From the Ashes of Dying Newspapers Will Come Authentic News

Al,

Is there a reliable measure of on-line (free) readership of, say, nyt (and others for that matter)? Do the circ. numbers above include on line (paid) subscriptions? Thanks!

Rick

Rick - The Audit Bureau doesn't measure online readership, which surely is an income stream for those newspapers from advertising (although much less lucrative) and in some cases paid subscriptions. But most of the US dailies that have attempted experiments in selling subscriptions have acknowledged their failure and gone back to making most of their content free (the exceptions being, say, the NY Times online crossword puzzle and stuff like that, which one can get for a few bucks a month).

Regarding the bottom line (profits) most of these newspapers have become money pits, being increasingly bought out by "vanity owners" (such as Carlos Slim's recent investment in the NY Times - he doesn't expect to make money off it, he knows he is likely to lose his investment, but he gets influence over its editorial positions and news coverage in exchange for being a part-owner and investor). Still, the NY Times admits that in the coming months 32 of its 400 newsroom employees - eight percent - will be laid off. The money just isn't coming in.

Others, like the Christian Science Monitor, have shifted to mainly being online publications, but still working on the advertiser model. Their staffs keep shrinking and with that their content. The dot com boom and bust a decade ago proved that the advertising model has great limits when it comes to online media. It is not sustainable. Something else must be created to replace it.

"The dot com boom and bust a decade ago proved that the advertising model has great limits when it comes to online media. It is not sustainable. Something else must be created to replace it."

The question for me is what this "something else" should be. As much as I agree with you, think about it and discuss the subject with others, I can't figure out a sustainable model to finance our efforts as journalists. We need to eat, feed our children, pay rent, and that prevents me, for example, from doing a lot of journalistic work I'd really want to do because authentic journalism doesn't pay the bills.

The "old media", for as long as it lasted, had at least the ability to pay its reporters so they could work full-time on reporting, travel, spend funds on investigations etc., and I think that developing a model that allows authentic journalists to dedicate their time to journalism without having to generate income elsewhere should be one of the first priorities if we want to take back the media now that the corporate molochs are collapsing. But again, I don't know the solution. In fact it keeps me awake at night.

Here is my concern.  In the past, institutions like the NYT at least purported to be conveyers of objective reporting.  Now, however, the market appears to favor the overtly partisan "news" outfits.

Should we worry that the demise of newspapers will mean fewer and fewer sources that strive for objectivity?

Jim - As I've said before, any reporter that tells you he is objective is either too self deluded about his own role to be able to report much of anything accurately, or he is cynically and knowingly dishonest about it (and correspondingly the "news" he reports).

The myth of "objectivity" has been a cruel joke on the readers, and one of the reasons why they are voting with their feet and leaving newspapers as a source of information. Let's not forget that at the very NY Times you mention, where the rules of (feigned) "objectivity" are particularly heavily enforced, it was their reporter Judith Miller who created out of falsehood the myth that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, called it "fact," and that falsehood became the justification for a war.

At least when Fox News does that (despite its infantile claim to being "fair and balanced") the viewer doesn't get sucker punched because nobody really believes that Fox doesn't have an ideological spin and bias. It was the belief by so many readers that the NY Times "strove to be objective" that caused people (and politicians) to believe the big lie about Iraq and go to a painful, harmful, expensive and destructive war.

The only reason today that fewer and fewer news organizations "strive for objectivity" is that fewer and fewer readers fall for any news organization's claims of it. It is my experience that people overall trust a media or reporter that discloses its bias while still striving for accuracy - a far more important journalistic precept than nonexistent "objectivity."

Al, I purposely referred to "purported objectivity" because I assumed you would consider the notion fallacious.  But even if individual reporters cannot claim objectivity, I think it might be a problem when single, large news organizations predominantly offer one viewpoint.

For example, assume that a reader gravitates towards The Huggington Post (which, ironically, was under attack at Kos today) because of its pointed analysis from the progressive perspective.  In isolation, that might be fine.  But I think it's problematic if readers don't expose themselves to other perspectives, as seems to occur increasingly.

One may retort that the answer to a limited perspective is to provide more information.  But even if we live in an age where information is limitless, it still might be human nature to rely upon sources that are comfortable and known.

I am rambling here, hopefully to a simple point: might the demise of newspapers (and the rise of partisan cable tv and the like) ultimately lead to more polarization and less nuanced understanding of events?

And if all sources are openly slanted or subjective, does that mean that there will never be any one source that most could agree should be deemed a credible source?

Okke - We have seven people right now that individually spend 40 hours a week or more doing journalism at Narco News, five of whom are paid to do it, two who subsidize it from outside income. This, on an annual budget of $55,000 to $60,000 US a year.

Sure, we live at subsistence level, close to the land so to speak, very much like the people we spend our time reporting about. Nobody is starving, but nobody is wandering around the Olympus of the elites either.

The pioneers in any field have always lived that way to create something new. I can't - and don't - expect that my income will ever be what it was when I worked for those newspapers that paid well and also for travel and expenses, too. We're too early in this struggle to expect that. And yet every day these pages are filled with the fruits of our labors.

And as I look around my neighborhood, I see families with five or more children working and living and surviving on even less. As support has grown from more people who back this newspaper with the sum of their small donations, rather than say to myself "aha, now I can make more money," I've scouted, trained and hired more staff instead. Because this is not a career. It's a cause. And over these nine years I haven't sent a resume to any other organization, including the many that asked me to do so. We do get paid - not in money, but in the more valuable capital of the trust we engender in the people who previously had no outlet for their voice, the people who will never earn what a big media organization pays its "journalists" and who have never been served by them either. Those are greater riches, IMHO.

