Working Title

The American magazine has a great analysis piece by James V. DeLong about the decline of the newspaper and the possibilities the future holds. In the end, he essentially advocates for a model where newspapers assert their rights over the intellectual property they produce and require payment for it.

The newsies must have had a Come-To-Jesus session recently, or perhaps Come-To-Darwin, because suddenly the Internet is full of rumbling about the need to find a monetization model. The editor of the New York Times just “challenged the belief among some of the digerati that ‘information wants to be free,’ saying ‘a lot of people in the news business, myself included, don’t buy as a matter of theology that information “wants to be free.” Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized, and explained—that stuff wants to be paid for.’” The LA Times talked of the need for an antitrust exemption so newspapers can jointly agree to stop giving away the product, and several columnists have chimed in about the need for monetization.
[...]
So the Netizens will fight the news industry on this right up to the point of mutual destruction, and then all bets are off because it is impossible to begin to imagine the shape of an Internet deprived of the material produced by the newspapers and wire services. At that point, the options change to government bailouts of the news business, or endowments for wire services, or beneficent foundations.
– Preparing the Obituary 3 Mar 2009

In DeLong’s view the newspapers have been devaluing their own expensively-created content by giving it away. Now they have to face the deficit between the value they create and that which they capture. At some point news will have to be paid for or not be created.

I got an email today from the Ontarion, the student newspaper at the University of Guelph, asking for an interview on the future of print. It’s perhaps a testament to the community in Guelph and the university that their paper spends so much time covering the city, instead of just focusing on issues directly perceived as impacting students.

Here’s what the reporter wrote:  

I’m writing a piece about the future of print media, especially local papers, in light of the economic downturn and recent layoffs at both the Mercury and the Kitchener Record. Would you be available to answer questions any time between now and Wednesday noon-time?

I’m curious to see what the student newspaper take will be on the situation. (Last week, 13 people were laid off at the Mercury, 21 at the Record. The visible html tags in the story about the layoffs bode poorly for the future of the paper, I’d say.) Many university papers already operate as not-for-profits — I wonder whether this will colour their perspective.

Jacob Weisberg argues in this week’s Newsweek that there has never been a single business case for news, and that it’s unlikely one will emerge. He makes the important point that news has never been strictly about delivering profits, as evidenced by the fact, he argues, that newspapers do things that are expensive and not directly linked to profit. (I differ somewhat, by the way, on this point: while it’s difficult to quantify, I’m certain that things such as six month investigations build readership, which is of course linked to profit.)

What this debate misses, however, is that, unlike most businesses, serious journalism has seldom been about the straightforward pursuit of profit. Nearly all of the most important journalistic institutions in the free world are hybrids of one form or another—for-profit, but underwritten by generous owners or other profitable businesses; not-for-profit, yet entrepreneurial; cooperative, or government-subsidized.

[...]

The great newspaper companies got away with not maximizing their profits either by being privately held or by setting up two classes of stock, which insulated them from shareholder pressure. When the families sold out, it was usually to less sentimental concerns such as Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune, which sought higher profit margins. But these chains were more efficient and sometimes significantly improved the quality of the papers they bought. Even rapacious media barons and public companies can protect journalistic values when motivated. Rupert Murdoch, for example, has consistently lost money maintaining quality at The Times of London. Out of some combination of vanity, competitive rage and sheer love of the newspaper business, he now looks poised to do the same with The Wall Street Journal. Many serious-minded magazines—The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The Weekly Standard—have similarly survived on the mixed motives of wealthy individuals.
–Dubious new models for news

 His argument is an interesting one, but I believe he fails to acknowledge that the most popular, mainstream model depending on a mix of ad money and circulation revenue is dead, and while different hybrids will exist, it needs replacing, badly. So I wrote a letter to the editor.

Dear Editor:
Re: Dubious new models for news, March 2
Jacob Weisberg makes a compelling argument against a new holy grail of a business model for news in the post-Internet era. He neglects to mention, however, that while different models exist, the most prolific one, relying on a combination of advertising and circulation revenue, was effectively killed off when no one seemed to be watching. Free sites like Craigslist encroach on paid classified advertisements; cheap google ads threaten large so-called display ads by the major telecom companies; news available free when you want it and where you want it means trouble for circulation revenue.
Newspapers — and, to a lesser extent perhaps, other news media — were slow to act when the Internet came along, and slower to realize that it’s their business model, not just their editorial model, that’s in trouble. Now with the global economic downturn pushing them against the wall, a new model is needed, and fast. If not, we look forward to a future where local news will be written by the mayor’s PR folks.
Magda Konieczna

I’ll let you know if it’s published.

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

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.