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