Jim - There will be moments in history when everybody generally does agree that an authoritative voice has emerged on a particular story. But in democracies, that can and should only be temporary. US Society got itself into bucketloads of pain and trouble by believing that the three big "objective" TV news anchors or the major daily newspaper in their regions would be the authoritative voice on all matters.

I don't think that readers of the Huffington Post are generally people who rely upon it as their sole news source, or as the one authoritative voice of journalism (that would be crazy, since it speaks with contradictory voices so often). I don't think it would be a desirable thing that they would. As one who sometimes publishes at HuffPo, I perhaps see more closely the ways it often repeats the errors of the commercial media and its bad paradigms much like the old "alternative press" did.

I frankly don't see any one authoritative voice on everything. If I want to know about a certain subject, yes, there are journalists and communicators that I look to who have a better ground-level knowledge of the topic, admit their biases, and still give an amazingly accurate view. We have some of them here at Narco News. When I want to know about border drug war corruption, I look to Bill Conroy. When I want to know about human rights abuses in Mexico I look to Kristin Bricker. When I want to know what is happening today in Honduras I look to Belén Fernández.

And when I want to understand polling data, I look to Nate Silver. When I want to know what goes on with culture and arts in my home town of NY I look to James Wolcott. So on and so forth. That trust is something that those voices have earned from me with their work and the accuracy of it. But for society to be diverse and alive it has to have many diverse and living sources of information from many directions, especially from below. There will never be another "paper of record" like the NY Times once was, and there will never be a Walter Cronkite. At their best - long ago - they were pretty good. But trying to repeat those projects after such top-down trust was abused by those media organizations would be folly.

(Present company excluded, of course)

A professor of mine who did media studies noted a few years ago that there are a few stock evil character types in popular entertainment. They include the corrupt politician, the sleazy lawyer, and the greedy corporate executive. Only slightly less common is the reporter who only cares about having a good story. In fact, in some ways reporters have it worse. There are entire TV shows which star characters who are honest politicians or lawyers. You can't say that for reporters.

Whether consciously or not, Hollywood figured out that people hate reporters almost as much as they hate lawyers and politicians. More self-reflective people in the MSM would have realized how much they are held in contempt by American society. They would argue that they are being tarred by the actions of a few bad apples, and maybe there's some truth to that. Then again, lawyers have the same problem. The difference is at the end of the day, I usually can't go online and get better services for free than I would get from a competent lawyer.

Here's a graphic of the declines in circulation:

http://www.theawl.com/2009/10/a-graphic-history-of-newspaper-circulation-over-the-last-two-decades

I have to wonder what Mark Twain would have to say about the state of U.S. newspapers and journalism today.

Maybe something like this:

It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our morals decay. The more newspapers, the worse morals. Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm. We ought to look upon the establishment of a newspaper of the average pattern in a virtuous village as a calamity.

… That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy. — Mark Twain, License of the Press, 1873

So I guess this fall off the wall for the daily newspaper industry was a long time coming, if Twain’s insights are to be given any credence.

What comes next is not certain, but it is clear the “pygmy” scribes are no longer invisible, nor are “their utterances” seen as the stuff of prophecy.

And as for how the journalist of the future will survive absent the “newspaper of the average pattern,” at least in Twain’s world, whining is not an option:

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

The key to surviving this media metamorphosis, in my opinion, is to first recognize technology is transforming the nature of the media, not the message.

At the end of the day, you still have to have a message that matters to people.

The messengers [journalists] who can consistently deliver on that front will rise to the top, even on the Internet, and supply and demand will take care of the rest.

In the mean time, maybe a few more ditches will get dug and a few more shoes heeled.

There is, to put it bluntly, very little reason to pick up most newspapers today. The news is old, often bland and less and less of it. There is far more timely, insightful and expert driven commentary in the blogosphere.

I think Al hit it on the head above - when I wanted  unique and forward looking insights into the 2008 elections - I went looking and found Al's blog. His insights struck me as dead on, and doing little but parroting what he and Nate Silver (another early find) had to say, I've now become  known locally as the go to kid for insights into political trends (hah!). The trick is to find the right sources, and know when you are hearing good stuff.

I've read Andrew Sullivan for years, watching with fascination as he's re-examined many of his own positions - watching a movement he was at the dead middle of drift mercilessly further and further to the right, leaving him stranded somewhere in the middle. It's a great read - entertaining and thought provoking, particularly when I don't agree with him. His blog is an interesting mix of entertainment, morality and politics. His huge readership numbers reflect that he's found a sweet spot and presumbably The Atlantic compensates him appropriately. The is nothing I know of in traditional media that even comes close to what he presents on a daily basis.

Al's model is great for those who regard real journalism as a calling, not a career to pay the bills. It's not for everyone. But if you are really good, and have something worth saying - the money will follow, if that is what you are after. Traditional journalism as we know it today wasn't started as a huge money making operation either, but just a person spending long hours setting type to advance their viewpoint.

No one guaranteed me a paycheck or success when I started my first software business. But it was something I loved to do and I was tired of following the whims of a big multinational (IBM). Journalism is no different - if you really want to do it, then do it - but on your own terms. As a longtime entrepreneur, I've found that when a person asks 'but how do you pay the bills', it's a pretty good indication that they aren't suited for the risks, thrills and rewards of leaping into the great unknown and creating something new and potentially wonderful. They'll just have to wait until someone else does it for them.

The pioneers in any field have always lived that way to create something new. I can't - and don't - expect that my income will ever be what it was when I worked for those newspapers that paid well and also for travel and expenses, too. We're too early in this struggle to expect that. And yet every day these pages are filled with the fruits of our labors.

But that is what my question is about; how do you see the "something new" in terms of how it is financed or maintained?