New Models for News - 2008 Breaux Symposium

New Models for

THE 2008 BREAUX SYMPOSIUM

ABOUT THE BREAUX SYMPOSIUM The Manship School of Mass Communication inaugurated the annual Breaux Symposium in 2000, the same year it established the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. The Center exists to complement the school’s academic program, which includes the only doctoral program in the country focused exclusively on media and public affairs.

The Breaux Symposium, named for Louisiana’s former senior Senator, is emblematic of the Reilly Center’s overall mission – to elevate public discourse. The goal of each symposium is to push the boundaries of debate about some aspect of media and politics.

The 2008 symposium, “New Models for News,” looked at a troubling trend, the decrease in original newsgathering by journalists. As a result of economic disruptions, traditional print and broadcast media have cut back editorial staffs along with bureaus at home and abroad. This has reduced the flow of news, especially the kinds of news that underpin the public’s reliance on the press as a check on government.

The symposium wanted to explore these trends and suggest ways to expand news reporting. The symposium built on the 2004 Breaux Symposium, “News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press.”

The discussants comprised a distinguished group of scholars, journalists and entrepreneurs: Jim Brady, Neil Budde, James T. Hamilton (the 2004 symposium idea person), Larry Kramer, Charles Lewis (this year’s idea person) Amy McCombs, Michael Maier, Geneva Overholser, Robert Picard, Benjamin Shute and Bill Wheatley. The seven essays included in this report were prepared prior to the symposium to focus discussion. We have edited discussant remarks for space and to enhance the flow of this report.

Each participant had a deep, abiding dedication to move beyond the gloomy talk of the decline of journalism to creative new platforms that ensure an informed and participatory citizenry. We hope that the essays and discussion in this report compel you to think about what you can do to strengthen and expand news coverage.

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Table of Contents 4 • Panelists’ Biographies

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N 8 • Symposium Intent • John Maxwell Hamilton 9 • Introductory Remarks • Senator John Breaux 10 • Opening Remarks • Charles Lewis

EXPLORING NEW MODELS 14 • The Problems 24 • New Models for News 41 • New Models for Journalists 50 • New Models for Broadcasting 57 • New Models for Advertisers 62 • Building Communities and Keeping Up With Changing Technology 68 • Can Philanthropies and Universities Play a Larger Role?

73 • Launching a Startup 79 • Panelists’ Summaries

E S S AY S 88 • Charles Lewis: New Models for News 96 • Geneva Overholser: Updating “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change” 112 • Robert Picard: News Consumption and the Business of Journalism 119 • Jay Hamilton: A Free and Subsidized Press: Updating the 2004 Breaux Symposium Proposals 131 • Jim Brady: Journalism in Transition 137 • Bill Wheatley: Weathering the Perfect Storm: Some Survival Skills 144 • Michael Maier: Medipedia or How to Learn from the Citizens

THOUGHTFUL EXTRAS 160 • Local News and the Nonprofit Model: MinnPost.com Editor Joel Kramer Offers Practical Tips 162 • Test Your Knowledge of the Economic and Financial Conditions of U.S. Newspapers 164 • Stemming the Decline in Public Affairs Reporting: An Eight-Step Approach

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PA N E L I S T S ’ B I O G R A P H I E S Jim Brady · Executive Editor · washingtonpost.com In 1996, Brady helped build and launch the award-winning washingtonpost.com. In 1998, he became Assistant Managing Editor for News and helped coordinate the site’s coverage of the Clinton impeachment proceedings. The following year he moved to America Online, where he spent four years as Group Programming Director, News and Sports, and in his final year, served as Vice President, Production and Operations, overseeing the 150-person department that builds and maintains all AOL products. He returned to washingtonpost.com in 2003.

Neil F. Budde · President and Chief Product Officer · DailyMe Inc. Budde was previously the Vice President and Editor in Chief of Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports. He joined Yahoo! in 2004 and helped build the site into the number one news site on the Internet. He produced the company’s first original multimedia news offering, “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” for which Sites was honored with the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Prior to his work at Yahoo!, Budde was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, the largest paid news site on the Internet.

James T. Hamilton · Charles S. Sydnor Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Political Science · Duke University Hamilton’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News (Princeton Press, 2004), examines how economic forces affect media content. All the News won the Frank Luther Mott Award for the best book in journalism/mass communication research in 2004. Hamilton also wrote Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming, which won the Joan Shorenstein Center’s Goldsmith Book Prize, and was a recipient of the David N. Kershaw award for distinguished public policy research.

Larry Kramer · Senior Advisor · Polaris Venture Partners Prior to working with Polaris Venture Partners, a national venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, Kramer served as the first president of CBS Digital Media. He created a division that put together all new media operations, including March Madness on Demand, oversaw the shift of CBS TV shows to the Web, and created distribution partnerships with Google, Amazon, Apple iTunes, Yahoo! and Verizon. In 1997 he founded CBS MarketWatch.com, which he ran until its sale to Dow Jones in 2005. He worked for 20 years as a reporter and editor for the San Francisco Examiner and The Washington Post.

Amy McCombs · Corporate and Nonprofit Board Member and former Media CEO McCombs has managed advertising-driven media for the Washington Post Company and the Chronicle Publishing Company during periods of growth and recession. In the early 1990’s she embraced the digital age with one of the earliest convergence of local broadcast content into print, cable, and Internet platforms. She is currently on the advisory board of The Media Convergence Group, an investment, holdings, and consulting group focused on digital media 4

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content and emerging technologies including social media, online video, mobile distribution and search. She received the Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the National Headliner Award from Women in Communications.

Michael Maier · Founder and CEO · Blogform Publishing Maier’s company, Blogform Publishing, produces multimedia-magazines for a wide variety of corporations and publications in Europe and the United States, including Time Inc., Hearst and Hachette Filipachi. It also publishes Germany’s first and largest citizen-journalism newspaper, www.readersedition.de. Maier was a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he researched the status of the citizen journalist.

Geneva Overholser · Director, School of Journalism · University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication Overholser previously held the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs for the Missouri School of Journalism before joining the University of California’s Annenberg School of Communication in 2008. An award-winning journalist, educator and scholar, Overholser was a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, an ombudsman for The Washington Post, a member of The New York Times editorial board and the former editor of The Des Moines Register, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service under her direction.

Robert G. Picard · Hamrin Professor of Media Economics and director of Media Management and Transformation Centre, Jönköping International Business School · Jönköping University, Sweden Picard is the author and editor of 22 books and numerous articles. He is editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies and was previously editor of The Journal of Media Economics. He has been a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He consults for media companies in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Benjamin R. Shute, Jr. · Secretary · Rockefeller Brothers Fund Shute directs the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Democratic Practice grant making program in the United States. He previously directed the Fund’s programs on philanthropy and the nonprofit section. He is the director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations and previously served as director of Independent Sector.

Bill Wheatley · Consultant and Adjunct Professor · Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Wheatley retired as executive vice president of NBC News in 2005, after 30 years with the network. He studied at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow and Shorenstein Fellow. He currently sits on the advisory committees of the Nieman Foundation and Boston University’s College of Communication.

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CO-MODERATORS:

John Maxwell Hamilton · Dean, Manship School of Mass Communication· Louisiana State University Prior to joining the academy, Hamilton worked as a journalist domestically and abroad, managed a World Bank program, oversaw nuclear non-proliferation issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and directed a Society of Professional Journalist’s project to improve news coverage of the Third World.

He is on the board of the International Center for Journalists, has been a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and in 2004 received the Freedom Forum’s Administrator of the Year award. Hamilton is the author of five books.

Charles Lewis Co-founder of three nonprofits, including the Center for Public Integrity, Lewis is the author of five books, including the bestseller, The Buying of the President (2004). He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN USA First Amendment Award, and currently Distinguished-Journalist-in-Residence and professor at American University.

Editor’s Note: The 2008 Breaux Symposium “New Models for News” occurred April 25-26 in the Holliday Forum on Louisiana State University’s campus. It was sponsored by the Manship School of Mass Communication’s Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. On the opening evening, panelists identified a plethora of problems news media must address to remain viable in a culture rapidly shifting to a byte-dominated information stream.

During the day on April 26 they discussed new models for media, such as nonprofit ventures or greater government involvement in funding journalism.

This report is an edited, condensed version of the discussion. The transcript editor, Mary Collins, taught writing at the graduate level at Johns Hopkins University for 12 years and ran a freelance business in Washington, D.C., which included writing and editing projects with National Geographic, the Smithsonian and other clients. In 2007 she took a full-time job as a professor of creative nonfiction at Central Connecticut State University. For the full transcript of the symposium, please call 225-578-7312.

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THE CONVERSATION

THE 2008 BREAUX SYMPOSIUM

SYMPOSIUM INTENT So how did this Breaux Symposium come about?

In fact, this is part two of an idea that Jay Hamilton came up with several years ago, which resulted in the 2004 Breaux Symposium, “News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press.”

This year’s idea came from Chuck Lewis, who thought we should focus on how we can find new models for original newsgathering. How do we deliver quality information to people so that they can be good citizens?

Many of us who have been trained with print journalism would prefer it was just like the old days, but it’s not like the old days. It’s not going to be like the old days ever again. So we have to figure out what the new days are going to be and how we can best serve the public journalistically.

We hope the ideas generated by this symposium will help.

—John Maxwell Hamilton

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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Senator John Breaux

Let me join Dean Hamilton in welcoming all of you to the LSU campus. I think you represent the best and the brightest in this area. We are very fortunate that you all have given your time to be with us on the weekend. We thank you for your contribution.

Many people will benefit from this discussion: students, professional journalists, editors, and the general public.

I got involved in these symposia almost 10 years ago, because as a person who has spent 34 years as a member of Congress in the House and the Senate, I was aware of the important connection between media, governmental officials and politics, whether we liked it or not. I could have the best idea to solve the biggest problem in the country, but if I can’t get that out to people, it’s not going to happen.

I had to use the media, as all elected officials do, in order to communicate public policy ideas and to encourage debate on those difficult ideas. And at the same time, political reporters needed us, because if they didn’t have us as a source, they wouldn’t be able to get the stories that they needed on what was happening in the political realm.

Now, it’s changed so quickly and so dramatically. My father is deathly afraid of even walking by a computer or trying to get on the Internet. He’s 86-years-old. He doesn’t understand it. I have grandchildren who are six, nine and 10. All three of them, the first thing they do in the morning is turn on the Internet.

We have gone from my father to my grandchildren and have a whole new way of presenting the news that people are understanding. So I think it’s particularly important that this group engage in discussion about how we are going to collect and disseminate news.

I know the people who produce the content will always be here, and always be an integral part of our democracy. Politicians can’t do it by themselves.

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OPENING REMARKS Charles Lewis

In 2006, Time Magazine fired the two members of the longest running investigative reporting team in United States history, Jim Steele and Don Bartlett, along with 600 people, as part of cutbacks. The same week Time, Inc. paid $4 million for a picture of Angelina Jolie’s baby. That to me said everything about what is happening right now, and it’s become very frustrating to watch.

I am sorry to repeat the litany of woes, but I will mention a few that I think are particularly obvious. Knight Ridder, the most honored chain in American newspaper history in terms of Pulitzer Prizes, today, no longer exists. It’s been broken up and purchased in pieces essentially. One of those papers was the flagship paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. There are half as many reporters covering Philadelphia today as there were 20 years ago. We have fewer reporters covering the same amount of news. Anyone, who even does basic math, knows that you have to do a certain number of stories a day. If you have half the number of reporters that means you are going to move a little faster. Those stories are going to be a little shorter; the chances of anything investigative just got diminished in terms of odds.

The Wall Street Journal has always been among one of the three or four elite and most respected newspapers in America. It was always an assumption with the two-tier stock ownership that they were exempted from these problems. Even though we had seen the passing of the Binghams, the Chandlers and the Pulitzers and all the great families in journalism, we assumed that somehow this would stop. The water’s edge would be the two-tier stock ownership. But we saw that when Rupert Murdoch offered a $60 share price, we suddenly had to say goodbye to the two-tier stock ownership.

So you can’t look at the landscape and the recent carnage and not think anything other than bleak thoughts. It’s bad enough that CBS News had 28 bureaus around the world at one point but is down to whatever it is, five or six. Now a story in the last week or two tells us that they are going to outsource international coverage to CNN. I mean Edward R. Murrow literally must be turning in his grave when he sees a story like that.

The extent of the problem cannot be overstated; at least 3,000 reporters have lost their jobs since 2000. A lot of very talented journalists have actually nowhere to work; a lot of important stories simply are not being reported.

As someone who likes to—excuse my language —investigate the bastards, whoever they are, it is very troubling, because there is no one to do it, and there is nowhere to publish it. It’s become a very, very serious problem. The new search engines, the Yahoos and the Googles, essentially aggregate news and take Associated Press stories.

I got frustrated with what I was seeing at CBS some years ago, and I quit and started a nonprofit called the Center for Public Integrity. We ended up with 40 10

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reporters doing investigative stuff. By the time I left at the end of 2004, the Center had produced 300 reports and 14 books on various subjects. We had a hundred journalists in various countries available on a contract basis.

The need for more creativity about models has become increasingly apparent.

There are other investigative reporting models. The oldest one in the United States is the Center for Investigative Reporting. The largest so far through 2007 at least was the Center for Public Integrity. Now you have ProPublica, which is just starting, which will have double the budget at its disposal as the Center for Public Integrity—$10 million plus a year, which in news is not that large, but for a nonprofit is unprecedented.

You may not know that there are 40 investigative reporting nonprofit centers in the world. Nonprofits are an intriguing model because we have a long history of them in the U.S. Associated Press is the largest news organization in the world as far as I can tell. We have an expert here to tell us more, but three billion people everyday see or read or hear Associated Press news in the world. It is a nonprofit that was started in the 1840s as a cooperative.

You have National Public Radio, which is a nonprofit. We forget that we created PBS and NPR forty years ago. Those were nonprofit institutions that were begun as a conscious effort to improve the quality of information in the United States.

NPR is one of the few news organizations that has seen its audience grow in the last decade. It’s got 25 to 30 million listeners, which is really quite stunning considering what has happened. It’s now one of the leading news sources in America, period.

Another interesting turn of events is hybrids that are starting to crop up on university campuses: Lowell Bergman, veteran investigative reporter with Frontline and The New York Times working with the University of California at Berkeley; David Protess doing that innocence project getting folks off of death row by using students at Northwestern University to report the stories; Florence Graves of Brandeis with an investigative institute working with the Boston Globe and The Washington Post; Walter Robinson, award-winning investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, working at Northeastern University which is also pairing up with the Globe. I am starting an investigative reporting workshop out of American University and will begin to forge partnerships like that as well, but I will also be looking at new models in general.

There is a new company called Global News out of Boston. Philip Balboni, from the New England Cable Association, and Charles Senott, who was a Boston Globe reporter, have created this to do international reporting. They have raised upfront money, seven or eight million, and have 70 reporters who will freelance.

Now, are these sustainable? It’s uncertain. What is the market exactly? But there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit kicking around. People realize we have a crisis in the state of journalism. The problem is rather clear: How do we provide important and serious information about our society? There is nothing more serious than indepth journalism or investigative journalism. It is the most expensive, most risky type of journalism.

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How do we come up with new ideas that redefine the landscape and adapt to current realities? One problem is the limited capacity for news consumption in the developed world, not just the U.S. Does it just mean really smaller niches and serious news will be for a tiny percentage of highly-educated, well-informed folks who care about the world around them? Are we just going to extend the NPR/PBS model to that niche market and find a way for them to pay for it? Is that the extent of what we are describing? Or is there a way with cell phone technology and the iPod use and all the other things to take in-depth journalism and redefine it in a platform that’s more accessible to larger audiences and especially to young people?

We must also talk about media literacy. We are not teaching people, as part of the discussion of democracy, that information about public and civic affairs really affects their lives. Are young people aware of what goes into reporting the news or the historical role of journalism in our democracy? Journalists were actually at the forefront, from civil rights to the minimum wage to women getting the right to vote, to the abolition movement. Are students taught that in school? Frankly, not really. Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Los Angeles Times, is creating a nonprofit to teach school children today about the role of journalism in U.S. history and democracy itself. It used to be that newspapers would do that.

They actually used to run ads about the importance of journalism in the community, but they have cut that.

We are here to talk about how to deal with this. I am trying to figure out how to do something on a larger scale and provide concrete models, not just theories. We know where we’ve been and we roughly know where we are right now, but where will we be in three years, five years, 10 years? If we can see that, if we can even come close, it will be thrilling.

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THE PROBLEMS JAY HAMILTON

I think we are here, in part, because of rational ignorance and, in part, technology. Let me explain what I mean by that.

We’re in a journalism school, so it used to be the five W’s: who, what, when, where, and why. But if you think about what you read in newspapers today, it’s really defined by five economic W’s. Who cares about a particular piece of information? What are you willing to pay for their attention, or what are they willing to pay for it? Where can advertisers reach these people? Where else can they get information? When is this profitable? That brings in cost ideas.

And why is this profitable? And that brings in the definition of property rights to information.

I know we have journalists and former journalists in the room, and I am sure you don’t fall out of bed every morning and say it’s a great day to maximize profits.

But the set of people who survive in the market and set of stories that survive are driven by those five economic questions.

Anthony Downs a while ago said that there are four information demands people have: producer information, how I do my job; consumer information, what am I going to buy; entertainment information, things that are just entertaining for me to know; and voter information, how do I be a better citizen.

The first three demands work pretty well. If you don’t get the information, you don’t get the benefit. The fourth one is problematic. You might really care which candidate is elected, and more information could help you make a better decision, but the probability is very small that your vote is going to be decisive, unless you are Justice Scalia. So, if you learn more about a car, you get a better car. If you learn more about a candidate, you don’t get a better candidate. This leads to what Anthony Downs called rational ignorance. A lot of problems that we are going to be talking about relate to rational ignorance, the fact that there is not a high expressed demand for public affairs reporting.

In the old days, newspapers were owned by people willing to trade off profit for the notion that they were doing the right thing. You got more public affairs coverage than was profit maximizing, and it was a great thing to own a paper because you were a monopolist. You were the way the advertisers got to the local folks. The cost of doing well wasn’t really that high because you were a monopolist.

Now we are in the world of the Internet. If you think about a perfectly competitive market, price gets competed down to marginal costs. The marginal cost of an additional page view is zero. That means price equals

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marginal costs equals zero, so you are not going to be able to charge revenue for stories that are not distinctive, for stories that are commodities. If you try to charge a price for information that others are offering for free, people will simply go elsewhere to get the (free) information.

Suppose I charge you to access my Website for information that many people are competing to provide you with. Unless you could get those many people in a room to agree to charge a price—which the antitrust division would be interested in learning about— they are going to try to get customers by offering the lowest possible price. The price will get competed down to what the additional cost of giving a person a page view is, which is zero.

There are other problems, but, in summary I would say: j Rational ignorance j Internet competes price down to zero j Owners used to care, and now their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize profit BEN SHUTE

I work with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a foundation that tries to strengthen democracy in the United States. For me and the foundation the fundamental problem is getting citizens the information they need or should have. No matter how good the journalism may be, if nobody wants to read the story, then we have another kind of problem with democracy.

To have a functioning democracy, citizens must have the kind of information on which to act—whether to vote is a rational act or not, a lot of people vote— and it’s more complicated than if a single vote can change an election.

BILL WHEATLEY

Is good, original journalism—the type that we have become accustomed to having in this country—going to survive, and, particularly, in areas where the connection to profit is vague?

Beat reporting at local newspapers, where a person covers City Hall religiously, for example, that sort of thing is where we’re seeing huge cutbacks. As the profitability of media declines, that is becoming more of an issue. By extension, the investigative reporting that Chuck talks about and has been his passion, is that going to survive, and, if so, in what form? That’s tied really to how it would be funded, as we have discussed, and, as Ben points out, whether there will be an audience wanting to read it.

I think as recently as a year or two ago, there was an assumption that newspapers should just live with modest profit margins instead of 18 or 20 or 22 percent—something more like the average company in America has, 7 15

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percent or something like that. But the decline in the prospects of newspapers, and to some extent network television, has killed that idea and many people are now thinking that profitability can go below zero basically.

If that is the case, how in the world is any commercial interest going to function for any great period of time against those prospects?

It’s not at all a given that, as revenues decline from the traditional side, the revenues from the new technology side will offset losses. And if that’s not going to do it, where is the money going to come from?

It’s wonderful to see some people stepping forward and saying, “We are going to put up $30 million over the next three years for investigative reporting, etc.” And I hope that continues and grows, but I don’t think it’s all that clear that it’s going to, and, inevitably, it comes with some baggage. People who tend to put up money aren’t always civic-oriented people. They have reasons for putting up money.

AMY McCOMBS

I worked in Detroit, and I see the same thing in the media business that I saw in the Detroit/ U.S. auto industry, which was a total lack of understanding of the customer. It was very clear that the U.S. wanted smaller, more efficient cars, and Detroit was building oversized gas guzzlers.

I think the media industry has done the same thing, particularly newspaperdominated media companies, which have basically lost touch with who the customer is and how the customer is changing.

The second problem is regulation. The 1934 Communications Act was landmark legislation that created the Federal Communications Commission and laid the foundation for television and telecommunication policy for six decades. It’s authors could not predict the technological and cultural changes that came during those decades, but they did create a framework that adapted and endured until the explosion of new technologies in the 1980’s and 90’s. The first major rewrite was the Telecommunication Act of 1996. With this act Congress attempted to bring order and reassert its role as policy maker. Unlike the 1934 Act, the 1996 Act was written in a climate of aggressive lobbying by all interested parties: broadcasters, cable operators, and telcos. The missing voice was the public. While Congress’ public stated intent with the 1996 Act was increased competition, the actual outcome has been media ownership consolidation.

Another example of misguided law is the 1970 Newspaper Preservation Act. The intent of the act was to preserve multiple newspapers in the same market by allowing them to combine business operations while maintaining separate news operations. Its intent was to protect the papers from declining advertising and circulation as television viewing expanded. In retrospect the 16

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law did not protect the papers from television and the technology threats of the 1980’s and 90’s. Without this assumption of a governmental sanctioned safety-net many newspapers may have been forced to be more realistic about their changing competitive world and would have innovated and embraced the digital age with enthusiasm. We will never know.

ROBERT PICARD

I think what we can all agree on is that the need for journalism is there, and the need for journalism isn’t changing. In fact, if anything, it’s growing.

The problem is the business of journalism is changing, and the foundation on which we operate is changing. The problem really isn’t profits, which are good in this industry. The problem is debt, and the problem is capital. This is really where the fundamental difficulties of the industry exist today.

The last month was really telling if you paid attention to the industry. You have McClatchy sitting out there with $2.8 billion in debt. Its debt ratings were downgraded. You have Sam Zell sitting out there. He has $800,000 million in debt due in the next six months that he’s got to find some way to take care of.

You have GateHouse Media, whose debt rating has been dumped down into the junk rating. The New York Times has been downgraded just above junk rating for its debt.

These events stem from managerial choices and issues that were made to take on debt and to create these situations where they have to pull so much money out of the newsroom and the operation to pay these debts.

We have the problem that all media operations have, whether they be nonprofit, whether they be employee owned, to have capital to operate on.

The Wall Street Journal went to Murdoch, not just because he paid a premium because it was more worthwhile for him, but because the company had so destroyed its working capital that it could not make the kind of investments it needed to make in the coming years to survive. These are business decisions that are creating the crisis that we are in today.

We had the Journal Register this month. Its shares have been below one dollar for several months. It took its market capitalization down to about $12 million. It went off the New York Stock Exchange. Sun-Times Media Group is about to get delisted if they can’t come up with a way to get their share value up and get their market capitalization increased.

And this is what is driving a lot of the changes that we see happening in these companies, and the way they are pulling money out of the journalistic operations to meet these other business obligations, because the business of journalism for the last 30 years is built on regular growth of income from 17

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advertising year after year after year and that stopped about 2001.

And now all of this debt that was put together in acquisitions and everything over the years is now coming due. And who is paying for it? The newsrooms.

We have seen some of the break ups of some of the companies. We have seen, and we are going to see, more sales of properties. The problem is they are going to companies that are taking on high debt or, worse, using private equity—which is the most expensive kind of debt you can acquire—which is not going to solve the problem. It’s actually going to exacerbate it in the long run. So the question becomes, how do we have any kind of decent journalism in this kind of environment? We are going to have to write off many of these big institutions as providers and find some other ways to do it.

Someplace along the line, we have to think about how we service local journalism and not just national and international journalism. It used to be in this country 25 to 35 years ago there were state news bureaus that basically were nonprofit, but those are all gone. How do we rebuild them? How do we do that at the national level again? How do we put these together to be able to provide better coverage along the way? We are in a situation now where there is no money to be made in national and international coverage. Media are closing the bureaus.

We also are coming to a huge crisis in the newspaper industry right now in terms of printing presses. Most printing presses in the U.S. are now 30 years old. They are all coming to the end of their useful life.

So we are in a really interesting time where you have this crumbling infrastructure of what made the business possible and what made the resources possible for journalism. It’s happening in print and in broadcasting.

There is no business model on the Internet. There is no investment in news on the Internet. We are seeing now a little investment being made by Google, MSN and Yahoo in sports and entertainment, but not in journalism. So they are not the answer to journalism.

LARRY KRAMER

I left my job as Executive Editor at the San Francisco Examiner in 1990 to start an Internet company that bet on the belief that news was not a commodity, and that if we could do quality news in one specific area—and this was business news—we could create a functioning business as well as a business model for quality content.

I thought we were skewing the odds to our benefit, because business news seemed to have a high degree of interest then. The markets were starting to get interesting. Things like Netscape were happening. The public was starting 18

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to trade stock, so there was a demand for content.

We stopped to think of what our audience wanted. We used the Internet and electronic distribution to deliver real-time information about stocks because our audience was trading them in real time.

So 10 years later, that paid off big time. Dow Jones, with 1,600 financial journalists, felt compelled to buy my company with 120 financial journalists, for $520 million.

And I stopped and thought about that—of the absurdity of that. These guys couldn’t figure out that there was an audience that wanted what they already did, but they just wanted it delivered differently from the way they were giving it to them, and Dow Jones just felt that they couldn’t do it themselves.

The media companies have more responsibility for the situation they are in than we tend to think. I have watched newsrooms during the glory years, and, I’m sorry, but most of those newsrooms, with the exception of four or five newspapers, wasted their investment. They would hire people to cover things that were totally unnecessary. They didn’t hire investigative teams.

They started home sections. They started very interesting things, which had no reason for being a part of a newspaper. They were growing in a way that could increase income, but they weren’t doing the kind of journalism we are all worried about, with very few exceptions.

On the way down, of course, panic mode set in. It’s even harder to be good when you are cutting than it is when you are going up.

I had to laugh during this whole Murdoch thing. The Bancroft family had the gall to sit there and say, we have to stand up for this company, but where the hell have they been for the last 15 years when that company spent itself into oblivion? They lost $700 million on Telerate, and they didn’t punish anybody.

That company was going down the tubes and put in a position where it could be bought by Rupert Murdoch for $5 billion.

Something else we didn’t do: we didn’t train the ad industry to understand how to use us. We’re sitting there worried about how to reinvent storytelling with this new Internet medium, but we better be doing the same thing with the advertisers who have to learn the same thing. We have to convince them that there is a way to tell their story on the Internet, too, or we are not going to get ads from them.

BILL WHEATLEY

Do you see the general interest publication or network model in this country going away and that everything is going to be much more specialized?

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LARRY KRAMER

I definitely see the need for more specialization on the part of the people who want to get information and on the part of people giving it. The general newspaper offers everything from a bridge column to sports and delivers all of it to your door, but the new media is replacing this general approach. If I am a bridge player, I can reach a community of bridge players on the Internet. Now as a media company and bridge editor, I need to understand this new type of community and figure out how to appeal to them. Putting a column in the local newspaper isn’t it. They have a new worldwide community and we have to serve it.

Now some publications may be great at all of this and serve as a kind of umbrella, but that’s a lot of work. It’s more likely that newspapers will gravitate toward the more Page-One type of subject areas, such as politics.

MICHAEL MAIER

I am from Berlin, Germany, so I am only a guest addressing American problems, but thanks to the Internet, all things are global, so we are talking about the same things.

I think the real shift in the Internet is that the principle of intermediaries disappears. People interact directly. They don’t need the manager to explain something to them. They can check immediately.

A process has developed where people started to rely much more on each other than on intermediaries, which isn’t surprising considering they don’t trust journalists and journalists in turn basically hate their readers. To followup on what Larry said, I have also noticed there is not one media company that has tried to teach advertisers to engage in digital storytelling that combines media interaction, text and animation.

My company in Oslo has been doing several digital magazines for Time, Inc. and People Magazine, because they, themselves, haven’t been able to do it, which was really stunning for us that we, crazy people from Norway, had to go to Time, Inc. and say this is the best way to do a story digitally; imagine how little they are able to educate their advertisers.

JIM BRADY

One of the things that hasn’t been discussed much is not only the need for the change of business models, but also the change of culture. After working on the Web for 12 years, I am still fighting—maybe a little less so than at the start—cultures that are rooted in doing things a certain way, even when that way isn’t working anymore. They are sinking, but they think they are on the right path.

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So how do we change the cultures even if they come up with a new model? If we all sit around all day tomorrow and come up with great new models on how to make journalism succeed, I would have to go back and sell that to a culture that is not always willing to do things differently.

Frankly, a lot of relatively young people at the Post believe journalism is done a certain way and can’t change no matter what the distribution platform is.

It’s not just a problem of people who are over the age of 50.

They have very firm ideas that getting readers involved to Michael’s point is something we shouldn’t be doing. Even though I believe strongly that for places like the Post and other local newspapers to survive, if you don’t own your community, whatever platform you are publishing in, you’re in big trouble. And part of that ownership going forward is not just providing information for your community, but bringing its members into the conversation and making them participate.

So if I woke up every day and people in Washington fired up their computers, and all they could get were Websites that were within 10 miles of Washington, D.C., washingtonpost.com would be in a very different situation than it is— but it is the World Wide Web and not the Washington Wide Web. We are now facing competition in ways that we never faced before either.

We believe if we keep doing things the way we’re doing it, we will eventually get that audience back and pull the revenue up to where it was, and I just think that’s unrealistic.

How do we decide what this business really can be, because we may never go back to the days of profit margins from 18 to 20 percent? We may have to decide that we are going to aim for a smaller number and figure out the right way to get there.

But going back to the community thing, I think we have made a lot of mistakes along the way, but one of them has been this insane chase for unique visitors at all costs. We’ll do deals with Yahoo. We’ll do deals with AOL, just so we can get lots of people coming to our sites for really short periods of time. So we can have a nice Nielsen number and people can write nice articles about how washingtonpost.com had a 30 percent increase in unique visitors.

Meanwhile, the numbers that really matter—how often do you get people to come to your site, how frequently are they coming to your site, how long are they spending on your site are sort of ignored in the process. We have tried to adopt the philosophy that visitors are great, but we really want residents. We are not going to survive on drive-bys. We have to have people putting down roots on the site.

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NEIL BUDDE

This new world encourages a lot of very shallow consumption. Yet, there is also a growing and an increasing number of people who behave as in the past and look at newspapers sometimes multiple times a day, and they look at many stories each time they come.

They get overlooked by the huge numbers of people that are so shallow. If we look at the mass amount of people at Yahoo news, we got credit for 35 million users a month. At least 25 million of those looked at one or two stories in a month. So if you wash all of them out and then recalculate the numbers on even the 10 million that is left, your numbers are much better or a lot better in terms of frequency of visits and the amount of time they come.

The question is, you still have to get a lot more of those heavy, hard hitting, frequent users online to make up the kind of revenue that you are losing for every one of those that you lose in print. I think if we can get away from the total numbers and the chase for the huge reach, and focus on how you can get people who look more like the newspaper reader, I think we have got a more sustainable business model.

LARRY KRAMER

I was going to say that one of the things they’re doing at The Washington Post—a function that is going to be a bigger part of journalism than it’s ever been—is the curator function. When suddenly all information is available, one of the roles of journalism is helping readers find which is the most relevant or valuable information. It is going to be a function that we as journalists must perform if we are going to stay an integral part of people’s lives. We need to adapt to that as something that is ours to do. Our training, all the fundamentals of journalism, must go into that selection process.

There’s a business need for that that, and it’s not all going to be automated.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

What should legacy media be doing? We don’t care how it’s delivered as long as the public gets information in the public interest. But, obviously, it matters now what is happening in mainstream media newsrooms, because they are the center of much of the original reporting.

What are the new forms, these wonderful, emerging new forms, new models, economic models? How do we open our eyes to all the wonderful things that are happening on the Web and sort out the best and coordinate and take advantage of them?

I am very much interested in the role of the public. Of course, there are a million roles: the public as journalists, the public as contributors, the public 22

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as demanders of quality journalism or not and what we might do to influence that.

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EXPLORING NEW MODELS FOR NEWS SUBJECT AREAS Non-profits ° For-profits ° Government sponsorship

JAY HAMILTON

There have been some market failures in the production, distribution and/or consumption of hard news, so we want to explore some new models.

• Nonprofit ownership of news outlets • Nonprofits that provide information to journalists. You see a lot of nonprofits beginning to realize that there are issues that aren’t being covered unless they become more active in the creation of information, such as the Pew Center and its polling information.

• Community foundations are looking for people to tell them if there are problems with local information provision. What role could we play? Their biggest concern: Would they be seen as taking sides in partisan disputes if they decide to provide particular types of information?

• Family ownership and changes in public policy that might encourage more family ownership. Family owners sometimes are willing to trade off maximum profits for doing the right thing for their community. Could there be ways to encourage the transition from family ownership to nonprofit ownership? I think we understand few people are willing to give it all away, like Nelson Poynter did. He famously said, “I have never met my great grandchildren, and I might not like them,” which was his explanation for why he was willing to give away his newspaper to an educational institution. There might be a way around that so they wouldn’t have to give it all away.

• Changing campaign finance laws. There are a set of people who really do want to talk to you about politics, and they are called political parties and candidates. Campaign finance laws currently limit the amount of information or amount of money that parties or candidates are able to raise.

So you have seen a proliferation of 527s and other organizations that get that money and say things about politics that parties and candidates can’t say because of the law.

There is a big debate about campaign finance laws, but people don’t often link it up to this other information deficit.

• Government provision of information. There is a large amount of government money spent on discussions about public policy. It’s most often abroad and now comes under the term “public diplomacy,” which is something we hadn’t anticipated.

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The idea of relying more heavily on nonprofits seems to generate the most discussion, but there’s some concern about organizations with an agenda. Of course people often assume that market-provided information doesn’t come with strings attached, but the network evening news now has minute-byminute demographic Nielsen ratings, so it’s pretty clear that advertiser information influences content.

(Editor’s Note: For a more detailed analysis of each nonprofit option mentioned here, see Jay Hamilton’s essay, “Updating the 2004 Breaux Symposium Proposals,” on page 119.)

BEN SHUTE

I would like to add the cooperative to Jay’s list. The second largest newspaper in Mexico, La Jornada, is in fact, a cooperative.

The cooperative form in this country exists in some interesting places: Sunkist Oranges, the cranberry growers, an electrical generating cooperative in New England, and, of course the Associated Press.

One opportunity would be to look at whether a cooperative can be changed into a 501(c)3. The other part of the discussion on nonprofits has been tied up in this notion of giving an existing entity to a nonprofit and not looking at starting up a nonprofit. ProPublica, obviously, is a startup. The Center for Public Integrity is a startup. But people forget that all of those public radio stations and all of those public television stations, some were started up by academic institutions, but many were startups.

The New Press is a nonprofit book publishing house started by Andre Schiffrin, who bailed out of commercial publishing because he couldn’t do what he felt a publisher should do. It’s reasonably successful and has a wonderful list. Financially, it’s like a lot of nonprofits, and has good years and bad years.

One possibility for owners who might be persuaded to give an existing newspaper to a nonprofit is to give it to a community foundation. Some papers have been given to educational institutions because of the tax laws that apply to foundations, which distinguish between “public charities” and “private foundations,” which are more heavily regulated and taxed. Private foundations are not allowed to own more than a certain percentage of a business, and educational institutions are automatically considered public charities. Community foundations are usually public charities, and could, I believe, own an entire newspaper company. So in addition to following Jay Hamilton’s suggestion of working with community foundations around the availability of information in the community, one might consider actually giving a paper to a community foundation. There are real issues there, because there are real questions about the extent to which a lot of

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community foundations look at the wellbeing of the whole community as distinct from some special interests, but that (community foundations) would be another place, if you wanted to give it away. I am struck by those opportunities that didn’t seem to me were fully pursued.

ROBERT PICARD

The problem with all of these suggestions is how do you sustain the operations? You can have all the tax breaks in the world to support family ownership, for example, but the fact is about 80 percent of family firms never survive the second generation. So you’ve got a short-term solution there.

