My journalism-student friend who showed me footage of a speaker at the hearings who really impressed me. David Simon, who used to be a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, made an enthralling and insightful speech about his take on the environment, and the many sins of both sides. Mr. Simon doesn't hold the same conflict of interest as current-day newspapermen, having left newspapers in the mid-90sand. He has since gone on to create and write the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire. Sweet.
Unfortunately, despite doing a fantastic job defining the context and urgency of the issue, and fairly painting both sides as to blame, I don't think David Simon offers a feasible solution.
I'll leave the context painting to David, and jump to his 3 proposed solutions, which he gives near the end of his speech. Again, if you're not familiar with the matter, or if you want to get the skinny from someone who can really sum up the entire problem from both sides in a fair and balanced manner, please watch the video.
1. David says:
"...a non-profit model intrigues. Especially if that model allows for locally based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything the government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued."
Interesting idea, but how would it work? This seems to conflict with a sentiment he expressed right before saying this - that newspapers should bite any hand that feeds them. Who would own them?Corporations? Wealthy locals? And what local interests would be willing to fund journalism on an international scale?
And what type of non-profit would newspapers be classified as? 501(c)(3) non-profits are strictly prohibited from engaging in politics. I'm classifying newspapers as a 501(c)(4) might work,despite the fact that (c)(4)'s are not allowed to further the private interests of those with financial stakes in them. This happens at public accounting firms, and essentially would mean that folks who work at newspapers can't own stock in anything their newspaper is reporting on whose story they can influence. However, C-4s are at least allowed to lobby and campaign politically.
Otherwise, Congress could simply write newspapers in as their own new 501(c), the real challenge remains figuring out how to finance the non-profit, all this would do is ease their tax burden.
2. Another of David's ideas:
"And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax based incentives for bankrupt or near bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or donate non-profitable publications to locally based non-profits should also be considered."
A short term solution, not one which is going to do anything but save a few brands and create tax haven for inventive accounting schemes. Such regulation issues could stem far into the future unless you set a real short sunset-clause on such a bill. How many companies that put out "news" or that own subsidiaries that are news organizations do you think will try to take advantage of a hastily drawn bankruptcy loophole in tax law?
And to what end would this serve, anyway? We are simply handing off a broken business model to some other company who won't know what to do with it. Such scaling back by a new owner would likely follow a Private Equity model, which would break any unions in bankruptcy court, then strip the company of assets and lay off a ton of people, building operations from the ground up again. I doubt this is what anyone has in mind for saving the "industry."
3. Third Simon idea, and this is the big one:
"Lastly, I would urge congress to consider easing anti-trust prohibitions to that the Washington Post, The New York Times, and various other newspapers can openly discuss protecting copyright from aggregators, and plan an industry-wide transition to a paid, online subscriber base."
Simon says it costs money to maintain the current model sending people places. That's abosultely right, it does cost money to do this, and it will always cost money to do this. But how in the world are you going to prevent people from accessing this information for free?
Let's look at how things work, currently. Information is released to the public through the website, and the two prevailing ideas are either people pay a flat-rate for all access, or make micro-payments for each article.
WSJOnline works with the flat rate for all access, and hybridizes the model by letting some of it remain free to the public, probably trying to incent new customers to subscribe by giving them a taste, while supporting the free part somewhat through banner ads. I have my doubts on this model, as I have not heard it working too well for WSJ, and nobody else seems to want to try it. Perhaps the micro-payments option could "work" once the infrastructure is in place (i.e., people find it easy and convenient to pay a few pennies to click on a link). This system can and will be developed, and I'm sure if newspapers won't pioneer this technology, amazon or ebay will, as they make the online payment process faster and easier. It's another question entirely as to whether or not customers will buy-in.
