journalism. The story never ends, you can add things, you can just now look at, say the Four Corners website. They did a wonderful story on mental illness and the army a couple of weeks ago. Once upon a time that story, if you were there on a Monday night, you might have seen it. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t see it. Now what’s happened of course is you know you don’t have to be there on a Monday night, you can actually download it, but what’s more if you go to that website, which they now promo I noticed, linking it in with News, you’ve got a wonderful starting point both as a journalist and as a member of an audience, as a starting point.
Now I went to a conference last year in Norway where there were 600 young investigative journalists from around the world who were talking not about their national stories so much, like we’re talking here about Australia but they were seeing that so many of today’s important stories are in fact cross-border stories, and I found myself going as a consumer to something like Pro Publica, which has been started by journalists who were in mainstream media in the United States, they are lucky, they have got non-profit funding, but they’re tracking what’s happening to the stimulus package in the United States. That is the sort of journalism that I agree we need. I agree that we need to get funding for it. I don’t think it should be — I wouldn’t for a minute suggest it should go to News Limited, but it should go to organisations that can produce journalism in the public trust.
But I would say that we lived through the ’90s, and we saw several magazines open during that time, and we saw them close. There was great hope that they would survive. They had some very good journalism in them. And one of the things that I take some heart for is that we do at least now have an independent media in Australia; we do have things like New Matilda, Crikey, Online Opinion and it’s much harder to control the story from that point of view. So I’m not saying I don’t think there’s a crisis in newspapers, but I think we’ve got to be very careful to distinguish newspapers from journalism, and not actually that we are a certain generation of journalists. I think the technologies are shifting around us, and young people understand that, and I think they will go with it.
Geraldine Doogue: OK, thanks, Wendy.
And Alan Kohler, as I said, you jumped out of that mainstream, put your own money into your own outlet to become a proprietor, a multimedia proprietor: is this the way of the future?
Alan Kohler: I actually agree with Campbell in the sense that journalism is extremely vibrant at the moment; there’s a lot going on, but for precisely the opposite reason to Campbell, and that is that I believe that newspapers are dying. But not only does that not matter, I think it’s a great thing. I think newspapers hold journalism back for a couple of reasons.
One is that they’re an incredibly inefficient way of delivering information. They require a whole lot of wood pulp, they need to be delivered using a whole lot of energy to get them there. They get wrapped up in plastic, and so they’re terrible for the planet. And secondly, they’re incredibly limited in scope and size. I mean the size of the newspaper each day — and I’ve been an editor of two of them; I know this — that the size of the newspaper each day is determined by the amount of advertising that’s been sold for that particular paper. So whether the book is for 54 pages or 32 pages is decided not by the stories that are around or the requirement of the public for information that particular day, it’s decided by the advertising. And also because it’s so expensive to produce, it comes out just once a day. And I just don’t think that’s very good. And I think that the reason that the newspaper circulations are declining is because not only people realise that the newspaper is not particularly good for them, or the planet, they get dirty, they get ink all over their hands, but also they’ve now got an alterative, which is the internet. And Wendy’s right, I mean the internet is by far the best way to deliver journalism. It goes all the time, and Business Spectator is going 24 hours a day, there is any number; we can publish any amount of articles that need to be published. It’s entirely flexible. If there’s a lot happening in the world, if there’s a big story going on, it’s just infinitely expandable. And you know, I mean you can see it now with all of the newspapers themselves publishing far more on their websites than they do in the paper.
Read more here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2009/2539281.htm