The problem with nonprofits is not that they can’t operate. They actually operate quite well when they get going. The problem is at some point, they need reinvestment in other things, and they find themselves in problems.

Twenty years ago, the majority of the health care in America was provided by religious-based, nonprofit organizations. Today those are all profit-making HMO’s and other such things. The reason that occurred was simply the nonprofits did not have the capital to reinvest into upgrading their facilities.

So we have to look at these larger pictures as well and have a sustainable kind of model rather than something that just gets up and starts something for two or three years, for a generation, and then dies because that doesn’t solve the fundamental financial problems.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Over the course of the past year or two, I have had an FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Commissioner take me to lunch to ask, “What might we really do? We don’t seem to be able to figure this out.”

Nobody has a detailed and specific listing of what would be the changes in tax laws that might affect current private ownership, for example, or what would be the ones that might affect a transition from a private owner to a community foundation ownership or to a nonprofit.

We talked about these things, and they exist in various places, but there is no real repository of the kind of detailed information that you then can say, okay, look, Frank Blethen, if you are selling the paper in Portland, Maine, and you really do want to think about a community ownership, here are the people to go talk to. One of the best things we could do is assemble this information in very practical ways, because events are moving faster than our conversation.

The Knight Foundation is also funding a continuing study of the information needs of communities. Peter McShane is heading it, along with the Aspen Institute. And they really are attempting to look at what the community 26

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needs are and what might be some of the roles that, for example, foundations and others might be able to play in the communities to fulfill them.

BILL WHEATLEY

It’s almost as though we need a registry in which you would submit the things that you are working on, and someone would organize all of this into some sort of directory of what is being pursued. Because I am sure there are things we don’t even know about that are going on here or there and other places. Most of them seem to be more complicated than they first look. We can say, well, wouldn’t it be great if we could get a tax break for having bureaus, but how as a matter of public policy, do you put that into effect?

JACK HAMILTON

Michael, are they having discussions like this in Europe?

MICHAEL MAIER

We do have discussions, but it’s very different from country to country. In Germany, we have a real strong and ongoing system of public television and radio. Germany is very decentralized. We have 16 states, and each state has its own system of public television and radio, which has its upside and its downside. I would say the upside is, of course, you have completely different TV coverage than in the U.S. When we came to the U.S. , we first thought something like “The Daily Show” was comedy—this can’t be serious.

It’s completely unthinkable in Germany. Even the private TV channels, they try to be objective.

On the other hand, what we do see is that this system engages people less. The public tends to say, okay, TV, radio news, serious news is something the state or the government has to do. They don’t think it’s their job to make news or contribute—to speak out. They say, “We pay our taxes,” and then their duty is done, which I think is a problematic system. That is why you don’t have a vital blogosphere in Germany. We don’t have a single significant, informational, political blog in Germany. The mindset of the people is to say journalism is not our thing. It’s the thing of these entities, which are somewhere. We don’t have to contribute in any way, like in America, where everyone, to my understanding, through this free speech thing, thinks he has to contribute.

In France, for instance, where it’s not like that, the blogosphere is really strong, because people still have this feeling that we are citizens and have to speak up.

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of encouraging people to lean back and say there is someone else doing it, which I think creates its own structures.

I think TV has lots of problems. There is not a really healthy commercial market for TV or radio in Germany, because we run our radio stations in Berlin against 11 competitors who are state funded. It’s completely impossible for a private entity.

JACK HAMILTON

When Michael starts talking about what works in Germany, you say to yourself a lot of this is culture or country specific. To say you have a model, it’s obviously crazy. Models are going to behave differently in different environments.

Do you have a comment on that, Robert, since you do a lot of work abroad?

ROBERT PICARD

What is important to do is to identify options that somebody can use, depending on the situation, depending on the individuals who are involved and depending on the tax rules.

One of the problems with tax rules, particularly here in the United States, is that when it comes to tax rules regarding foundations, the IRS doesn’t like to break them down. The IRS wants them very generic, so they apply across all kinds of foundations. And they get really worried if you start giving a little special preference for health care, a special preference in this case for journalism or for other things, because they need relatively simple ways of applying how those are applied.

JACK HAMILTON

We know we ought to have public parks because the society needs parks. And we know that we need schools, and we need to subsidize schools and pay for those schools because schools are important things. Why can’t we say information is important and start from that point of view, news and information, and then work to solutions to subsidize it from the government’s point of view?

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

I think that is a great idea, but we have a citizenry that has become accustomed to having their news provided to them. It’s a little like Michael was saying, people are assuming their public television will give it them. Why should they create it?

We have the different situation of people assuming that the commercial 28

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model is going to give them information, and they will pay very little for it.

So we would have to help foster a sense of responsibility. Of course, it’s growing up in digital media, a sense that we want to be contributors as citizens, but there is a real disconnect in terms of feeling responsible for paying for substantial, original journalism.

I think one problem is that those of us in the press haven’t spoken out on behalf of journalism, and people don’t really understand what is happening.

Still, when I give speeches, I hear all the time, oh, well, so they are making just a little less money than they used to make.

LARRY KRAMER

One of the problems is that the public’s expectation for news is being filled by a new media that doesn’t have the same underpinning as journalism per se.

The danger is that people think they can go to a site that has no journalistic integrity and get the same kind of information they were getting before from something that did.

Part of that is the industry is not doing a very good job of explaining what it is that we do. We were delivering a newspaper to their door at one point in time, and that was the primary place they got information but now they can get that information fifty different places in 10 seconds on the Web. We need to do a bang-up job of explaining what the difference is between raw, unfettered information and, again, I will use that word, curated information, or something that has been vetted.

JAY HAMILTON

One reason why it is incumbent on universities and nonprofits to try to develop this policy is because there are a set of folks making public policy decisions who don’t believe there is a problem. That’s why they are not looking at questions like this.

I asked one of the FCC commissioners, pointblank, whether he thought there was a market failure with the creation of local information. He said no. He said the fact that you can go on the Internet and access information about your community means that there is not a market failure.

It’s the throwback to the 1980s version of the FCC’s regulation, where the FCC was ruled by folks who said the public interest is defined by the public’s interest; television is just a toaster with pictures.

I’m not saying the FCC should be at the forefront of this, perhaps because of the First Amendment, but I do think that there are a set of people who don’t believe there is a problem. If you do believe that there is a problem, then it is incumbent upon you to try to develop this list of policy tools.

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JIM BRADY

I worry that we may end up too focused on trying to figure out what the next structure is, and forget about the fact that there is still a pretty vibrant business that may still support us going down the road; we can’t afford to get too distracted by a lot of other models. I think we should have lots of options, but taking the eye off the ball of the current models concerns me a little bit.

MICHAEL MAIER

We are talking about two different things: How do we save the old media so they can do good journalism? And, how can we embrace new technology to produce new good journalism? They are two completely different points.

One of the most important things for journalism, is to understand how these new things in the Internet are working. Just take Wikipedia. I don’t understand how something like that can happen. No big foundation, no big profit guide. We can discuss in detail whether it’s good or not, but still, for me, it’s remarkably good without any money.

Where is the market failure? People just did it themselves. They don’t get paid for it. It’s a problem for the business model. So which is more important: that people get information or that someone makes money off delivering that information? It’s two different things.

What is missing so far is respected institutions, like universities or foundations, really digging into these new ventures.

NEIL BUDDE

The market is made up of supply and demand, and what is out of whack is that there is not enough demand. People can see that there isn’t a huge demand to consume a lot of the good, quality journalism that is being produced. We’ve got to get the public more interested in reading about some of the issues that are important to society.

For years, particularly in the newspaper world, we could publish a lot of that, and we didn’t have to know that very few people actually read those stories, because what mattered was that the people making the decisions and the people setting the policy were reading them.

Now you can measure it, and it’s suddenly like, whoa, nobody is looking at that. And then the market forces are telling the editors, well, stop producing that and start producing something that people are reading.

JACK HAMILTON

Is original newsgathering declining?

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ROBERT PICARD

We never had many newspapers doing really exemplary national and international coverage. That was the province of maybe a dozen, two dozen papers at the most.

Most papers were just abysmal on that kind of coverage, if you go back 30 or 40 years ago. They were depending on the AP. They had two or three pages of wire copy, maybe some syndicated, and that was it.

Only maybe four or five dozen papers in this country really on a regular basis did highly distinguished local coverage. Local television news has been invisible for years. We really have this idea that we did an awful lot of original, important coverage here, and I’m not sure that it really happened.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Can I just step in with a little bit of counter information about that? We definitely have some indications, for example, about state news coverage. Now we may think it’s not important, but it was a very different scene when I began it in the 1970s. And there were studies that were done in connection with the publication in the American Journalism Review, too, that look at very specific declines in state legislative news coverage. Now it has some implications for us as a democracy.

You talk about there were maybe a couple of dozen newspapers doing it.

Well, that is more than are doing really excellent local news coverage today. I would love to see more indicators, but I wouldn’t quite so readily accept it.

AMY McCOMBS

This is just taking a little bit different twist on some of the history you gave.

You talked about the shift from the consumer paying for content and then shifting it to the advertisers.

In the newspaper era people paid for a delivery system. Today, they are actually paying more for delivery systems. If you look at the original cost of cable as a utility and what people are paying now. Look at the cell phone and what is happening there.

It appears to me that people are willing to pay quite a bit and probably more than they have ever paid for a delivery system. This creates new gatekeepers. The cable operator is a gatekeeper that broadcasters have always worried about. The cell phone companies are now providing content and access to content.

ROBERT PICARD

In the U.S., for every dollar that an advertiser pays for media, consumers pay

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seven. And they are spending quite a bit, but they are not spending it for news. They are spending it for entertainment. As I have already said, I think it was a minority of the people that bought the paper for news. It was probably less than a quarter of the people.

JIM BRADY

In one of the essays, someone said, “We need to stop romanticizing the past and casting every change in the business as damaging to journalism.”

To tie it back to the question you asked, “Is there more or less news gathering going on now?” Is it journalistic definition of news gathering, or is it public definition of news gathering? A blogger goes to a local zoning board meeting and writes up a report to do some journalism and we get so tied up in the discussion of whether it’s journalism or not. We don’t seem to ever want to ask the readers do they consider it journalism or information they can use.

I think there is a lot of different newsgathering going on than there was before.

ROBERT PICARD

Very often we are seeing too much coverage of easy and replicable news that every other news organization can do. We have 15 different stories about the number of casualties in Iraq yesterday. After a while, the public doesn’t care.

There is no meaning. They’re skipping it.

What the public needs is some substance of, “What do we make of this?”

These are the kind of stories that are missing and the ones that take time.

We know what every candidate said yesterday at every stop they made along the way, if we want. But do we really have any better picture today of where things are going in the campaigns or issues or other such things? Probably not. That is the stuff that takes money and time, and that is where the resource base comes in.

LARRY KRAMER

That was what we did with our affluence when we had it. When newsrooms went from 200 or 300 to 500 or 600 editorial staff, as they did in a lot of cities in the last 20 years, what did they cover? Well, we put the second guy on the plane with the Giants. We did things that went in a direction that didn’t really help our industry grow.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

That’s why it would be so hard to do the metrics. Because as Jim was saying, it depends on how we define journalism. If we are looking at the flow of 32

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international news, wouldn’t we want to include Global Voices Online, for example, this wonderful aggregation of bloggers? Certainly we would.

On the other hand, if we are looking at the flow of national news, the question of whether or not newspapers that used to cover the agriculture department, for example, make a difference, there may be industry publications that are covering it well, but, in fact, there are very few mainstream news publications that are covering it.

So do you get that residual affect that people are understanding agriculture as well as they used to when there were newspapers that didn’t just put another boy on the bus to cover the campaign, but that went in there and covered the agriculture department, which is expensive, in-depth kind of coverage?

JACK HAMILTON

Isn’t it true that the models we use determine journalistic norms?

For instance, the idea of objectivity in journalism, as Jay has shown in his book, is really an economic issue. We like to think journalists all of a sudden said, hey, we ought to be fair and get balanced views. What happened was there was an economic model that actually promoted the idea of having a publication that wasn’t offensive to lots of people, right? So if we start looking at new models, we may also get new definitions of what even journalism ought to be. You want to say anything about that, Jay? JAY HAMILTON

Fixed costs drove the creation of what we think as a moral idea. The magic word was high-speed printing press. We used to have a partisan press. And then in the 1870s, the high-speed press was invented. It was really expensive.

If you wanted to spread the average cost across a lot of people, you stopped being the Democratic paper or the Republican paper. You became the independent paper. That was very attractive also to advertisers because they didn’t have to negotiate with five papers. They could negotiate with one paper.

Today, the great news for consumers is fixed costs have gone down so you can have literally an outlook very close to what your political world view is.

You can see your ideas reflected back to you, and that is the partisan nature of the Internet.

And that is what Jim is competing against. He’s competing against people who can get coverage much closer to their political world view. And then it’s up to him about how he responds to that. Does he personalize? Does he create three or four different bloggers within the news site to have different viewpoints?

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The interesting thing also is it makes the other outlets seem more biased. If I am now getting an outlet that tells me my world view, other networks seem more biased because there is a lot more difference between what I am seeing and what they show.

If you look at average audiences across cable shows, people who consume cable now view the other ones as much more biased, because there is such a difference between what they are hearing.

BILL WHEATLEY

I think finally we are beginning to get it, but is it too little, too late? And that goes to issues of how creative we can be in creating the sort of content that people are willing to seek out and that advertisers are willing to support.

Among the very clear trends is that the media are beginning to play to their individual strengths. We are seeing more and more newspapers, for example, understanding that local is the name of the game for them and that their single best possibility in the new technology may be to be the leading voice in their communities for information and commentary and analysis.

We are seeing and understanding that the traditional tools have expanded in a way that you really have to be involved in multimedia presentation. If you have to have creativity in how you tell your stories, then you have to use not only words but pictures and graphics and documents, etc.

Jim, what are the trends you are seeing at washingtonpost.com?

JIM BRADY

Our most popular sections of the site is arts and living, because arts and living incorporates horoscopes, crosswords, comics. If I took those three out, arts and living would not be number one on our site.

Opinions is number two. Politics is number three. So you are starting with sort of the fun stuff and the opinion stuff right off the bat, and then local news and sports after that.

I found the talk of going toward more specialization very interesting, since we have a very general store approach. There are a number of things we have launched in the last couple of years that I thought people wouldn’t like.

For example, we had really bad sports scoreboards for 10 years. They got no traffic. Finally, AP was able to put together and work on the stats and make some really good stats packages for us. I figured we’re not going to get any traffic on these. ESPN and CBS’s SportsLine own this space. We put sports scoreboards up, and they just shot right up.

And that would have been something I never would have tried if we’d 34

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focused on specializing. If we’re only able to play where we have a clear advantage, then we’re going to do politics. We are going to do opinion. We’re going to do local news, local sports, and we are going to leave all the commoditized information out.

So we have actually seen the opposite effect. We have launched a lot of things that we didn’t think would be successful, and they were, so that is actually kind of encouraging, but it’s also confusing. We are really going to have these five or six pillars in five years. We just aren’t going to be able to do the other stuff between them. We are likely going to have to give up portfolios to the Journal and to MarketWatch. We’re probably going to have to give up sports scores to ESPN. But, for now, the idea is build audience and build traffic, and we’ve been surprised how many things we’d consider niche have worked for us.

Now the general store approach may work for our site because it’s a local paper but a national brand. I don’t think smaller papers are going to get a lot of traffic off of some of the things we’ve gotten traffic for.

If you look at a lot of the smaller papers, they’re finally focusing on making their sites community hubs, which I think for a long time they just didn’t even do it. They got distracted by this national and international audience that the Web brought and decided, wow, I can suddenly get all of these people from outside the area to come to my local newspaper, and they completely missed the obvious thing in front of them that they could build communities around their local area. So they spent two decades basically trying to build these audiences outside their regions and ignored the one that was going to generate all the traffic and all the revenues.

Now that is starting to come back. If you go to conferences, everybody is talking about turning their local site into a community hub. Meanwhile, all of these listserves and blogs have popped up in these areas that have already grabbed a fair amount, not all, but certainly a fair amount of audience. So like I said, we’re a bit of an anomaly. I think that’s the only way to go for a lot of local papers.

BILL WHEATLEY

What about embargoing material for the newspaper? In other words, making it so you can’t get some information on the Web. JIM BRADY

Yes. Again, we are in a bit of a unique situation in that 85 percent of the people who have come to washingtonpost.com are outside Washington and couldn’t get the paper anyway. So for us, we have always felt like holding anything back doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, because most of the country 35

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can’t see it anyway, even if we just put it in the paper. So I am not sure that that would help us a lot.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Print publications ceasing to do print and moving online—this trend is moving more quickly in Europe, is it not, Robert and Michael? I have heard of several European papers that have now decided to cease print publication. I think the Kentucky Post is the only one I know about in the United States.

MICHAEL MAIER

Well, there have been some business magazines in Switzerland who closed down the print operations and only do it online, but I don’t know about any really respected or mid-size newspaper that closed down in Europe. It’s very different from country to country. Like in Germany, we still have the crazy situation where the big newspapers, like Süddeutsche, which is comparable to The Washington Post and The New York Times, deliver a fraction of the content on the Web. But Süddeutsche, which is based in Munich, has exactly the same issue as you do. They are strong in the local area but not distributed nationwide.

LARRY KRAMER

One of the issues for local papers is redefining the community. Local and regional newspapers used to be the one common thread in cities. I think people themselves are redefining their communities, sometimes around some topics that aren’t really geographically local anymore.

There is a really interesting regulatory issue, which used to be that a regional newspaper couldn’t buy the community weeklies around it for antitrust reasons, but on the Web, they can cover everything. They can build local coverage in.

The San Francisco I experience every day is different from the San Francisco someone else experiences every day. We may both love the San Francisco Giants, for example, but have very different commutes to work and need very different traffic information.

A local entity could cover “my San Francisco” on the Web better than ever before. I could get alerts on my Blackberry if my traffic route is affected going home, for example.

By definition, it’s going to have to include things like bloggers and the kind of people who are gathering Little League scores. You don’t need a five-year veteran reporter to cover a Little League game. But you, in fact, can cover that Little League game for the first time as a regional newspaper, and you probably should.

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The Washington Post gets the kind of traffic you are talking about to those other features, because people are creatures of habits. No matter how many Websites you go to, almost everybody I know narrows it down to four or five that they use regularly. And they are willing to get certain things from those four or five if they will give it to them.

HISTORICAL FLASHBACK ROBERT PICARD

It’s difficult to solve problems if you don’t understand how they developed. I always like to look at the bigger picture.

In many ways the challenges that are facing news organizations today are the result of what were reasonable rational responses to the conditions in the 20th Century, conditions that are very different today.

And the choices that were made by news organizations in the past are really at the heart of the problems we face today. I want to take a few minutes to just put those situations in a historical perspective and to look at what happened.

If we look at today compared to a hundred years ago, the number of news sources and the amount of news has expanded dramatically. The average number of pages in newspapers tripled during the 20th Century. The average number of network television news operations was 16 times higher in 2000 than it was in 1950.

News became available 24 hours a day on cable. And the Internet, of course, has multiplied the number of places we can get news as well.

Today we are essentially awash with news and information.

In the 20th Century news organizations created a huge oversupply of news. News and information were available from them more and more, and the consumption didn’t increase proportionately with the supply; in fact, it declined. In any industry, when you have consumption declining while supply increases that is disaster. That is at the heart of what we are doing today.

Readership problems have been evident for 50 years in the newspaper industry. We hit a peak of circulation in 1993, but penetration of newspapers in the population has been declining at one and two percent a year for 50 years. The end result: the penetration in the audience today of newspapers is half of what it was in 1950. That’s a dramatic change and dramatic decline. That’s coming to roost now, and advertisers and others are seeing that and questioning that.

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Network television viewing is half what it was in 1980. News magazines are down between 15 and 20 percent in the last 20 years. This decline is going on, but we are pushing more and more news and information out there at the same time, and this is problematic. People are spending more time with media, but on entertainment and diversion, not news and information.

The interesting thing about the arrival of the Internet, is that it’s not hurting newspapers as much as it is hurting television entertainment.

Television entertainment is getting burned very badly. In some of the nations where you have the biggest uses of the Internet, you have as much as a 20 percent decline in television viewing. But they are not giving up news because they already gave that up. They are giving up entertainment, so that creates a real problem.

The reality has always been that most people never read the newspaper because they loved the news. They read it to get the sports scores. They read it to get the lotto results. They read it to get recipes. They did it for all of these other things, and it was cheap and easy historically to do so.

In the heyday of network television where they had the very high ratings, people weren’t watching the network television news because they loved the news, but because when they switched the channel, there was also news on the other channel, because all the networks put the news on at the same time. So you didn’t have any place to go. The number of independent channels was limited in most of the country, so you were forced to watch it.

Well, today we have a very different situation. If you look at news organizations over the 20th Century, you really do see that what we did during most of the 20th Century was add nonnews items. If you look at editorial content in the newspapers, only about15 percent of it is anything that you would consider news, and the rest of it is other kinds of things.

Newspapers sat there and added all of the features, the entertainment, the sports, the comics, the advice columns and other such things over the years. They added food and expanded it into sections, rather than an occasional recipe, simply because the advertisers wanted it. They added an automobile section because the advertisers wanted it. So this gave the readers a lot of things that they could do there.

When network television expanded out of the evening areas, they began following the same pattern. So you started getting a lot of entertainment news, cooking segments, product reviews, other such 38

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things on the morning shows. It followed the pattern seen in newspapers.

One of the problems for the news industry as a whole is that journalists and news executives have really short and rosy memories. This is due, in part, to the fact the work was very concentrated on the here and now, which is quite understandable. But it’s also wishful thinking, thinking back on the good times of the past, and there is some belief that the good times can return.

The good times were an aberration. We have had journalism for almost 300 years, depending on where you are, and most of the time journalism was a rather impoverished field. We got used to this nice last half of the 20th Century and think that it is, in fact, the norm.

It was a really short and unique, abnormal period in which economics and technologies gave a lot of resources that allowed an expansion of coverage and allowed us to do things that we couldn’t do before. And so we got rich, fat, and happy, and we liked being that way.

But before the explosion in profits, you could make money in journalism but not a fortune. Most of your rewards were nonpecuniary.

You got to have influence in the community. You got to do some public service, to seek the truth, do all these kinds of things. Those gave a lot of intrinsic rewards rather than monetary rewards along the way.

If we go back 75 to a hundred years, there were only a few in the major cities that ever made big money, and most often we frowned upon them because of their practices and the tactics they used in doing it.

But when they began journalism schools, they rehabilitated themselves along the way in a number of places.

So what does all this in the end tell us about the state of news organizations? Well, how would they have to change in the coming years? And that’s really where we are looking.

We must see where we have come and how we can develop news organizations that are going to get stronger.

It means that most of what everybody knows about the newspaper business from the last thirty years will have to be discarded and will have to start again and think about the newspaper and the broadcast and online businesses in a very different way. It means that companies are going to have to become much more innovative and entrepreneurial in their approaches to their information.

That won’t be comfortable for most people in the industry. It’s certainly 39

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not going to be comfortable to corporate ownership as this occurs, but it’s work that I think has to be done if news organizations are to remain relevant and sustain themselves in the 21st Century.

(Editor’s Note: For a more in-depth discussion of the history of media and Picard’s thoughts on future trends, see his essay, “News Consumption and the Business of Journalism” on page 112.)

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NEW MODELS FOR JOURNALISTS SUBJECT AREAS Journalists as curators ° Avoid lecturing; let readers in ° Embrace risk in Web ventures ° Finding the equilibrium for staff levels for print versus online

LARRY KRAMER

I think we need to understand the new roles of journalists in this world, and one of those new roles is as a kind of curator, where you provide the guideposts to all these other bits of information.

We tended in the newspaper to feel like we had to publish something, and just because somebody else was publishing it didn’t matter. We had to do it.

What the Internet does is it connects people with databases. All we have to do is let people know where to find the information.

Just giving them the ability to come through our site and go to the audio recording of what issues are coming up in front of your town council tonight—or point them towards a blogger who is writing about it—is a function we never performed before.

Are you somebody’s prism into their own community? Are you there to tell them, “You live here and here are some things you should be interested in?” I think we are.

ROBERT PICARD

I think one of the most important things that Michael has said, and Larry has underscored, is that with the new communication abilities, the public is demanding to have a different relationship with the content provided in the past. They want to be addressed differently. They want to take part in the communication in a different way.

I think this is a particular problem for journalists, because they have always had a certain amount of disdain or contempt for their audience—the schoolmaster of the people. We had to take them and train them and mold their minds so they would do the right thing. We certainly don’t want to have to talk to them very often. We certainly know better what they need than they know what they need. All of these attitudes are fairly reflected in a lot of journalistic practices over the last 100 years.

That is one of the reasons it’s so difficult for traditional organizations or traditional journalists to make this change because it’s not just about technology, and it’s not just about how you present something; it’s about how you relate to those people, and those people are suspicious in many journalists’ eyes. I think that creates a huge problem when we move into new media.

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GENEVA OVERHOLSER

I would just say that that has definitely been true. I think it has radically changed in the past year even. If you go to the American Society of Newspaper Editors now, you hear a completely different tone. We used to hate that we have to listen to readers. Now we get completely that they don’t want a lecture.

They want a seminar. Readers want in. We may not be doing a very good job of being responsive, but people are totally over the “We don’t care.”

JIM BRADY

I think the reason we learned that is we watched other sites do it better than we did. So we watched a bunch of people succeed by building communities when we weren’t. So we learned our lesson a little bit late on that.

Unfortunately, I think the biggest disagreement between the Website and the paper since I have been there has been over whether to allow comments on articles. The folks on the print side had no interest in letting readers actually say what they thought about these articles in any kind of public view.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Who are they to care?

JIM BRADY

Right. It was kind of like Andrew Jackson at his inauguration letting the public into the White House. Some worried that they were going to break the china.

They were going to lift the antiques. And the truth is there are people who want to break china and do all of that, but there are lots of people who actually want to have an engaging, productive conversation, who can provide tips, who can become sources, who can point out mistakes in articles. Now looking two years forward reporters went from saying, “I can’t believe we’re putting comments in articles,” to “Did you see I got 450 comments on my article today?”

LARRY KRAMER

The really fascinating thing here is that the nature of the story has changed.

It’s not aloof. It’s now the beginning of a conversation. I asked the people at CBS if they are paying attention to blogs after what happened to Rather. You better at least face up to what they are saying, because there is a chance they are saying something that matters, and you need to hear it. You can make your own decision about what to do about it, but we have been afraid of it because the blogosphere is open and free and unedited.

It’s been difficult for media sites to embrace the blogosphere, because we worry that the public doesn’t know the difference between journalism and an unedited, unadulterated blogger, somebody who can say whatever he or she wants.

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So putting blogs in open comment under any page that has a media brand on it has been scary, legally and for a lot of reasons, because people believe we are going to be held to a standard—it’s different than putting it on Yahoo, something that doesn’t exist as a media company or brand. The fact we were scared of that kept us from doing it.

JACK HAMILTON

Traditional media companies have one big comparative advantage, which is the capacity to gather information and sift it, but they are always trying to protect parts of that franchise, which makes them less creative, and so there is that tension.

MICHAEL MAIER

I couldn’t agree more that many journalists, of course, are very aware of these problems, and have changed their minds. But what I have been watching, and what we also have been watching in our research, is it’s more a structural problem. It’s something deep in the culture.

For example, when the Los Angeles Times tried to introduce the Wikipedialike thing, Michael Kinsley was in charge of the editorial page of the LA Times at the time. Wikipedia was taking off and they decided, hey, why shouldn’t we do something like it? So they encouraged readers to write their own editorials on the Internet so everybody could contribute.

But they only thought three days ahead. They started and then had night shifts Tuesday and Wednesday, but by Thursday they got tired, and they went home at two o’clock. That was in 2005. Everyone knows the Internet is 24 hours. They had very, very bad technology that didn’t protect them against spam. So foreign spammers went over the site and posted terrible stuff.

By Saturday, they closed the experiment and said it failed. I have been in many Internet ventures. I have never been spammed by porn, although we haven’t spent a lot of money protecting ourselves. I don’t think you can close down an experiment after three days.

JIM BRADY

Two things on the LA Times: first, they took the Iraq war as the example.

When you test a new form like that, you should use a clearly benign editorial, like “How cute are puppies?” where there isn’t going to be a huge debate about the topics and focus more on how to use the actual function.

The bigger problem: They took the risk, which was great, but the minute that first real risk didn’t work out, they just shut down for a couple of years. We have had blowups that were not maybe as big as that one, but certainly a 43

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couple that were as close to being as big as that one. I just felt like the one thing you do when you have hundreds, thousands of emails/comments coming at you, telling you that you’re doing something wrong, is to just shut that venture down all together and just get into a defensive crouch.

LARRY KRAMER

I agree with you that the Web is a culture where if you risk and fail, your reputation in the Web industry is better than if you don’t take any chances. A lot of people have trouble getting their head around that. We have tried lots of things and failed, but a lot of people say, good for them for trying that. If you just sit there and say that is not going to work, you actually hurt your reputation more than help it; a lot of media companies are just not used to that sort of situation.

JIM BRADY

Yes, I want to talk more about how we’re making it harder on ourselves by not adapting culturally to the way things are changing.

First, is the continued over-analysis of every new thing that we do. For example, people on staff, even the Web staff, will ask, why don’t we put a database of every vote cast in Congress since 1991 up on the website? But is that journalism?

Is this database useful for people who come on the website? Is anybody really going to dispute that? We get into these incredibly, long tedious arguments about whether this is part of The Washington Post’s mission or not. I think most of it is past, I would say, but there is still some of it. We tend to overanalyze every single thing we do.

There are people who are sort of wedded to, “This is the way we have always done things ever since I graduated from J school X-years ago.”

There are so many things we do on the Website now that people question say, for example, a pet page. We know anything furry gets traffic. It’s never going to be what The Washington Post is about, but user generated pet photos generate half a million page views a year. That subsidizes the sort of stuff that we want to do journalistically, wherever that is. But we end up debating why we are doing things like pet photos.

Why do we build technology sections on Websites to attract advertisers? Why do we have a travel section in the newspaper? These are all sorts of things that have been done. We tend to re-discuss them again when we get to the Web. We tend to get bogged down in all of that stuff, which leads to the second problem: a complete aversion to risk. And I understand in the print 44

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newspaper world, trying new things is a lot harder from the actual production side of things. It’s a lot of work. But on a Website, it’s not. We should be rolling.

On top of that, you have this immense amount of information about how people use your Website. So you can try things, get them launched and find out where there is an audience pretty quickly. If there is not, you know you are not annoying anybody by shutting it down.

Despite that, we are still stuck in a culture that overanalyzes: Let’s focus group test; let’s do this; let’s do that. I think I made a lot of progress on that by just trying stuff. We did live shows around big political nights. We just do four hours of live TV basically on the Web, where Post reporters come on and talk about what is happening on Super Tuesday, the primary. We are doing one today with the NFL draft where we will have someone sitting in front of a camera for six hours talking about every single pick and how it affects the Redskins, because that’s what people in Washington care about. They don’t care about the 31 teams. They care about one.

JACK HAMILTON

Are there places to go to see what has worked on the Web and what hasn’t worked?

JIM BRADY

Sure. It’s not publicly on the Website. We run metrics. You can run metrics on how many page views you get, how many repeat visitors you get, etc. So yes, we have done lots of things that haven’t worked, but the worst thing you can do is not try.

This kind of fits into the over-analysis: let’s not revisit history. Inevitably if I go speak to the print newsroom downtown somebody will ask the question, “Why don’t you charge for the Website?” I have answered it in every single newsroom meeting for the last three years.

Why do we let Google index our content? Why doesn’t Google pay us for the right to index our content? Of course, it will never happen. As Google drives a quarter of a million page views a day on our Website, I’m not sure exactly why we would want to block them.

We tend to have asked these questions about revisiting things we should have done five years ago or six years ago or 10 years ago or 12 years ago as opposed to like, okay, this is where we are. Let’s reorient ourselves and look forward and figure out how to get to the next place.

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ROBERT PICARD

One of the interesting conflicts between print and online, rather than the fact that they just don’t like each other for various reasons, is there is a difference in the way they approach the creation of content and the creation of the product. In a newspaper, you have very strong process orientation. You have got a lot of different activities that have to come together in a very short period of time.

The knowledge of how to do that resides in the organization. It’s in all the process and procedures and handbooks and everything that you have. Once you go online, however, what you are dealing with is much more of a project orientation, which is, let’s create this package. Let’s put these features on. The knowledge tends to reside in the producer. So you get real conflicts when you have project orientation coming up against process orientation. This is not just a newspaper problem. This is now opening for television stations that are now putting all their news online. You are running into huge conflicts of where does the knowledge in how to produce this lay, and there is difference between having it in the organization and having it in the personnel.

CHUCK LEWIS

What is the situation with the presidential race regarding the traditional print part of The Washington Post versus the online part, in terms of the staffing issues? Your site is probably regarded, I would say, as the most successful, highest quality U.S. newspaper Website for various reasons.

We all know that the larger staff by far is on 15th Street, and the smaller staff is across the river, and this is not necessarily unique to The Washington Post.

I remember you and I were at a conference at American University just 18 months ago, and the guy from The New York Times had dark circles under his eyes, and it looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks because he had like 900 reporters at that time and he was looking at the numbers. He was trying to figure out where this is going. And I guess, what is your latest thinking about that? The Post has gone from something like 850 to 650 editorial employees, whatever the numbers are. Where is the equilibrium factor? When veteran Washington Post, award-winning people ask, “Do you think that I should move over to the Website?” what do you say? Where is this going in one year, three years, five years?

JIM BRADY

A really quick background for those who don’t know; we wouldn’t be the last of the larger papers that have a completely separate newsroom. The print newsroom at 15th and L, and the Web newsroom in Arlington are supposed to report up to the same person but don’t have any connection to each another.

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So Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie and I both report to Katharine Weymouth, who is the CEO of Washington Post Media. We are unique in that way. We are also not in the same building. We’re not in the same state.

I think where it’s headed: the Website has not grown in the last couple of years. We haven’t shrunk either. The Website’s editorial staff is basically what it was two years ago, about 95 to a hundred. The newspaper is obviously going down in circulation. You can’t have separate newsrooms forever in the financial climate we have now. So we are going to start talking about ways to bring them together, whether it’s physically, organizationally or both.

We probably brought 10 people from the newspaper over to the website in the last two years, because people are really interested in coming over now and seeing this new thing. As one of them said, “I got tired of sitting over there dreading what was going to happen in the future and decided that I wanted to be a part of figuring it out.”

So that certainly helps in terms of culture.

When we hire people from the newspaper, we do incredibly intense training.

We have people from the newspaper come over and spend three days at the Website now, 15 at a time, three days at the Website, sitting with multimedia journalists, sitting on the homepage, hearing what the business model is.

Basically, we give them as much as we can in three days. People sort of get what we do now a lot more than they did before.

So I think our future is merging newsrooms to reduce cost base. I think you are going to start to see papers like the Post, who are going to have to look at the viability of weekly sections.

I certainly know that no matter how small the Post newsrooms gets, it’s going to cover politics, national security, local news, local sports, and local business.

JACK HAMILTON

Do you have cases, Jim, where there is duplication of coverage?

JIM BRADY

No. JACK HAMILTON

How do you avoid that?

JIM BRADY

Multimedia journalists have to partner with Post journalists doing their own projects. We have maybe 10 bloggers/writers, but they work closely with the 47

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paper. Basically, the rule is we don’t want to ever have two people at the same event, unless we intended that to happen.

So we have people who are called political bloggers, but part of that is because there’s such an appetite for political news on the Website that we wanted someone who could sort of continually produce journalism all day long as opposed to those sort of dribs and drabs that you get when you get it from the once-a-day publication or people filing earlier during the day.

We’ll hire our own people and put them into places where we need more content or because the Website is so national and the newspaper is so local.

We have a blog about it. It’s called celebritology. It’s just sort of writing about celebrities, which is one of our most popular. But it’s something the paper probably wouldn’t do because it’s a gossip column. They tend to be very Washington focused. So when we see a content gap like that, because of the different audiences, we will go do something.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

On the one hand, you may have 100, and 15th Street has 650 or whatever. But on the other hand Howie Kurtz, who was on 15th Street, does a lot of work specifically for you. I would assume there is an enormous amount of talent on 15th Street that you tap into.

JIM BRADY

There are probably 45 to 50 people in the downtown newsroom that blog with some regularity for the Website. There are 30 to 40 who do weekly, live discussions where they answer questions from readers. There are 150 of them trained to shoot video now. We probably run eight to 10 reporter videos a week.

We have tons of stuff from the reporters in the newsroom. That’s why we don’t have to really hire our own journalists. The only thing I think we have to sort out is when you take those newsrooms and when you put them together, there is certainly some cost savings in terms of facilities and equipment, things like that. I am not sure there is a huge overlap between what we do and what folks in the newspaper do. I think they are very, very different jobs.

