Working Title

Several people altered me to the story about news funding in the Sunday Star by former Star publisher John Honderich, discussing the very topics we discuss here at Working Title.

He writes that five years ago — the point at which he left the publisher’s post, and when I was midway through my masters in journalism — newspapers were flourishing. Today, with cutbacks and layoffs, bankruptcies and shortened workweeks — some Canadian papers have dropped their Monday editions — it’s time to talk seriously about who is going to fund journalism, he writes. Otherwise, democracy will suffer.

He enumerates a list of options for newspaper funding, some of which we’ve been considering for this project, some of which we haven’t.

1. Government-funded or subsidized media, in the way of French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to double the amount government spends on advertising in print and online press.

“The state’s first responsibility is to respond to the emergency that comes from the freefall of advertisement forecasted for press companies in 2009,” Sarkozy said.

France to Double Newspaper Ad Spending in 2009 to Help Media, Bloomberg, Jan. 23

2. Foundation-funded journalism, such as ProPublica (which is, incidentally, also a not-for-profit, and has $10 million in grants), or the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
3. Crowd-funding, such as spot.us, which we’ve already written a bit about.

Honderich’s point is that as the bottom line catches up to papers, we’ll have to find an alternative, or seriously consider losing projects like the Star’s series on racial profiling, on which the paper spent millions and years.

It’s exciting that this topic is making its way into the public eye. We’ll be contacting Honderich on getting involved in our project.

We’re about to have our first real interviews for this project, after several months of doing research, applying for arts council grants, building websites and investigating recording equipment.

The topic is the Crier of Port Hope, a not-for-profit paper set up by a group of folks upset about the quality of the Port Hope Evening Guide, a then-Southam owned daily in Port Hope, which is just far enough east to not qualify as a suburb of Toronto.

The Crier is actually how this Working Title project originated. Most journalists in this part of Ontario know its story, at least vaguely, at least in part because of the involvement of writer Farley Mowat. I was fascinated by the image of these civic-minded folks, sitting in a pub one day complaining about the paper, then resolving to each put in $100 and see what happens. (They published, once a month, for more than a year.)

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my interest focused on a grassroots rebuilding of journalism — and so the idea for this book was born.

We’ve decided the chapter about not-for-profit papers should be the sample chapter we shop around to publishers, which is why we’re beginning with Port Hope.

This Friday sees us at Ryerson University in Toronto, talking to journalism professor John Miller about the Crier. Saturday we head to Port Hope itself, initially to the archives, where apparently every scrap of information about the Crier is housed. After that we’re hoping to gather some of the folks involved at a local pub to hear from them directly. Then next week, we’ve got a phone interview lined up with one of the Crier reporters, a retired professor living in Ottawa.

We’ll be recording all the interviews with an eye to creating a radio doc as well; watch for some of the audio files to be posted here.

An article in this month’s Atlantic discusses the end of journalism as we know it, by suggesting it plausible that the New York Times would go under by May. (The Times needs to take drastic measures over the next five months or they’ll default on $400 million of debt — on top of $1 billion already on the books — Michael Hischorn writes.)

It’s worth a read. He discusses the conundrum that all papers everywhere are, no doubt, struggling with: the fact that even as print readership drops and internet readership rises, print readers continue to be the ones to pay for quality journalism. He cites “common estimates” that indicate a web news product could support 20% of the staff of a print product, a change that would obviously mean less and worse news.

Perhaps most interestingly, he tackles the question that’s long been top of mind for me: why don’t people seem to care about this impending crisis?

“If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands,” he writes.
End Times Atlantic Monthly January/February 2009

The article presents interesting alternatives to news funded in the mainstream way, but this argument about why people don’t care is perhaps the most interesting one.