Working Title

On his blog, Bob Massie parallels the purposes of the newspaper and the university. For a provocative blog post, he explores the thought experiment of the New York Times and Harvard University merging.

At first I wonder about how apt each one is for the other in a practical sense.

Students at Harvard Student Agencies do publish the successful Let’s Go! budget travel guide with student writers updating the books each year. A more relevant example may be the Poynter Institute which owns the St. Petersburg Times.

Could the Poynter-Petersburg arrangement be better as a merger though, rather than a ownership-profit setup. Let’s see what Bob has to say:

Currently both universities and newspapers rely on the same old-fashioned and restrictive business model: they try to channel the flow of information into a bottleneck which they control, and then they charge people for access to the information. We know that some forms of learning can only take place among actual human beings learning from each other in “meatspace” (though I prefer the term “meetspace.”) But as both the news and the human intellectual genome bottled up in colleges are increasingly released on to the Internet for free, the justification for these forms of restriction will begin to fall. And more and more are recognizing that global free education is a right, not a privilege. Equally important, it is possible.
[...]
In an era when it would be cheaper for the New York Times to buy a Kindle reader for every subscriber rather than to keep cutting down trees, when more and more people get their news on Google than through a subscription to any one paper, and when universities are trying to blow up the walls and silos that keep their brilliant employees from solving multidisciplinary problems and to share the courses openly on the Internet, we need to rethink how information and education are linked — from scratch.
– “BREAKING NEWS”: Why the New York Times and Harvard Should Merge 7 Feb 2009

• Who would step in to save the New York Times? 1 Feb 2009

I was struck, wandering through the renovated Art Gallery of Ontario yesterday, by contrast. At a time when the newspaper industry is so much in trouble that no one seems willing to predict where the bottom might be, I checked out Ken Thomson’s donation to the gallery, worth several hundreds of millions — roughly the amount of immediate debt the New York Times was struggling to deal with before Carlos Slim stepped in.

Of course, Thomson’s money wasn’t all newspapers. The comparison is hardly a fair one. But it’s tempting for the strength of the contrast, and the notion that there may never be such a thing as a new-media mogul.

• The Thomson Collection at the AGO

As the daughter, directly, of an economist and, indirectly, of a failed communist country, I’ve been brought up on the belief that more competition is better. And so it was a bit of a surprise to me recently when I found myself wondering whether there’s a ceiling to that notion.

But here’s how the argument, which I’m still bouncing around in my head, goes: certainly, competition, especially in the news business, has many pluses. I was city hall reporter at a small daily in a city where the only real competition was a paper that came out on Tuesdays and Fridays, and went heavy on the feel-good community stories as well as on city hall. I certainly noticed my editors were more aggressive in assigning stories for our Tuesday and Friday papers, for fear of being scooped. Good so far.

But it seems we might be at a point where competition is hurting. The quality of news has, arguably, been improving over the last several decades. We’re at a point now, though, where papers are cutting staff, reducing foreign budgets, cutting down on investigative reporting. And it’s all because there’s too much competition. With hundreds of news organizations offering news free online as well as attractive places to advertise, the market seems to have simply fragmented beyond the point where any one organization is able to deliver quality. The audience still exists — it’s just that it has zillions of places to go for what it wants.

It’s a hard argument to make. I went to journalism school in Vancouver, a city where the two dailies, many of the weeklies and one of the television stations were all owned by the same company. People — not just journalism students — were worried, reasonably, about what this meant for their understanding of the world.

But maybe it’s time to take a little step back and try to understand how much competition helps, and how much hurts.

How are we going to get local news if this economic crash takes down legions of local papers? That’s been a burning question for me, and one that was tackled by prominent news folks writing in the New York Times this week.

Interestingly, there’s little mention from these folks of different journalism business cases. It does come up, certainly — Joel Kramer, formerly of the Minneapolis Star Tribune (which last month filed for bankruptcy), has started a not-for-profit regional website, MinnPost.com; Craig Newmark of Craigslist (whom newspaper editors must, in their deep dark unshared thoughts, blame for some of the current quagmire) suggests foundation-funded ProPublica and crowd-funded spot.us might be the way of the future.

But many of these folks — the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism for instance — suggest, mostly, more of the same. While charging more for news would certainly change the financial model, it’s a tweak at a time when things have changed so much it just might be time for an entirely new model.

Some highlights from the article:

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, makes interesting points about being clear what we want to protect when we lament the loss of good reporting. He suggests that if papers have been “good,” it’s only been in the last generation or two.

…until a few decades ago most big-city newspaper reporters did work more like Hildy Johnson’s in “The Front Page” than like Woodward and Bernstein’s during Watergate.

That sounds like cold comfort, though I suspect what he’s trying to say isn’t that we’ve settled for it before so we can settle again, but rather that we needn’t expect the death of democracy to accompany the closure of a few newspapers.

Joel Kramer, former editor, publisher and president of the Minneapolis Start Tribune, makes an argument similar to ours for not-for-profit news organizations.

Given the sharp decline in what advertisers will pay to reach eyeballs, I don’t know if there is a way for high-quality journalism to be profitable any more, especially locally. …

That’s why I’ve started a regional journalism Web site based on a not-for-profit model. MinnPost.com sells ads and sponsorships, but much of our revenue comes from annual donations from people who care about serious news coverage of Minnesota. Serious journalism is a community asset, not just a consumer good, and people (and foundations) should support it, as they support museums. We’ll see if that argument persuades enough people.

And if it doesn’t, he has a backup plan: charge more for news. Expect circulation to drop, but perhaps revenue will go up. It’ll take a special combination of adventurous management and financial desperation for papers to try this one, I expect.

Geneva Overholser, director of the Annenberg school of journalism at the University of Southern California, suggests newspapers partner up with whoever is doing successful newsgathering in their community — the arts organization that has good events listings, the bloggers that are good arts critics — and then focus on the tasks that are underserved in their community as a way of allocating limited resources.

• Battle plans for newspapers, New York Times, Feb. 10

Magda and I travelled to Port Hope this weekend to research The Crier of Port Hope.

We met with John Miller at his office in Toronto on Friday. Before the interview, he said “I wish I had thought of that idea,” which was welcome encouragement for our project. He told us the story of the Local Newspaper Committee and how they started and ran a newspaper, The Crier, for a year and a half.

John also gave us copies of some of The Crier issues and a T-shirt.

On Saturday we drove to Port Hope. After arriving, we explored the town until the archives opened. In the little brick building that houses the Port Hope Archives, we spent two hours flipping through the five boxes of papers, taking notes.

The e-mail communications we particularly interesting because it gave us a feel for the discussions the criers had at the time.

We had to rush back up Ridout Street to the Winchester Arms to meet up with Bill Edwards, one of the Crier founders, and Sophie Kniesel, who became editor after a few issues. We chatted with them and listened to their stories of what Bill calls “a great adventure.”

Tuesday morning, now back in Waterloo, we interviewed Denis Smith, who now lives in Ottawa, on the telephone.

Soon, I’ll put up some photos of our trip and we’ll post more about our research on the Crier.

• Port Hope bound 3 Feb 2009