AMY McCOMBS

I left the Washington Post Company in 1988 to go to the Chronicle Publishing Company. I believed it was critical for media companies to breakdown their various silos. Headquartered in San Francisco the Chronicle Company had an advantage. It was at ground zero of the digital age….Silicon Valley. Not only was the technology being developed but the early adopters were there.

We entered the Internet world early when Spyglass was one of the few Web 48

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browsers. We were listening to our consumers. In the 1990s they wanted news information when they wanted it, how they wanted it and where they wanted it.

So we put together an interesting model that was really product driven. I brought the newspaper’s managing editor, Dan Rosenheim, to the broadcast division where we were creating a 24-hour cable channel and an integrated Website. He was a newspaper guy who got it.

I will give you an example of the value of all of these multi-platforms.

When Steve Jobs announced in Boston Apple’s partnership with Microsoft we broke the story on SFGate, our Web platform. Our camera crews were there so we moved the story to our 24-hour cable channel where we were able to go more in-depth. The story continued on our 11pm news and in the Chronicle’s bulldog edition where the print reporters on the scene picked up new angles and information. The story continued to the next day’s paper and sold out at the news stands. The consumer was able to get the story how they wanted it and when.

Across the system, everybody began to see how on a project basis you could work together. We can begin looking at partnering as a model. In many cases, I ended up partnering with the cable owners in our Midwest broadcast markets. We created a partnership where everybody added some value.

Partnering within media companies and within a given market is difficult.

You feel competitive. There is lack of risk taking.

I meet often with journalism convergence students. I want to meet with them because they are the younger ones with all of these gadgets.

I say, “Why did you come to this convergence program?” They all said, “We really like information. We like storytelling. We are a visual people. There was nowhere in a conventional college where we could fit what we loved to do.

The only place that it all came together was in convergence media. It was our J school.”

I think those are the people that are going to solve a lot of these problems, because they understand the technology, and they are not afraid. They have none of the cultural problems. They see the values of all the different pieces.

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NEW MODELS FOR BROADCASTING SUBJECT AREAS Networks are losing control of distribution ° The changing definition of “local” ° Should the government get deeper into the TV news business?

CHUCK LEWIS

Bill, as the former executive vice-president of NBC News, and your long-time network service, what is the network strategy?

It seems like the financial strategy for the networks is to own as many owned and operated local stations as possible. They are the cash cows, but as for foreign coverage, one network is talking about outsourcing it to CNN. I am trying to see what the strategy is for newsgathering in the future but also the business plan for the network news division.

BILL WHEATLEY

I am not sure there is a solution, first of all.

The desire is to hold on to the profits as long as possible. There have been cutbacks in an effort to maintain those sorts of margins.

There is clearly an expansion on the Web; some are doing it better than others. I would say for the evening news, there is some attention being paid these days to doing more original work. They recognize that news has become such a commodity that we better have some different stories from everybody else, or why would anyone watch us. I think that makes sense to some degree provided you can do good stories and make them interesting to the audience. They are maintaining the beat system by and large, which I think has paid benefits. NBC has been spending a lot of money to cover the environment, for example.

But in terms of a long-term strategy, it’s basically to try as long as you can to maintain income and see what sort of other businesses you can get into. The network news divisions are expanding in terms of getting into education or working with publishers, using their archives, video archives, etc.

I don’t think that the networks, and, particularly, the stations they own, have fully thought through the consequences of all of this changing technology, and even for them, there is going to come a day where it’s going to be extremely difficult to afford them. They really need to position themselves well. They have some advantages. I think NBC has been particularly advantaged by its association with MSN and MSNBC in creating large audiences.

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ROBERT PICARD

One of the things that network owners have looked at in the last few years is how to stop being a network and how to become a channel instead. Basically, they can cut out local stations and go direct through cable or whatever.

Because you would cut out a huge amount of expense of service to the local stations by doing that and still actually be able to have access to most of the audience because of the expansion of cable and satellite.

The one thing that they keep coming back to in these discussions, however, is where do we get local news if they do that, because they now have all of the local news exchanges? And even if they manage to hang on to owner/operator stations or switch those into bureaus, they still can’t get enough coverage nationally to handle it. And on top of that, they lose all the sales they are getting through their news video provision along the way.

So there is this really interesting strategic problem for them in how they deal with the local stations and whether or not they move out. Because they can move out next week and all go on cable and actually not lose much of an audience.

LARRY KRAMER

The networks are scared to death of losing control of distribution. The networks control not just the creation of content, which they spend a lot of money to control—they spend a couple of billion dollars developing shows every year—they then control the distribution.

So historically, there were four networks, first three, then four networks that had the bulk of the programming. If you were a producer of television shows, you had to get your show accepted by one of these networks if you hoped to have a television show.

They spent a billion dollars a year developing programming starting with 100 producers, 50 shows, 50 pilots, five shows to make it. It’s a hit-driven business.

So CSI, which is three shows on CBS but a single franchise, is worth $2 billion to CBS in revenue a year. That is $2 billion out of about a $12 or $13 billion total corporate business, because it involves syndication and other revenue streams.

They know how important it is to be able to drive those hits. And the fact that only four of them are doing it helped protect them. Even in years when they might not have been that good in what they picked, there were only three other guys doing it. That is all changing now, and they’re scared to death of it.

When you stop to think of why a network was built, it wasn’t built around 51

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local news. It was built because the networks need affiliates in every city to get their programming to that city.

If you are CBS, and you wanted your programs to be seen in New York, you needed an affiliate. Either you owned it or somebody had it, and that was the entire underpinning of the network structure. That is totally out the window.

Who do you know that is watching television on rabbit ears based on that broadcast? You are getting a local station, but you are getting it through cable, or you are getting it through satellite.

One of the reasons the networks are so scared of putting any content on the Internet is because they lose control over distribution. They watched what happened to the music industry where Steve Jobs got the set pricing. They didn’t. They lost control over pricing. He had the only device people were buying music on. The television networks are scared to death of that.

ROBERT PICARD

When newspapers go online, they save about 65 to 70 percent of costs, but lose 95 percent of their revenue. So it’s not a very good trade off. It’s good on one side but not on the other. If you look at broadcasting, it has the same problems. So when and how you trade off becomes an issue.

We have a really interesting problem in this country today in that half of the television stations in America do not broadcast news. How did we ever get to that point? How did we ever allow policy to degenerate to the point where we say you can have a station, but you don’t have to broadcast local news? That is a frightening thing to me in terms of policy.

JACK HAMILTON

When you had limited spectrum, you can then rent it out based on public service, and we don’t require that anymore the way we did once before. So we have an option, the Jay Hamilton sort of option, which is that we can subsidize traditional media through tax relief and other positive incentives.

But even in this new world, are there ways to do the opposite of what we fear government will do, which is censor? Are there ways for the government to promote news?

BILL WHEATLEY

Should America be thinking about government-subsidized news? Perhaps.

Possibly, broadcast journalism along the lines of the BBC in Great Britain or NHK in Japan, where the public pays a license fee annually and the government sets up a permanent, independent structure to cover news and information and present it. Here in America, we’re reluctant to get into that.

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MICHAEL MAIER

Do you think that America would like to have such a system right now?

BILL WHEATLEY

I think the average American would be concerned about the government getting into news, and the average journalist is concerned about the government increasingly getting into news.

Now, on the other hand, I think overall, the BBC and NHK systems work in the sense that they do a responsible job of covering the news. So there is some public value, certainly, to having them.

JACK HAMILTON

The late Tim Cook had some very interesting things to say about this. The government does all kinds of things for the media, like letting you ignore child labor laws so that you can deliver papers or subsidizing postage or allowing joint operating agreements. There are a whole bunch of things that the government allows.

Maybe we need to educate the consumer that the government has already been involved. You just didn’t know it. So now that we have agreed the government is going to be involved, let’s decide what else ought to be done.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

There is no question we have a national aversion to this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fruitful at least to talk about the government role. Also, there is Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian in the U.K. The media in Britain is very different in no small part because there is this kind of support for the BBC. So we are fools not to at least talk about it. In fact, news literacy is, of course, one way to think about government involvement. At this program I attended at the National Press Club, there was a wonderful scholar talking about Canadian requirements in junior or high school where people take media literacy courses. In fact, there is a very different view toward media in our two countries because of the difference.

There are things we don’t talk about here, but that doesn’t mean we are smart not to talk about them.

BILL WHEATLEY

It’s important that it be on the table, and we look at it intelligently. The devil is always in the details on these things. Obviously, you need editorial safeguards. If you want to set up such a system, you need to make sure that there is some likelihood that it can be sustained and that it’s not going to be 53

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subject to the political fashion of the moment in terms of saying, well, okay, we set up this license fee, but this is tax cutting time, so let’s get rid of that.

But, yes, I think that it does have to be on the table. How that works in terms of broadcasting, how it works in terms of the emerging Web equation, is a trickier question, as is how you make sure that it doesn’t stifle the sort of creativity and innovation that you like to see in journalism from an independent community.

ROBERT PICARD

There actually is a growing anti-licensing fee movement in Europe, and it’s not fueled just by the competitors. In a number of countries they have actually done away with the license fee. The BBC in its current review thinks it might lose its license within 12 years.

There is new movement emerging in several European countries where you have film and television production boards that have grants that anybody can apply for to produce cultural programming, documentaries, domestic drama, things of that sort, that are outside the license fee.

There is no reason why you couldn’t do that in a journalistic way by creating something, maybe akin to the NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] or something like that, that actually funds certain kinds of journalism that we are not getting or very expensive kinds of journalism.

MICHAEL MAIER

The downside of this public television and radio is that, first of all, they naturally started to move into commercial areas. The BBC is attacked because it has a commercial entity, which acquired “Lonely Planet.” People said, “Why the hell has the state funded the company to acquire ‘Lonely Planet’?”

The German public television is heavily attacked because of moving into the Internet. So your commission really put a bar on that and said no way. You must not do more than just program-implicated stuff on the Web. So there is already a sentiment that there are restrictions.

Maybe one result of this meeting would be to look at models around us and evaluate specific models and then either pursue them further or stop asking for them.

One of the downsides of the Guardian as a nonprofit; they make their money with other things, but not with journalism.

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GENEVA OVERHOLSER

He said it’s not a nonprofit, but it’s true it doesn’t make a profit. They say a prayer every morning to Auto Trader. The Scott Trust does not require it to make money.

MICHAEL MAIER

Yes. So if you talk to the people, they will tell you that the Guardian is a great journalistic operation, but that’s not the way they make the money. The existence of the BBC or the public radio and television in Germany encourages traditional media to say, “Well, it’s the job of the BBC. Why would we do that?”

We do have that, for instance, in Germany, which is called only for Deutschtown radio, German radio, which is only for Deutschtown. It has 24hour coverage, but you can’t listen to that stuff. It’s really terrible, but it created a political class that communicated with the elitist journalist on this level. And normal people, when they switch on the radio, they think, “What is this? Is this Turkish? What is that?”

Therefore, I think you create an ivory tower and that is not so good for this broad society.

BEN SHUTE

A very quick observation is we have examples like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. The reality in this country is that those kinds of government-funded things are not able to do anything very edgy, and we’d see the same thing if we had a National Endowment for Journalism. It would be very safe, very bland journalism. And none of Chuck Lewis’s investigative reporting would get supported by it, because the minute it gets edgy, well, you know, the American way is motherhood and apple pie.

JACK HAMILTON

There are all kinds of reporting. What about some models for supplying news that doesn’t need to be edgy; the public just needs to be informed. And there are other models where we want to make sure we do the kinds of things that Chuck does.

Are there certain kinds of news that could be funded by the government or by government entities that wouldn’t do everything we wanted journalism to do, but would do some of the things we wanted journalism to do?

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LARRY KRAMER

Who decides what it is that we want? Here’s an interesting issue. We talked about this earlier. One of the companies is called Answers.com. And they have two Websites that are huge. Answers.com itself is a huge Website, 20th or 30th largest in the country.

You go online. You ask a question, and you get an answer compiled from several sources that Answers.com pays—encyclopedias, traditional sources—and you get these great answers, very informed, very accurate.

That site has been growing nicely. It slowed down a little bit in the last year or two, and they started a site called wikiAnswers where the public is doing the answering, like Wikipedia. It’s growing much faster than Answers.com. It’s almost past Answers.com in traffic. It’s clearly not as accurate, although, you know, it’s fairly accurate information, but it’s all done by the community. The community is providing the answers to what the reader believes is a more interesting, updated way than our own traditional sources of information.

It’s a little scary, but it’s interesting. Who is to say which the public would prefer? And there are different kinds of information that we may think is the appropriate way of doing information, but it’s not demonstrated that that is exactly what people want. How do you deal with that?

JAY HAMILTON

There could be data and information on government activities or the outcomes that we care about that government is involved with that could be funded through a NSF [National Science Foundation] style agency. The thing that is interesting right now is Google might be trying that. Google says its mission is to try to make information available.

Think about local crime statistics, the possibility of emissions, pollution indicators. That is all information that is dispersed. If you brought it together and made it usable through computer programs, government could fund both of those. They all have positive spillovers. There could be input data that could be funded by the government.

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NEW MODELS FOR ADVERTISERS SUBJECT AREAS Advertisers, which spend just eight percent of their budget online, need more models for their own storytelling ° As the vehicle for general news fractures, and advertisers also splinter off, what will subsidize public affairs and foreign news reporting? ° Can substantial news still bring in ad revenue?

BILL WHEATLEY

It’s sort of an article of faith now that advertisers aren’t fully plugged into the Web. Media must find a way to capture them, get them interested and provide them with the right cost structure to do that.

LARRY KRAMER

The public is now spending whatever it is, 30 percent of its time on the Web, but advertisers are spending just eight percent of their budget on the Web. Advertisers generally follow where people are, but they don’t know how to do it on the Web. They don’t know how to measure it. What is the definition of engaging people on the Web? Nobody has done a really great job yet of trying to figure that out.

JACK HAMILTON

At one point, Bill, you were trying to create new products that could pivot off of the traditional products. You said to me, “If they want me to come and sing it, and they will pay me for it, I will do it.”

Say a little bit about how you do that, what the mechanism would be to make that work.

Secondly, I would like you to answer the question, let’s say you make one of these other platforms highly successful, why not get rid of the old platform all together? Why should you be subsidizing the old way? Why don’t you just get rid of the old way and make a lot more money?

BILL WHEATLEY

I don’t think we should stick with platforms just because they exist. We should stick with them because they are effective in one way or another.

In terms of innovation and how you create new products, we have seen probably the most remarkable period in our history, just in the last 10 or 15 years, of ways in which information is made available to people, in digestible, easily accessible forms.

I am not sure that the media has done as good a job as it might have in terms of helping people understand why storytelling is important.

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In terms of reaching people with information, we should absolutely be platform agnostic. The joke I made to you is if there were a market for me to come to your house and sing the news to you, it would be a reasonable thing to do, if there were a market for it. Our job as journalists is to find out things and tell people about them, but there are lots of ways to do that.

NEIL BUDDE

I think there is some danger that you are creating new products more around advertiser demand. I mean you decide you need to have more health coverage on your broadcast, because there are a lot of people who want to advertise on health content. You can’t say that it’s wrong that people don’t have some interest in health. But then all of a sudden, you are also trying to put more of it on your front page, because you have advertisers over there, and you don’t have any advertisers over in your world news section of your site.

Again, as long as you are taking the money that you are getting by beefing up your health coverage and spreading some of that across the broader range of topics that you can cover, it’s great. But what if all of a sudden, you say, okay, well, we are doing so great in health, why don’t we just do nothing but health, and that’s all you do. You become nothing but a health site, and you stop doing world news. That is more of your concern.

I was speaking to a bunch of journalism professors a couple of months ago.

We were trying to talk about this topic, and somebody wasn’t getting it, because it’s like we have always had auto sections, we wrote auto stories.

Then all of a sudden the bell went off. He said, now I know what you’re talking about. That is when the publisher came to me and handed me a list of the new beat structure for my reporters, and I realized that every one of the beats were the top advertising categories.

LARRY KRAMER

And the reason it worked in the newspaper business for some period of time is you are able to leverage the fact that you are already delivering a paper into somebody’s house.

There may be an advantage journalistically in how we are producing news on these other platforms, too. The fact that you have a network that sends out information on multiple platforms may mean you have an advantage of being the guys to bring traffic news to a bunch of people, and you should use that advantage.

I just think you have to look at it from both directions. What can you do economically that gives you an advantage journalistically? What does the consumer want? And you’ve got to stop and think about how the consumer 58

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wants that information, because even though they may have accepted it as part of the newspaper, because, in fact, it was the only thing that came to their door, they may not have any interest in having it be in the same place that they get their other information on their portable device.

NEIL BUDDE

But it really goes back to the fact that general interest, world affairs, public affairs news has always been subsidized by all these other activities. And it’s the same thing as the Guardian. They are sitting there saying thank God we have Auto Trader making all this money that we can pour back into journalism.

BILL WHEATLEY

It’s a real challenge to some degree then when they start looking at that and realize they don’t need to keep pouring their excess profits from this into public affairs journalism. Also, now, people can just go directly to the auto section online and don’t have to bother reading about what’s going on; the two are completely separate.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

It seems to me if we look at it from the other end of the telescope and think, okay, is our main concern whether or not the people in our democracy are getting adequate information?

What was happening with newspapers was not just advertising pressure.

That was certainly real. There were 1,500 daily newspapers, and there were as many stories as there were newspapers, and different ones had different pressures. The other bad thing that was happening was that we began to be derided for being a top down editor, trying to give people what they needed rather than what they wanted. There began to be a false dichotomy.

As Robert Picard’s work has so clearly shown, there was never this great majority who used to want substantial news, and now, alas, we have sunk into this terrible, cheap, tawdry sensationalism, and the American public has gone to hell. I mean we would love to moralize about these things. As we know, people really are rational actors.

In the past we had this vehicle for giving people substantial news, and now we can’t figure out what is going to pay for that vehicle. You can have the sort of thing where The Washington Post would do this and Kaplan, Inc. will help pay.

Or the case of Alan Rusbridger—although, he doesn’t just say well, thank goodness for Auto Trader. He also points out that the Guardian is building an incredibly successful business model based on very substantial news. He 59

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said—I think his figures were since 9/11—he now has nine million visitors in the U.S. without a cent of marketing out of his total 20 million. It’s the number one online newspaper in the U.K., but it’s become a huge international presence as well. The BBC is doing well here and you could say this is based entirely on our failure to believe in the substantial market for substantial news here.

Either we can put substantial news out there, because it’s supported by something else, like Auto Trader, or because it has value, and people are going to pay for it. People pay a lot to get the Guardian or The Economist if they are subscribing in hard copy. Of course, most of them are not.

But he believes, and I believe this is true, that people at Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, are going to be able to make considerable money down the road out of this incredible subscription he has online. They haven’t figured it out yet, but it really is valuable.

JACK HAMILTON

Would you speculate that some enterprises, traditional ones that have the qualities that we care about—getting original news, getting depth—some of those will be able to make money doing it with new media components that have some advertising attached to them, but that the market could only sustain a limited number of those?

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Probably. What I worry about is what is driving the people who are running them. I mean Rupert Murdoch will make money, but we’re already seeing his impact on The Wall Street Journal. I don’t know that we can conclude entirely, but we see that his top editor has left. He’s going to be able to make money, but is the Journal going to give us the same news emphasis it used to in the past?

MICHAEL MAIER

The Guardian succeeded in the U.S., in part, because it was the first left-wing liberal media which opposed the war. So that was how they came to gain an audience.

In terms of revenue, sorry, but they do not make a lot in the U.S. and they are not big enough. They are big compared to the national audience, but compared to the U.S. market, where even you say it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, or USA Today, they are not big.

Then there is a huge gap that comes next. If you look upwards, it’s Google. It’s Yahoo. It’s whatever. With all due respect to the Guardian, there is no big 60

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business to be made there. I would say it’s a fraction of the overall business that they would make from online advertisement in the U.S. GENEVA OVERHOLSER

To be fair, I didn’t say that he said he was making a lot of money here now.

I do believe that they believe that the amazing international network they have has great potential for making money.

JACK HAMILTON

It’s an interesting mix of models of nonprofit almost providing venture capital to see if maybe they can make a success out of it so that they can actually get a revenue stream that can support even more newsgathering with that base under it.

ROBERT PICARD

Well, I was going to say one of the things we have to look at when we look at coming in, we have the Guardian, a nonprofit, and The Economist, which is clearly profit oriented, but they are not actually investing in the United States. What they are doing is making secondary use of what they have already done and making it available in the United States in the way they couldn’t do so in the past. Their success here is because of the dirth of material that already exists here.

Now, if you had to go out and start that from scratch, you probably couldn’t afford to do it, given the number of people who read the Guardian or The Economist or watch BBC. So that’s an issue.

There is one thing we don’t like to ask ourselves, but is media necessary for democracy? We have told ourselves for 200 years that, in fact, we had to have the media stand between the governors and the governed, but there were democratic nations and democratic activities long before media.

There were democratic movements in places where the media were completely controlled by authoritarian governments.

But we always made this assumption that it is the press and the media that make democratic things possible, and I am not sure that that is necessary. What is necessary is communication among the people questioning what is going on among the governed.

And as we move into more and more different forms of communications, the role of the press as an institution has to necessarily change. We have to question whether we really have to preserve it exactly the same way doing exactly the same thing.

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BUILDING COMMUNITIES AND KEEPING UP WITH CHANGING TECHNOLOGY SUBJECT AREAS Embrace the fact that readers want to be involved ° Avoid a proprietary mindset; make your site a hub that sends visitors to other news sources ° Email is old news; time to Twitter ° Help online readers drill down to their idea of the essentials ° Shaping a digital identity and “Daily Me” for each online visitor

JACK HAMILTON

Let’s talk about the very specific kind of model that you specialize in, Jim. JIM BRADY

It says on here that I’m focusing on newspaper Websites. Actually, it’s more news Websites, and what we all kind of need to do differently. The short version: Become more relevant. I think for a long time we all denied that we were becoming less relevant to the communities around us, but basic numbers, whether those numbers are penetration or revenue, have shown that a lot of us are becoming less relevant.

Newspapers have always been in the lecture business. We tell you what we think is important for you to know, and we hope that you like what we tell you and you continue to buy the product. The Internet has made that passé now. The community demands to be involved. They are not just passive observers anymore. They expect to participate in the process. They expect to participate in the publishing of information; a lot of us are a little late to the game on that.

We have found when you build communities around personalities or local issues or a local sports team or event, those people stick to your site. They come back every day. The community that The Washington Post can build around politics, the community that it can build around local theater can’t be found on any other site. The information may be findable on another site, where there is going to be a show and how to get there, but the people that actually surround that topic and go to the site everyday and talk about it are unique and can’t be found elsewhere.

We, again, have found that if you post a comment on our Website, participate in a live discussion during one of our discussion groups, even just send an email to a reporter, any level of engagement, suggests that you are likely to be a very, very heavy user of the Website. This is what Facebook is built on— communities.

The second thing is we are really picking up on what Larry has said about becoming curators. The Washington Post’s mission is to produce great

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journalism, but now that mission has to change to provide access to great journalism, ours and other people’s great journalism.

I think there is a trust that The Washington Post and most newspapers and networks have that we need to take advantage of. People do view us as a gatekeeper still, but a different kind of gatekeeper than we were in the past where we told you what we thought was important for you to know. There is this whole other world of information out there that we have to give people access to.

The bad news is that newspapers, media companies by nature, are the worst served because we spent the first five years of the Website saying I’m not going to point to The New York Times. I don’t care how good that story was, I’m not going to point to MSNBC. We are only going to point to things that one paper does.

Bloggers who started aggregating content years ago just didn’t worry about that. They didn’t have an aversion to The New York Times or an aversion to CBS or an aversion to somebody that they had been competing with for 20 years.

And because of that, we got our clock cleaned by a lot of people that just came in, like Drudge, and just said I am going to aggregate all of this stuff. Of course, Drudge does a little bit of pointing to some sites and not others, but many bloggers don’t have that problem.

We have to get better at giving people access to information and journalism that matters to them regardless of whether it emanated from our site or not.

If you really think about it, just from a business perspective, it makes sense. I get this one a lot from people at the Post. Why do we point to other Websites?

Why would we do that? All we are doing is sending people off site. Doesn’t that go counter to your whole argument that we need to spend more time on the site, come back more often? We get them here then send them off somewhere else?

Think about how we all use the Web. What is the most used button on your browsers? Your back button. So if The New York Times breaks the Spitzer story, and we don’t have it, we have basically a story saying that The New York Times broke the Spitzer story. We put a link in from our story to The New York Times story.

There was a lot of hubbub about why you would do that. Well, if you’re on our story, and you click to The New York Times story, the back button gets you back to us. If we just write a story that says The New York Times wrote a great Eliot Spitzer story, and we don’t link to it, they are going to go to Google, and they are going to search Eliot Spitzer, and then they are on The New York 63

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Times site. Now their back button doesn’t come back to us. The back button goes back to Google.

The closer you make your own site a hub where people are and make it one click back to your site, the smarter I think you are.

Two of our most popular important blogs are Howard Kurtz’s “Media Notes,” and Dan Froomkin’s “White House Watch.” Basically they comb through information and pull 10 to 12 links out that people would be interested in about coverage of the White House, for example.

We link to blogs. We link to The New York Times. We link to any site we can. I think we are trying to expand on that model. It’s not cheap to do, because it does take time to be a curator. It’s not an easy task. But we have convinced people we’re the only voice that matters.

Finally, there’s distribution. In a lot of ways, we are all still trying to figure how to build our Websites to be really useful. We almost have to go on to the next thing already. We have to be figuring out how to get our content onto mobile devices, get content in front of people where they want it, whether that is on a cell phone or an iPod, an automobile navigation device, which I am sure probably we are going to be trying to do in the next couple of years, or whether it’s just putting little kiosks on other people’s Websites. There is nothing wrong with The Washington Post having a little kiosk on Facebook via Wigid. There is no problem with The Washington Post having its own YouTube page, its own iTunes page, its own Twitter strategy.

These are all things that we are focusing on a lot now. One of the scariest panels I participated in took place about two years ago at American University. They brought in 18-year-olds and basically asked them how they consume media. Now at most of these conferences there is all sorts of pontificating about people in the business. We all say what we think. And then you go into this thing watching 18-year-olds talk about how they consume media, and you want to just resign immediately, because it’s so completely different from what we’re talking about. I feel like I was raised largely in the Internet era, and, yet, they are in a totally different place.

They think email is way too slow. We’re all attached to our Blackberries and we think, oh, my God, my email never stops. This thing is just a beast, you know. They think email is way too slow. It’s SMS. It’s Instant Messenger. It’s Twittering over their every thought. It’s Facebook status updates. I can’t go five minutes without telling somebody what I am doing. Not just one person now. Email is also tough because it’s harder to announce something to 200 people at once. Twitter or Facebook, you can tell everybody you know what you are doing at all times.

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So it’s those kind of things: how they communicate; how they go out at night; where are they going to go. They don’t look at the Weekend section in The Washington Post. They are using their cell phones. There is a social networking site where basically you can say where you are all the time. I have five of my friends at this bar on the next street over. I’m just going to head over there.

JACK HAMILTON

How does this have an impact on news? What kind of news is consumed?

JIM BRADY

Our mobile strategy certainly is always going to be partial to sending out breaking news and headlines. But I don’t know that I view the future of news as somebody having the Walter Reed story on a cell phone, though you can certainly interact with it on the Web page. The thing about the Walter Reed series, it was also one of the most trafficked stories. If you added it up over the course of the year, the page views were in the millions.

I think the appetite for investigative journalism is certainly there. When we do it, it certainly always does well.

JACK HAMILTON

Did you run the whole story?

JIM BRADY

We make it available. We did videos on some of the soldiers. We did photo galleries, audio photo galleries. We did a multimedia presentation on top of the story itself. We also provided a lot of access to Dana Priest and Anne Hull when they came on and actually answered questions. So we added a whole bunch of other stuff to it. But the stories themselves, outside of that, were in the millions.

How do you deal with the sort of generation who wants stuff now? You send them an alert, and you give them a quick read on what the story is and send them back to the Website.

We’ll make it available via cell phone, but I don’t expect people will read a story like that on the cell phone. I think you give them an abstract, and you try to convince them and tell them what is on the site that is going to expand on the story.

So I am actually not really that worried about whether or not there’s an audience for journalism with a capital J.

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LARRY KRAMER

The stories that come to me on a portable device are things that are sort of actionable. I would only want to know something that quickly if there was really something I wanted to do about it. That’s why you set your alerts. It’s very different than what we choose to cover as a news organization.

My point from yesterday was about how many trees died for that series to run in the paper when not that many people actually read all the words. We actually do a much more efficient job on the Web giving people the ability to drill down at any level they want to in a story, because we have all of the assets of storytelling available to us. We have video and other things that in the storytelling process aren’t available to us in just one format.

So if the interview with the head of Walter Reed was three paragraphs in the paper or a two-minute element on a broadcast, you can sit there and watch the whole 30-minute interview on a Website. You can go far deeper than you could if you really wanted to in print.

The medium is actually much better for allowing people to use every minute they are willing to invest in that story in a way that gets them more information. And everybody’s level is going to be different. It’s a far superior medium for it.

JAY HAMILTON

Jim and I talked about this a little bit last night. If you think about who knows the most about the local community, I would like to put Google on the table for the following reason. If you think about who knows about us and what we are interested in, it’s partly from what you search and partly from what you read with double click and advertising tracking.

One of the things that sets news goods apart is that they are experienced goods. You have to consume them a little bit to know what is in them. So what people try to do is guess what you are interested in when they serve it up to you.

There is all this information about what people are interested in. I would actually pay a subscription for a site that I could log onto and that would give me the great story mix that I am interested in. I don’t have to search for it, but it has to really work well.

The reason I could pay a price for it is that unlike other information, it’s the information about me. You have to know more about me through algorithms and things like that, and that’s why you can charge me.

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NEIL BUDDE

My current job is with a company called DailyMe. The whole concept is getting to that point where each individual is getting something that is highly relevant to them.

I don’t think it’s just about personalization. It’s not just about watching what you have read in the past. It’s a mix of different ways in which things bubble up. It’s not about putting your blinders on and saying I only want news from the Republican perspective or the Democratic perspective. There are a lot of different ways to do that.

And I would agree that no one has really captured that yet and gotten to a point where the promise of what you want is being delivered. There are a lot of people trying a lot of different approaches, and I think there is still a lot of work that has to go into that.

Your interests are going to lie across a wide range, and they are going to require information from a wide range of sources. In our case, one of the approaches is licensing a lot of content from a lot of different publishers so that you can bring stuff together that wouldn’t exist on any one given news organization site. So I’m not sure you are going to get that from a single news organization. You are going to want material from a wide range of places.

I also think we have to start looking at a kind of news consumption 24 hours a day. What you want at seven o’clock in the morning is different than what you want at 10 o’clock.

The things you want coming to you by alerts need to be highly relevant and kind of actionable and useful to know. The things you want in the morning may be a completely different package. You may have more time you are willing to spend. It will be across a variety of platforms.

It’s not just about knowing what you are interested in, but also knowing what you are interested in at different times of the day. Your interest on weekends may be very different than your interest during the weekday.

How do you make sure that the mix of what you are getting starts to match that as well? It’s something that people have talked about for years. I think it scares some editors. On the other hand, I think it’s also a way in which this good journalism gets out to a wider audience of people, because if they are interested in it, they may not know that the newspaper over here has written something very interesting about that topic because they never go to that newspaper site. But if you bring it into something that does match your interest and pull that in, then they’re suddenly exposed to it.

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CAN PHILANTHROPIES AND UNIVERSITIES PLAY A LARGER ROLE? SUBJECT AREAS Once the foundation money dries up, where will you find new capital? ° Can a non-profit be self-sustaining? ° Not all philanthropies are alike ° Make journalism schools centers for R&D

JACK HAMILTON

Ben, what is the role of philanthropy in all of this?

BEN SHUTE

I think that you can’t lump all philanthropy together, because if you look at some of the history you see some of the change. If you go back, as Chuck keeps asking me to do, to PBS and NPR and the founding of those things, that was a time when philanthropy was less focused on the near term, less focused on metrics and less focused on the media impact than recently.

Those are terms that are used a lot today in the foundation side of philanthropy.

The other piece of philanthropy is whether it’s in a foundation form or something else, such as individuals of great means, who still tend to give more out of passion than as a businessman with a plan.

Even NPR, which got founded through some of these earlier foundation efforts—there are those who believe that one of the things that has allowed NPR’s news side to grow so rapidly in the last few years is Joan Kroc’s endowment gift, which came out of a passion.

It also helped address one of the real problems with foundation funding and, therefore, at some level nonprofit activity in whatever field. That is that nonprofits have real problems when it comes to amassing capital, because you can’t distribute. There is no exit strategy that involves a public offering.

A for-profit can amass capital by either selling shares or by getting a venture capitalist interested who will ultimately cash out. The exit strategy is the public offering.

You can’t do that with the nonprofit. The new venture philanthropist likes to talk about an exit strategy, if you’re going to fund the startup of something.

Well, the venture capitalist exit strategy and the venture philanthropist exit strategy have to be totally different, and that’s one of the places where venture philanthropy breaks down.

If it’s a nonprofit 501(c)3 startup, it can’t pay back its investors, because it can’t have a proprietary interest. You can make a program-related 68

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investment, which is a loan. You can make a loan that has a below market interest rate attached, and you can get the principal back. You can do that to a nonprofit or to a for-profit, if it’s a certain kind of public benefit, and a philanthropy can make an investment in a for-profit operation, which is what our endowment does.

There are those who argue that a foundation, which is legally supposed to spend five percent of the value of its endowment each year on grants and the administration of grants, is essentially leaving 95 percent on the table. That is to say, we may be as a foundation very interested in combating global warming, but we may or may not on the endowment side buy a lot of shares of ExxonMobil.

To take it a step further, we may not be willing to take the risk of investing from the endowment side in a solar energy start up, because our investment folks may say that’s too risky, but we could give the money to a solar startup.

ProPublica, another recent big charitable start-up that, as I understand it, was established by a family or a family foundation. It’s a couple saying we want to do this.

Foundations are sometimes good for startup capital to begin in a nonprofit form, but if you are going to operate within the nonprofit form, the ongoing need for new capital gets to be a real problem.

For example, as I mentioned earlier, The New Press, which is a nonprofit book publishing house, started from scratch as a nonprofit and got a lot of foundation money in the initial investment. But in the vagaries of the book publishing business, there are periodic needs for infusion of capital, and that’s hard to come by.

JACK HAMILTON

That is an issue that I think is an important one. Let me see how you react to this. I remember some years ago people were starting little stand-alone, foreign news services. They would say, well, we will do that for five years, then they will be financially viable. Well, foreign news never pays for itself. So it’s a ridiculous standard to expect it to be self-sustaining. It’s got to be supported by some kind of subsidy. That’s sort of what you are saying, right?

BEN SHUTE

Right. Foundations are very reluctant to be permanently subsidizing a particular organization or a particular field even. This is a real problem.

Twenty years ago, the foundation paradigm was, we will start up something.

We will prove that it’s important, and government will take it over; that doesn’t work anymore.

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So who is going to take it over? Well, the current fad in foundations is the notion of the self-sustaining nonprofit. It will develop some revenue streams somehow. Well, nine times out of 10, if the nonprofit can generate 60 percent of its annual income from earned income, it’s doing very well. The Foundation Center is a classic example. The Foundation Center is funded by foundations because it helps them give their information back to the public.

And because the Foundation Center aggregates the huge amount of data about how much foundations are giving to what nonprofits, they have publications and trainings that nonprofits pay a lot for. If you are in the fundraising side of a nonprofit, the foundation directory and the foundation online database is where you can go if, say, you have a soup kitchen. Who is funding soup kitchens in my area? So right there that information is very helpful. You can charge for that.

We helped start an online database called GuideStar. It basically aggregates all the 990s, the tax forms from public charities, and makes them available in a variety of ways. It’s a crazy operation in one sense, because GuideStar paid for the IRS to scan 990s into digital form and then got those on CD-ROMs. Then GuideStar has to pay people to enter the data manually from the CDROM images into the database. Ultimately, people will file electronically, and that piece will go away. But we managed to pull together a consortium of maybe 10 to 20 foundations that put up fairly significant money to help GuideStar get started, because there were huge startup costs.

The balancing act for years has been: what do they charge for and what is a free public good? Some of the foundations like ours that put up money, we kept saying that some of it has to be a free public good, because that’s what we gave the grant for. And others are saying, no, you’ve got to monetize the intellectual property. How to keep that business going and then how to recapitalize it periodically is very tough.

