Are today’s news organizations 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, and others feel the same way. Consider the following two bits of news. First, the NY Times Company turned a minor profit in the 2d quarter of 2009 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: “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 It’s not just an outdated distribution model holding them back. It’s an outdated model of what’s being distributed.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? All of those papers are flagships of different newspaper conglomerates. It seems to me that consolidation is inevitable.

Nicholas Kristoff’s formulation of “The Daily Me” underscores the problem. The amount of written content on the internet is overwhelming, and not just content, but specialized and industry/topic specific content. Why does a national circulation newspaper need an arts page? Or any other specialty section? As consumers break content apart and consume just the pieces they want, specialization is bound to occur. I don’t read the NYTimes for technology related news, I read Ars Technica instead, which does a good deal of its own reporting and analysis. While Kristoff sounds an appropriate warning about viewpoint insulation that might result from such self-editing, there’s a tremendously self-righteous claim underlying the warning – that members of the institutional press like the NYTimes are somehow neutral and objective in their editing and reporting, while a reader left to his or her devices would select bias-confirming sources instead. The institutional press has peddled its fair share of biased and subjective reporting.

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 old content delivery methods, 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.

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. This can work today in ways we’d never imagined before.

A presenter at the Kernochan Center’s Google Books Settlement Conference decried what he perceived to be the growing inability to make a living as a writer and asked rhetorically “do we want to live in a society where only the Medici can write?” His query ignored the crucial change in the 500 years since the Medici ruled Florence- we now live in a society where everyone can publish. The underlying worry of the aforementioned writer is that this new society will lack the old financial incentives to write and, relevant to this inquiry, to report. But news reporters aren’t necessarily in it for the money, and we definitely want to live in a world where the Sulzbergers, Murdochs, Grahams et al aren't the only ones who can publish. If the reporting is worthy, the eyeballs will come.

---

Raza: You lay out the main arguments usually made by new media optimists, but I'm not sure you've advanced them, or responded to their critics.

There are many fan-blogs that are credible sources of information, but providing information is only one piece of what reporters do. Lots of journalism--think of CIA or State Department correspondents--involves ferreting information from officials who DON'T want to share it, when there hasn't been any specific EVENT, like a sports game, for you to interpret. It's the difference between a story that begins with "This happened" and a story that begins with "This will be happening," and it's the difference between news that is flashy and news that is a bit dry. That kind of reporting emerges from people who spend 60-80 hours a week talking to people on their beat and don't have time for another job to pay their bills. So the only ways to do that are A. to make money doing it or B. to be a Medici. I am one of those who thinks there may be ways to make money online (probably in combination with some nonprofit funding) but until that happens, new media won't supplant old.

The issue is not whether there will be enough content, but whether there will be all the right kinds of content: where is the citizen blogger reporting, on the day BEFORE the Fed makes it choice, what the new interest rate will be? This also goes to your point about people's insatiable demand for information online--the thing about old media models is that they were able to feed people news they needed but didn't necessarily want by putting it on a page with news they wanted but didn't need. I have no doubts about the survival of sports column/punditry on the web, but I have my doubts about reporting on school board meetings. Ezra Klein, who is a huge advocate for new media, admits as much in this video.

I, like you, am less worried about the ideological echo chamber, because I think it's easy enough to aggregate from diverse sources so long as journalists of the future are taught in J-school that this is what they're meant to do.

-- MahaAtal

---

Raza, it seems to me that Maha points out a hole in your paper. Namely, I think that this paper should address the concept of "sources" in the future of news. I have a few examples that I think will be helpful to your paper, and also refute some of Maha's assertions.

Maha, I read your first paragraph above as saying that "bloggers are different than real reporters because real reporters have sources, and bloggers don't have the time (or money) to maintain sources." Remaining in the world of sports, I would like to direct both of you to the ProFootballTalk Rumor-Mill. The Rumor-Mill is likely the most important source of insider information for journalists, the public, agents, players and management in the NFL. It was created by Mike Florio, a West Virginian lawyer, in 2001 as a means of trying to promote his self published book, 'Quarterback of the Future'. (The book looks terrible, its about time traveling football players). However, he has sources in powerful places - and by updating every day and communicating with sources and fans he was able to build a business with sponsors such as nfl.com and Sprint. Thus, through something Raza does address, credibility, and something he doesn't, sources, Mr. Florio was able to turn his hobby blog into a journalism business while maintaining his law practice. He even began delivering opinion via youtube. So I don't agree with Maha's point that bloggers are any different that reporters. Once you begin to get credibility and sources, you will likely get more of both and, if intelligent, can turn web traffic into sponsorship.