However, I think these suggestions are treating a symptom, not the disease. So people aren't paying for newspaper articles online. Fine, there's the symptom. The disease comes from the fact that readers are just getting the information from elsewhere. As David Simon explains, the blogosphere
"does not deliver much first generation reporting. Instead, it leeches that reporting from main-stream news publications whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary, and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news aggregators, and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves."
This is not only absolutely true, but describes what our website does in it's entirety!
Can we stop blogs from doing this? Look at how difficult it has been to police illegal music and movie file-sharing. And that's data where the content (i.e. the syntax) doesn't change. Imagine how difficult it would be to police for stolen semantics? That aside, by chasing quotes or hyperlinks alone, our government would need to invest in an incredibly expensive and difficult-to-maintain technological regulation program that would almost certainly infringe on our first amendment rights. In fact, the mere act of policing for everything written in newspapers sounds in itself, to pull from Simon's panoply of references, Orwellian.
This is why, although David Simon can complain and enlighten, he does not deliver a feasible solution. Technology is always going to be disruptive. I'm fully aware how frightening that this time, it is disrupting an important and necessary public good, but that isn't going to turn back the tide.
Is this death of journalism as we know it as bad as everyone assumes it to be? Ask yourself how mediocrity was allowed to flourish prior to the internet, which is what Mr. Simon purports. What do you need to combat that mediocrity? Obviously, newspapers aren't the best answer - otherwise we wouldn't have had an industry which "butchered itself" (Simon's words) in quality. And certainly, this is not a sin of the newspaper industry limited to our times, lest I cite the period of "yellow journalism" at the turn of the 19th century.
Isn't it clear that the best model will come from one which people can describe as important to them as soon as it happens, and which the powers that present the issues can aggregate these concerns and speak about them in one cohesive voice? Mr. Simon recalls when Baltimore newspapers stopped reporting on social services, despite the fact that 50% of adult black males in Baltimore were without a job, or now newspapers were ignoring the Baltimore criminal courts, despite the high degree of crime in the city. Contrast this with Google, which now can literally save lives by tracking when and where spikes of "flu symptom" search queries appear, and notify the CDC or regional health care groups, who can act to combat an outbreak before it becomes an issue. Whatever solution to journalism comes about, if its input is crowd-sourced, it will truly have a finger on the pulse of what people care about. Thic can easily be done by noting what people talk about in a traceable public forum (like the blogosphere and twitter) that would help whatever replaces the current journalism model concentrate its efforts.
Obviously, news does much more than this, by also enlightening its audience on issues people who didn't know they cared about. I don't know how this can be done reliably. However, to the extent that these issues are corruption, I think we can at least start by trying to better frame the problem. I think that journalism fights corruption in places where there isn't enough transparency. The real issue in solving corruption, therefore, must be in increasing transparency. This is something technology is very good at doing.
Lastly, I take issue with Simon's opinion of the quality of the blogosphere - not in terms of how it gets its information, Snow describes our sins with great accuracy there, but rather by the manner in which people treat the writing. I find it quite easy to know when to stop reading a blog post, or a comment on a blog post, as I've developed an eye for a quality argument. There are enough bloggers out there who I have grown to trust and respect who add value even if it isn't first-generation news. I also find it much easier in this new technological environment to do the appropriate fact-checking, or get a contrary opinion. And hopefully, as more data is published on the interenet and search becomes more inteelligent, that fact checking will have to rely less and less on other journalist articles, and more on the real, unbiased data or record (take, for example, what is expected of data.gov, especially considering when powerful search tools like Wolfram|Alpha integrate with those services).
Anyway, the same skepticism over honesty, integrity, and completeness has always held true over newspapers as well. Why else do people complain over Fox News, or say that one does not get a real perspective of a news story unless they read 2 or 3 different papers?
How do we save newspapers? I guess Simon has cited the best ideas the industry has going it - force paid content and imbibe the industry with tax exempt status. Will that actually work in the long run? Doubt it.
Maybe we should be asking how else the world can find out about what is going on...
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