There is a role for philanthropy, and there’s a role for foundations, but for the kinds of nonprofits that require continual subsidy, like the Center for Public Integrity, for example, it’s going to be and is, I think Chuck would say, a constant search for replacing the foundations who age out, because either their priorities change, or they won’t continue to provide support indefinitely. I know this one foundation that does very good work, but they have a rule that they will only support somebody for three years, and then the grantee has to take a year off. And unless you find another foundation that is on a different three-year cycle, it’s just this constant search.

So we are good for some things. We are good for startups. We are good to try out an idea occasionally, but long-term subsidies have to come from someone else. NPR does it very well.

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BILL WHEATLEY

I think the distinction between endowment and philanthropy is important. If you have a billion-dollar endowment, you can spend $50 million a year and have your operating costs covered indefinitely. But if you are relying on $10 million grants, you’re going to have to get them renewed again and again.

JACK HAMILTON

I want to talk about universities. We talked about entrepreneurship and whether journalism schools could do a better job. Are there other roles for universities that we ought to get on the docket here?

AMY McCOMBS

As you know, there is an increased use of video on the Web and also advertiser interest for video on the Web. There is this fire hose of video out there. Video from all types of sources, mainstream media…YouTube…the government…NASA…you name it. So how do you organize it, and it is your curator concept, because nobody is doing this with video in a way that I think is feasible, particularly for consumers.

I want to share with you a start-up I am working on, a video news service designed for the mobile world. We looked at doing it in the Bay Area, with its high costs, and decided it must pay for itself in a very short period of time.

The cost of entry into the new media is low and it is realistic to believe you can build a business with a model that pays for itself with revenue very quickly, There are amazing available technologies that easily screen videos for easy use by journalists. And if you can add editors, reporters, and marketing staff at a reasonable cost you have a business.

So we decided to do something that is very common in the biotech and technology worlds where research universities participate in the building of a for-profit enterprise. As example, Stanford birthed Cisco, Yahoo, and Google.

We decided to take the same approach and placed our startup at a university.

We wanted to develop an R&D model at a journalism school. It becomes a research and teaching opportunity for the university in exchange for an equity position. The business can take advantage of a graduating work pool that matches its needs. The students and graduates get opportunities in the fast moving digital moving environment. A win-win for all.

The other thing we wanted to take advantage of, again, to manage the funding structure, was to look at community and state investments, tax deferral, and other advantages you received when you are stimulating economic and job growth. We ended up in the situation where the local government is participating along with local investors who are interested in 71

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benefiting the university and the local economy. The state is reviewing it this week as to whether it wants to put money in it.

This is a business model for a media business that brings a number of private, public and nonprofit organizations together in a unique partnership.

JACK HAMILTON

Journalism schools do all kinds of research, but they have never been considered a research and development place, but I think that is something that can change.

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LAUNCHING A STARTUP SUBJECT AREAS Media is just one piece of an evolving communication system ° Keywords for online ventures: Self-expression, interaction, collaboration ° Don’t ignore seasoned veterans when doing a startup ° Educate your online sales force separately from your print sales force ° Develop a language beyond words ° Adapt

JACK HAMILTON

Michael is going to talk about what it takes to start up a new freestanding operation.

MICHAEL MAIER

I would like to follow up with something Bob said, “Do we need media at all?”

We are seeing a completely new communication and information system evolving. Media is only a part of it. Everything is changing in such a dramatic way that we have to think about where media fits in this communication information system, which is transforming on a global scale.

Things have really changed dramatically since 2000. We basically knew what journalism was then. We knew about the relationship of politics and journalism and readers. We knew about the business models of journalism.

We knew everything and said let’s just cut the production costs, no printing, no distribution and do it from scratch.

I think we have completely new roles in this communication and information system now. The toughest thing is to adapt. Some new rules: • Journalists need to get out of the lecture business. People know better than you, and you will always find a reader that knows better than you.

• Celebrate self-expression: Bob, you said that most of the new Internet is selfexpression, which is something newspapers or the news media is not used to.

• Interact with your audience. Allow them plenty of opportunity to provide feedback.

• Collaborate with others, especially for investigative projects.

• Understand the new processes. Search something, find something, send something. This is process. This is something fundamentally different from getting up in the morning and reading a newspaper. The information flow is really spread over to 24/7.

• Embrace digital storytelling. I think most of the stuff which is out there right now is database. It’s not a medium. Google is a database. It’s not a medium. Because the medium always needs navigation, showing the user something that is important is something to do. I think what you described with your experience is just the beginning. We will develop a language that is far beyond words.

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• Develop a digital identity.

I am an old journalist. For me, this is really new. I was very happy that I had the opportunity last year to be a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School and really reflect on these things. I think one of the real problems of the media is that they are always producing something. They have hardly time to think about the next day. They have to think about the next hour, and it will kill them, because if they don’t understand these rules, they will always be behind.

I think we not only have the rules, we also have some new empires that enforce the rules. Let me just mention three of them, because it’s real important to understand: Google, Facebook and YouTube. All of them are going for advertising. Don’t underestimate them. They are all competitors. All of them are going for data. They are opening themselves up.

On YouTube, for example, you can create your own publication. You can take the complete content from YouTube, using their programming language, and then steer it through a playlist. I think 70 percent of the overall Internet content is YouTube. So YouTube is the Internet. They offered a possibility to structure content as a medium, which I think is a huge step, and we will see completely new things emerge out of this.

Traditional media are closed shops. They don’t open themselves up at all. So there are these new rules and at least two empires, who by the way, also collaborate: Google and YouTube, and Microsoft and Facebook. So it’s really getting to be a very powerful commonwealth on the Internet.

Two more pragmatic things: we have been talking about teaching more entrepreneurship. I couldn’t agree more, though I am afraid it can only be taught to a certain extent, because so many personal values are involved, which you can’t learn in school. One of our board members, former dean of the Harvard Business School and chairman of Harvard Business School Publishing, admits that, basically, none of his students, although highly educated, are able to run a business venture, not even a small one, which is for me kind of funny.

I think it’s interesting. We talked with Larry the other day a little. You [Larry] were forty when you became an entrepreneur.

Maybe we should respect the seasoned journalist more, who goes out there and runs the venture. I think in the media companies, there is a little bit too much hype about the young kids. They may bring in a lot of experience about the Internet, but they won’t be those who run the business.

When it comes to money, investors are good. It’s about the ability to pay your people, which, of course, always raises the questions, “What is your business model? How do you generate revenues?”

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It took me three years to make our first significant revenues with my first start-up, which was very difficult because of the crises in 2001. Then the business models became clearer, so it was more obvious how to make money. Recent developments though are showing decline of advertising in journalistic ventures on the internet. The pressure is enormous. Most things have to work right away, or they won’t work at all.

The reason for the shift? I think our whole mindset before was we are a media company and media has to take time. Today, the Internet is more like, we don’t have time. We have to work right away, or we won’t work at all.

When it comes to the second important thing, you need really special people.

I think you cannot train anybody to be an entrepreneur. I have met many people who will always be nonprofit people. I have met some who made the shift but basically it’s a character thing. You’re either a person who takes risks or not. You need people who are willing to let go of personal wealth for a while. You don’t find them in traditional newsrooms. My experience is I stopped hiring traditional journalists, because their first question was always about the compensation package and a car.

Various young people who have Internet experience have a much more natural approach for not asking for these things first. It’s not that they are naïve, but they are willing to go through more.

JACK HAMILTON

Michael, do I hear a contradiction? At one point I thought you said we need to get traditional journalists, but now the problem is those characters come in, and they don’t want to be treated in a risk environment. I’m hearing two different messages.

MICHAEL MAIER

No. What I’m saying is that I would not hire journalists today as they are. I think the journalists themselves are changing, too. We see many journalists that have gone into the Internet companies. They have learned the culture is different there.

I would not hire a journalist only because of his name and give him all of this compensation stuff. I would rather say that I’ll take two young journalists who have a good education and do it themselves.

JACK HAMILTON

There is a model, the Bloomberg model, where they have been hiring all kinds of big name journalists who were traditional journalists, and put them behind an expensive wall that you had to pay to get through to hear what 75

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they had to say. But they wanted those names because they thought it was the way to increase the traffic.

LARRY KRAMER

Well, to that audience it is important. The audience that Bloomberg is serving is a pretty high end audience. It’s different, I think, than starting a new Internet product.

MICHAEL MAIER

And when we started, we hired some of the big names, but not most of them.

It was very difficult in 2000, because everyone was hiring like crazy, but we also hired two-thirds young people.

They were constantly hired away from us. We became a kind of breeding place for the traditional media, which means we just generated new people all the time.

My experience is the compensation package is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s also the general approach. If you go to a journalist and ask what is most important for you, I don’t think he would say self-expression, interaction, feedback, collaboration. I think it would be a different ranking.

But, still, you need professionals, no doubt. You also need allies. You need an environment. You need some big organizations to help you. I am happy to see that many news organizations as well are starting to support small ventures, because what you said about MarketWatch, they know they would not be able to create this, even with all the money they can put in. Maybe it’s because this conflict of production and project, something like that.

I think it’s also very much about being optimistic. One of the main experiences we made is we shifted the business model every month basically.

Once we saw no revenues in 2001, we started radio. We knew we could produce better stuff for radio. We went into radio communication. Later we took over the teletext for the biggest German private TV network. We saw that the teletext as a short written text is basically very similar to what we are doing on the Internet. So we just created new businesses. I think this is crucial.

So when it comes to the environment, I think we have really learned to get rid of all the things which aren’t really necessary. I think it’s become an extremely efficient way of production, which I think is something that will have an impact on the industry. You have 650 people in the newsroom, print newsroom. It’s not necessary to produce this kind of quality you are doing.

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JACK HAMILTON

This is because in Germany you don’t have as many editors?

MICHAEL MAIER

But we still have good papers. I think what the Internet really teaches every industry is that you can save costs not only with the editors. They are the least significant. I mean, the whole technology is developing into this thing which is called the cloud. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with that, which means no one is buying a computer. No one is even buying the software anymore. Everything is posted somewhere, and you pay for what you use.

This has such a huge impact on the industry. We are doing a huge job in Germany with the second biggest newspaper company. It’s incredible what kind of technical costs are still there, which will be gone in two to three years.

It’s just not been necessary to do it anymore. The Internet has forced us to learn to produce at the lowest possible costs. There is no overhead.

I think one of the key things we learned, which also has to do with the revenues, is that we have always done our own sales. Most of the news companies do not educate their own online sales forces. They either package it with the print sales force, or they outsource it to a third party.

This is something I cannot understand at all, because if you delegate this to a third party, you lose one of the major components.

Finally, I have to admit that since I have been working in the Internet, I have read more books. I don’t know why, but it happens. The way I get my information, although somewhat clumsy and strange, spares me so much time that I really have found I read more. I do not have the feeling that my own mindset is reduced to bits and bytes 24 hours a day. So I think if you understand technology as an improvement in your life, then someone like myself, an old media guy, can be pretty successful.

LARRY KRAMER

There are a couple of things I think I can highlight. I would say one of the tricks in starting a new business on the Web is to really understand your audience. Communities are the most important thing to talk about on the Web. If you look at the difference between successful ventures and unsuccessful ones it’s a good contrast.

Facebook went after a community that already existed—college kids trying to hook up. We all know they are out there, and it gave them a way to do what they wanted to do better, faster, more officially. It became a homerun.

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A number of the other early startups tried to create communities. They were trying to tell you, come in here and you will find this new community. It will be cool. But people don’t want to put in the time to get it, understand it, or believe it.

MarketWatch knew there was a community of people who wanted to trade on the Internet, needed information fast and needed it in real time, and were obsessed about it; going after that audience and making sure everything you said and did was consistent with what they wanted was the magic of that business.

Secondly, I would say embrace the elements of the Internet. Don’t fight them.

Search. Embrace the fact that people use search to go around the Internet and understand what that means. You can be stubborn and think your front page is the only way people should come to your site. You better accept the fact that they are going to be coming other ways, and you better be ready for them.

All of us were late to the game redesigning our story pages. We just didn’t understand the fact that they weren’t always going to go to our front page. At MarketWatch, we used to have what we called our secret weapon, human agents we called them, but they were really just editors. Every other media site at the time was putting its news together and defining automated ways to take preexisting news media and put it on the Web. Google uses algorithms to determine which version of the story goes to the front; it’s all done by computer. But anything involved like that takes smart people, and bringing their work to the Web is the magic.

We couldn’t find a contact management system flexible enough to do what we wanted to do on the front page, which was what we did in the newspaper.

We would make some headlines bigger, others smaller. Our stories related to each other in a varying number of ways to reflect what our editors thought the day looked like, which is what you could do in a newspaper with a piece of paper and six-column pad.

We needed it, so we had to build it ourselves. People say, oh, you are crazy. It’s too much work. But it was the gist of who we were.

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PANELISTS’ SUMMARIES JACK HAMILTON

I want to let Geneva talk about the manifesto and then we’ll sum up and go around the room.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

If I were to update the manifesto, I am reminded of what reporters always say, which is at a certain point you don’t want to do any more reporting in case it should ruin the story. The truth is I wouldn’t update it the same way.

When I did the manifesto originally, I did it because I was so tired of 40 years in journalism of lament and I really wanted to focus on possible routes forward. I sort of artificially picked what some of it would be, such as an increased role for nonprofits.

I think it was extremely useful to me, and, I hope, to some others, because it really did help me focus on the future and routes forward.

But in fact it’s been particularly interesting here to me today as much more of a journalist than as an academic to then pull back and put our current situation into context. We journalists are not very good at context: 2000 years ago we would have reported the hell out of the crucifixion and missed the part about Christianity.

It’s hard to be pulled away from our rosy, short-sighted scenario, but it’s good. We tend to have these more moralistic notions about, oh, the audience doesn’t want us now. But we know a lot more now about what people want.

That was one of the most important pieces of information for me.

The other point, of course, is how many of the changes really are a result of the increase in use. Even though we don’t like to have our conventions turned upside down, it can be quite freeing and I think helpful for us as we move forward.

Of course, your emphasis, Jay, on business reasons, economic reasons really contributes to objectivity and the fact that the change now in fixed thoughts is enabling partisan news to return much more richly.

We tend to attribute the wrong reasons to the wrong causes.

JACK HAMILTON

Explain what you mean by that.

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GENEVA OVERHOLSER

What I mean is we say people now just want to have their views affirmed rather than think about what is happening.

JACK HAMILTON

Try to understand why it’s happening?

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Yes, we need to try to understand why it’s happening instead of having moralistic, judgmental views, which I think we tend to do, in the journalism business especially, because we think we have been such saviors. We deplore all the change in attitudes. When we aren’t thinking rationally about what the cause is, then we’re certainly not likely to think rationally about the solutions, which is obvious but important to think about here.

Also, I thought it was useful, the way we realized the complexity of the solutions. If we do manage to change the tax laws or figure out how to transfer ownership, that is very interesting, but how do you sustain it once you have it in place?

We do want to think about government roles, Michael’s good point, but put it into the American context, how would we really model how it would work here? I really continue to feel strongly that so often we have all of these conversations, and we don’t really emerge with any very specific ways to come up with useful aggregations of the kinds of information people would be seeking on these topics, and I hope we might think about how that could happen. There would be a registry, or an accumulation of case studies, or a clearinghouse for information about ownership issues, or what kinds of models people are using to do new media as it grows up in these various communities.

A couple of things did not receive the attention I think they should have. I think it’s useful also to put this conversation in the larger context of so many people seeking to figure out how you pay for content online. It’s not just journalists who are trying to figure this out. Artists are trying to figure this out. How are we going to have micropayments? There are things like click share, Bill Densmore’s effort to address this, or digital ID, which would allow a consumer to carry that around and pay.

I think this whole issue of how we are going to pay for content online is so interesting and rich, and we have many allies or fellow victims in search of solutions.

The other is the implication of so much of Bob’s thinking is that we are going to have to be focused on what we can do and what we alone can do exceptionally well.

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I am really worried about the quality of leadership in so many mainstream news organizations. There are exceptions—yours are certainly among them—but we do come from a field in which the leaders of our news organizations really didn’t have to be innovative. We didn’t do R & D. We didn’t do training. We just moved along. As Eric Newton has said, being a cash cow is a business strategy, but it’s not a business strategy that has created good leadership.

And so what we are left with now is terribly important to us. I don’t mean we are the only ones that can produce it. I hugely embrace citizen participation, and I think public insight journalism is really interesting, including a lot of aggregations of blogs, and I don’t need it to be called journalism. I don’t care what platform it comes out on. But we all know that one important element here is this important tradition, for example, in this country, of people who have the Rolodex, the heft, the stomach and the tenacity to go up against big business and big government. And we’re not going to supplant commercial media any time soon. So in the meantime, we really do have this issue of kind of a weak leadership in way too many of our mainstream media newsrooms, and I don’t mind ending on a sour note.

JACK HAMILTON

First of all, I think we all agree there is not a model, but many models, and we have to think in terms of many models. One of the first issues that came up is we need to get a better sense of what all the models are, and even better yet, to start looking at them in terms of templates.

So, for example, if somebody has a family business and they want to sell it, what various ways do they have to protect that investment and to have it perpetuated rather than having to go hire an attorney to start from scratch?

There ought to be some templates they can follow. We may need a clearinghouse. We talked about that. We want to know what is being done, what needs to be done, and we need to find a way to make it all available.

Maybe we also need to be thinking about models that should be tested. In other words, we ought to say, okay, here’s a model that ought to be tried.

Nobody has tried that model.

This group was unusual, because one of the things I have noticed: when you get journalists together, even in this day and age, anything that is said differently, they get their heckles up. But nobody here, no matter what was said here, said, “Absolutely that is not going to happen. I don’t want to be a part of that.”

I think everybody agreed that even getting the government involved could be okay under certain circumstances. There is nothing wrong with asking the question and seeing how it might work, and I think that’s a huge step forward.

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When we had the first one of these conferences, we had some very good people in that group, but many of them said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that. That would never be acceptable.” So I think this is mostly a testament to you, but also somewhat a testament to the changing times. I think partisan news is one of those questions. After all, one of the liveliest times in journalism was in the late18th Century when James Gordon Bennett was fighting with Webb.

So maybe there are some things we ought to look at and figure how to promote, especially if it gets more information out there.

So that I can participate in that, I want it to go on the record that I am even willing to consider models in democracy, as Bob says, where we don’t even have journalists. We have democracy without journalists. If you can figure how to do that project, fine with me.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Actually, he said without organized media. That is different from journalists. I still think you ought to clarify that. I think without journalists would not be what you would say necessarily. Jim Carey, bless his heart, identified journalism as people gathering and telling their daily stories.

ROBERT PICARD

I mean without the organized media as we have them structured today.

JACK HAMILTON

I appreciated their point. I think another interesting point that has been made here: the news media as curator. We know where to look for the table of contents in a book, and we know what the index looks like. We know how to navigate it because that stuff is always in the same place, and it’s always there. We haven’t figured out how to create those kinds of things online.

We need to ask questions about how much original news is out there. Is it better or worse? We actually need to know answers to that question. And, in the process of answering them, we need to know: What is news gathering?

What is a journalist? What is news from the point of view of a consumer as opposed to the point of view of a traditional city editor? We even had a question of defining what the word “local” means in a world like we have today. Another question that was brought up: How do you define what is a good Website? What defines excellence?

Another set of issues came out that I put under the rubric of media literacy.

There is the old journalistic media literacy, which was newspaper readership projects that really aimed to get kids hooked on newspapers, so you give them free newspapers so maybe they would be a newspaper reader. This is a pretty limited way of thinking about what media literacy is. We have gone beyond 82

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that to some extent by now recognizing we ought to teach people to be good consumers. I think this group here took it to even another level. Actually, this is kind of important for us, because we have an endowed chair we are about to fill in media literacy, and maybe we are going to rethink that in light of what I heard here. As we point out over and over again, because you are in the public, you just assume you can get a lot of free information. You paid very little for it, and it was all there. Maybe we need to start educating people that good information is going to cost you a little bit more money.

There are all kinds of people whose expectations need to be changed, such as the idea of advertisers’ expectations being changed. Why should you advertise on the Internet? It might be good to train people to do that. Also, we need to train people in the FCC or government officials or legislators so they understand maybe what needs to be done.

I think Ben’s point was while there were some limitations about what philanthropy can do, maybe we need to start educating philanthropists and charities about what they need to do if they are going to really help create a better information environment. A little bit of money for a short period of time is one way to go, but maybe we’re going to have to find some other ways to do it.

Of course, the idea came up that maybe we need to educate the public so they understand what subsidized news means, which might make them more open to government subsidies, for example. It is interesting if you look back at the Commerce Department in the 1920s. They had all kinds of programs to teach people to be consumers. That was one of their main things. You were supposed to get little children to make sure they understood why buying stuff could be fun. So maybe we need to start getting little babies and telling them why reading the paper might be fun.

More can be done with universities. The entrepreneurship is a really interesting question. One thing I thought of, and I am sure there are lots of things we ought to have in our courses here, is to ask students to create an information product, not just learn how to put together a Website. Maybe they ought to create a product, find a new product. That would be a good exercise. I think a lot of work needs to be done on R&D. We have such a disconnect between our schools and what the profession has done historically, which is complicated because of the way universities themselves are evolving.

I will get together with our staff and see if we can put together a kind of Listserv to get us started and then as we get ideas and links in it, we’ll find a way to keep throwing information around. If we share information, maybe other people will get involved and, maybe, there will be some projects out of this.

Shall we go around the room to see if anyone wants to add or subtract or amplify?

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BEN SHUTE

A number of the things that have been brought up here are not journalism specific. You mentioned the lack of leadership in journalism, lack of leadership in industry, lack of public leadership among university presidents.

There was a time when university presidents were looked to as sort of public leaders. There were times when there were people like my own former boss, David Rockefeller, when he was chairman of Chase, for whom corporate philanthropy was a major interest. Chase was also a major collector of fine modern art. You don’t see that kind of leadership anymore. Even the question of how we are going to charge for things over the Internet, yes, it’s a common problem with lots of people besides journalists, certainly the music industry.

But that takes you into the whole regime of intellectual property, which gets you to things like people patenting life forms, people going into the Third World taking something from a rainforest that has been a source of indigenous economy for years, and patenting it and trying to charge for it. It’s all in the middle of huge societal changes and one of the things the profession should be doing is illuminating those connections.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER

Again, I want to thank everybody that helped put this together. It was really a wonderful event and great experience at LSU. So you served a number of purposes. I am very optimistic. Where we are as far as the media technologies, and then the challenges and the need for more information and the complexity of our world, really stimulate good journalists and stimulate good minds. Now we have this opportunity with tools we’ve never had before to address them. I wouldn’t mind if some of the traditional companies went away and broke up. I think one of the problems has been the way these companies have been managed; new ones will sprout up.

ROBERT PICARD

Organizations are created to satisfy needs and serve purposes. When times change those purposes change or are not as clear. They need to assess what they are doing and why they are there. Some of them will wither, and some of them will figure out good reasons to continue existing. When they can do that, they can make it possible for other people to support them. I think that’s where we are. Those organizations that don’t do that are going to be surpassed by young newcomers who come in and do it instead of them.

MICHAEL MAIER

I just want to follow what Bob said. Organizations are here to fulfill needs. I saw this as a small organization that fulfilled at least our need to discuss, and I very much appreciate if we could continue that. Either as a Facebook, or 84

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wherever, I say open a collaborative blog on your site. You could have people reading and contributing.

JIM BRADY

Talking about culture, I still think that is the biggest shift that the media have to make in terms of adapting. I will say in terms of trying to put a positive spin on what has happened in the last couple of years, it really took a severe decline in the business to wake people up, but things have changed. So if you want to take any positive from what has happened in the last couple of years, media companies now have to adapt more quickly and be less risk averse than they have been in the past. Compared to a lot of other industries, we’re still pretty far behind them.

NEIL BUDDE

I always hate to end these things without sounding a note of optimism. We are in a period of transition. There are going to be a few rough years. But I think on the other side of it, we are going to find the models that make sense, and the work that we are doing today is going to be important then, because that’s when it’s all going to start to pay off. I am optimistic.

CHUCK LEWIS

I think we have all been to the future of journalism in the last few years. This has been one of the most interesting discussions for me for lots of reasons.

We have a mix of a lot of backgrounds from different parts of the world.

One up-note to mention: We did a piece of international investigative reporting and posted it on the Web in audio form about six years ago about a leader who had violated international sanctions, essentially radar technology, in the Ukraine.

We got a secret audiotape of him illegally selling $100 million worth of technology; the same guy had a journalist decapitated. We put it on the Web and there was a news story throughout the world within hours. The UN started to investigate for violations of sanctions and there was a criminal investigation in that country, all from a little Web story that was posted in the U. S. from D.C. Those kinds of things were so breathtaking. We have literally taken those for granted. What is possible in terms of journalism, ironically with all the gloom and doom, it’s never occurred in the history of journalism, what we can do now is unbelievable, and it’s thrilling The way forward from here: we do have to work on models. We are getting into a real interesting area now with more hybrids that use existing infrastructure and think of fresh ways to lend venture money.

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You have a talent pool coming out from one of the preeminent journalism schools in the world. You have an interesting idea that no one else is doing.

You have a technology that is a new edge technology that needs to be developed. And you have donors, investors rather, who are interested, but you also have others that are getting involved.

Everyone has to think of all of these different ways. One thing we have learned from all your rules, Michael, is that there are no rules more than ever.

It’s quite liberating, actually.

I agree with so much of what you said, Geneva. The quality of leadership is astonishing to me. I have recently interviewed Ben Bradlee about owners. We were talking about the Chandlers, the Binghams and the Pulitzers. I said what has happened here? Where are all of those people today? Where are the new owners who are going to take up the leadership, the challenge for journalism?

He really couldn’t answer that. No one knows where they are. It is a really serious problem. That is why these gatherings are so crucial, because this is a world that needs leadership and needs to find its way, and models are part of that. But it’s also individuals as well. I also think universities are crucial.

One of the routes forward is that this conversation should not stop here. I happen to think that it would be very useful for us to stay in touch with each other somehow.

I think the clearinghouse idea is extremely valuable. Jay, you are getting ready to return to Duke University at some point, and I am getting ready to look at models where I am at American University. Jack, you are already doing a media effects lab here. And, Geneva, you’re going to the University of Southern California as the new director of journalism. Congratulations again.

This energy needs to be put in a bottle or something. We can’t just let it go away. We have to work on it here. I think it’s very, very exciting what could come of it actually, all these conversations. I find what we talked about quite energizing and quite universal.

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New Models for News

By Charles Lewis

Introduction The fifth annual Breaux Symposium at Louisiana State University, ‘News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press,’ explored ways for newspapers to increase their capacity to gather and disseminate news in America today.

Specifically, the March 2004 conference focused on nonprofit journalism ownership, foundation and government subsidies to generate important public information, and possible new federal policies, including changes to the U.S. tax code, to encourage the ownership control of media companies by individual or family owners.

It remains the only ‘future of journalism’ conference in the nation devoted to the subject of nonprofit journalism as a public service, outside the commercial realm, notably differentiating it from the slew of other recent discussions throughout the nation regarding the incredible shrinking newsroom crisis facing journalism today.

Some of the venues for this ongoing national rumination have included Harvard University (the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy), the American University School of Communication, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), the University of Nevada (Reno), the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and others.

Following the practical approach of the 2004 Breaux Symposium, this year’s conference will continue the analysis of precise, real-life models for news gathering and publication, but widen the scope to include both nonprofit and forprofit economic models for multimedia journalism today, not just inside the United States, but internationally, in particular Europe. What specific solutions are emerging that might ameliorate the current quality and quantity of serious news coverage today by the major commercial media corporations? What transcendent insights and lessons can be gleaned from the rapidly changing landscape of new media entities and old media convergences and adaptations? At this juncture, what is the likely, foreseeable future for journalism as a profitable or at least sustainable enterprise in the years ahead?

Some of our distinguished participants at the conference will write essays about these issues. Jay Hamilton will review what has happened since the 2004 Breaux Symposium vis-à-vis the economic policy proposals and other themes considered then. Robert Picard will provide historic and comparative perspective about news consumption patterns and how that might influence the entrepreneurialism of new models of original news gathering. Bill Wheatley will assess mainstream media strategies to adapt to change, particularly regarding the development of 88

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innovative products that supplement traditional news delivery. Michael Maier will write about successfully starting new media ventures, including what is entailed in defining the market, lining up investors and advertising, etc. But he will also assess the economic viability and news reporting potential of the various, latest forms of citizen journalism in the world. Jim Brady will explain how one of the most successful newspaper websites came to be, how it relates to the parent company, and what its future capacity to provide original news coverage is likely to be. Geneva Overholser will update her ‘On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change.’

The Still Unresolved Predicament At the start of a tumultuous new century, with the public’s need for credible, unvarnished information as vital as ever, the news-gathering business, in all its commercial media forms, has been undergoing an historic transformation. Public confidence and trust in news and the news media are at disconcerting levels. Mass market consumer interest in news from traditional, for profit, newspaper, magazine, television and radio media outlets have been steadily eroding literally for decades, which has not gone unnoticed by advertisers and investors. Because of these disturbing trends, and the industry’s laggard response to exciting new technologies hugely impacting global communications and society in general, its long-term economic future has become the subject of intense concern and speculation.

Of course, meticulous information-gathering and editorial quality-control essential for serious, high quality news require time and money – finite resources that many news organizations are increasingly unable or unwilling to expend.

Indeed, in recent years nearly all of our media corporations have been actually reducing their commitment to journalism, reducing their editorial budgets, early ‘retiring’ thousands of reporters and editors from their newsrooms, in order to keep their annual profit margins high and their investors happy, harvesting their investments from a ‘mature’ industry. The net result of this hollowing out process: There are fewer people today to report, write and edit original news stories about our infinitely more complex, dynamic world.

Consider the unimaginable media ownership developments in just the last two years: Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s stunning takeover of Dow Jones, the parent company of the estimable icon, The Wall Street Journal; the dismantling of the most Pulitzer-honored newspaper chain in America, KnightRidder; sale by McClatchy Co. of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to a private equity firm for less than half its purchase price eight years earlier; efforts to sell the Tribune Co. failing because its current market value apparently was too low. The Tribune Co. includes some of the country’s most venerable newspapers – the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Newsday and others. It is now in the hands of a real estate tycoon with no previously manifested interest in journalism or public service.

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Newsroom reach continued to diminish, with hundreds of reporters and editors accepting company ‘buyout’ offers at the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many other newspapers, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism 2007 State of the News Media report. Four newspapers which have produced quality international news coverage in the past — the Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, Newsday and Baltimore Sun — closed their remaining overseas news bureaus. As veteran correspondent Tom Fenton has observed, a quarter century ago, CBS News, once the network of Ed ‘This . . . is London’ Murrow, had 24 major or small foreign bureaus and stringers in 44 countries; today there are six bureaus, none of them in Africa or Latin America.

It is well-understood by us all now that the era of public-spirited owners dedicated to more than the bottom line — the Pulitzers, the Binghams, the Knights, the Chandlers, and now the Bancrofts — has largely passed. Today’s media owners seem more often to be faceless investors from out of town dedicated primarily to cutting overhead, increasing quarterly share earnings and inevitably reducing coverage. Today the Philadelphia Inquirer has half the number of reporters covering the Philadelphia metropolitan area as it did in 1980. And that is also the pattern for all newspaper reporters in the Philadelphia area, dropping from 500 to 220 in that time. There simply are fewer and fewer professional reporters monitoring those in power; nationwide, newspaper owners have jettisoned at least 3,500 newsroom professionals since 2000, or seven percent of the editorial workforce nationwide, according to the Project on Excellence in Journalism.

As John Carroll, the respected former editor of three major newspapers, most recently the Los Angles Times, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2006 at their convention in Seattle, ‘We have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner. Under the old local owners, a newspaper’s capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything. Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public . . . What do the current owners want from their newspapers? The answer could not be simpler: money. That’s it.’

How can the public ownership of newspapers which began 40 years ago preserve some greater social obligation beyond merely making money? Supposedly it was the two-tier stock structure that allows venerable media families to elect a majority of a public company’s board and continue serving its community in ways other than financial. But Dow Jones & Co. in fact has such a structure and Murdoch was able simply to make family members a $5 billion, $60–a-share price offer they couldn’t refuse.

In April 2007, New York Times Co. shareholders were urged for strictly financial reasons by a Morgan Stanley money manager to overturn that company’s two-tier structure. Days before the Times Company’s annual meeting, the CEO of the also two-tier structured Washington Post Co., Donald Graham, wrote a blunt editorial entitled ‘The Gray Lady’s Virtue’ in the Wall Street Journal, citing the ‘crazy risks’ of 90

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the Morgan Stanley gambit. ‘If the stock structure were eliminated,’ Graham wrote, ‘a line of buyers eager to purchase the company would form within minutes. No one could say no. The line would include private equity firms, high-ego billionaires, international media companies lacking a famous property and lots more . . . It isn’t guaranteed that anyone owning the Times would spend more than $200 million on its newsroom budget or deploy dozens of foreign correspondents around the world. Sending any one of those reporters overseas costs lots of money and doesn’t add a penny to this year’s circulation or advertising revenue.’

The Sulzberger family managed to retain control of the Times Co., its two-tier structure intact – for now. But it all seemed emblematic of the current unsettling era, particularly the perception of the owner of The Washington Post taking to the streets – Wall Street, that is – to defend The New York Times?

It was Graham’s mother Katharine, of course, who ultimately made the courageous decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, in defiance of nervous lawyers and a federal gag order against The Times from printing them, and despite the Nixon Administration threatening to seize Post Company broadcast licenses if they published them. Imagine today’s out-of-town money managers risking a billion dollar enterprise on something un-quantitative and immeasurable, principle over principal, committed merely to ‘a simple search for truth. With fervor, not favor. With fairness and courage,’ her former Executive Editor eulogized at her July, 2001 funeral.

Ben Bradlee, Vice President-at-large at The Post, has often spoken of the ‘sacred trust’ between owners and editors, and he recently said, ‘The beginning of a good newspaper is to have an owner who cares. And if they don’t care, they are not going to be good newspapers. They just are not going to be. I mean they are going to be a toy. Or they are going to be a source of income.’3 While more and more newspapers inevitably will continue to transform themselves into ‘print-Web hybrids,’ as Robert Kuttner and others have written, online advertising revenue must catch up to current editorial payroll levels.4 That prospect is uncertain at best, and future layoffs in the immediate years ahead seem likely. Not surprisingly, in recent years, the sheer volume, enterprise and quality of serious news stories have quite noticeably diminished, especially among small and mid-size newspapers. And international reporting and investigative reporting, always time-consuming and expensive, increasingly have come to be regarded by management as high-risk, high maintenance, high-priced impracticalities.

Thus far, meanwhile, new online commercial media ventures are noticeably light when it comes to their commitment or their capacity to publish original reporting. Of course, the global reach of the new technologies, the versatility, range and depth of what is possible journalistically because of multimedia convergences, the ease and relative affordability of high-speed communications in this information age, are all terrifically exciting and historically unprecedented.

The highly successful Web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, however, merely aggregate, automate and re-package other people’s work. While the world’s 91

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blogs continue to proliferate and will develop further as a content form before our eyes, hardly any of them at present is solely devoted to responsible reporting and ‘fact-based journalism.’ Perhaps new stand alone, advertising-supported, profitable, original newsgathering and storytelling venues – beyond password protected, subscription-based, specialized niche publishing – will robustly evolve in the digital age, but that hasn’t really happened yet.

As a result, now other credible, less traditional models for producing original, high quality, substantive journalism are suddenly more interesting and relevant to a profession under siege. And while much has been written of late about the current, dire state of commercial journalism, very little has been said about various independent, non-commercial initiatives specifically designed to produce high quality, public service journalism.

One distinguished exception is veteran newspaper journalist Philip Meyer, a visionary computer-assisted reporting pioneer who wrote Precision Journalism in 1972, has been vocal for years now about the prospect of a news organization operating irrespective of profit margins and quarterly earnings. Now in his final year as the Knight Chair and Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Meyer wrote in his 2004 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, ‘The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance and social responsibility.’ He cited nonprofit institutions, such as National Public Radio and the Center for Public Integrity, as perhaps representing such a model for the future.

As was noted at the 2004 Breaux Symposium, there is a long, well-established American journalism tradition of nonprofit ownership, from the creation of The Associated Press more than 150 years ago to newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Petersburg Times, the Manchester Union Leader, The Day in New London, Connecticut, the Anniston Star, the Delaware State News and such publications as Congressional Quarterly, National Geographic, Consumer Reports, Mother Jones, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and Harper’s. 5 On national television, two highly-respected programs, Frontline and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, are aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), created in 1967.6 But no nonprofit or for-profit news media organization in the United States today can match the audience growth of National Public Radio (NPR), which began in 1970 and now has 36 bureaus worldwide and 26 million weekly listeners, double the listeners of a decade ago. 7 Despite its often excellent and in-depth reporting of national and international affairs, however, NPR is not known for its sustained commitment to investigative reporting (e.g. the sole investigative reporting radio documentary unit in the U.S. today actually operates out of St. Paul, Minnesota, home of Minnesota Public Radio /American Public Media, a separate nonprofit and the second largest producer of public radio programming, which also airs regularly on NPR stations nationwide).