As to Maha's second point, which I read as saying that we will lose content without a print media. People may not cover school boards any more, but there may be more stories that surface with new media. Maha's assertion that bloggers don't break stories is refuted by the Florio example, as well as this website. As reported here Jeff Pataky, the blogger who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, uses contacts in the police department to break stories about police misconduct. I would argue that a blogger is more likely to be able to hold police accountable because of the political pressures against that type of investigation for the 'traditional' press, so content that would not have seen the light of day before will be able to surface. People, through the blogger's reputation and credibility, will be able to judge the truth of the allegations.

-- JustinColannino - 09 Apr 2009

---

Justin: I feel I should clarify my points somewhat. Firstly, I am not making a distinction between "bloggers" and "reporters" but between citizen/enthusiast/fan and reporter. If you haven't already, read Jon Chait's 2007 essay where he distinguishes between the reported "wonkosphere" and the unreported "netroots." A blogger can be either of those two, but MOST, not all, sports blogs fit into the enthusiast mode. Reporting is not just having sources, but working your sources, something that is both labor- and capital-intensive.

Secondly, I'm not disputing that there will be more and different types of reported news stories that emerge from the blogosphere, but just because there are more breaking stories about topic A (say all those bloggers who beat the big media in breaking campaign stories last fall) and more breaking stories in total, doesn't change the fact that there are less stories about topic B (say, the school board or the Federal Reserve). The question is whether we're okay living in a world with no reporting on those topics, and if we're not, how we're going to pay for them--one way is to rethink online ad and subscription models, the other is to make journalism a nonprofit, public-sector funded field. So none of this goes to say the web is bad for journalism, but rather to point out that "There is more content produced" is not, in itself, a justification of online journalism.

If all web journalism took the form of the reported blog, and if there were reported blogs for all beats, we'd be off to a great future, but so far, it doesn't work that way. I hope it does, and on good days, I believe it eventually will.

-- MahaAtal

• I think there are a couple of issues that should be dealt with in revisions and haven't been touched yet. First, at least until recently, the losses of money by newspapers publishers were largely attributable to the fact that they were publishing newspapers. Printing and distributing newspapers is an extremely expensive and utterly stupid business in the 21st century: until the onset of the current financial panic, newspapers could have staffed and conducted their businesses on the web at a profit. The current advertising collapse is an event that needs to be segregated from the "Boo, hoo, Craigslist destroyed my business" bullshit the newspapers were giving out in 2007 and first-half 2008. Even now, if Rupert Murdoch owned all the journalists and other creative types he owns, but didn't publish any dead-tree newspapers with their stuff, the rest of his media empire would be wildly profitable. So there wasn't much reason to believe that the "newspapers or bloggers" analysis had any truth in it at all. You need to scrape past a very thick coat stupidity on the part of the publishers before you get down to the bedrock question whether employing the journalists and editors based on the available advertising revenue is profitable if you stop printing crap on paper and loading it on trucks.

• Second, as Maha points out, you aren't asking how we produce information, you're asking how we produce chatter. To call sportstalk information is ludicrous. What you need to explain, as she points out, is how hard news is gathered, not how businesses promote themselves using free media to the working people who are cheated by the opiate called "sports."

• Third, whether you are talking about the people she still insists on calling journalists or the people you call bloggers, advertising is what supports all their activities at the end of the day, and compelling people to watch advertisements in digital media is impossible. All the push advertising models (which excludes search-based advertising which is pulled by the user) will become history shortly. So the line between the journalists and the bloggers is irrelevant. The right lines separate those who are self-financed, those who are financed by push advertising and compulsory payment (the models destroyed by the net), and those who are financed by other means. All the analytic action based on other distinctions, whether it is you praising bloggers or Maha and other J-School parties promoting "make people pay" has to cope with the technical facts of 21st century life: you can't stop people from sharing, so you can't make them pay, and you can't stop them from filtering, so you can't reliably sell their eyeballs to advertisers.

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

Note: I've edited my 11 August 2009 response to Eben into a revised essay above. As a result, many of the preceding comments may seem non-responsive to the essay above them.

-- RazaPanjwani - 25 Jan 2010