What Nicholas Kristof and the Denver Broncos Suggest about New News Sources

Eben,

What originally sparked my interest in writing this paper were the questions of establishing credibility as a reporter without being a card carrying member of the institutional “press,” and the impact of a bottom-up editorial control on consumers of news. However, it seems that the conversation has taken a decidedly economic turn. I’ll do my best to consider those concerns. (As an aside, I had never really thought deeply about the first amendment and assumed it referred to some sort of vague freedom of someone or something to ‘report’ without interference. I hadn’t thought about it as a literal freedom of the means of information distribution before this class.)

Your points seem to synthesize the preceding commentary, so I’ll use them as a jumping off point to continue the conversation.

Your first questions asks whether today’s news organizations are sustainable on their current revenue models if you cut the cost of physical printing and distribution. I think the answer is that it may be viable for some companies. Consider the following two bits of recent news. First, the NY Times Company turned a minor profit in the 2d quarter even after discounting one-time savings and accounting adjustments, despite plummeting advertising revenue. Second, in a recent flurry of articles, op-eds, and responses over Ian Shapira’s WaPo column, the president of Media at Thomson Reuters had this to say: [[http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-in-the-link-economy/][“the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper… [industry] leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting “resources” (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing…”]] More to the point, Hugh McGuire? of Book Oven bluntly stated “why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they’ve spent on it?”

The takeaway here seems to be that there are too many newspapers writing too much useless crap. It’s not just an outdated distribution model holding them back. It’s an outdated model of what’s being distributed. And if that’s the case, why do we need to so many papers anyway? Do I really need a Washington Post, LA Times, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, and take your pick from the McClatchy? company story on the same event? It’s seems to me that consolidation is inevitable.

This brings me to the second inquiry, where does hard news come from? A leaner newspaper enterprise that spends less time contemplating the quandary of upper-middle-class Manhattanites looking for private kindergartens would have more resources to spend on “real” news. Leave the soft news for another business model to handle.

Similarly, a leaner “real” news focused enterprise could make its bones on investigative journalism. That being said, I think the importance of institutional backing to investigative reporting is overstated. Granted, I haven’t seriously studied the muckrakers since high school, but they seemed like fairly entrepreneurial folks, with their own muckraking focused magazines. It might be a sustainable model today. Breaking free of a model of investigative journalism that emphasizes the journalism too much, there are alternative streams of revenue. In particular, modern day muckrakers can take a page out of their forbear’s playbook and start publishing books instead of newspaper or magazine stories. Ida Tarbell turned her articles into a book on Standard Oil. Jacob Riis published a book. Upton Sinclair used the novel genre. Cliff Levy’s way isn’t the only way to get investigative journalism published.

I agree with your third point, that the real distinction between sources of information is how they’re funded. If a slimmed down institutional press is the outcome of the current industry upheaval, the next question is how do aspiring journalists who aren’t working for the institutional press keep afloat? Will free-lancing and solo reporting through a personal website or blog generate enough income? Or maybe we should take a market-based approach to this – if your reporting isn’t generating enough income to support it, it isn’t worth reporting in the first place. Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough grip on the finances of ad supported websites.

-- RazaPanjwani - 11 Aug 2009