None of the nonprofit ownership outlets mentioned above is solely engaged in the practice of investigative journalism, which can be defined as ‘serious 92

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journalism that takes a comprehensive, exhaustive look at issues that have significant impact on the lives’ of the public.8 However it is defined, it is painstaking, very time-consuming work, usually taking weeks, months and sometimes years to complete, with the possibility of not finding a publishable story at the end of the process.

I am hardly a disinterested party to this subject. After 11 years, I quit the commercial journalism milieu, specifically network television production at the CBS News program 60 Minutes and before that, ABC News, and in 1989-founded and for 15 years directed the Center for Public Integrity, based in Washington, D.C. During that time, the Center published more than 275 reports, including 14 books, and broke several major news stories, its work honored more than 30 times by national journalism organizations.9 Other nonprofit investigative journalism organizations on three continents dedicated for years solely to publishing investigative content include: the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in Berkeley, California; the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, based in Manila; and the relatively much newer and smaller Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, based in Bucharest.

We also have seen some innovative, cross-platform, content-producing collaboration and synergies between investigative reporters, universities and commercial media companies. The considerable human and physical resources of those institutions—researchers eager both to learn and be mentored, libraries, office space, experts in various disciplines—help respected investigative journalists do their important work. And of course for major media organizations, it vastly reduces the cost and logistical encumbrances of investigative journalism.

These hybrid models are occurring at the University of California’s Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Brandeis University, the American University School of Communication, Point Park University in Pittsburgh, the University of Missouri School of Journalism and elsewhere. More for- profit/nonprofit hybrid partnerships will likely emerge.

What is sometimes forgotten is that PBS and NPR were created roughly forty years ago in part due to a perception that the public needed more substantive, enriching news. And philanthropic foundations were instrumental in helping to create these two vital, national nonprofit institutions and their noncommercial systems of distribution. According to Bill Kovach, the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, ‘I think we have to really count on philanthropic organizations, at least in an interim period while this destabilization continues.

Because most news organizations are so scared and so unsure of themselves, they are not protecting their franchise. And somehow a philanthropy that believes in democracy has to help stabilize it.’10 There are tantalizing, recent signs that specific philanthropic institutions and individuals finally realize just how severe the crisis has become. For example, the Sandler Foundation in California in late 2007 pledged $30 million over three years 93

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to establish a new, original reporting organization called ProPublica, based in New York, and other major donors have pledged their support as well. Following in the footsteps of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which began in 1977, and the Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, this new ‘independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest’ is led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger.

There will likely be others. If five million people regularly coalesce as subscribing members of a National Geographic Society, why can’t other serious journalistic entities draw such numbers in a digital world, across borders? And beyond daily news coverage, is there a way to regularly generate high-quality, investigative and international reporting as a syndication service or as a ‘viewers like you’supported Web destination? Such things are absolutely possible, and absolutely sustainable, with the right combinations of people, resources, and timing—and they are certainly needed.

The questions for philanthropists involved in these and other nonprofit journalism ventures are: Can they overcome their sometimes short-term thinking and fickle, often idiosyncratic nature and make significant, multi-year commitments to strengthen or build pillars of journalism in their communities, the nation, and beyond? Can they think outside their own agendas and embrace the inherent value of accurate, nonpartisan information to our national discourse?

And two important questions for nonprofit reporting organizations: to safeguard against partisan, ideological or other non-journalistic motivations, will they ensure the integrity of the editorial process the way newsrooms and advertising departments have operated separately, limiting interaction between regular staff and donors? Will they publicly disclose all of their annual contributions?

Of course, nonprofit journalism is only one answer to the current crisis. New, for-profit companies with owners committed to better informing their communities and to journalism writ large, must and certainly will also emerge in the months and years ahead to fill the above-described voids, since, as Geneva Overholser put it so well, ‘the long-building plaint is now undeniable: journalism as we know it is over.’11 The often unnoticed irony is that amidst the current, deteriorating state of original, investigative and otherwise independent journalism in America, right now there are new, very energizing forces at play – talented and highly motivated journalists, mindful of the stakes involved; entrepreneurial leaders with vision, a commitment to community and financial wherewithal; new media platforms and technologies revolutionizing the means and cost of production; and every day, more and more signs of what is possible journalistically, particularly with the new social networking connectivity of the Web and related, constantly improving technologies.

The challenge of this year’s Breaux Symposium is to accurately assess the full range of new, for profit, nonprofit and hybrid models of news today and, as we can imagine, tomorrow, and to gauge the extent to which these new models are likely 94

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to improve the current quantity of reporters devoted to committing original, indepth, high quality journalism.

(Some information in this essay comes from recent writing by the author: ‘The Nonprofit Road: It’s Paved Not with Gold but Good Journalism’ in the Columbia Journalism Review, September/October, 2007, and ‘The Growing Importance of Nonprofit Journalism,’ published in April 2007 by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy).

1. Robert G. Picard, ‘Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations,’ Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, Research Paper R-27, 2006, p. 8.

2. Philip Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press: 2004), pp. 9-13, for a discussion of ‘The Harvesting Strategy’ and the origins of that term.

3. Interview with Benjamin Bradlee, April 25, 2007 4. Robert Kuttner, ‘The Race,’ Columbia Journalism Review, March/April, 2007 5. ‘Nonprofit Journalism,’ by Daniel Akst, in ‘Journalism’s Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation,’ A Report of the Carnegie Corporation of New York 2006, pp. 56-68. See also ‘News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press,’ The Breaux Symposium, March 20, 2004 (The Manship School of Mass Communication/The Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs, Louisiana State University), p. 19.

6. Ibid (Akst), p. 58.

7. Ibid, p. 56, 63.

8. James L. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (University of Missouri Press: Columbia, Missouri: 2005), p. 2.

9. The Center Web site, www.publicintegrity.org, lists all awards, annual reports (the 2000 report includes a history and chronology of the first 10 years, including a list of all major reports), the annual IRS 990 forms for recent years, donors and other information.

10. Interview with Bill Kovach, June 28, 2007 11. Geneva Overholser, ‘On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change,’ New York , June 2006 (Web circulated), p. 1

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Updating “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change”

By Geneva Overholser

Overview “Journalism as we know it is over,” I wrote in June 2006. Today I would add, “and a whole new world has opened before us.” “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change” was a document intended to bring hope in a time of difficulty. Two years later, there is even greater difficulty—and still more reason for hope. We wouldn’t have chosen devastating disruption as a cure, but ours was a field so fiercely resistant to change that it may have been required, In my 40 years in this craft, I often yearned for more accountability, greater democratization, increased transparency, less pomposity and insularity—in all, a clearer understanding that our reason for being was public service. Fear has fostered all those characteristics, and we who call ourselves journalists know now that we will live or die by that very understanding.

There is still good reason to fear—and not just for the survival of media as we have known them, but for the continuation of a healthy supply of reliable information in the public interest. We are far from answering the toughest question: How are we going to pay for the creation of content? And, for all the new models, it remains unclear how we will reliably provide the kind of journalism that can stand up to big government and big business, acting as watchdog, championing the powerless and ferreting out secrets.

But so much has changed for the better in the past couple of years. In many traditional media organizations, newsrooms that were once innovation’s enemy now lead it. Old hands learn Drupal, bloggers adopt ethics codes. The old straitjacket about who is a journalist has been stripped off by the fast-emerging reality of aggregators and curators, citizen journalists and crowd sourcing.

Collaboration and hybridization seem now to offer enormous potential—not only the old forms of collaboration, such as a newspaper and television newsroom coproducing stories, but new forms: Universities that hire journalists to work with students to produce investigative reporting used by both new and traditional media (Brandeis, Columbia, Berkeley and others). Nonprofits that turn out national investigative work themselves (the Center for Public Integrity and the coming Pro Publica)—or nonprofits that support journalists in doing so (the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting). And even the unintentional collaborations such as the work by Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and by McClatchy newspapers, which together brought out last year’s U.S. attorney scandal stories.

Amid such change it’s not surprising that the signals keep switching on us.

Things we thought we knew turn out not to be so clear. Is advertising going to 96

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continue to be linked to news? Was the old business/journalism wall our great protector—or an impediment to much-needed entrepreneurialism? Is anonymity essential to the Web (assuredly not, for information in the public interest)? And the question that looms over all: With this great proliferation of voices on the Web, what steps will it take to ensure that a sufficient proportion of it is reliable information in the public interest-and how will those sources be identifiable and discoverable for the public? Some of the answers here, too, of course, will be unexpected—just as some of the bloggers so decried early on by “legacy” media have done much to help bring accountability to journalism. This is truly an era when developments that at first seem inimical may prove over time to bring benefits.

Citizens will increasingly need to take responsibility for the condition and availability of information in the public interest, from demanding more of it to educating themselves about what is happening to it and how to judge what works for them. Individual investments are going to be essential—such as those by the Sandler family in ProPublica, and by Emily Pulitzer in the Pulitzer Center—as will the kind of individual support that public radio has made familiar. And reliable information will come from untraditional sources—from nongovernmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, which has 80 people collecting data across the globe—to governmental sources and, aggregations of bloggers. Those who know and care most about journalism will need to step up their efforts to differentiate it from other forms of information-provision by strengthening and adapting its core principles to a digital world. And we will need to speak out more effectively in these difficult times on behalf of journalism as a public good, a resource essential to democracy.

Amid the unsettlement, unpredictable causes for hope will continue to arise.

Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt told an advertising-industry conference in April 2008 that digital media will “create new opportunities for advertisers and new opportunities for information...The scale of this is underappreciated.”1 Digital identities2 will enable micropayments for those selecting bits of information across the Web. Metadata—collections of data about data—will connect information and advertising in ways that can support original content. And other yet-unnamed forms will emerge.

Introduction In the face of change such as rocks the media world today a few years form an eternity. Thus I am grateful indeed for the opportunity to update the “Manifesto.”

The nine propositions (See Appendix) at the base of the original were formulated for a June 2005 gathering. Though each retains merit in an examination of journalism’s prospects, some are far more vital than others. The prospects for progress on corporate social responsibility, for example, have been largely overwhelmed by the speed of the collapse of traditional media economic models. Other of the propositions, meanwhile, gained such force that they began to define my own work 97

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without my being entirely aware of it. I have been devoting time to nonprofit journalism organizations, chairing the board of the Center for Public Integrity, serving on the boards of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, Alicia Patterson Foundation and other groups. And I have brought forward other topics into projects (the new Media, Enduring Values work I will describe below) and programs, such as the March 28, 2008, symposium commemorating the centennials of the Missouri School of Journalism and the National Press Club. “The Next Century: Journalism for a Digital Globe,” brings together four speakers on ideas from other countries on the future of journalism. One is a Swede speaking on how government subsidies extend the reach of media in Western Europe. One is a Canadian scholar, talking about how required courses in news literacy affect Canadians’ expectations of their media. One is the editor of the Guardian in the UK on how a nonprofit news organization can put transparency and accountability at the center of its commitments. A speaker from Joy FM in Ghana addresses the community-building role that radio and its online component have played there. A video of the program can be found at http://www.press.org/library/missouri.cfm and more information about the program, including excerpts, can be found at http://journalism.missouri.edu/news/2008/04-08-npc-centennial.html.

The most important generalizations about the propositions three years on, however, are two: j To have reduced the universe that is “new forms of media” to the stature of one of nine propositions seems mind-bogglingly inadequate to the 2008 observer. j The changes so quickly taking place have caused these nine fairly distinct-

seeming ideas to blend dramatically with one another—just as journalism trends more generally seem to be melding and merging.

Thus this update, while mindful of the nine original ideas, regroups and blends the progress report on various fronts so as to reflect the reality on the ground.

The world of non-profit journalism has shown remarkable forward movement.

Led by former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger, ProPublica joins the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Investigative Reporting as an independent investigative reporting organization.3 With $10 million a year committed by Herbert and Marion Sandler, the New York City-based organization plans to employ 24 journalists and make its work available free to mainstream media outlets, as well as on its Website. Where the news establishments have long been hesitant about publishing investigative work not done by their own staff that resistance is breaking down as news budgets decline. The Boston Globe is regularly publishing work by classes at Northeastern University headed by former Globe investigative reporter, Walter Robinson.4 Other signs of vitality are plentiful. New forms of nonprofit journalism, such as the public Radio Exchange, New America Media, the National Black Programming Consortium, Linktv and ITVS have joined the more familiar PBS, NPR and 98

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American Public Media. In practically the same time frame in late April of 2008, three gatherings with nonprofit journalism at the core of their discussions will take place in Berkeley, Baton Rouge and New York City, each involving a mix of leaders of existing nonprofits, prospective funders, legacy media leaders and academics.

Nonetheless, nonprofit journalism is hardly poised to supplant the prevailing commercial model in American media. And concerns remain about whether individual benefactors or foundations will unduly constrain the journalism of the organizations they support—or whether nonprofits’ work will be weakened by the absence of the value of commercial discipline. Still, it’s clear that the collapse of commercial media is dramatically strengthening existing nonprofit journalism organizations and spawning new ones rapidly.

Indeed, it is in this arena we find one of the meldings of the nine ideas, with, new media models emerging daily as the collapse of traditional media’s economic underpinnings makes itself evident in daily reports of staff and newshole cuts, stockprice plunges and ownership changes. Former journalists, or community activists concerned about the poverty of information in the public interest in their hometowns, band together to launch new (mostly Web-based, but sometimes niche print publications) media outlets. The models are sometimes for-profit, often notfor-profit, but they typically encompass a broad range of support mechanisms.

Emails from founders of two of these outlets offer a more complete look at the range of models, which typically include individual gifts, foundation support, user support, advertising and collaboration with other media. A look at www.MinnPost.com (see page 160) illustrates a community approach to the news that links richly to others (for example, to TCDailyPlanet at www.tcdailyplanet.net, an aggregation of local ethnic and neighborhood information sources), enjoys collaboration (find a death certificate by linking on partnering Minnesota Historical Society or see who is funding your national representatives through a nifty interactive project with the Sunlight Foundation) and roams widely over the news and information landscape.

Are these new media outlets one more threat to a challenged traditional-media world? Former Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Eric Black, now a MinnPoster, answered in an email to me: “Papers like the Strib are dying the death of a thousand cuts. You know... the list of the cuts. At this point, something like Minnpost is a very small additional nick. Most people who read Minnpost probably still read the paper. But they are unhappy with the dumb-down.

Minnpost wants to fill the need those readers feel for ‘thoughtful approach’ news.

The audience is small, but seems to be growing. And many of them really like it, which may loosen the bonds that connect them to their lifelong addiction to a paper on their doorstep and could, if it catches on, become a more serious cut.

“People I talk to at the Strib are afraid, very very afraid, but not much of us MinnPosters. They’re mostly just jealous of us because we got the buyout and because we aren’t heading into contract negotiations with an employer that’s sinking.”5 99

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Is this model likely to become a common nationwide phenomenon? Watching MinnPost and other such developments, James B. Shaffer, Dean of the School of Business at the University of Southern Maine and former chief financial officer of the Los Angeles Times, thinks perhaps so. He believes there are concerned citizens with means who might well step up to address the information needs of local communities. Noting the challenges so publicly facing the Times’s current owner, Tribune Co., as well as the feuding among the owner and top editors at the privately owned Santa Barbara News-Press, Shaffer wrote me: “Just as in Santa Barbara, I suspect there is a huge reservoir of money and passion that can be tapped to create a new news organization in LA. If I weren’t so busy with two jobs at the University of Southern Maine, I’d be packing my carpetbag for either LA or Santa Barbara and trying to get something going. I’ll bet someone will.” 6 The Manifesto looked at the role of the citizen in two ways—through the lens of their own responsibility to be informed, and through the lens of the need to make the changes in the media world clearer to the public so that the citizens’ role in demanding information in the public interest would be strengthened. In both these arenas—and in an important additional one—there has been a burst of activity in the past several years.

The additional role, of course, is that of citizens not just as consumers of media, but also as providers of it. Much has been done in the last three years to strengthen this enormous rise of interest in citizen contributions. The Knight Citizen News Network at www.kcnn.org for example is “a self-help portal that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites.” KCNN has learning modules on the principles of good journalism, instruction on media law, on making videos and much more. Meanwhile, David Bennahum’s Center for Independent Media at http://newjournalist.org/about/ supports bloggers by providing journalism training and helping them place their work.

Most traditional news organizations understand by now that citizens want their media to be less lecture, more seminar, but too many have responded with a kind of reader-contribution ghetto of pet photos. Other news organizations are reaching out to bring user-generated content into their mix in richer forms, and some are working to develop crowd-sourcing into a strong component of their news report. Public Insight Journalism, instituted by Minnesota Public Radio, is a particularly interesting example of how to tap systematically the wisdom of news consumers so as to better inform the reporting that MPR journalists do.

Wikipedia, of course, is the ultimate in inclusive sourcing, and its merits are debated breathlessly—a debate that does nothing to slow its steamrolling progress.7 Broad inclusiveness also has its downside. Kevin Kelly, a self-described booster of what “decentralized, out-of-control systems can accomplish,” and a man who says the success of Wikipedia “keeps surpassing my expectations,” has also recently written on The Technium at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/ a piece called “The Bottom is Not Enough:” 100

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“Throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too.” Kelly adds that “the supposed paragon of adhocracy—the Wikipedia itself—is itself far from strictly bottom-up.

In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia’s process reveals that it has an elite at its center, (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears. This is why Wikipedia has worked in such a short time.”8 There are countless ways for citizens to contribute to and shape journalism, including (increasingly) sites that invite readers to submit news tips or that show citizens how to do local journalism in partnership with media organizations. These exciting developments do not however address a major concern of those watching the decline in journalism produced by large companies. In this nation of big government and big business, who will continue to have the deep pockets, tenacity, Rolodex and access to hold power accountable? With all the questions afoot about how to pay for content on the Web—for journalists as well as artists and others—this challenge remains troubling.

Even as so many citizens show such promising eagerness to engage, this is still true: Our experience has trained Americans to expect that media will be virtually free to them, and that its supply will continue without any citizen responsibility for it—the kind of responsibility that citizens feel, say about education, even in a nation where public education is universally available. If information in the public interest is to find sound new footing, this must change.

Happily, efforts to awaken that sense of responsibility for an adequate supply of journalism in the public interest—in essence, how to engender an understanding of journalism as a public good—are another area in which action has picked up recently. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is urging community foundations to put support for local journalism on their agendas and has teamed with the Aspen Institute—the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. In February 2008, Knight co-hosted a symposium on the same topic. The American Society of Newspaper Editors, meanwhile, is considering a national campaign to “promote the First Amendment in American Life.”

Another approach is to strengthen the public’s demand for better journalism by teaching news literacy. Howard Schneider’s work on this issue at Stony Brook University—where every undergraduate takes a news literacy course—has expanded to include a “News Literacy Center” on how to judge credibility in news.

And a former Los Angeles Times reporter is forming a speakers bureau that will bring journalists, including retirees, into middle schools throughout the nation.

Some citizens have actually created an active media-reform movement, as I learned at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform, which drew some 3000 people to Memphis. Its aims have typically focused on such measures as saving community Internet, opposing media consolidation, supporting low-power radio, 101

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bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, seeking network neutrality for the Internet, and pointing the FCC spectrum auction toward public airwaves. In other words, substantial overhaul of the system—not efforts to foster concern about challenges undermining the industry—has been the movement’s emphasis, though Free Press, the group that hosts the conference, is inviting traditional journalists to the 2008 event in Minneapolis in an effort to broaden the conversation.

One remaining activity with a focus on corporate responsibility can be found in the work of Trillium, an asset management corporation that, according to an email from Farnum Brown, the vice president in charge of the project, has “incubated and has now spun out a freestanding media responsibility non-profit called Open MIC: the Open Media and Information Companies Initiative.

Together Trillium and Open MIC are approaching a host of media and telecom firms, raising issues ranging from freedom of political speech to diversity in media content to access to information technology. In each case, discussions are guided by the belief that the values we promote as citizens are the same as those we seek as investors: diversity and competition, creativity and innovation, openness and transparency. Trillium and Open MIC are currently engaged in formal discussions with AT&T, urging the telecom giant to adopt a formal policy against censoring any form of political expression.” 9 A prospect mentioned some three years ago as an interesting one to watch was the conversion by publicly owned companies to private ownership—with the potential that a lower expectation of return could encourage investment in news.

The conversion has certainly proceeded, but mostly as the consequence of failing newspaper profits or sales from one company to another that have involved a resale of the unwanted newspapers. Thus newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, once owned by Knight Ridder and now privately held, are confronting today’s sped-up economic decline under new private ownership. Equity investors, layering new debt onto already shaky newspaper operations, have found the transition a rocky one, and cutbacks among these newspapers have been, to say the least, no less stringent on average than among publicly held newspaper companies.10 How are “legacy” media handling the burgeoning of platforms and models?

Many say poorly indeed. Consider this view from our colleague Robert Picard in his Shorenstein Center paper “Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organization,” Spring 2006: “Corporate executives have little vision...News executives have been turned into relatively passive administrators and managers who no longer lead by stature and vision. Everyone talks of decline and only feeble efforts to respond to the changing environment are underway. No one talks of achieving greatness, few are innovative, few produce quality content, and fewer still seek to increase value.”11 At a Knight Fellowships gathering at Stanford in May 2007 on “How will we pay for the journalism we need?” Salon founder David Talbot said newspapers made bad deals early on with the Web portal giants. “They devalued their own content.

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At this point, it’s getting the genie back in the box” to try to ensure that their products are not taken for free or sold cheaply. “Sometimes I feel guilty because I was at the cutting edge of the murder of the newspaper industry,” said Talbot. “But in my defense, I think the industry was already committing suicide.”12 Most newspaper leaders have behaved fairly helplessly in the face of the “information wants to be free” Web ethos. An exception is Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His paper offers, for free online, only headlines and sometimes a few paragraphs—in a bid to entice people to read the newspaper. His circulation, unusually enough, is up.13 Lem Lloyd, vice president of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, countered the gloom at the Stanford gathering about newspapers’ fortunes on the Web with descriptions of what the consortium does in leveraging ad content for its 271 member newspapers. “I’d like to shed a tear for optimism,” he said. “Local online advertising is going to [be worth] $9 billion by 2010.”14 Still, Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN - each of them among the top ten sites on the Net—all rely on news gathered by others. And their Websites dwarf the traffic of those others, even the top tier of news organizations, according to “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” by Thomas E. Patterson. The brighter news is that for “name-brand” newspapers and television sites, the growth is good, though still slower than that for aggregators and search engines. It’s local newspaper sites that are not doing as well, wrote Patterson.15 Of course, it’s the public need for reliable information that matters, not what platform it arrives on. If all newspapers and network broadcasts died, but a rich flow of good journalism reached more Americans than ever, there would be no problem (except of course for lots of journalists and media organizations!). But some impediments to that prospect are evident today. For one thing, the promise of democratization afforded by the Web lies still in the future, with heavy users (and generators) skewing male, young and higher-income, particularly among blog readers, according to Nielsen,16 though the demographics are changing. And then there is that previously noted question about who does the big, expensive, hard-to-get investigative story?

Amid such questions, a new one arises: is the old media/new media divide passé? An article in Harper’s Magazine last year focused on the Prelinger library in San Francisco as a “post-digital” library. Rejecting the disparaging of a stark conflict between “treeware” and the digital culture, the library’s owners said we should stop celebrating—or lamenting—the discontinuous story of how the circuits will displace the shelves, and start telling a continuous story about how the two will fit together, enriching each other, to the benefit of us all.17 Certainly, different kinds of reading are more effective on different platforms.

Those media that figure out how best to deliver what kind of information where will be miles ahead of those less nimble.

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communicate these matters to the public meld now with the need on the part of the public for greater assistance in judging the ever more chaotic world of media.

To that end, the Poynter Institute is working on a project suggested by Jim Naughton, its former president, that he described in an email this way: “I’ve been trying to persuade Poynter to create a daily digest of the best journalism on the Internet—capsule summaries, similar to Romenesko’s—that guide the user to things like an ongoing series in a regional newspaper or a brilliant piece of correspondence in a magazine or an investigative piece of substance on a broadcast website or an evocative photo-essay from Darfur. The digest (call it WOW, for What’s On the Web) would be available to newspapers to run on, say, page 2A where they increasingly are focusing on late-breaking personalities, and to all media to use on websites. If Poynter creates it, I’d hope they would earn income to support training. If Poynter does not, I’d love to persuade Knight or someone to fund it. The idea stems from the belief that newspapers withstood any real threat from radio in part by becoming the source of reliable information about what’s on the radio. Then they did the same with television. But newspapers and other mainstream news organizations have not yet mastered the ability to help people navigate to what’s worthwhile on the Web, not on a consistent and timely basis.”18 Poynter’s Bill Mitchell wrote me in a more recent email that “ Part of WOW is in the works, at least the online component, in the form of a Best Practices/Winning Work/Backstory feature (name still under discussion) that would highlight good stuff, probe how they did it and link to it.”19 Accountability and transparency are today’s watchwords for many media ethicists. The two existing state news councils, with their emphasis on holding news media accountable, were hoping in 2007 to replicate themselves. It seemed at first that they had succeeded in two cases—New England and Southern California—though the latter failed and had to return its start-up funds to the Knight Foundation.20 Bill Densmore, who heads the New England News Forum, lists these long-term objectives for that new effort: (a) Strengthening the journalist-educator connection (b) Training/advice for ‘citizen journalists’ (c) Media-accountability/watchdog efforts (d) Sponsoring forums on public issues affected by media”21 Often discussed as an aid to a public baffled by the Wild West of new media options is some kind of signal of reliability—a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, if you will. In some realms of knowledge, examples exist. Healthnet.org is a global health information network that “breaks down barriers to information access” on medical issues internationally, as it describes itself on its Website. More broadly, Newstrust.Net is a site that enables viewers to evaluate information according to key journalistic standards at http://www.newstrust.net/about/. A committee I am part of at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is considering as a principle

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recommendation the establishment of something comparable for science information—or perhaps the systematic stewardship of science information on Wikipedia—toward the same goal of providing a reliable resource.

The Missouri School of Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists joined forces on a project called New Media, Enduring Values, aimed at addressing concerns about what happens to journalism’s essential principles as old forms give way to new. With Minnesota Public Radio, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and WHO-TV in Des Moines, we have sought to develop prototypes for how to translate even more richly online such tenets as the creation of a public forum, verification, and making important news interesting. Some possibilities began to emerge as we tried to separate the traditions that could be jettisoned from the principles that must be kept. 22 But the effort to translate requires a recognition that new platforms have their own cultures, making the translation of, say, the commitment to named sources even more difficult in the anonymity-loving Web than in print. J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer offered another interesting example relating to credibility and citizen journalism: “Surprisingly trust grows in the cit-j world in exactly opposite ways than journalists protect it. For instance, journalists maintain cred by taking pains not to cover anything they care about or have a hands-on association with. Cit journalists grow trust by covering the things they care about and are associated with. They assert that their hands-on knowledge is exactly what adds value.”23 Any attempt to codify journalism ethics in today’s world also runs smack up against the increasingly difficult question: What exactly IS journalism? New-media whiz Adrian Holovaty recently took his chicagocrime.org at once national and also broader with everyblock.com—an aggregation of all kinds of datasets made searchable for individual addresses, now available for New York, San Francisco and Chicago. I asked Holovaty if he considered everyblock to be journalism. “That’s an academic question,” he replied.

Academic or not, the difficult debate, “What is a journalist?” is perhaps best supplanted by, “What is journalism?” James Carey wrote in “The Culture in Question,” afterword to “James Carey: A Critical Reader,” about the importance of a “return to practice:” “We must ask not what the ideals of journalists are but what the spirit that is expressed in practice is and to what degree that spirit and practice are consistent with our needs as a democratic people.”24 For a sense of just how many ways that spirit might manifest itself, consider this list of terms from a Journalism that Matters conference at Yahoo in May 2008, supplied by those attempting to update the outdated terminology of “journalists” to fit the emerging media world: curator, aggregator, news-recommender, beat blogger, community host, finder, network reporter, information architect, database manager, programmer, developer, group filter, sense maker. Whatever we call them, surely Holovaty’s work, the interactive timelines on conflict in the Middle East provided by the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. attorney questions first raised by blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, the games in the public interest designed 105

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by Ian Bogost for the New York Times—and countless other forms of media provided by NGOs or individuals—are providing information in the public interest.

A final proposition addresses the role of government. I have been party to several conversations—among media reformers and guild members and FCC staffers—in the past couple of years aimed at attempting to join forces on initiatives of one kind or another, but all have foundered. Various ongoing efforts, principally by media reformers as mentioned, concentrate on issues such as ownership rules, Net neutrality and the spectrum auction. Mainstream media interests have stepped up their support for a federal shield law and for strengthening of the FOIA, with recent success on the latter. A rich list of suggestions from our colleague Jay Hamilton (see page 164) focuses on some of the issues above and adds changes in inheritance-tax law, addressing legal hurdles to establishment of nonprofit journalism organizations, campaign finance reform, and expansion of grants to creation of information about public affairs. These topics are eminently worthy of public engagement, yet they remain significantly under-covered by media and poorly understood by many citizens. Surely the simplistic and inaccurate notion that the government HAS no role to play in media, still the knee-jerk reaction among many journalists and in much of the public, is one of several explanations for lack of effective action in this arena.

It has become almost a commonplace to hear calls for a new Hutchins Commission, a blue-ribbon panel, or a Marshall Plan of one kind or another in order to address the challenges that today’s cauldron of media-change seems to pose. Meanwhile, the new media world is rapidly (and obliviously) birthing itself.

Ethnic media are flourishing, new models are being born, more voices are heard than ever. No one really knows what lies ahead. But thoughtful observers CAN see what stands out among recent changes, and I asked two of my favorite in-theknow media types to do that: Merrill Brown, MSNBC.com’s first editor-in-chief and now a consultant; and Jan Schaffer, a Pulitzer-winning Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and editor now directing J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism.

They had strong agreement on both the most noteworthy developments and the most regrettable failure.

First, Schaffer’s response: “My sense of major developments is: 1) the rise of non-narrative news forms—video, games, twitter, audio—forms of news and information that don’t necessarily require a narrative arc.

2) the rise of “Search” as a new definition of journalism and search and find sites like Holovaty’s new Everyblock.com that allow users to find their own stories.

3) certainly the rise of social networking to amplify and discuss news.

“It is heartening to see, in the hyperlocal citizen media area, how the desire for a “sense of place” is fueling user generated content.”

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And the disappointment? “Traditional news organizations are still painfully slow to ‘get it.’”25 Brown put it this way in a phone call from the We Media conference in Miami: “The simplest most obvious thing is the development of Facebook as a medium.

If you’d said two years ago that Geneva and Merrill and a whole bunch of our friends would be pretty engaged in Facebook, we’d have scoffed.” Merrill added that what Facebook could mean for many who support journalism is hard even to imagine. “As an information-sharing, money-raising, communication device and platform, the social network development is at its infancy. I think that’s a big deal.

The power of social networking is really transformational.”

As for the thing that didn’t happen, Merrill’s lament about traditional media’s tardy responsiveness was virtually identical to Jan’s. 26 The original Manifesto ended with a quote from Michael Riley, then editor of the Roanoke (VA) Times, who was presiding over one of the more innovative newsrooms around, thanks to a “corporate culture [that] willingly embraces change.” Three years later, it seemed a good idea to track Riley down to see how things had played out. Here’s what he told me: “In summer of 2006, Bob Merry, the president and editor-in-chief at Congressional Quarterly, called to discuss with me the job of top editor at CQ. I knew CQ well and had been watching it, and in the past five years had seen that it was one of the few media companies that really embraced wholeheartedly and unreservedly the digital publishing platform of the future through CQ.com, a news and information juggernaut built on nearly two score deep databases and a robust (and growing) newsgathering force.

“I wasn’t looking to leave Roanoke, but the opportunity at CQ was enticing. CQ had built what I consider the ideal type of journalistic business designed for the future. They understood the Web and how to reach their audience through it; they had a robust and flexible digital publishing platform; they served a demanding niche audience (those interested in Congress, politics and public policy) with rich and deep content. Nearly 65 percent of CQ’s revenues came from online sales. That compared to 5-7 percent of newspaper revenues derived from online sales. That’s a huge difference, and a marker of their success.

“The more I learned, the more I realized that CQ’s vision for the future made great sense. It combined a strong commitment to journalistic excellence, a track record of innovation, and a robust and growing business model. So I decided it was the right next step for me.” And what happened to the newspaper?

“Sadly, after I left Roanoke the tsunami that had inundated much of the industry hit that newspaper, which was recently put up for sale along with all the other properties of Landmark Communications, including the Weather Channel. They are continuing their innovative work, but the financial realities, I gather, are making it much harder to make progress.”27

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Addendum 1: From “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change,” http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/Overholser/20061011_JournStudy.pdf In June 2005, a group of journalists, scholars and others concerned about the challenges confronting American journalism gathered at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

The nine propositions below served as starting points for their discussion.

• A greater role for nonprofits—organizations such as the Center for Public Integrity, the St. Petersburg Times and National Public Radio, along with foundation support—could help lift all media.

• Citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to be informed. Media literacy courses, stronger civics education and other tools can create the environment of vigorous debate in which the press can thrive.

• Our society would be better served if journalists could make their voices heard more effectively - in response to freedom of information challenges, reporters threatened with jailing, concerted efforts at misrepresentation of the press, and so forth.

• The media can significantly strengthen their own position by doing a better job of holding themselves accountable and making their work transparent.

• The essential role of a free and responsible press must be made a primary concern of the public. Only they can protect and sustain it. The discussion must be brought to public attention.

• More responsible corporate governance among media companies is essential if the costly work of original journalism is to be sustained.

• In this period of challenge and change, journalists would profit by seeking a clearer common understanding of ethics and good practices, and a deliberate recommitment to journalism’s public-service role.

• New forms of media, the engagement of a richer array of people in producing media, and new ways of using media are transforming the landscape. An understanding of these changes, their potential and the challenges they pose, is essential to addressing the problems and opportunities confronting journalism.

• The government role in protecting, regulating, and supporting a free and responsible press demands thoughtful consideration and public discussion.

Addendum 2: Email from Jay Hamilton to author, Feb. 27, 2007 Policy proposals in part would depend on what a person thinks is behind the current problems with journalism. I think the lack of coverage of public affairs arises from a) changes in technology and costs structure that make it harder to 108

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generate revenue for newspapers (competition from Internet, demise of classifieds) b) lack of expressed demand for some hard news, even if citizens would benefit from the information (the ‘rational ignorance’ problem) and c) change in ownership structure that means fewer families/media company founders exist who are willing to trade off profits for doing the right thing and covering government. I think the biggest market failure probably exists at the local level in terms of the dwindling support for local watchdog investigations by newspapers.

What is to be done? Unfortunately I think that many of the frustrations people feel with journalism are often phrased in good guy/bad guy analysis (e.g., owners are too big, too greedy), when really most of the downfalls of journalism simply arise from profit maximization and shareholder interests. I find it difficult to prove all of the above, which is why I am not submitting comments in FCC proceedings.

But since you asked for ideas, here are some suggestions: A. Relax cross-ownership restrictions. Newspapers really do provide the local information that most people get, even if they watch local tv (since local tv gets its facts from local newspapers). Local newspapers are hurting. They are still very profitable, but investors are upset because the profits are below the anticipated levels that shareholders had when they bought in. IF relaxation of cross-ownership strengthened newspapers by allowing them to get better video for their websites and use their information in another platform, then the FCC might want to consider this relaxation. Ultimately I view both tv and newspaper outlets as demand driven, so if the same person owns both in a town they still might offer diverse coverage if the audiences for print and tv were different. Talking with newspapers large and small (e.g., Washington Post, smaller town newspaper) might yield insights into how crossownership relaxation might work.

B. Inheritance taxes and newspapers: I think that families are sometimes willing to tradeoff profits for high quality coverage (think dual stock ownership and the Times, Post; perhaps family influence too at WSJ).

Historically the record is mixed on individual influence on papers (e.g., Tribune and the Colonel). But if one were willing to roll the dice, changes in the inheritance tax for media properties might help preserve a subset of newspapers in family hands. Frank Blethen has well developed ideas on this!

The LSU volume you’ve seen (News in the Public Interest, available on the web via the Reilly Center at the Manship School) details this proposal.

C. Nonprofits and news provision: More cities/wealthy folks are talking about running newspapers as nonprofits (or as for profit entities owned by nonprofits). Poynter would be the place to talk about legal hurdles to this.

