Save journalism, not newspapers

I'm a big fan of David Simon, the creator of HBO's The Wire, Generation Kill, and The Corner. Yesterday he appeared before a panel of Senators from the Commerce committee, and participated in a discussion of the fate of newspapers in the US (reported in Dallas Morning News).

As usual, his analysis is spot-on; it should be, he's been trying to tell us of the problem for over a decade. Newspapers are losing readers because they're doing a worse and worse job of covering the news and their communities; in the fifth season of The Wire, the Baltimore Sun pretty much missed or buried all the actually big news events that took place. He identifies the root cause: driven by a desire to make larger and larger profits, corporate-owned newspapers have been trying to reduce costs (personnel, mostly) while increasing circulation (to be more valuable to advertisers). This has led to overworked editors and a decimated newsroom, with fewer tenured reporters. The net result has been a disaster for journalism, and as Simon warns, will eventually lead to an environment in which public officials no longer feel constrained by the watchful eye of the fourth estate.

Sadly, I disagree entirely with his two proposed solutions to the problem.

• Newspapers should charge readers for the content they create. Simon belittles the belief that "information should be free" on the Internet; it's this "freeloading" attitude toward newspaper content that is part of the problem, and the best solution is to figure out how newspapers can charge their readers for access to the content. After all, this content is costly to create; journalists, photographers, editors, managers must be paid, and their expenses covered while working on long running stories.

  While he's correct on the costs, he's coming to the wrong conclusion. Newspapers have never charged readers directly for the content therein; most of what you pay for covers the cost of raw materials and delivery. Newspapers have always paid for content indirectly by selling advertising, and there's no reason to expect that to change on the Internet. Yes, it's harder to make as much money - the newspaper is no longer the exclusive (or premier) advertising delivery vehicle for the community, so it can't charge a premium for the service. That's not the fault of the Internet readers; it's just a side effect of being in an economy where competition has sprung up for advertising dollars.

  If you make readers pay for content, fewer readers will come; that's a downward spiral, which seems only to lead to a small number of people paying large amounts of money for reporting, leaving the rest of us out in the cold. That's certainly not the model that speaks truth to power; only widely disseminated reporting can effect social change. In a strange sense, we've always had a small number of people paying for journalism - advertisers have often realized their power and attempted to use that to influence editorial decisions - but in the end, the need to deliver a large audience to advertisers has driven the delivery systems (newspapers, radio, television) to disseminate their product as widely as possible as cheaply as possible, to the benefit of society and to each of us individually.

  So how should newspapers recoup the cost of doing great journalism, if advertising dollars won't cover them? I don't know, but I do know that charging for content is likely to be a dead end. Instead, publishers should charge for some added value: access to archives, alerts for breaking news, or some other popular service. While we still have a multiplicity of news providers, we're likely to see experimentation in this area.

  One chilling suggestion Simon makes is that Congress consider relaxing anti-trust prohibitions so newspapers can collaborate on how best to charge for their content. The very last thing we need is a collusive attempt to establish a single business model, perhaps even the least efficient or effective one available. This would be analogous to relaxing anti-trust laws so software companies can collaborate on how best to eliminate their open-source competitors. It's a very bad idea.

• Change the tax code to make newspapers tax-exempt, as non-profit organizations. This is a heavy-weight non-solution to the problem, and it's a suggestion which gives an unfair competitive advantage to newspapers over other content producers such as television, radio, and of course Internet-only sources. It's also unnecessary; the Texas Observer and Mother Jones Magazine are two examples of publications run by non-profit foundations (full disclosure: I contribute to both). Therefore, a solution is already out there; in my opinion, we don't need to exempt newspapers especially from taxes in order to save journalism.

  On the other hand, I do support one of his suggestions, which was to give some sort of tax preference to a particular one-time event: the transfer of ownership of a newspaper from a for-profit corporation to some non-profit organization (such as an independent foundation, as above). This one-time benefit would help more quickly close the book on the disastrous experiment of having Wall Street own newspapers. I don't mind paying holding companies a bribe to divest themselves of the real assets, the personnel and the presses, as long as the transition is to an ownership structure which is more robust and responsive to its readers.

Another model for funding journalism is the curious system that is found in the United Kingdom: the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), funded by a tax on radios and televisions. It's a progressive approach to the problem; journalism (and to be fair, entertainment) is seen as a necessary public good, and so it's financed by a tax levied by the state. Interestingly, the result has not been an organization that shies away from attacking politicians - in effect, biting the hands that feed it. It's sadly a model which will never fly in the United States.

David Simon makes another good point: journalists require standing to be taken seriously by the people they're interviewing and/or reporting about. Traditional newsrooms have nurtured the careers of those journalists who are now household names, either nationally or in their community; elected officials tend to be more careful when challenged by these reporters because they know they have a constituency. The non-profit foundation model can hopefully also nurture the careers of "rock star" reporters, who can supplement their salaries or other compensation with speaking fees and book deals. Perhaps what we'll end up seeing are even more specialized journalists, who get to know a particular geographical area or topic really well, and become worldwide authorities on their subjects. I especially like his quote on page 7 (of 10) of his testimony; read the whole thing when you get a chance:

When I was in journalism school in the 1970s, the threat was television and its immediacy. My professors claimed that in order to survive, newspapers were going to have to cede the ambulance chasing and reactive coverage to TV and instead become more like great magazines. Specialization and beat reporting were the future. We were going to have to explain an increasingly complex world in ways that made us essential to an increasingly educated readership. The scope of coverage would have to go deeper, address more of the world, not less. Those were our ambitions. Those were my ambitions. ...

In summary, I think the problem is how do we save journalism, not "how do we save newspapers". Journalism is a system we know, and one whose contours aren't likely to change; you need to pay for good writers, good interrogators, and people who can pull the story together. That's what we need to make sure persists, not the particular delivery system.