Note that at times people talk as if a family would have to ‘give it all away’ to establish a new Poynter, but at the LSU event we did talk about how an entity 109

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could buy a paper from a family and promise payments over time in debt as the paper was run, so the family would not be giving it away. It would be getting payments (perhaps lower than profit max) from a paper owned by a nonprofit.

D. Public interest requirements and satellite/digital: I don’t think requiring all broadcasters to provide certain levels of public affairs programming would work, because the First Amendment would prevent the FCC from being really specific about what this means. And more research is showing information impacts from soft news. But I think that there are ways to require folks using the airwaves to provide some dedicated channels with nonprofit public affairs programming (e.g., PBS, CSPAN). I am not up to speed on this area, but I know NC public broadcasting is having a hard time getting its expanded digital channels taken up by satellite folks. NC public broadcasting head would be a good source.

E. Freedom of Information Act: FOIA lowers the cost to reporters of really finding out what is going on in government. Under the Bush administration/Republican congress agencies have been given signals to dry up/slow down information provision. The Democratic Congress could have oversight hearings on this.

F. Campaign Finance Reform: when people consider regulation of campaign funds, they often stress corruption/appearance of impropriety/equity and downplay that ultimately funds are often translated in political information.

With the decline of newspaper coverage, partisan sources of information are an alternative source of political information. The quality is different, but people do learn some facts/impressions from political ads.

G. Hands off the web: The FEC sometimes creates fear about chilling speech on blogs, as people begin to worry about whether campaign finance laws apply to them. To the extent that the FEC can clarify/stay out of regulating Internet speech that would help discussion of public affairs proceed (even if it is subsidized by campaigns).

H. Support Digital Trust Fund legislation that would expand the types of grants envisioned to include the creation of information about public affairs. Right now Digital Trust Fund legislation (from Minow and Grossman) targets infrastructure and digitalization of some types of information. But I think the market failures involved in public affairs coverage mean that the Trust Fund could be used to subsidize creation of public affairs information. As you know, the Trust fund proposal would tap auction revenues. This use of funds would be controversial.

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1 2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

Stuart Elliott, “Telling the Heavyweights How to Avoid Extinction,” New York Times, April 30, 2008.

For a fascinating look at the many possible faces of one persona’s digital ID, from where you work to what you buy to what your hobbies are to what information you seek and how, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredcavazza/278973402/.

Richard Perez-Pena, “Group Plan to Provide Investigative Journalism,” New York Times, October 15, 2007.

Northeastern University Campus News “In the Spring and Fall semesters of ‘07, the students produced six page one investigative stories that ran in the Boston Globe.” http://www.northeastern.edu/nupr/news/0907/Walter_Robinson.html.

Email from Eric Black to author, Feb. 26, 2008.

Email from James Shaffer to author, Feb. 26, 2008.

See Nicholson Baker, “Why Wikipedia Wins,” The New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008, or Stacy Schiff, “Know It All,” New Yorker, July 31, 2006.

Kevin Kelly, “The Bottom is Not Enough,” http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/02/the_bottom_is_n.php.

Email from Farnum Brown to author, Feb. 29, 2008.

David Carr, “Newspapers’ New Owners Turn Grim,” New York Times, March 24, 2008 Robert G. Picard, “Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations,” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Research Paper Series, Spring 2006.

Knight News, “Journalists and media analysts debate how to pay for quality news coverage,” February 2008, page 20.

Walter E. Hussman Jr., “How to Sink a Newspaper,” Wall Street Journal, opinion page, May 7, 2007.

Knight News, “Journalists and media analysts debate how to pay for quality news coverage,” February 2008, page 20.

Thomas E. Patterson, “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, August 2007.

“Blog Traffic Grows, and It’s Mostly Male,” New York Times, January 29, 2007, page C3.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the Post-Digital Library,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2007, page 47.

Email from Jim Naughton to author, Oct. 21, 2006.

Email from Bill Mitchell to author, Jan. 29, 2008.

Email from Bill Babcock to author, Feb. 27, 2008.

Email from Bill Densmore to author, Feb. 27, 2008.

See more information at http://rji.missouri.edu/projects/new-media-enduring-values/index.php.

Email from Jan Schaffer to author, Feb. 28, 2008.

James Carey, “The Culture in Question,” from “James Carey: A Critical Reader,” Stryker and Warren, eds, University of Minnesota, 1997.

Email from Jan Schaffer to author, Feb. 28, 2008.

Phone conversation between Merrill Brown and author, Feb. 27, 2008.

Email from Michael Riley to author, Feb. 27, 2008.

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News Consumption and the Business of Journalism

By Robert G. Picard

Let’s all sit back in our chairs, cross our arms, close our eyes, and begin the contemporary mantra of journalists: j “Declining readership and viewership. Waning profits. Repeated layoffs.

Quality journalism is disappearing. The old days were better... j Declining readership and viewership. Waning profits. Repeated layoffs.

Quality journalism is disappearing. The old days were better...”

We all know the evidence: readers are abandoning newspapers and news magazines, viewers are switching off television news and public affairs programs, the Internet is increasingly the location where many people get their news, advertisers are following audiences, news organizations are cutting bureaus and coverage areas, and the number of full-time journalists is declining.

The process has set off cries of alarm from within the industry. Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser say the trends put “American Journalism in Peril.” Tom Fenton has lamented the decline in serious journalism and international coverage calling it “Bad News.” Bonnie Anderson has argued it is the reason why infotainment has become so prevalent on television. Bill Kovach, Tom Rosensteil, and Eugene Roberts and hosts of other editors and journalists have warned that newspapers are failing readers. James Fallows argues that the current condition of journalism is endangering democratic processes and participation.1 Everyone is pointing fingers trying to find the culprit and critics easily target greedy owners, corporate journalism, and the arrival of free newspapers and the Internet. But despite the rhetoric the current conditions of news organizations are not the fault of ownership per se and are not caused by free newspapers or the Internet. Those are just complicating factors. The root causes are much more fundamental and part of a significant shift in the nature and use of media.

We have relatively short memories about the journalism business, so we need to step back and look at journalism from more than its current perspective. If we do so, we see that journalism and news organizations have changed remarkably in our life-times. When many of us were young, newspapers were relatively unprofitable, competition was still evident in more than 100 cities, and television news was limited and a loss leader for the networks.

In 1950 total newspaper advertising nationwide was just $2 billion, enough for owners to make a living and for only a few owners in major cities to live well. In 2000 advertising provided nearly $49 billion in income to newspapers, two and a 112

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half times as much income in real terms as in 1950. The growth of advertising and the disappearance of competing paid circulation newspapers made newspapers extremely profitable and led to the growth of publicly traded newspaper companies owning large numbers of papers nationwide. The number of newspaper owners in the U.S. was cut in half between 1970 and 1990 and profits rose into the 25 to 35 percent range and remained steady.

Television news was altered after it grew from 15 to 30 minutes daily in the 1960s and by the development of videotape and microwave and satellite news distribution capabilities. In the 1970s news became highly profitable for the networks. News operations were expanded in the morning and late night and multiple bureaus were established nationwide and abroad. Local stations followed suit, drawing audiences away from network news, and news operations became the largest source of revenue for many metropolitan stations.

Those good conditions made news organization rich, fat, and happy. But the conditions have changed dramatically in the last decade and a half and we seem to view the decline as uncharacteristic and a departure from the norms of the past.

What is actually happening, however, is only the disappearance of a relatively short, unique, and abnormal time period in which limited competition and improved communication technologies gave news organizations the financial resources and technical abilities to expand their activities and coverage globally, nationally, and across states. Advertising growth that funded the development of news in print and broadcast has now reached a plateau or diminished depending on the market. The disappearance of the days of easy profitability and regular growth has caught many by surprise, but the causes have been evident for decades.

Look, for example, at the newspaper industry. Readership problems have been evident for half a century. Although actual circulation rose continually throughout the Twentieth Century, reaching a height of 62.6 million in 1993, penetration has declined steadily at 1 to 2 percent each year since 1950. The pace has been steady despite the disappearance of additional types of news media. The expansion of network television didn’t increase the loss, the arrival of cable news channels didn’t amplify the decline, and the arrival of the Internet didn’t boost the pace.

Newspaper companies and industry publications didn’t worry too much about the decline despite warnings by Leo Bogart, I, and others over the past 30 years because company revenues were growing through increased advertising expenditures and acquisitions and because profits were rising. The penetration of newspapers today, however, is less than half of what it was in 1950. Advertisers have caught on to the fact that newspapers are no longer as useful for their purposes as they once were.

Although the time frames differ slightly, similar patterns and declining audiences have afflicted television and magazine news organizations. Network television news viewing is half what it was in 1980 and circulation of news magazines is down 15 percent. And that is before one even adjusts for the fact that the U.S. population has increased by one-third since 1980. Statistics regarding 113

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Internet news use do not show a dramatic shift to Internet news and that most use is primarily the viewing of headlines. So if audiences aren’t shifting to TV, news magazines, or the Internet what is happening to them?

The answer is simple, uncomfortable, and points to the fundamental problem faced by news organizations today.

Those of us who love news and journalism have deluded ourselves into believing that it is a widely held sentiment. It may be heresy to say so, but the reality is that the average member of the general public has never been highly interested in news and has never been willing to pay for it. Those most interested in news have always been the most economically, politically, and socially active members of the community. One hundred years ago they were about one in ten persons today about one in five because of significant socioeconomic changes in the Twentieth Century. Nevertheless this still is and always has been a minority.

In it heyday, nightly network news drew large audiences not because of widespread public interest in news, but because audiences had few choices to watch anything else at the time slot. People read newspapers not because they loved news, but because they wanted sports stories and stats, comics, advice columns, recipes, and employment ads unavailable elsewhere or at a low price. In fact, news organizations have spent much of their contemporary history adding non-news features in order to attract the audience. Unfortunately, the growth of consumer magazines, television and cable sports and other entertainment, and Internet sites that cater to non-news interests now serve those interests better than newspapers.

If you seriously analyze human behavior, you find that most people are content with a quick daily news scan to determine if something new is going on that affects their lives in the short term. A glance at the front page, the television news teasers, or the top five headlines on the Internet is enough for them absent a compelling story.

The 500th newspaper story about developments in the presidential primaries or the latest in the thousand stories broadcast about the war in Iraq do not gain their attention. Stories about a parent throwing children to their death off a bridge, Britney Spears missing a court hearing, or whether Roger Clemens injected steroids may attract and amuse them into occasionally paying attention, but the bulk of the population is generally not interested in solid news and journalism.

How Journalism and Its Business Models Need to Change So what does all this mean to the business of journalism and the abilities of news organizations to serve the public? What does it tell us about how journalism needs to be organized and funded? How does it tell us we should view the changes?

First, we need to rid ourselves of the strange and unhealthy notion that the enterprises of news organizations should be static and unaffected by change.

Enterprises develop to serve functions and needs in specific environmental settings. We must recognize that those enterprises must change when the settings 114

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are altered. It is the nature of business that some companies will wither and some will thrive in times of change. Some will lose their way, merge or die; some will find new paths.2 This development is normal and we should not be horrified by it. We need to recognize that what is changing is not the need for journalism, but the business of journalism.

Second, we need to stop romanticizing the past and casting every change in the business as damaging to journalism. Even in the best of times, most news organizations were highly dependent upon news agencies and services for the national and international news. Regular, exemplary national and international coverage was the providence of only about two dozen papers and highly distinguished national and local coverage was limited to about four dozen papers.

In television news, excellence in national and international coverage was limited to network news and local coverage was undistinguished in most of the nation’s local markets.

Newspaper employment statistics tell an interesting story about the changing nature of the business. In 1950 there were about 280,000 newspaper employees.

Today, even with all the cutbacks, there are about 375,000 newspaper employees and they are spread among 300 fewer papers than in 1950. The main reason we think that employment is in such turmoil is that the employment level peaked at 440,000 around 1990 and has been going downhill since. Clearly a structural change has been taking place but, interestingly, journalistic employment followed a different path. In 1970 there were about 40,000 people employed in newspaper newsrooms, but by the year 2000 that number had grown to 56,000, a 40 percent increase. Even accounting for a decline of about 3,500 newsroom jobs since 2000, there are still one-quarter more journalists working in newspapers than in the highly profitable years that fueled the growth of corporate newspapering.

Third, the situation shows us that news does not work very well as a commodity.

Competing journalists provide much the same stories and there are too many providers and far too little demand for news. Enterprises providing news cannot be expected to make significant money from a commodity in the long run.3 As part of their business strategies, news organizations have increasingly commercialized their content and activities and this commercialism has led to an emphasis on content designed to attract broad audiences that can be sold to advertisers.4 The strategy has significant effects on resources devoted to producing quality journalism. It tends to produce average quality content and promote short-term profit maximization, and it makes serving public interest functions of media difficult.5 Despite the fact that this strategy has been widely adopted, there is no evidence that it works to attract new readers, viewers, or listeners or to stem the decline in news consumption. Yet publishing and broadcasting executives seem wedded to it despite its apparent inefficiency.

Fourth, we need to accept that news organizations as we know them will become less profitable and hence smaller. This, of course, leads to cries of woe from owners. News audiences are not suddenly going to increase. Although they 115

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may spike upward during crises and major news events, average audiences will continue to remain low and decline further. Consequently, business models will have to be adjusted and company size and organizational structures and operations will have to be reduced to reflect that reality.

Most major news organizations today—whether print or broadcast—are vertically organized, bureaucratic organizations with heavy overhead costs, paying significant managerial charges and returns to their parent companies, When they were producing 25 to 35 percent returns, these inefficiencies did not interfere significantly with basic newsgathering activities. However, now that returns have been cut in half, the inefficiencies are increasingly being paid for out of newsroom budgets.

In recent years much criticism of efforts to seek efficiencies has focused on corporate ownership of news organizations, and a growing number of observers have expressed desires to change the ownership to reduce profit and commercialization pressures.6 Many of the advocates for such change reveal considerable naiveté about the nature of enterprises and organizations and assume that any change will be beneficial. Informed consideration of the subject makes it clear that no ownership or business form-including not-for-profit and employee ownership-is ideal. Each creates significant financial and managerial challenges for enterprises engaged in journalism.7 Experience has shown, however, that non-profit news activities have been more successful for magazines, radio, and television than for newspapers.8 We must also recognize that good and poor management and journalistic conditions appear in all forms of ownership and operations. Performance is more dependent on the individuals who control the organization than the organizational form itself.9 Clearly, however, all news organizations, regardless of their ownership, will need to reform their cost structures.

If one considers new initiatives set up as alternative news gathering and distribution arrangements (such as the not-for-profit Voice of San Diego, MinnPost in Minneapolis, and ProPublica and institutes such as Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism), their advantage is not just that they don’t have to provide profit, but that they are relatively lean organizations avoiding the high fixed costs and large administrative and managerial costs typically found in traditional news organizations.

Fifth, journalism will need to pursue less but better journalism. News organizations today are trying to do too much and in doing so are doing very little well. If you look around any newsroom, you find that the majority of the people are not doing the kind of journalism that is cherished as ideal. The majority of the staff work on lifestyle, food, automotive, real estate, and entertainment stories rather than focusing on developments in the community and its organizations, wrestling with social issues, or exploring national and international topics relevant to the readers or viewers. The audience for lighter news and information is dwindling and having its needs met elsewhere.

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Sixth, the basic business model is highly convoluted and it must change.

Journalists and social observers want good journalism, but companies won’t charge enough for it because their minds are still stuck in the mass journalism business model. Good journalism costs money and companies need to start charging those who want it accordingly. Free or nearly free are not the right prices and are formulas for disaster in the long run.

Raising prices will, of course, lead those who are less interested in news to leave newspapers or news magazines, but it will also reduce production, distribution, and marketing costs. It will, of course, also affect the willingness of many advertisers to purchase advertising. It will take the publications’ business model back a few decades, but there is no reason to believe it will make them unsustainable except as cash cows.

All of these suggestions are problematic for large, well-established news organizations, especially publicly traded firms; however, I would like to suggest that we as social and journalistic observers should not be too concerned about what will become of specific media businesses, their structures, and their employees—we can leave those concerns to their owners, managers, and employees. Instead, our concern should focus on what will become of journalism and how it will be offered and funded in the new environment.

Our focus should be on how to ensure that society gets the kind of local, state, national, and world coverage it needs. If traditional news organizations can play a part in that in the future, fine, but our task is not to find ways to preserve them.

Rather, it is to identify and explore new ways of funding and organizing enterprises to serve the fundamental informational needs of society.

The answer may involve journalism cooperatives, it may include not-for-profit news organizations, and it may even involve commercial firms. We should not be too deterministic in seeking and promoting specific models and we should not allow our idealism and dissatisfaction with the current condition of news organizations and journalism to cloud our judgment about the efficacy of different possibilities.

1

2 3

4

Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002;Tom Fenton, Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. New York: Regan Books, 2005; Bonnie M. Anderson, News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom Line Business of Broadcast News. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004; Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil, The Elements of Journalism: What News people Should Know and the Public Should Expect. Three Rivers Press, 2001; Eugene Roberts with Thomas Kunkel and Charles Layton, eds. Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001; James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Pantheon, 1996.

Robert G. Picard, “The Rise and Fall of Communication Empires,” Journal of Media Economics 9(4):23-40 (1996).

Robert G. Picard, “Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations,” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, Research Paper R-27, 2006, John McManus, Market Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993; Doug Underwood, When MBAs Rule the Newsroom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; Philip Gaunt, Choosing the News: The Profit Factor in News Selection. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990; James T. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.

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5

6

7

8

9

Robert G. Picard, “The Challenges of Public Functions and Commercialized Media,” pp. 211-229 in Doris Graber, Denis McQueen, and Poppa Norris, eds. The Politics of News: The News of Politics. 2nd edition. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2007; Robert G. Picard, “Money, Media, and the Public Interest,” pp. 337-350 in Geneva Overdose and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. The Institutions of Democracy: The Press. Oxford University Press, 2005; and Robert G. Picard, “Commercialism and Newspaper Quality,” Newspaper Research Journal, 25(1):54-65 (Winter 2004).

John McManus, Market Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993; James D. Squires, Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers. New York: Times Books, 1993; Cranberry, G., Besancon, R. & John Solo ski, Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2001; David Choteau and William Haynes, Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. London: Sage Publications, 2001; Philip Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004; Newspaper Guild-CWA, Considering Ownership Alternatives at Knight Rider Newspapers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), 2005. Available at: www.knightridderwatch.org/PDF/FAQ—12-22-05 TNG-CWA-KnightRidder.doc; Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba, Special report: Is hometown ownership really the next thing? Editor & Publisher, 139(11):37-42, November 29, 2006.

Robert G. Picard and Aldo van Weasel, “Capital and Control: Consequences of Different Forms of Newspaper Ownership,” International Journal on Media Management, 10(1):22-31 (2008).

Charles Lewis, “The Non-Profit Road: It’s Paved Not with Gold, But with Good Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October, 2007, available at http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_nonprofit_ road.php; Kelly McBride, “Can Non-Profits Save Watchdog Journalism,” Everyday Ethics, Poynter Online, Oct. 26, 2007, available at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=131993; Randy Dotlinga, Nonprofit Journalism on the Rise, Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 12, 2008, available at http://www. csmonitor.com/2008/0212/p03s01-usgn.html; Robert G. Picard and Aldo van Weezel, “Capital and Control: Consequences of Different Forms of Newspaper Ownership,” International Journal on Media Management, 10(1):22-31 (2008).

David P. Demers, The Menace of the Corporate Newspaper: Fact or Fiction? Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1996; Miles McGuire, “Wall Street Made Me Do It: A Preliminary Analysis of Major Institutional Investors in U.S. Newspaper Companies,” The Journal of Media Economics, 16(4):253-264 (2003); Robert G. Picard and Aldo van Weezel, “Capital and Control: Consequences of Different Forms of Newspaper Ownership,” International Journal on Media Management, 10(1):22-31 (2008).

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A Free and Subsidized Press: Updating the 2004 Breaux Symposium Proposals

By James T. Hamilton

Hard news can be a tough sell, to consumers, advertisers, and editors. Much of the public chooses to remain rationally ignorant about the details of politics. The reasoning is simple—the odds of a single person’s vote tipping an election are so small that he or she won’t invest much effort to learn about the details of policies and candidates. Learning more about a potential car purchase can get you a better deal, but your learning more about social security or global warming doesn’t mean Congress will pass more effective legislation. This lack of a strong, expressed demand for coverage of public affairs translates into lower investment in developing government stories by reporters and editors. The higher costs of discovering and assembling hard news (relative to human interest or celebrity stories) also tip the scales. Given the lack of interest in public affairs coverage among many demographics highly valued by advertisers, the market for hard news looks relatively bleak.

While this reasoning about incentives has held true for many years, in the past media outlets such as local newspapers were distinctive in two ways. They were often owned by individuals or families, some of whom were willing to trade off profits for the notion that their coverage of the community was a public trust. The monopoly or oligopoly nature of local newspaper markets also meant that there were high profits to fund editors, reporters, or owners willing to pursue public affairs stories beyond a point where they were generating additional returns to the paper.

Changes in technology and ownership, however, have altered these calculations.

On the Internet, competition among sites to deliver many types of news stories drives prices down to marginal costs. Since the added cost of one more page view is zero, this means that for news that is widely available the price is zero. Hence most sites can’t charge subscription fees, and revenues must come from advertising. At the same time, the drop in the fixed costs of setting up an information source (e.g., blog, specialized website) means that more information niches are being covered. People can find their own worldviews reflected in a media outlet more easily, which means that traditional news providers are competing for attention with outlets offering personality, partisanship, and passion. In addition, advertising dollars once destined for newspapers are now going elsewhere. Many of the advertising functions served by newspapers, such as connecting workers with jobs or people with new cars, are being performed by websites such as Craigslist, Monster, and Autobytel.

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Against this backdrop of declines in the market for public affairs coverage, the 2004 Breaux Symposium offered up five economic policy proposals aimed at increasing the production, dissemination, and consumption of hard news.1 Since then the prospects for local watchdog coverage in media markets appear even dimmer. At the start of 2008, the market value of publicly traded American newspaper firms had dropped by 42 percent (i.e., by $23 billion) relative to the end of 2004. While in 2004 newspapers got 44.1 percent of local online ad revenues, by 2007 Internet companies enjoyed 43.7 percent and newspapers only garnered 33.4 percent. Overall web traffic was growing for readily recognized brands such as Washington Post or New York Times, but use at smaller or mid-size newspapers’ sites was actually declining. Operating profit in mid 2007 was 16 percent, down from 22.3 percent in 2002 (and below the expectations of many investors when they bought their shares of newspaper stocks). From a base of 56,400 newsroom workers in 2000, by 2006 the newspaper workforce had declined by over 3,000, with more cuts announced in 2007 and 2008.2 What is to be done? The changes in media markets have increased attention to many ideas discussed as ways to subsidize the provision of hard news. This paper will review what progress has been made in debates over each of the five policy proposals originally made at the 2004 Breaux Symposium. The paper will also offer new questions about how feasible, operable, or desirable each of the policies might be in helping further the watchdog function of the press.

Nonprofit Ownership 1. More media outlets should be operated by nonprofits, and public policies should encourage and support this type of media ownership.

Discussions of the benefits of nonprofit ownership often cite the successful hard news focus of National Public Radio, the Associated Press, the BBC, and the St. Petersburg Times. Four types of nonprofit ownership that are attracting increasing, recent attention are: Nonprofit newsroom: ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom slated to open in 2008 that will be funded with $10 million a year (for three years) by Herbert and Marion Sandler and other donors. Former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger will head up the hiring of about two dozen journalists who will focus on long-term, investigative projects. As he describes the project, ProPublica will focus on “the deep dive stuff and the aggressive follow-that is most challenged in the budget process.”3 The group will offer its watchdog stories about potential problems with government, business, and other organizations to existing media outlets. In this way the stories created by ProPublica can gain wider distribution, though the option will also exist to simply release stories on its website. As Steiger puts it, “The idea is that we, along with others of similar bent, can in some modest way make up for some of the loss in investigative-reporting resources that results from the collapse of metro newspapers’ business model.”4 Local media sites run by nonprofits: Experiments in local news provision are 120

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also appearing. Launched in 2006, the Twin Cities Daily Planet is “a community newswire and syndication service showcasing the best work of the neighborhood and community press, as well as work by Twin Cities independent journalists and the voices of engaged citizens.”5 The website offers a mix of local news stories by reporters, blogs, and citizen comments. The website is produced by the Twin Cities Media Alliance, a nonprofit which receives funding from foundations and local members. In New York City, the Gotham Gazette website is produced by the Citizens Union Foundation of the City of New York. According to the site, “It functions as four publications in one—a daily digest of news about New York City; a news operation in itself; a policy magazine; and a reference tool for students and serious researchers alike.”6 The site produces articles that focus on the details of policy problems and solutions in New York.

Blog aggregators run by nonprofits: Globalvoicesonline.org is a nonprofit headquartered at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet that “seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online—shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”7 The site’s volunteer translators, authors, and regional blogger editors select sample blog entries to highlight discussions taking place in different regions of the world and also post longer-form pieces. The site is designed to be an informed guide to the global blogosphere, with an emphasis on areas often neglected in mainstream media coverage. Note that a guide to blog expression can also be run as a commercial site. Blogher.com, which started life as the blogher.org site, is the “number- one community for and guide to blogs by women.”

The site indexes and samples postings from more than 10,000 blogs. Blogher also helps place ads in a subset of blogs that are “vetted for appropriateness of content, category relevance, blog frequency, and adherence to editorial standards.”8 Academic hybrids: In September 2004 Brandeis University launched the Elaine and Gerald Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, whose stated goals are to “investigate significant social and political problems, and uncover corporate and government abuses of power.”9 The Institute’s journalists publish their reports in mainstream media outlets. Students at Brandeis gain experience in investigative reporting by helping do research for Institute projects. At Columbia University Journalism School’s new Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, students can specialize in learning how to engage in investigative reporting and ultimately produce stories aimed for publication or airing through media outlets.

Foundation Subsidies for Information 2. Foundations should provide subsidies for information and analyses used in public policy debates. These subsidies may support the creation of information or the training of journalists to analyze particular issues.

Foundations continue to provide analyses, information, and databases helpful for journalists writing about public affairs. They are also playing a greater role, however, in sponsoring experiments in community affairs/watchdog journalism.

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new idea that works can be realized easily by other firms who can copy without investing. Innovation that has public benefits (such as an informed citizenry) can be even a tougher sale, since they may add less to the bottom line. The Knight Foundation and Sunlight Foundation are examples of groups willing to fund innovation in the watchdog function. Their efforts may be multiplied if successful projects are copied by other news media outlets or if the projects established generate support from other donors or users.

Nonprofit research: Increased philanthropic giving to support policy analyses has translated into increased operating budgets for the top research organizations in Washington, DC. As New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller observed in January 2008, “… some of the country’s largest foundations are pouring money into research organizations. In the past five years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has assets of $37.8 billion, has committed more than $24 million to the Center for Global Development…The Gates Foundation has also given millions of dollars to Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations.”10 Sometimes a nonprofit will provide information in the form of a database useful to the public and journalists. OMB Watch developed a website, FedSpending.org, which tracks federal spending so that budget expenditures are more transparent.

When Congress passed legislation requiring OMB to develop a similar site, the agency actually paid OMB Watch to help with the design. The new site, USASpending.gov, “allows users to search by contracts and grants, contractor names, congressional districts, and lawmakers.”11 The National Legal and Policy Center takes the process one step further by examining publicly available data for potential stories to research and bring to the attention of the wider media. Analyzing the financial disclosure forms of Rep. Alan Mollohan, the Center uncovered evidence suggesting that the member channeled earmark funding to business associates that “cut him in on lucrative deals.”

Describing their approach, the NLPC said the center “broke the Mollohan story only because it had the staff, expertise, and time to conduct a thorough investigation. It is highly unlikely that a major newspaper would have bothered to do such research. Even newspapers that have the investigative tools are unlikely to pursue such a story because they aren’t certain it will necessarily lead to a headline-grabbing scandal.”12 Foundation support for journalism innovations: Through a yearly competition called the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Foundation has committed to providing at least $25 million in funding over a five year period for digital experiments in community journalism. Winners in the first year (2006) of the program included the MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media (designed to encourage community news experiments), EveryBlock (“an open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn [and act on] civic information about their neighborhood or block”), and Open-Source Community News (a “community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, 122

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citizen journalism, online advertising and ‘reverse publishing’ from online to print”).13 In February 2008 Knight sponsored a conference of local community foundation officers with the aim of encouraging their support for efforts to improve the provision of information in their communities.

The Sunlight Foundation, founded in 2006, also encourages through grants and pilot projects the development of new ways of holding government accountable.

The foundation says it ‘offers “transparency grants’ for organizations that are using new “Web 2.0” technology to further the organization’s mission of making information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. Our goal is to support groups and individuals who are going beyond the traditional, single subject public disclosure database, and who are interested in creating cutting-edge tools to enable the media, bloggers and citizens to sift, share and combine government information in ways that are useful to them.”14 Many of the initial grants focus on combinations of data and technology that permit greater scrutiny of congressional lobbying, donations, and legislation.

Academic centers: The University of Maryland’s Institute for Interactive Journalism continues to offer startup grants through a yearly competition to fund experiments in participatory news ventures. At the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, Dan Gillmor has become the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. As he described the mission of the new center, “We’re still in the early days of this incredible shift in the media landscape. Innovation is a global affair now, and I’m looking forward to working with students from a variety of different disciplines— and connecting them with people in the media, technology and investment communities in places like Silicon Valley—to develop their ideas into products and services.”15 American Press Institute: The API’s Newspaper Next : The Transformation Project has provided innovative research on potential new business models for newspapers. The project focuses papers in part on helping readers with specific information questions they have to solve in daily life (e.g., Where can I find summer programs for my kids? What good bands are playing tonight in my town?).

Since people will often not express a strong demand for voter information, this means a paper might not be focused on watchdog functions as it tried to implement the Newspaper Next strategies. The API takes this head on though, arguing that in order to pursue a civic mission newspapers first have to survive. As an API report notes, “Newspaper Next takes a pragmatic view. For newspaper companies to keep fulfilling their important civic roles, we see two prerequisites: The regular attention of a large majority of the public; a strong and sustainable financial base. Both are endangered under the traditional newspaper business model. For both, Newspaper Next aims to provide the necessary innovation process, tools, and strategies to achieve new growth.”16

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Individual/Family Ownership 3. Public policies, including the tax code, should encourage the control of media companies by individual or family owners.

The pressure from Wall Street on publicly traded media companies to maintain high profit levels has resulted in cutbacks in newsroom employment and increased debate about the possibility of philanthropically minded individuals buying these firms. The assumption is that these individual owners might be willing to run newspapers that earn lower rates of profit but provide higher civic returns through their coverage of public affairs. To date such wealthy benefactors have not emerged to win control of media companies. Debate about the advantages of individual/family ownership of media properties continues, including discussion of topics such as dual-stock ownership systems, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), and the possible transition from family owned properties to nonprofit ownership.

Private, local ownership: When a group of local businessmen, headed up by advertising/public relations executive Brian Tierney, bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News, hopes that local ownership would translate into better news coverage ran high. Yet faced with the declining advertising and revenue trends familiar across the industry, the new owners adopted in 2007 a response common across large metro newspapers—a significant cut (more than 15 percent) in the Inquirer newsroom staff.17 In his 2006 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (which owns the Buffalo News), Warren Buffet provided a warning to potential local newspaper owners: For a local resident, ownership of a city’s paper, like ownership of a sports team, still produces instant prominence. With it typically comes power and influence. These are ruboffs that appeal to many people with money. Beyond that, civic-minded, wealthy individuals may feel that local ownership will serve their community well. That’s why Peter Kiewit bought the Omaha paper more than 40 years ago.

We are likely therefore to see non-economic individual buyers of newspapers emerge, just as we have seen such buyers acquire major sports franchises. Aspiring press lords should be careful, however: There’s no rule that says a newspaper’s revenues can’t fall below its expenses and that losses can’t mushroom. Fixed costs are high in the newspaper business, and that’s bad news when unit volume heads south. As the importance of newspapers diminishes, moreover, the “psychic” value of possessing one will wane, whereas owning a sports franchise will likely retain its cachet.18 Dual-class stock: Some media companies have dual-class stock ownership structures, with a few individuals or a family related to the founders owning stocks 124

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with greater voting power. This effectively gives company control to a small set of individuals or a family. At companies like the New York Times or Washington Post, this allows the controlling families (i.e., the Ochs-Sulzberger family, the Graham family) to consider factors like the impact of the paper on the community and nation, even if this civic impact does not result in maximized profits. Critics of the structure point out that it also allows the companies to be run inefficiently in other areas of operation, because the disciplining threat of a takeover is reduced.

Though some investors in the New York Times, Google (where voting control rests with three top executives), and News Corp. (controlled by Rupert Murdoch) have offered proposals to end the dual-class system, each of these efforts was unsuccessful. The dual-class structure right now appears to be a way for individuals and families to retain control of media companies. Note that sale of the Wall Street Journal, controlled by the Bancroft family, demonstrates that dual-class stock companies can change hands if a high premium is offered.19 ESOP: At the end of 2007 Samuel Zell completed a $8.2 billion deal that transformed the Tribune company (which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, and 23 television stations) into a “nonprofit organization owned entirely by an employee stock ownership plan, but Mr Zell, who invested $315 million in the deal, has the right to buy up to 40 percent of it in the future.”20 The ESOP structure provides numerous tax advantages, offers employees a chance of high returns, and gives Zell control akin to an owner and relatively long-term incentives to remain invested in the company. His ownership though would not fit into the category of a wealthy individual seeking to use papers to make a strong civic contribution. Stressing his emphasis on profits, Zell said, “When all is said and done, what must be remembered is a newspaper is a business. It used to be a fabulous business that made extraordinary margins. It’s now a very good business with appropriate margins.”21 When asked by a photographer at the Orlando Sentinel (a Tribune property) for his opinions about “the role journalism plays in the community, because we’re not the Pennysaver, we’re a newspaper,” Zell said, “I want to make enough money so that I can afford you. You need to in effect help me by being a journalist that focuses on what our readers want that generates more revenues.” When the journalist responded that “what readers want are puppy dogs…We also need to inform the community,” Zell declared, “I’m sorry but you’re giving me the classic, what I would call, journalistic arrogance by deciding that puppies don’t count…What I’m interested in is how can we generate additional interest in our products and additional revenue so we can make our product better and better and hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq.”22 From family-owned to nonprofit: Individuals that own media properties could decide to protect their public service function by converting the properties to nonprofit ownership. This is often described as requiring a family to “give it all away,” as Nelson Poynter did when he created the nonprofit Poynter Institute to operate as the owner of the St. Petersburg Times. But the 2004 Breaux Symposium 125

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discussion noted that there are possible ways to structure a transition to nonprofit status that would in effect allow a family to be paid for the sale of assets. Analysts such as Medill’s Joe Mathewson have continued to speculate what changes in tax laws and nonprofit regulation might be required to facilitate these transactions.23 Partisan Information 4. Public policies, including campaign finance laws, should encourage the development of partisan media outlets, such as cable channels supported by interest group or party funds.

As media coverage of hard news topics by some media outlets has dropped over time, there remains a set of people willing to spend money to talk to voters about politics—candidates and political parties. Current campaign finance laws attempt to limit the amount of money spent in federal elections, primarily out of fear of the corrupting influences associated with fundraising. Analysts concerned with the declining resources that media companies devote to political coverage, however, do not often see changes in campaign finance laws as a way to increase speech (albeit partisan speech) about government.

Restrictions on the amounts that individuals may contribute to candidates have given rise to organizations that raise political funds separate from campaigns and that spend in support of candidates. Recent policy decisions mean these groups will be very active in the 2008 campaigns. In June 2007 the Supreme Court “stuck down a ban in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws on political advertisements by corporations, including nonprofit groups, within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election.”24 This means that outside groups can spend money supporting candidates up through election day, as long as the expenditures are not coordinated with the campaigns.

In the 2004 election independent groups called 527s (a reference to the IRS code that defines them) spent $685 million. Though the FEC fined some 527s for campaign finance violations, more 527s are organizing for the 2008 elections and using FEC decisions as guidelines about what is feasible in their campaign activities. Some groups now prefer to direct their political activities into 501(c)4 organizations, which “pay no taxes on the donations they collect, but – unlike charities—their donors do not get a tax deduction. They are allowed to make political endorsements and engage in other political activities as long as political action is not their primary purpose.”25 Campaign finance laws ultimately restrict the amount of political speech candidates can offer through advertising and get out the vote efforts. By channeling money to independent groups, the laws also mean that candidates are associated with speech in the public mind that is not coordinated with the campaign’s issues and tactics. This is one reason why some candidates urge their supporters not to give to 527s. As Obama spokesperson Debbie Mesloh put it, “We do not think people should be donating to 527s. We would rather have them involved in our 126

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campaign. Obama thinks that candidates should be accountable for the campaigns they run, the donations they receive and the money they spend.”26 Government Subsidy 5. Governments should subsidize the creation of information about public affairs and the infrastructure necessary to deliver data about society and government.

Since the 2004 Breaux Symposium, there has been increased interest in government support for media outlets that influence public opinion abroad, incremental improvements in the Freedom of Information Act process, and continued debate over whether spectrum fees could be used to subsidize the creation of information infrastructure.

FOIA: The OPEN Government Act of 2007 makes a series of changes to the FOIA process designed to speed the release of government information. The act creates a FOIA ombudsman (the Office of Government Information Services) and requires more transparency in the handling of FOIA requests. The ultimate effect of the law will depend on an administration’s commitment to openness. Given changes in media markets, the act redefines (for fee status purposes) a representative of the news media as: …any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience. In this clause, the term “news” means information that is about current events or that would be of current interest to the public.27 As one analyst interpreted this: …bloggers and websites may now be considered by this definition as members of the news media. However, bloggers and websites must still show that the information they seek under a FOIA request fits the definition of news.28 Domestic Public Relations and Advertising: According to a 2006 GAO study of seven federal departments, the Bush Administration spent more than $1.6 billion over a two and half year period on advertising and public relations contracts. DOD recruiting accounted for a substantial portion. The report also noted that: The public relations and advertising contracts spanned a wide range of issues.

Several relate to Administration priorities, including a contract to “provide expert advice and support in the development of several marriage-related initiatives,” an education campaign regarding the “Medicare Modernization Act, and its coverage and benefits,” and a contract regarding “message development that presents the Army’s strategic perspective in the Global War on Terrorism.” An FDA contract had the objective of warning the public about the “consequences and potential dangers of buying prescription drugs from non-US sources.”29

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About $1.2 million of the funds went for the creation of video news releases. In prior reports, the GAO determined that VNS production by federal agencies can “violate the ban on covert propaganda if those video news releases are broadcast to the public without identifying the role of the federal government.”30 U.S. Public Diplomacy: To counter anti-Americanism and support US efforts in the war on terror, the U.S. now spends large amounts abroad to provide information to overseas audiences. In FY 2006, these expenditures included $796 million in the State Department budget and $645 million spent by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. According to the GAO, the BBG expenditures funded “multiple discrete broadcast entities that broadcast in 57 foreign languages to 125 media markets around the world.”31 In 2004 the BBG created Alhurra TV, a commercial free Arabic language satellite channel run by the Middle East Broadcasting Networks to provide news and other programming . In 2002 the BBG created Radio Sawa, which also broadcasts in Arabic.

Encouraging Independent Media Abroad: The Center for International Media Assistance, authorized by Congress in 2004 and funded through the National Endowment For Democracy, sponsors research, information provision, and networking conferences designed to promote the development of independent media outlets outside the U.S. It tries to aid the media assistance efforts often mounted by nonprofits and volunteers from the private sector. Many of the problems facing U.S. media are also encountered by media abroad, as evidenced

by CIMA report titles such as Global Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Support.32 Digital Promise Project: Supporters continue to press Congress to pass legislation that would take part of the proceeds from the spectrum auctions to support a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, which would fund (in a manner akin to the NSF) research and development of ways to promote learning and information provision that involve digital technology and the Internet.33 What’s Next?

A Google search for “journalism business models” yields over 1.7 million hits.

Clearly, there is much being written about the search for ways to support papers in a Internet world of diffuse attention, low subscription possibilities, and advertiser support that has not (and may not) catch up to traditional revenue levels. The 2004 Breaux Symposium offered 5 policy proposals to consider for ways to subsidize the creation and consumption of public affairs coverage. Questions that still remain about these proposals are: Nonprofits ownership: How could a transaction be structured so that a family or individual could transfer a media outlet to nonprofit ownership without “giving it all away” ?

Foundation subsidies: How could you estimate the cost of providing the watchdog function in a local media market? What types of stories would be involved and resources be needed to cover this type of news? What ways could you 128

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use available databases and new software programs to computerize part of the watchdog? How could you use information from searches at the local level to detect problems citizens are experiencing? How can foundations recognize local journalism experiments that work and support their diffusion and support by individual donors?

Individual/Family Ownership: What policy changes would need to be made to facilitate the transfer of family-owned properties to nonprofit organization? What is the distribution of these properties across different media markets right now and what are their business prospects? How many might consider the transition to nonprofit status? Would ESOP ownership be feasible or desirable for media properties beyond the Tribune company?

Partisan Information: What type of evidence might indicate whether partisan information provision is a desirable way for voters to learn about candidates? What mix of disclosure laws might work sufficiently well so that caps on donations could be raised or eliminated (thus raising the resources available for political speech)?

Government subsidy: How could the FOIA process truly be improved? What are the current prospects for passage of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust? Is there a way to fund current experiments in information infrastructure through government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health?

1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16

News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press. The Breaux Symposium, March 20, 2004.

For information on the current operation of news markets, see: Reflections of A Newsosaur, “$23B Zapped in News Stock Value,” http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/01/23b-zapped-in-news-stock-value.html; Emily Steel, “Local Papers’ Web Scramble,” The Wall Street Journal Online, http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119794082707735587.html; John Morton, “Buffeted,” American Journalism Review, October/November 2007, http://www.ajr.org/article_prinatble.asp?id=4416; Paul Farhi, “Online Salvation,” American Journalism Review, October/November 2007, http://ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=4427; and Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The State of the News Media 2007: An Annual Report on American Journalism,” http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2007.

Richard Pérez-Peña, “Group Plans to Provide Investigative Journalism,” New York Times, October 15, 2007.

Paul E. Steiger, “Read All About It,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2007, page A1. http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119888825411356705.html Twin Cities Daily Planet, “About the Twin Cities Daily Planet,” http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/about.

Gotham Gazette, “About Gotham Gazette,” http://www.gothamgazette.com/about.shtml.

Global Voices Online, “About,” http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/about/.

See BlogHer, “About BlogHer,” http://blogher.com/about-this-network and Blogherads, “For Advertisers,” http://www.blogherads.com/for-advertisers.

Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, “Who We Are,” http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/who/.

Elisabeth Bumiller, “Research Groups Boom in Washington,” New York Times, January 30, 2008.

Elizabeth Williamson, “OMB Offers an Easy Way to Follow the Money,” Washington Post, December 13, 2007, page A33.

John K. Carlisle, “Conservative Nonprofits Can Battle Liberal Media Bias Though Investigative Journalism,” National Legal and Policy Center, http://www.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=2347 Knight News Challenge, “2006 Challenge Winners Awarded May 23, 2007,” http://www.newschallenge.org/winners.html.

Sunlight Foundation, “Transparency Grants,” http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants.

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University, “Digital Media Leader Named Knight Center Director, Kauffman Professor at ASU,” http://cronkite.asu.edu/news/gillmor-110607.php.

N2 Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project. 2006. Blueprint for Transformation, American Press Institute.

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17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32

33

Katharine Q. Seelye, “Layoffs Imminent at Philadelphia Inquirer,” New York Times, January 3, 2007.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc, “Shareholder Letters,” http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html.

For more on dual-class stock ownership in media companies, see Landon Thomas Jr., “Morgan Stanley Criticizes Stock Structure of Times Co.,” New York Times, November 4, 2006; Frank Aherns, “Murdoch’s Bid for Wall Street Journal Accepted,” Washington Post, July 31, 2007; Elinor Mills, “Google Sticks with Dual-class Structure,” May 11, 2006, CNET News.com, http://www.news.com/2100-1030_3-6071494.html; Elinor Mills, “Google to Defend Dual-class Stock Structure,” April 12, 2006, CNET News.com, http://www.news.com/Google-to-defend-dual-class-stock-structure/2100-1030_3-6060691.html; and David Lieberman, “News Corp. Hangs onto Its Dual-class Stock System,” USA Today, October 21, 2007.

Richard Pérez-Peña, “New Guard Arrives at Tribune, a Developer Who Speaks His Mind,” New York Times, December 21, 2007.

Mark Fitzgerald, “Sam Zell Speaks at Inland Conference, Slams That Guy Nero,” Editor and Publisher, October 22, 2007.

Molly Selvin, “Challenge Authority, If You Dare,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2008.

Joe Mathewson, “Newspaper Saved! Newspaper Saved! Read All about It!,” Media Giraffe Project- Link and Reference Blog, http://mediagiraffe.blogspot.com/2005/12/ownership-journalism-professor-offer.html.

Jim Rutenberg and David D. Kirkpatrick, “A New Channel for Soft Money Appears in Race,” New York Times, November 12, 2007, section A, page 1.

John Solomon and Matthew Mosk, “Nonprofits Become a Force in Primaries,” Washington Post, December 5, 2007, page A01.

Carla Marinucci and Joe Garofoli, “Obama Urged To Renounce Groups’ Ads; Critics Say He Does What He Denounced Edwards for Doing,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 25, 2007, page A17.

Scott A. Hodes, “FOIA Facts: The Impact of the OPEN Government Act of 2007,” LLRX.com, http://www.llrx.com/node/2003/.

Ibid.

“GAO Finds Federal Departments Spent More Than $1.6 Billion in Public Relations and Advertising Contracts,” Fact Sheet, page 2, http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20060213110444-05660.pdf.

Ibid. page 3.

Jess T. Ford, U.S. Public Diplomacy: Strategic Planning Efforts Have Improved, But Agencies Face Significant Implementation Challenges, testimony before the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human rights, and Oversight, house Committee on Foreign Affairs, GAO-07-795T, April 26, 2007, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07795t.pdf.

Center for International Media Assistance and National Endowment for Democracy, Global Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Support: A Report to the Center for International Media Assistance, December 5, 2007.

For more on the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, see Digital Promise, “About Digital Promise,” http://www.digitalpromise.org/newsite/

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Journalism In Transition

By Jim Brady

There’s an unprecedented amount of gloom and doom enveloping the media business these days. Newsrooms are getting smaller. Media companies with onceobscene profit margins are now struggling to maintain profits at all. Foreign bureaus are being shuttered; investigative units being dismantled.

Yet, despite these cold, hard facts, I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be in journalism. Interest in news is unprecedented, and the Web now provides us with incredible capabilities for producing better, deeper journalism and delivering it to an audience with no geographical boundaries.

Because of these capabilities, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been the past few years that U.S. media companies finally seemed to decide this Web thing wasn’t going away. For the lucky news organizations, that slow response has become a handicap; for the unlucky, it was fatal.

As a Washington Post veteran—I spent eight years at the newspaper and have spent a combined seven at washingtonpost.com—I feel lucky to say I work at a company that embraced the Web early, backed that support with money and staff and encouraged experimentation. We didn’t necessarily know where we were headed, but we felt it was toward some destination.

The Washington Post created its new media subsidiary—then Digital Ink, now washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive—in 1994. One year later, we became part of a dial-up proprietary network called AT&T Interchange—right about the time everyone migrated to the Web. We then abandoned the proprietary network, and officially joined the Web community by launching washingtonpost.com on June 17, 1996. In the nearly 12 years since, the site has grown into one of the largest news sites on the Web, won hundreds of awards and become recognized as one of the leaders in Web journalism. We have a large, talented staff of journalists, and we’re surrounded by terrific Web professionals in sales, marketing, technology and elsewhere. We’ve been profitable the past four years, largely because of the national business we’ve created. We’ve provided a locally distributed newspaper with immediate national and international distribution. In short, we’re extremely proud of what we’ve done.

There’s one problem: It isn’t nearly enough.

Despite our successes, we still face major questions about our future: How will we fund the newsgathering of the future if we’re not able to significantly increase online revenue? How will we continue to produce world-class journalism if we’re asking a shrinking newsroom to embrace the 24/7, multimedia world we now live in? Will the methodical process of producing investigative and enterprise journalism be able to satisfy the always-hungry Web beast?

Of course, there are many newspapers asking more serious questions than these.

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They’re wondering whether they’ll be around at all to take advantage of this new medium. And while survival is indeed a powerful instinct, there are still many media companies doing little more than dipping their toes into the Web. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of innovative news sites out there, large and small and more by the day. But in far too many cases, these companies are still using their sites for the basic task of republishing their print or broadcast content. While that will always be a part of what those sites need to do, the Web provides all sorts of other journalistic opportunities, and I wanted to take some time to talk about how we’ve tried to embrace those.

The washingtonpost.com newsroom is unique in many ways. First off, we’re one of the last holdouts in maintaining separate print and online newsrooms. That doesn’t mean we have duplication among staffs; we don’t. It doesn’t mean we don’t work closely with the newspaper every day; we do. It merely means that the editorial staffs don’t report into one editor. We also work out of separate newsrooms: the print side is in downtown Washington; the Web staff is in Arlington, Virginia.

The Web site and the newspaper’s continuous news desk—which coordinates the files coming from newspaper staffers to the Web—communicate dozens of times daily, including via three teleconferences. We’re now involved in the early stages of major Post projects. The Web staff contributes ideas to newspaper projects; the newspaper staff contributes ideas to Web projects. This kind of collaboration is crucial to unlocking innovation. As Len Downie told the Post newsroom last year, our multiplatform future is no longer our future; it’s here. The challenge ahead of us is not to preserve The Washington Post newspaper, it’s to preserve Washington Post journalism and to assure that it can be consumed by readers via whatever platform and in whatever format they please.

To do that, washingtonpost.com has adapted a relatively simple core philosophy: Keep one foot rooted in the core journalism values of The Washington Post, and with the other, stretch as far as possible to try new things in this new medium.

Washingtonpost.com shares the same journalistic values as the newspaper, but we’re also are working in a medium that’s indisputably different, one that requires trying new things and sometimes going down in flames. Fear of failure can be debilitating. All we have to lose by being too conservative is everything. So, at washingtonpost.com, we’ve tried a lot of new things. And, sometimes, we have indeed gone down in flames. But, on the Web, experimentation is something that’s usually rewarded, so even our failures have sometimes brought praise.

One blogger put it best, writing that while many sites seem like they’re merely trying to be “on the Web,” washingtonpost.com seems as if it wants to be “of the Web.” Here’s how we’ve tried to do that.

Washingtonpost.com has four key areas of focus when it comes to our journalism: j Multimedia storytelling 132

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j Database journalism j Reader engagement j Distribution

From a pure journalistic perspective, multimedia storytelling is the most exciting opportunity. For The Washington Post, storytelling options have long been limited to text, photography and graphics. The rise of the Web has added a number of new tools to this equation: video, audio, photo galleries, panoramic photos, blogs, etc. Now, we can approach a story with a different mindset, one that says, “What’s the best way to tell this story?” There are still times where the right answer is text only; one of the key lessons to learn on the Web is that, just because you have the tools, you don’t always need to use them. But more often than not, we’re combining articles with video and/or photography. Or, in some other cases, we’re creating multimedia packages that have no text component at all.

We created our multimedia team in 1998, and hired our first video journalist in 2000. We now have six full-time video journalists, and four video/audio editors.

Additionally, we have six photo editors. We’ve also expanded our training into The Post’s newsroom, where approximately 120 print reporters have been trained to shoot video. We now run 8 to ten reporter-shot videos each week.

The rise of multimedia journalism has also transformed the physical newsrooms of the newspaper and the Web site.

• Both the Post and post.com newsrooms now have television studios, where we produce interviews with Post and washingtonpost.com journalists for use on local and national broadcasts and the Web site. We also recently produced our first live show for Super Tuesday using these facilities. j Washingtonpost.com has a multimedia control room - called “The Cave” where we produce dozens of breaking news audio and video each day, edit video content shot by Post and post.com reporters and produce documentary video work shot by washingtonpost.com video journalists. j The Web site and the newspaper each have newsroom radio studios, where

we produce all of our podcasts and narrated photo galleries and where we handle radio interviews done by Washington Post staffers. We recently started producing our first Internet radio show, hosted by Post local columnist Marc Fisher.

The net effect of these efforts has been phenomenal. In January 2008, thanks to political primary intrigue and a new design of our story pages, we more than doubled our best month ever for video on washingtonpost.com, and more than doubled our 2007 average for photo galleries. The day is gone when multimedia journalism is merely an interesting experiment. Having journalists committed to multimedia storytelling is now a must.

An area that newspapers have not embraced as effectively is database journalism. One often hears about the Web’s “endless news hole,” which, of course, 133

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is largely a myth. You can only publish as much good journalism as you can produce, and that takes skilled reporters and editors. And the Post has fewer reporters and editors than it did a few years ago, as do most newspapers. But what that endless storage space is perfect for is databases that can be useful to your readers. Washingtonpost.com has been very active in this area. We’ve created dozens of useful databases on the site, including a congressional voting database going back to 1991 and a searchable list of U.S. war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We also have created databases around political campaign donations, political advertising, video game reviews, local crime, local home sales, sports recruiting, recipes, local entertainment and others. One we’re especially proud of is called Local Explorer, which takes all our data on local crime, home sales, schools and points of interest, and plots it all on maps, so you can personalize that data.

When built properly, databases attract significant repeat usage and take very little work to maintain. As a result, from a business perspective, databases provide a better return on investment than any of our other major priorities.

If you’re looking to increase loyalty to your site, however, look no farther than your readers. The Web provides the best opportunity in the history of media for journalists and readers to communicate with each other in real time. And while this isn’t something all journalists are celebrating, news sites must make the best of this opportunity if they’re to remain as vital in their communities as they’ve been in the past.

I mentioned earlier the need for risk-taking in Internet journalism, and that applies more to reader engagement than anything else on this list. Here are a few things you need to know about your readers: some of them are jerks, many of them won’t like the journalism you produce, and the angrier ones tend to be more active. But the upside is huge. When given a chance to participate in the conversation, readers come back. A lot. If I was talking to someone, and only had one question to try and determine whether they were a loyal reader of washingtonpost.com, I’d ask: “Do you post or read comments on our articles?” If the answer is yes, odds are they are among our most loyal readers.

To really engage with your readers, though, requires a shift in thinking by journalists. In print, the publication of an article is normally the last step in the journalistic process. On the Web, it’s just the start. The publication of an article on the Web now kicks off a conversation that happens on your site and off of it, and journalists need to be aware and attentive to that reality. Reader comments can often point out problems with a story, provide tips to reporters or generate new story ideas. Readers need to be viewed not only as consumers, but also as resources. If you can get journalists to engage with their readers—the reasonable ones only, of course—it can produce better journalism.

Our reader engagement efforts have been among our biggest successes. You can now post a comment on any Washington Post article, with monitoring done postpublication and by using staffers and readers to find the out-of-bounds stuff. The site now has more than 80 active blogs, many of which have built loyal followings.

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We have two large panel blogs, one on world affairs (PostGlobal) and one on religion (OnFaith) that have opened us up to new audiences. We program 70-80 hours per week of live discussions, where readers can ask questions of Post journalists and newsmakers in real time, giving them a level of access that gets them more engaged. We hyperlink all bylines so that it’s easy for readers to send emails to our journalists. We recently launched two new interactive features: j Groups, where journalists—such as E.J. Dionne and Gene Robinson—toss out 2-3 questions a week for readers to debate j Live Chat, where readers can talk to each other in real time during a shared

experience such as a political debate, the Oscars, the Super Bowl, etc.

In addition, we also make it easy for readers to see what the blogosphere is saying about Post articles. All of our articles have a link to see a list of blogs that have commented on that article. Even though many of those comments may be critical of The Post’s journalism, we believe in transparency and in embracing the construct of the Web, where related information and opposing viewpoints should be easy to find.

On the distribution front, our philosophy is simple: In this new world of media fragmentation, we no longer control the format in which readers consume our journalism. That’s scary, but also a huge opportunity. We now have the chance to get our journalism in front of readers while they’re driving via audio podcast or radio, while they’re watching their televisions via set-top boxes or video podcasts, or while they’re standing on a street corner looking for a restaurant via cell phone or iPod. And we can push our journalism to them via RSS, e-mail newsletters and widgets. We can no longer apply the “Field of Dreams” mantra - build it and they will come—to our Web sites. We need to be putting our content where the people are, on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. For example, washingtonpost.com has two Facebook widgets, a Facebook product page, a YouTube page and an iTunes page, all designed to make sure our name and our brand are getting in front of Web consumers.

That leads to the major challenge all news sites face: Because of the plethora of interesting sites on the Web, getting a reader to your site even once is incredibly hard. To combat that, sites need to throw as many fishing lines out there as possible in the hopes of reeling in readers. That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in the features described above. It’s also why we’ve invested in creating content for narrow niches. So while a good chunk of our traffic comes from politics, world news and opinion journalism, we also have built strong communities around fantasy football, gardening, commuting, home repair, parenting, high school recruiting and many other non-core topics.

Overall, we feel the areas of focus described above have served us well, providing us with the opportunity to expand on what’s in the daily paper while also embracing new ways of engaging readers. We’ve seen many tangible signs our strategy is working—significant increases in both unique visitors and page views to 135

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washingtonpost.com, not to mention some exciting awards.

But, as I said earlier, we still have a long way to go before declaring victory. The good news — to paraphrase an old Steve Case line—is that we’re still in the early innings of this ballgame. If we can aggressively embrace the opportunities ahead of us, I believe we’ll survive this storm.

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Weathering the Perfect Storm: Some Survival Skills

By Bill Wheatley

Imagine for a moment that you are the veteran publisher of a mid-to large-size American newspaper.

In your early years on the job, being publisher was rather enjoyable. Your newspaper had prestige and power and the money was rolling in. Yes, circulation was losing a percentage point or two a year—the culprit, you assumed, was television news—but your print competitors had been largely vanquished, your advertisers were clamoring for space, and your profit margins were the envy of other businesses.

At some point, you heard about the Internet. You thought it intriguing that, by linking computers, information could be sent around the globe almost instantly.

But you wondered if the Internet weren’t just another fad, like CB radio or PacMan. You probably didn’t think of it as much of an opportunity for the news business, and it certainly didn’t seem like a threat.

It wasn’t long before your kids were begging for a home computer and AOL. You began to think there might be something to this Internet thing, after all. So, your company built a Web site and recycled on it your newspaper’s daily content. The additional costs were modest and you thought there might even be a few bucks to be made by selling online ads.

Soon, with a speed that startled you and almost everyone else, Internet use soared and news content was everywhere, not only in your paper and on television and radio, but also on countless desktops and laptops, even on pagers and cell phones. To your chagrin, some of it was your news, appropriated without payment

by Web entrepreneurs. Worse, paying subscribers to your paper started to migrate online, where news had the advantage of being free. Some of your top advertisers headed there, too, as did customers for your highly profitable classifieds.

A perfect storm had developed, and you now reacted vigorously, if tardily. You strengthened your site with breaking news, blogs, and other fresh, multi-media content. You joined an online ad consortium. You merged your newspaper and online staffs. But profits kept falling, so you slashed jobs, closed news bureaus, and eliminated coverage beats. This hurt editorial quality—some said it amounted to gradual suicide—but you felt that, given the pressure you were under from your stockholders to maintain profit margins, you really had little choice.

Now, despite your best efforts, circulation and ad sales continue to fall and your online business isn’t coming close to making up the difference in income. Profits are declining sharply, and the future is looking none too good. Incredibly, you are beginning to believe that your once-flourishing organization is in a death spiral.

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You’d sell, but who would pay a decent price? How, you wonder, did it come to this? Oh, for those happy days of yesteryear.

Our publisher is imagined but his plight is all too real. He and his true-life contemporaries can hardly be blamed for their deep funk and longing for the old days. The sad truth is that, for much of the news business, the sun that once shone so brightly isn’t likely to shine that brightly again anytime soon, if ever.

All of the mainstream news media are having their difficulties. But the situation is especially daunting for newspapers, once the darlings of Wall Street but now struggling to meet ever-lowered financial expectations. While television and radio news and other types of news publications are also feeling the pain, their circumstances, while reduced, have yet to become as dire. Still, it’s not an exaggeration to say that, overall, the journalistic quality of the mainstream American media is severely threatened and that there’s no consensus within it on how—or even if—things can be turned around.

All of this would be of just limited interest were it not for the fact that journalism in the United States isn’t just another business. It is, of course, something far more important: an integral part of our democracy, the primary means by which Americans receive the information that they need to perform their duty as citizens.

Any substantial lessening of the quality of American journalism and its watchdog role can only lead to a lessening of the quality of American democracy. You don’t have to be a seasoned civics teacher to understand that it’s in the national interest that good journalism continues to be practiced.

As it has become clear that journalism’s long-time economic model is in trouble, a number of public-spirited people and organizations have proposed what can only be called rescue plans. Wealthy individuals and foundations, it is suggested, might buy ailing newspapers and operate them as non-profits. The government could set up tax breaks for media companies and/or create a large fund for them to draw on for worthy projects. Journalism companies could follow the economic model of public radio and television, becoming non-profits supported by private and federal grants, corporate underwriting and citizen contributions. Philanthropy could become a major source of funding (already, a wealthy couple has pledged $10 million a year for three years to form ProPublica, a non-profit organization which will which employs investigative journalists and distributes their work.

Despite the good intentions evident in these suggestions, there are legitimate questions about their practicality and appropriateness. Could enough wealthy individuals and foundations be found to fund the need? Would they attempt to exert influence on the journalism that was produced? Do we really want the government—and, by definition, politicians – involved in underwriting news coverage? Can the public be expected to make substantial charitable donations to enterprises that it has long regarded as businesses?

If safeguards could be arranged, some of these ideas might be well worth pursuing. But given the very high cost of covering the news, it’s not likely that the adoption of some, or even all, of these initiatives would be adequate to maintain 138

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the scope and quality of the journalism that Americans have come to expect.

(Perhaps the federal government could find sufficient money, but it’s hard to imagine a Capitol Hill groundswell for a journalism bailout.)

What seems far more likely is that, for the foreseeable future, much of American journalism will remain in commercial hands. In the near term, the worrisome financial trends are likely to continue but, over time, as the journalism universe becomes increasingly centered in digital media, there will no doubt be a shakeout, a survival of journalism’s fittest. Indeed, there is evidence that the shakeout is underway already, with too many news and information outlets chasing too few advertising dollars. Not every outfit will be able to survive but the ones which do will have a shot at a better future.

What specific steps might news companies take to improve their chances of survival? Different circumstances dictate different tactics, but some strategies would seem to be smart for everyone. Here are some approaches that executives, editors and producers on the frontlines would almost certainly be wise to take: Play to your strengths The days of news outlets being all things to all people are fading, especially on the Internet. Web users want focus and expertise. Increasingly, they can find it without having to wade through content that they don’t find pertinent to their interests.

Unless yours is among the handful of news companies that have far-flung resources, this means concentrating on what you probably do best: covering your local area. Focus on local news and information like a laser. Organize your coverage in ways that guarantee that it will be both comprehensive and insightful, that, on all platforms, yours is the place people go when they want to find out what is happening in the place they care about most: where they live.

Except for international and Washington stories of particular importance to your area, leave the heavy lifting in these coverage areas to outlets with adequate resources, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, the wire services, and the television networks; millions of people have already migrated to their sites for extensive coverage of these areas and millions more will no doubt follow suit.

Chasing them will most likely prove fruitless.

Separately, consider expanding your product line by playing to your organization’s demonstrated knowledge and skills. Create spin-off sites or publications for local sports, business, entertainment, politics, even for individual towns and neighborhoods. You already have expertise in these areas, so you’ll be entering this ball game on second base. And, if you choose carefully, there’s a good chance that you’ll find new advertisers wanting to reach the special audiences you create.

In all of this, remember that, by virtue of the interactivity it offers, the Web gives you an unparalleled opportunity to build a close relationship with your local audience. Provide your users, as many sites now do, with the chance not only to search your archives but also to scan public databases and access other interesting and helpful local information. Offer lots of opportunities for them to comment on 139

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your content and interact with members of your staff and one another. Let them contribute information which will help you better report continuing stories. In short, make them integral to your site’s energy and image. Not everything that they contribute will be important or insightful, but more than a little of it will be. And they will appreciate the opportunity to participate.

Overall, don’t forget for a moment that the battle for Web supremacy on the local level will be pitched: newspapers will fight it out with broadcasters and an array of Web upstarts. To win, you’ll need to employ every advantage that you have, not the least of which is knowledge of your community.

Innovate Don’t fall into the old trap of failing to try new approaches. Instead, come up with fresh ideas and take some risks.

If you have a promising notion for a new site or publication or a better way to display content or a different way to price ads, be willing to give it a chance. Your gambits might not always succeed but, as the lottery slogan says, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

Happily, a growing number of news companies are now busy innovating, on both the editorial and business sides. Some random examples: j A large number of newspapers have entered agreements with Google, the Internet search and advertising giant, to make print advertising space available to Google’s numerous ad customers, many of whom have not advertised previously in print. j The Washington Post has created LoudonExtra.com, a Web site serving the

people of fast-growing Loudon County in northern Virginia. j The New York Times and a number of other companies have entered into

alliances with Monster.com, the popular job-search site, to share listings and branding, both online and in print. j Cincinnati.com, the Web site of the Cincinnati Enquirer, has created

CinciNavigator, an interactive map which permits users to click on any spot and get the latest information for that area on news stories, traffic, crime, citizen complaints, property sales and other topics. j The Indianapolis Star has developed IndyMoms.com, a Web site with content

of interest to young mothers. It’s also publishing a companion magazine. j OrlandoSentinel.com has built MyTeam Varsity, an ambitious high-school

sports section with scores, photos, even game video. Every local school has a page and much of the material is user-generated. j In Ohio and Florida, groups of newspapers have agreed to share certain

editorial content, help in each paper carry state news occurring beyond its main coverage area.

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j Minnesota Public Radio has set up Public Insight Network, a group of

hundreds of citizens who act as sources on a wide variety of topics for its radio news program and Web site.

None of these innovations is single-handedly going to guarantee broad success for the companies involved. But the vigor and creativity that they and numerous other new initiatives represent is encouraging, a hopeful sign for a business that learned the hard way that to stand still is to fall behind.

Invest You have to find a way to do it. Yes, profits are dropping and operating budgets are tight and getting tighter. But, as much as news companies would like to save money, survival requires that they spend some. That means investment in people, in technology, and in anything else that might provide a competitive edge. Some companies recognize this, while others are having difficulty coming to terms with it.

Investment funds must come from somewhere, but where? One logical source would be for news companies to live with smaller profit-margins than the doubledigit percentages to which they have become accustomed. They and their investors might concede the reality that times have changed and that, by insisting on high profits—and, therefore, low investment—now, they are endangering the viability of their shares later. Regrettably, given the short-term profitability proclivities of Wall Street and the heavy debt some companies are carrying, this isn’t likely to happen.

Nor are most investors likely to come to believe that, when they invest in companies that perform a public service, those organizations have some obligation to spend money to ensure that the public will be served in the future.

What other sources of investment might be helpful? There’s always borrowing, but debt can be the enemy of progress; and there’s public equity: taking a public company private in order to have room to maneuver outside the pressures of Wall Street. But that, too, generally involves debt – and investors who may get impatient to cash in.

Admittedly, finding the investment funds that might help ensure a successful future is, in these days of shrinking corporate profits, a tough task. But, somehow, they must be found, even though it will probably require short-term pain. Without investment, your organization won’t have much of a future to protect.

Do really good work In this, you don’t have much choice. In the Web era, your monopoly or nearmonopoly status is gone and, with it, the option to be mediocre. If your news products don’t provide good value, people will find ones that do.

Accuracy, clarity, insight, originality—these are the type of classic attributes that, in an increasingly competitive landscape, your editorial products will need if your company is to make it. Achieving and maintaining these values requires employing talented people and giving them the time and the tools and the

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oversight they need to do a superior job. At a moment when news is increasingly thought of as just another business—and an unprincipled and predatory one at that—the road to future success requires that your organization be known not only for being on top of the news but also for covering it with high ethical standards and an enduring commitment to fairness. In short, it means respecting the fact that your audience has choices and needs good reasons to select you.

Excellence, of course, has its financial costs. But in the competitive, turbulent years ahead, failing to achieve it may prove to be even more costly than doing so.

Use technology to your best advantage Remember, using technology well can give your organization a strong competitive edge. Almost every day, a new device or piece of software comes on the market offering new possibilities for the effective gathering, presentation and distribution of news. The challenge for journalism companies is to keep up with the advances and select the ones with the best chance to improve their products.

In this, it’s important that you employ experts who not only know how to apply the latest technology but who also are careful not to let that technology become an end in itself. Having lots of bells and whistles may make your products seem up-to-date but, will provide real value to the user only if the technology performs some useful function.

When it comes to editorial matters, make sure that your technology fosters communication and comprehension. A good search function or an intuitive navigation system or a dynamic data display can make all the difference in determining how satisfactory, even stimulating, your site’s users find their information experience.

Use the best distribution technology to make sure that your material gets the widest possible viewing. Make it easy for users of your site to alert others to its content through e-mail and links to “sharing” sites like Digg. Build widgets (regularly updated links to your content) that interested Web users can post on their blogs and social network pages. All of this will help you expand your circulation and bring in viewers who otherwise might not visit your site.

Always be open to the possibility that a new technology may come along that is transformative. For example, right now within news circles there is increasing interest in wireless reading devices, portable digital tablets like Amazon’s Kindle, offering subscription to a growing list of news publications, delivered electronically and ready to read take with you. Currently, the reading experience is very basic: words, no pictures, no color. But consumers seem to like Kindle’s convenience and portability and there is a waiting list to get one. What happens when the addition of color and photography, perhaps even video, makes the wireless readers more compelling? Could these devices turn out to have wide appeal and provide a major boost for the news business? It’s too early to know, of course, but they are a reminder that advances in technology make further change a constant prospect.

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Don’t give up on print If you own a newspaper, almost everyone is telling you that its days are numbered. You may already be persuaded that this is true. But the paper is probably still generating most of your revenue and no doubt will for a considerable time to come. Rather than letting it wither and die, there’s still a chance to put new life into it, perhaps even to create something that will last.

The challenge is to look at your newspaper in the same way that you look at your Web site: as a fresh canvas on which new strokes can, and should, be painted. As your site attracts more and more of your hard-news audience, consider a gradual transition of the newspaper to content offering more background, analysis, and criticism. Make it an attractive venue for the thoughtful reader and upscale advertiser. Experiment with new sections and features. Stock it with material that isn’t available elsewhere, even on your site.

Look at it this way: nurturing your newspaper doesn’t necessarily mean throwing good money after bad. Like your site, your newspaper needs plenty of attention and lots of innovation. It may not be the financial behemoth that it once was, but its cause is far from lost. It still can be viable, but not without care and feeding.

While there is still time, you should work hard to save it.

Even if news companies adopt these and other approaches, and even if some of the non-profit initiatives work out, the task of ensuring the survival of highquality journalism will be a strenuous one. Publishers—real, not imagined—and just about everyone else in the news business are going to need all the smarts, energy and creativity that they can muster. But a vigorous and able press, a press that enhances democracy and contributes to our civilization, is well worth fighting for. Let us do everything possible to make sure that one endures.

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Medipedia or How to Learn from the Citizens

By Michael Maier

Introduction In April 2007 more than 5,000 people signed an Internet petition1 against an icon of the newspaper industry: The Atlanta-Journal Constitution had announced plans to eliminate its book editor position. It was a solemn fight of the readers for the preservation of the papers’ extensive and well-regarded book section. The literacy amateurs joined forces to prevent the newspaper from giving up a valuable tradition of reporting. They used the modern technology of the Internet as a platform for preserving an old publishing value.

As this case shows, there’s no need to feel frustrated about the reader’s ability to understand what counts in journalism and there’s a lot of reason to believe that the Internet will enable people to participate actively in journalism. The Internet empowers people to speak up and gives them a voice in defending journalistic values.

Like in the citizens’ upheaval against the management of the Atlanta-Journal, we find lots of people on the Internet, who are truly inspired by journalism. We find people who care about politics and are just not satisfied by the way the traditional news media is doing its job. We find people with knowledge, honesty and character who want to change the society to a better one.

During a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School in spring 2007, I investigated this new movement of citizens as journalists2, which to me is one of the most remarkable developments to reinvent journalism. To really point at what I mean, I will not speak only of “citizen journalism”—as it has become the common expression—but rather put all forms under the umbrella term of “network publishing”. Many of the grassroots initiatives are micro-publishers rather than mini-journalists. They are people with genuine publishing impetuses, trying to contribute to truth, information, control and transparency and hence setting up small, but effective, organizations to change the landscape of the Fourth Estate. Journalism is one of their tools, as is publishing in the sense of being economically responsible for their operations.

“Network publishing” includes citizen journalists—people who have adapted some of the tools of traditional journalism and contribute to entities which, at first glance, look quite like conventional media outlets. Additionally there are the activists—people who follow an agenda and set up a web-based initiative encompassing information, mobilization and “real world” action. And there are the bloggers—people who run a weblog, either alone or in collaboration. And 144

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finally, there is the large world of “wikis” - groups that create collectively written essays or articles, without attribution to a single author.

For all of these network publishers—citizen journalists, activists, bloggers and wiki-contributors—the network is essential: Citizen journalists need the company of other websites with the same approach; activists mobilize by networking heavily; bloggers define their own worlds through linking to each other and articles in a wiki can only be written and published when they are made widely available on the Internet.

Also the consumer industry has discovered the Internet as a new channel for networking and direct marketing. The money can go directly towards consumers or to technologies such as Google, which reaches targeted consumers at low cost.

Hence, the business model of journalism has become shaky, because advertising doesn’t work the way it automatically used to for decades. Advertising has started to ignore the intermediaries, which may lead to substantial damages in journalism3.

This shift challenges all forms of journalism—be it traditional media or network publishing. The key question will be whether journalists are able to create products that attract exactly the audience the advertising industry is after and cannot be found elsewhere than in a journalistic environment.

The debate whether journalism should become more of a nonprofit concept does not catch the full dimension of the media crises: Advertisers are absent because readers stay away. Readers stay away, not because they are dumb, but because they feel alienated from traditional journalism. Just replacing those who pay the checks (up to now the advertisers) with new ones (foundations, family owners) and protecting the ivory tower of journalism as it is, definitely will neither transform the media nor the society. I disagree that money is the most important issue in journalism.

Network publishing clearly prizes ideals over money: People act as citizens in the same way as they demonstrate against a war in Washington D.C. or rally for candidates in primaries. They create their own media, expressing their view of journalism. They will find ways to earn at least as much money as they need to make a humble living. This may be nonprofit, but why run away from the market?

My own experience as a founder of newspapers tells me: If you really deliver a great product you also will be able to raise ad-dollars. And if not, you can constantly improving your product until it works. Once you convince advertisers, you will sleep better, because you’ll know: My newspaper has value and does not depend on the generosity of a great donor or the mood of an eccentric sole-owner.

And as we see with some of the network publishers, the interaction with the market can force enterprises to improve their quality: Treehugger.com4 is a prime example of a profitable business that not only put together some content, but also created a media that meets the expectations of advertisers.

Network Publishing has not yet found the ultimate sustainable business model.

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developments. Real profitability though is rare. Internet enterprises are narrowly focused on advertising as the sole source of revenue. While up to now size has been the main focus for advertisers, this may change in the next step of the evolution: “MySpace users build up ad immunity”, writes Business Week5 in early 2008, indicating that few of the millions of users of social networks are eager to click on ads. This places niche sites in a better position for advertisers more interested in reaching the right target group than the most gigantic audience.

Citizens, Activists, Bloggers, Wikipedians My research for the Shorenstein Center contained portraits and detailed content analyses of 25 websites produced by citizens, either alone or in cooperation with professional journalists that focus on environmental issues. My great team6 analyzed all content hosted by these websites from April 9 to April 13, 2007. We conducted a survey among bloggers with almost 100 responses and lead many interviews with bloggers, citizen journalists, professional journalists, journalism academics and other academics.

In general we found that citizens started to move into journalism because they were concerned about issues of public interest. They saw that the environmental topic was a no-go for many mainstream media before 2007. They simply wouldn’t cover it. Fascinated by the possibilities of the Internet, citizens would start to raise their voices, quite often without a clear plan. They did so, because they see issues not been covered sufficiently by the traditional media.

Citizen journalism websites are able to take issues that motivate or worry people, such as the environment, and contribute to journalism in a kind of new “ecosystem.”6 The citizen journalism websites, though they originated in an emotional attachment, are not overly biased. They have fresh and sometimes very inventive approaches to their topics. Citizen journalism websites directly address the reader, whereas traditional media quite often seems to be a dialogue between the media and the political elites. Citizen journalism websites lack continuity and work best where they are structured as a hybrid of ordinary people and professional journalists.

Activists use the Internet as a publishing platform for short term or regionally confined actions. Most of their activities are explicitly motivated by the old media’s lack of interest in their specific concerns. They build up smart networks that connect their own publishing work with the old media, lawyers, lobbyists and other political activists. They are either self-funded or funded by foundations. They work as volunteers and want to remain volunteers. Part of their concept is to stop publishing after the action is over. Activism will play an important role in future political discourse.

Bloggers see themselves as stand-alone operations. Their work is meant to be complementary to the old media. They aim for accuracy and do not want to replace the old media. They see themselves as symbiotic with traditional publishing. There is a strong trend towards collaborative blogging.

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Wikipedia has become a serious news source for a growing number of people worldwide. Wikipedia collects and classifies news with a heavy reliance on the work of traditional media, as well as documents from institutions such as courts, associations etc. Wikipedia does not deliver narratives, which differentiates them from traditional journalism.

Many Network Publishers In the U.S. market there is an amazing variety of citizen journalism projects with an environmental focus. WorldChanging.com7 and Treehugger.com reach huge audiences with about one million unique visitors or more per month. Both sites combine issues like climate change or solar power with design and architecture.

In Chicago, the Chi-town Daily News8 tries to combine hyper-local journalism with a special view on local environmental issues. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities Daily Planet10 also has a close eye on the local print newspapers. Editor Mary Turck herself spent thirty to forty hours deciphering a very technical and dense report from The Green Institute and came to a different conclusion about a local environmental issue than the mainstream media.

In Paris, Agora Vox11 has established a spin-off, Natura Vox12. This website only covers environmental issues, and provides very high quality coverage. In just months, Rue8913 has become one of the leading news websites in France. In Berlin, Germany, Readers Edition14 features tech-issues and climate change as the most read and written about issues.

In Latin America the rise of network publishing very much goes hand in hand with human rights movements or the social pressure to develop and establish democracy. Environmental coverage has a very strong readership there, as some of these countries face more immediate consequences of climate change compared to countries in the northern hemisphere.

In Chile, Atina15 is part of a big social movement that wants to transform the country into a better place. El Ciudadano16 tries to position itself as an advocate for free speech. In Argentine, Ecoportal17 aims to change the “political ecology in the sense that we try to link environmental issues to society issues such as poverty, gender, and indigenous populations in order to generate an environmental consciousness.”18 Global Voices Online19 aims to be a platform for all developing countries. In close cooperation with the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, Global Voices Online has become a fast growing website, covering many important but traditionally neglected issues of developing countries. Of course the environment plays a major role. Global Voices is based on a close collaboration with bloggers — “bridge bloggers, who have a deep understanding of the Internet but also know what may be interesting for the readers,”21 as founder Ethan Zuckerman puts it.

The traditional media hasn’t covered environmental topics for quite some time.

Other topics, like the war on terror or globalization, have been attracting more interest. During the period of our research we observed an increase of the coverage 147

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of environmental topics in the traditional media. At least during the first half of 2007, climate change has become one of the top-issues in TV, newspaper, radio and magazine-journalism. Whether or not this has been a result of the activities of the citizens was not part of our research, but it does show that citizens have been ahead of traditional media on this topic.

There is even a difference in the editorial voice: Citizen journalists take the issue seriously, whereas the mainstream media’s approach is often shallow and market driven. Michael G. Richard, editor at Treehugger,com, says: “I think that just being independent makes us different. Our writers are also probably a lot more diverse as a group than traditional journalists, because they almost all have day jobs that aren’t journalism. Some are scientists, engineers, designers, architects and others.

They don’t just report on what an expert told them, often, they are the experts.”22 The Activists Have Impact Activists start network publishing initiatives because the Internet is a cheap and fast tool to get an idea or a concern known or at least take it “public.”1 The activists enjoy the fascinating freedom of short term horizons and pure enthusiasm; often they are very smart in finding ways to get funding—from allies who support their particular goal or share their political interests. Sometimes they achieve respectable results, which come quite close to the results of investigative journalism.

In Texas, the initiative StopTXU.com23 successfully stopped the building of new CO2 emitting factories by the energy company TXU by professionally spreading information and communicating messages over the Internet. Tom Friedman described the case in The New York Times: “The Internet age is an age of transparency, when more people than ever can see right into your business and judge you by your deeds, not words. TXU could not manage its reputation by just hiring a P.R. firm and issuing a statement because, thanks to the Internet, too many little people could talk back or shape TXU’s image on a global basis through the Web, for free.”24 In Ontario, the computer scientist Richard Holt started a fight against the gravel industry as he realized how much land is sacrificed to inflate the profits of this industry. He set up the website GravelWatch25 and soon a network of similar organizations took actions to protect the local environment. Holt himself ran into trouble, as the gravel industry tried to put pressure on his university in response to his activities. After all, the industry was one of the big sponsors of the university.

But Holt prevailed and ultimately had quite some input on the gravel industry’s long-term strategy.

It was the absence of comprehensive coverage by local media that motivated two individuals in England to start their campaign to fight the building of a massive, £1 billion Science Park, which was to be built on a largely untouched landscape. By creating SaveWye26, they finally were able to prevent the area from destruction.

The Union of Concerned Scientists27 has created a website and established its 148

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own medium. They generate original research, provide expert commentary on the news, and promote advocacy campaigns that attempt to affect public policy28.

MIT-scientist Richard Lindzen, who is one of the sharpest critics of what he calls “hysteria without evidence,” uses his expertise to critique popular environmental views: “The Internet makes it impossible to suppress information. Everyone has talking points. The press has its own simplicity. At least there is some balance through different views published on the Internet.”29 He mentions websites such as CO2science.org, which according to Lindzen, is “very much on the skeptical side.”30 Realclimate.org aims “to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.”31 The website publishes vivid debates about topics that run in the mainstream media.

Articles like “Why global climate models do not give a realistic description of the local climate,”32 combine expertise and links, and are well written and accessible to a broader audience.

The Bloggers Don’t Bite Sometimes blogs can become relevant overnight and raise themselves beyond any discussion their original purpose. In 2005 the Thai military launched a coup against the president. All media was shut down immediately in an attempt to control public opinion. No reporting could leave Thailand, except live coverage from an ordinary shopping blog, run by a Thai woman with the Internet name “gnarlykitty,” who posted the first photos from the coup, with the headline: “Military coup!!!” She just happened to see what was going on, and turned her blog, which usually ran recommendations for shoes, bags or events, into a onewoman newswire about the military’s attempted coup in her country33.

By word of mouth, her blog became a source for media organizations all over the world. After the crisis was over, the shopping lady returned to recommending items for shoppers. She didn’t want to be a political or journalistic blogger, although for a moment in history she made an inestimably high contribution to international journalism.

Not even “political” bloggers see themselves as journalists. In a survey of 300 bloggers worldwide done for our Shorenstein research,34 only 36 percent of bloggers writing about politics describes themselves as journalists. (Multiple selfdescriptions were permitted). 72 percent saw themselves as commentators, and 67 percent said that they also may be called analysts. Almost every other blogger (48 percent) feels that he or she is “part of a larger community.”

They don’t want to destroy the old media: Only a tiny fraction (7 percent) thinks that blogging is going to “replace old media” and 4 percent do not see any interaction between blogging and the old media at all. The overwhelming majority (83 percent) see blogging as “complementary to old media”. They don’t even threaten the media: 26 percent see themselves as a threat, but 74% think that blogging only “challenges old media.” And by doing so 75 percent think that they 149

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“add value to the old media”. Of course they want to be unique: 78 percent say that they are “covering what old media misses.”

Almost every other blogger seems to be quite aware of the bad reputation they have: 49 percent said that he or she focuses on “accuracy.”

As recent Technorati data show, blogging growth may have reached a peak—at least in the English speaking world.35 For the first time since the rise of blogs, the number of active blogs is declining, despite a still growing blogosphere.36 One of the reasons may be that people would rather “communicate through a peer group in a social networking environment37 where shared interests will guarantee you an audience, rather than propel your thoughts into the blogosphere where often they will be read by no one unless you have managed to build up a brand”.38 The blogosphere continues to evolve. Clay Shirky, a New York professor for journalism and blogger, mentions the growing success of collaborative blogging: “In 2002 the top ten bloggers were dominated by strongly opinionated individualists. In 2007 it’s the group weblogs that attract the most readers.”39 And among group weblogs, those who adapt professional structures do best: for example, Ariana Huffington’s “Huffington Post.”40 When they launched, she hired the P.R.-guru Jonah Parretti to promote the blog—an action which earned her a lot of disparagement in the blogosphere. Now she is respected by even the sharpest critics of the blogosphere for having created something where it is hard to say whether it is still a blog or an altogether different medium.41 The Miracle of Wikipedia Collaboration is also the secret of Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, millions of people have started to use Wikipedia as a news medium. And the amateurs writing the Wikipedia articles have developed a strong sense of the need for entries to be more and more up-to-date. One of the Wikipedia contributors described the feeling of many when they first learned of the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2006: “Oh my God! This happened. It’s going to be historic.”42 And then 2,074 Wikipedia editors started to “[create] a polished, detailed article”43.

The New York Times acknowledged the important role of the encyclopedia44 as “an essential news source for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet trying to understand the shootings at Virginia Tech University.”45 In the days following the massacre, the Roanoke Times, published near the Virginia Tech campus, said that Wikipedia “has emerged as the clearinghouse for detailed information on the event.”46 How could Wikipedia achieve such recognition? It seems that the secret is a very smooth combination of traditional values. Angela Beesley, one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, sees the most encouraging aspect of Wikipedia as “the fact that hundreds of thousands of people can work together towards a shared goal: building a freely licensed encyclopedia.”47 The strength of the organization is that the community is more important than the technology—one of the big misunderstandings that consume traditional 150

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media sources when they move to the Internet.48 The technology as such cannot protect Wikipedia from vandalism and manipulation, as Beesley says: “Only people can do that. By having a community vigilant against those sorts of edits, they are, for the most part, kept in check.”49 The enemies of Wikipedia are “people pushing a particular point of view… especially when they’re paid by a company to do that.” As Beesley sees it there are many people who are not interested in writing neutral articles but rather want to “push their own agenda” and create “deliberate vandalism, self-promotion, and spam.” They can use the technology provided by Wikipedia to destroy the product and it “can be time consuming for the community to find these sorts of edits and defend against them.”50 The particular quality of the entries in Wikipedia and the relatively low error rate indicate that there must be a superior standard by which everyone measures his or her work: “Maybe it is the metaphor of an encyclopedia which brings Wikipedia to this standard of seriousness,”51 says Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger from Harvard Kennedy School. Wikipedia is not only a brand in the typical marketing sense.

Wikipedia gives everybody’s role a higher meaning. There is a common understanding of what an encyclopedia ought to be: neutral, objective, accurate, everlasting. The concept is the motivating spirit behind everybody’s commitment.

Newspapers celebrate a similar concept: Even the smallest regional newspaper believes it is valuable to a community beyond the sum of the ads that it sells. There is a difference whether you talk about the “press” or the “media.” The “press” always connotes the common ideas of “freedom of the press,” “first amendment,” “Fourth Estate.” The “media” has a clearly derogatory taste: It’s the paparazzi, violators of privacy, and voyeurs52.

The Value of Participation In July 2005 New England Cable News (NECN) started an experiment in which viewers were invited to send video news to the network. The program was called “Video New England” and, after a slow start, brought many valuable contributions.

Steve Safran, then director of digital media at NECN, described the quality of most of the videos as “excellent.”53 Asked whether he thinks ordinary people can appropriate the rules of journalism he answers: “Anyone can adapt to the basic rules of journalism. They’re not hard. Be fair, get both sides of the story, be aggressive and do what you can to tell the complete story. It’s more a matter of knowing the rules and the desire to stick with them.”54 Bill Kovach, the former Nieman curator, is involved in a project where ordinary people are integrated into the overall coverage of “old media”: The Committee of Concerned Journalists and the Reynolds Institute of the University of Missouri Journalism School have embarked on a one-year project to develop a protocol for transferring the work of existing newsrooms to the World Wide Web while maintaining the standards outlined in The Elements of Journalism. The Milwaukee 151

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Journal, Minnesota Public Radio and WHO-TV in Des Moines, Iowa, are involved in the project.

For Kovach there is no doubt that ordinary people can “embark” on journalism.

He does not see the necessity of formal journalistic education as a prerequisite for being able to contribute to journalism: “There is no reason to believe ordinary people can’t do journalism given the record in the U.S. Most journalists of my generation were not trained as journalists. I, for example, majored in marine biology and had no formal training when I began working for a newspaper in 1958 and there’s nothing to suggest I and my cohort are special people.”55 Kovach, who was also the former Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times and editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, believes it is more up to the journalists to change. For him the future shape of journalism “depends upon whether and how readily journalists accept the idea that it is now part of their responsibility to help citizens learn the rules of journalism and to become their own editors and publishers and how effectively they learn to do that job once they understand it is the only way to assure their own survival.”56 Jay Rosen, who just started a venture involving ordinary people57, is even more convinced that it is up to the media to “become capable of learning. Media organizations are designed to keep people out. Just try to get to the office of a journalist without appointment. You will end at the doorman.”58 For him, the motivation of citizens to contribute is already part of their qualification: “It’s the people who demand journalism at its best who want to participate.”59 And Thomas Middelhoff, former CEO of Bertelsmann, sees the desire for participation as a “value in itself”: “Making up your mind as a free man is a value. So it is worth using the right of free speech. The Internet offers this possibility to everyone.”60 How Network Publishing Changes Washington The variety of contradictory views about environmental issues that are published shows that network publishing has become part of the modern political discourse.

The fact that people can articulate their opinions and express their concerns and apply their expertise will have significant influence on the political culture. “The biggest impact is making bona fide two-way communication more important,” says Mike McCurry, a former Clinton spokesman who today runs a PR company in Washington.”61 Mark McKinnon, P.R. advisor for George W. Bush and in 2008 one of the men behind the revival of Republican candidate John McCain, says: “Anything that encourages more voices means more democracy, and that’s a good thing.”62 Of course McCurry sees potential danger in knowing people’s positions too. “I think there is some danger that Internet political communications can wind up telling small audiences exactly what they want to hear. The challenge is to get social networks of political activists to see what they have in common with others.”63 McKinnon sees a shift in the political communication paradigm. “The media as 152

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an elite is dead. Stick a fork in it. The body is cold. Politicians as an elite is dead, too. Internet has totally democratized politics and put a pitchfork to the elite politician.”64 His prediction: “Whoever wins the next election will do so in large part because they recognized and harnessed the power of the internet.”65 He sees this as a big challenge because of the many voices on the Internet. “Internet makes messaging even more competitive, which means it’s more important than ever that messaging be clear.”66 But “the mainstream media press will still set the boundaries of debate,” thinks McCurry. “Remember that most on-line debate is about things that citizens have seen in newspapers or watched on TV.” And he is not quite sure that elites will truly fade due to the Internet. “There is still a cultural bias in the media and the political blogosphere that skews upper-income, upper-educated and privileged.” The Web will create more “citizen-politicians,” newcomers who don’t fit the traditional career-path for aspiring politicos.”67 Mike McCurry thinks the system as a whole benefits from activists who promote their causes through network publishing. “Letting the ‘little guy’ express himself makes the debate more chaotic, noisier and probably a little more raw-edged. But it also generates excitement and a sense of participation, all things you want to have in a campaign.”68 McKinnon, the Republican, expects that “it will be harder to sort out” what’s true and what not. “It may be messy,” he wrote in an e-mail. “And it may take awhile.

But ultimately, the good guys will prevail because Internet = more information and democracy = good.”69 Business Models There are different models that work. Nonprofit is a good choice for websites like World Changing or Global Voices, who already have access to grants. Others such as Chi-Town News from Chicago start with a concept and then seek money. Some of them are nonprofit in a strategic, organized way, which means they have budgets and systematically are looking for donors. Some are more or less living from a day-to-day basis, relying either on one big personal sugar daddy or on many small donors. The business status of many 2007-citizen journalism websites: they are highly enthusiastic and very short of money.

Those going after profit have quite developed structures, including sales strategies and sponsorship concepts. They even have people hired for this or have outsourced these services. There seems to be some kind of niche market for environmental issues, but it still is quite small and has not yet developed to a point where substantial organizations (even small ones) could make a reasonable living.

Jeff Jarvis, blogger and journalism professor at the New York City University, is convinced that money can be made with network publishing. He mentions the technology website Techcrunch70 as “very profitable” or Nick Denton’s Gawker Media71 with “very significant revenues”72 and a good profit. Also small operations can make money, such as Debra Galant’s blog73 in New Jersey, which now has 153

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started selling very local ads which cannot be picked up by the local newspaper.

Jarvis: “What is missing in many operations is the entrepreneurial spirit. We didn’t tell our journalists how to make business. But in these kinds of operations they have to be able to do it.”74 Jarvis sees a good potential for network publishing, although some structural changes have yet to be implemented, like an “advertising network” for network publishing. And something else is of importance: “Big old media is supported by big old advertisers. Google is really smart in letting smaller businesses participate from their revenues.”75 The need of raising money will occur as soon as people will start to ask for money for their contributions or the publishers want to assign people for special tasks. As Clay Shirky, a prominent blogger, puts it, “The question of paying people for their contributions will inevitably be asked the moment an organization has more revenues than expenses.”76 Though a study for Readers Edition showed that being paid is one of the least important issues for writers, it seems quite likely that at least symbolic compensation will be requested. The world’s biggest citizen journalism newspaper, OhMyNews77 from Korea, pays each writer a small amount of money, and so far has been successful with this model.

If network publishing wants the ability to have suitable journalistic coverage whenever the reader or the news situation demands it, they will have to pay for the work of the citizens. Today, at many organizations, if the key people take a leave or go on vacation, the coverage comes to a standstill. If someone simply loses the urge to write he or she can stop. Unless the network is very large, this causes serious problems. Network publishers need a solution for this problem.

Steve Safran, who is experienced in traditional journalism and in network publishing, sees the old and new media as facing the same challenges: “So far, the business of citizen journalism has faced exactly the same problem as the business of traditional journalism: it’s hard to sell. Backfence.com78 found this out. Good site, good citizen journalism, tough to sell advertising. Idealism is wonderful, but you still need money.”79 Conclusion and Some Imperatives In 1997, the programmer Eric S. Raymond described the very first steps of the open-source movement. He explained how the savage world of the hackers transformed itself into a powerful community to develop computer software.

Raymond’s title, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” illustrates the fundamental difference: “No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather … a babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, which would take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.”80 For the news media the analogy is obvious: The cathedrals are the traditional newspapers, the bazaar is network publishing. To my view it is not the central question whether we find modern patrons who give donations so we can renovate 154

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the cathedrals and finance the editors to give their sermons every Sunday. The most important step is to understand that people want and can actively participate in the process of the creation of news. I would not prefer a model where a one-way-journalism is perpetuated by just finding great sugar daddies.

The arbitrariness of a newspaper tycoon is not more democratic than Wall Street’s dictatorship. But the way of how people have learned to collaborate, interact and engage themselves through the Internet can bring new quality and, hence, new life into journalism.

As we have seen, collaboration between the two is possible or even natural on several levels, but there are others where it won’t work. It’s important to accept the differences where they are insurmountable. To combine things that don’t fit together is just a waste of time and money. Traditional media and network publishing can identify the field of collaboration and mutual learning. There is no guarantee that things will work fast. But it’s rather likely some things may be successful for both the old media and network publishing.

The creation of hybrids is a promising approach. Not too much money is needed and this money will be better invested than billions spent on acquisitions of websites without a journalistic soul. Traditional media and citizen journalism projects can make a nice and fruitful tradeoff. The citizen journalists have strengths: Culture of participation, networking information, freshness81, dynamism and creative chaos. What they need is professional journalists and managers, structure, reliability, money and a legal net. Traditional media are strong exactly in the latter areas and desperately need what citizen journalists can do best.

The activists can be used as local sources and political seismographs. They should be carefully observed and can be used as sources. There is no difference between some of the very interesting activists’ concerns and the concerns of citizens at the local pub, museum, choir, et cetera which are ungrudgingly covered and supported by the old media. The media will learn more about their local community if they know what’s up when people start raising their voices on behalf of some particular issues on the Internet.

Political communication will change significantly through the direct collaboration of activists and political organizations. Players can use the open discourse to enrich their political coverage. First, they will see what people want or are concerned about. Second, they will be able to identify trends earlier and thus better anticipate political developments.

Blogging is a completely different thing than traditional journalism. The culture of blogging and news media cannot be brought together without serious damages to both82. Bloggers are individualists and, as such, they are a valuable species. To integrate them into news organizations may be a nice marketing gag but no more.

The bloggers need the freedom; and freedom only is real freedom if it’s total. A blogger will always run a story for a good laugh—and that’s fine. Media can use their expertise and buy their content. Media can aggregate blogs, if they are very 155

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courageous. But the bloggers must keep their watch-dog function. It hurts sometimes, but it heals the media ecosystem in the long run.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV can all activate their community in order to broaden the coverage, but be aware: This is not an easy thing. As is demonstrated by the disaster at the Los Angeles Times83 you need a lot of expertise, which is freely available: In 2005, The Los Angeles Times invited its readers to comment, critique, and expand on the articles that appeared on the paper’s Op-Ed page, following the model that had been successfully established by Wikipedia. But the LA Times failed for create a valuable new format by neglecting basic rules of technological vigilance which are more than common sense on the internet.

When, at the very beginning of the experiment, pornographic spam and rude texts started to flood in without filtering, those responsible for the well-intentioned project panicked and killed Wikitorial after just two days. What a great Wiki it would be if The New York Times did not just throw away 985 letters to the editor every day (as they only print 15)84 but used them to create a Wiki on the Web. Or would the disaster of the coverage of WMD have happened, if every major newspaper in the U.S. had brought together its best experts in its foreign department with its correspondents and made a collaborative decision? I doubt it.

A decomposition of hierarchy - that’s revolutionary,” says former New York Times public editor Dan Okrent85. I think it’s doable and I think it’s even necessary.

Very old fashioned organizations can harness the new possibilities. Law Professor Cass Sunstein86 reports that the CIA has started its own Wiki, “Intellipedia”—which has turned out to be a big success. If the CIA can do it, it shouldn’t be a big deal for The Washington Post.

The media always have an initial problem embracing new technologies,87 but after a while they get it and they do better than before. Maybe not on paper or on the TV-screen or the radio alone anymore, but really multimedia—with texts, video, audio, participation, interaction and all the great things the new web has brought into the media.

If journalism is able to get back the readers’ interest and involvement, the advertising industry will be faithful with this new media and continue to pay them the money they need. Patrons and family owners may look comfortable only at first sight. After all, real independence has been best granted to media in the environment of a free market. It may have become more difficult today, as more players compete for the money, but the kind of participation made possible through the Internet can revive journalism and transform both the old thinking and the traditional business model in a way that finally will bring us the media we deserve88.

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http://www.petitiononline.com/atl2007/petition.html My paper finally focused on the relationship between professional journalists and amateurs. “Journalism without journalists: Vision or caricature?”, at: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/discussion_papers/D40.pdf 156

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Chuck Lewis points at the increasing importance of Non-profit-models for journalism: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/working_papers/2007_3.pdf www.treehugger.com: In an interview in May 2007, editor Michael Graham told me, that the site was “profitable”. In summer 2007, Treehugger was acquired by Discovey Communications.

Business Week, February 4, 2008: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2008/tc2008024_252834.htm?chan=search Special thanks to Isaac Wohl, Veronica Minaya, Florian Zinöcker and Hyoungmi Kim Interview with Dan Gillmor, April 10, 2007 www.worldchanging.org www.chitowndailynews.org

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http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/ http://www.agoravox.fr/ http://www.naturavox.fr/ http://www.rue89.com/ http://www.readers-edition.de/ http://www.atinachile.cl/ http://www.elciudadano.net/ http://www.ecoportal.net/ Interview with founder Ricardo Natali, April 2007 http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ Interview April 2007 Email interview, May 29, 2007 Sometimes activism emerges from the desire to transform the world - which to some seems easier since the Internet came up.

The veteran rock singer Peter Gabriel e.g. founded “Witness”, a “YouTube for human rights”, because “with the telephone and Internet, anyone, any place call tell their story.” Gabriel interviewed by Reuters, quoted from Commweb, January 2007. http://www.environmentaldefense.org/content.cfm?contentID=5490 Tom Friedman, “Marching with a mouse”, http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/opinion/16friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Friedman+Marching+with+a+Mouse&st=nyt &oref=slogin http://www.gravelwatch.org/index.htm http://www.save-wye.org/ http://www.ucsusa.org/ For example, giving advice how scientists can work with the media: http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/resources/how-scientists-canwork.html Interview with Richard Lindzen, May 2007 Interview ibid. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/about/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/climate-models-local-climate/ http://gnarlykitty.blogspot.com/2006/09/military-coup.html The survey was conducted in the US, France, UK, Germany and Latin America. The response rate was 30%.

Heather Green in Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2007/04/blogging_growth.html http://www.sifry.com/main/ At the same time figures are released that only a fraction of Web 2.0 users is actively generating content: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_20_expo_data.php Victor Keegan in The Guardian, April 12, 2007 Shirky, Ibid. www.huffingtonpost.com Andrew Keen, The Cult of the amateur, S 191 New York Times, The Latest on Virginia Tech, from Wikipedia, April 23, Pg. C4 Ibid.

The NYP describes Wikipedia as “a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done.”, Ibid.

Ibid.

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Andrew Kantor also describes, how “the interactive nature of the Internet has made it the focal point of memorials and messages, condolences and commerce, speculation and squabble”, at: .http://www.roanoke.com/vtshootingaccounts/wb/113689 Email interview March 2007 Dan Gillmor about his experience with a citizen journalist project:” Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building.” At: http://bayosphere.com/blog/dan_gillmor/20060124/from_dan_a_letter_to_the_bayosphere_community Of course there is a code, e.g. for verifiability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability Ibid.

Interview Ibid.

Martin F. Nolan, Orwell meets Nixon: When and Why “The Press” became “The Media”, Shorenstein research paper, Fall 2004 Nieman Reports, Winter 2005, pg 23 Email Interview, March 14, 2007 Email interview April 20, 2007 Ibid. www.newassignment.net Interview, Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Email Interview Mike McCurry, May 21, 2007 Email Interview Mark McKinnon, May 2, 2007 Ibid..

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid. http://www.techcrunch.com/ http://gawker.com/advertising/ Interview Jeff Jarvis, April 2007 www.baristanet.com Ibid.

Ibid Interview in April 2007 http://www.ohmynews.com/ www.backfence.com Ibid.

Eric S. Raymond, The cathedral and the bazaar, Sebastopol CA, 1999, pg. 21 “There’s a kind of serendipity, if you like - a freshness of this stuff”, Orato editor Paul Sullivan says, establishing a citizen website (www.orato.com) after nearly 25 years working for established news outlets such as The Globe and Mail, CBC-TV and the Sun Media chain; The Globe and Mail, December 9, 2006, Page A15 As it just happened to the German newspaper “Die Welt”: A blogger, paid by the newspaper, heavily criticized the editor of the paper’s sister publication “Bild”. The blog entry was removed and the editor of “Welt Online” announced that in future every blog entry will be read by an editor before being published. The action caused a lot of malice in the German blogosphere and left quite some uncertainty with those hired by the paper to embrace network publishing. In: Eine Art Apo, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, May 11, 2007 I described the reasons for the disaster at: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/discussion_papers/D40.pdf Dan Okrent, Public editor #1, Cambridge 2006, pg. 223 Interview May 3, 2007 Interview May 3, 2007 Jay Black/Frederick C. Whitney, Introduction to mass communication, Dubuque (Iowa), 1983, p. 93 Steven Levy in Newsweek, March 26, 2007, Science Page 6: Levy has the best summary for the situation: “If we are to lose the beneficial halo generated by professionals, experts and geniuses, it won’t be because of ankle-biting bloggers, callow Wikipedia authors and mediocre folk singers riding the long tail. It will be because the audience at large thinks that the truly good stuff isn’t worth paying for. If all goes well, new business models will make it easier for excellence to be rewarded. In any case, we will ultimately get the media that we deserve.”

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Local News and the Nonprofit Model: MinnPost.com Editor Joel Kramer Offers Practical Tips A group of experienced editors and reporters, led by Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, launched a nonprofit, local, on-line news publication, MinnPost.com in 2007. I communicated with Joel via e-mail about the progress of their startup and he offered a vivid accounting of the pros and cons of an on-line news venture.

He writes: In the face of all the local journalism buyouts, I wanted to develop a sustainable model for high-quality journalism. I was open to both for-profit and nonprofit models, but I pursued the for- profit approach first on the theory that profitability implied sustainability. But after a lot of research and many conversations, including with prospective investors, I concluded that the nonprofit model was better for two main reasons: j My goal of supporting high-quality journalism fit a nonprofit value system better. For example, if you are attracting for-profit investors, it’s hard to get them to think about arbitrarily limiting their profits and pouring more back into the journalism; in a nonprofit, that commitment makes complete sense.

I began using the argument that high-quality journalism is not just a consumer good but a community asset, and it resonated. My best prospects for major investments told me they would just as happily donate as invest. j I concluded that an enterprise that spent what it takes to do high-quality

journalism and focuses on a local (rather than national or global) market has very little chance of making a profit, or even breaking even, on just advertising, without revenue from readers. But of course, “the Internet wants to be free,” and I saw no way I could get enough people to pay to read, when much smarter and bigger players than I had failed to do so. Therefore, I concluded that the only chance was to get a subset of readers to pay voluntarily, and this naturally led to a nonprofit approach, like the membership model of public radio or public television.

Once the nonprofit approach was established, I figured I could use all the revenue sources that made available: advertising, sponsorship, individual founding donors making large one-time startup gifts, annual member-donors at all levels, and foundations. A major decision, however, was to define sustainability as meaning ”breaking even” without soft foundation dollars; in other words, MinnPost would be sustainable when its revenues from annual donors and advertisers and sponsors equaled its annual expenses. I developed a plan to reach that breakeven in year four, which meant MinnPost needed foundation support to sustain us through the first three years, while we built up our donor base, our 160

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traffic and our advertising and sponsorship. Starting in year four, we might still seek foundation grants but they would be for special projects, not core operations.

This approach appeals to foundations, because they don’t like to be in the sustaining business. It also builds a business discipline into the venture; we must make the needed progress on all the metrics so we can become sustainable in four years.

So far things are going well. Visits to MinnPost.com were 30 percent higher in recent weeks than one month earlier, and 50 percent higher than a comparable period in December. In the past 30 days, we have had more than 75,000 unique visitors. Also, the number of people signed up for our daily email alert — a very good measure of the loyal audience — now exceeds 3,350 and is growing 10 percent a month.

Advertising started out slow but is picking up. Though we re behind plan because of the slow start, I’m optimistic.

Now that we have almost four months of journalism and traffic data under our belt, we are starting to approach local foundations for another round of funding.

Since we are spending about $1.3 million a year and bringing in far less from small donors and advertising right now, it’s imperative that we raise quite a bit more to get us through to year 4.

On the journalism side, the first month was a struggle, because of getting used to our content management system and developing relationships with our freelance writers. In the last two months, I think the journalism has become much stronger.

Now, we are examining what we╒re learning about what our visitors like, and planning to make some changes to make the site even more of a must-read.

Would I do anything differently? Only with hindsight. For example, we could not sell ads for our print version, so we’ve now stopped distributing it widely.

I knew that it would not be easy to build a financially sustainable standalone online site with a mission of high-quality journalism in one state, but based on our results in the first four months, I’m confident that we re on track for a breakeven enterprise by year four, provided we can raise enough money in the next couple of years to keep us going until we get there.

— Geneva Overholser Updating “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change”

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Test Your Knowledge of the Economic and Financial Condition of U.S. Newspapers

By Robert Picard

1. The average newspaper circulation is ❑ a) 150,000 ❑ b) 110,000 ❑ c) 85,000 ❑ d) 50,000 ❑ e) 35,000 2. Newspaper penetration per population ❑ a) Has remained relatively stable ❑ b) Dropped suddenly after 2000 ❑ c) Dropped suddenly in the mid-1990s ❑ d) Began declining steadily beginning in 1980s ❑ e) Has declined at a steady pace for 50 years 3. Newspaper advertising income reached an all time high of $49.3 billion in ❑ a) 2006 ❑ b) 1999 ❑ c) 1993 ❑ d) 1989 ❑ e) 1984 4. Adjusted for inflation, advertising income in newspapers is ❑ a) About the same as in 1950 ❑ b) 1.5 times lower than in 1950 ❑ c) 2.5 times lower than in 1950 ❑ d) 1.5 times higher than in 1950 ❑ e) 2.5 times higher than in 1950 5. Since 2000, classified advertising has declined about ❑ a) 10 percent ❑ b) 25 percent ❑ c) 50 percent ❑ d) 75 percent ❑ e) None of the above 6. Income from online newspaper advertising has replaced which portion of lost income from print classified advertising ❑ a) 15 percent ❑ b) 30 percent ❑ c) 45 percent ❑ d) 60 percent ❑ e) 75 percent 162

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7. Newspapers are primarily dependent upon which type of advertising ❑ a) National ❑ b) Retail ❑ c) Classified ❑ d) Preprint ❑ e) Legal 8. The return on sales for newspapers is now ❑ a) Below pharmaceutical companies ❑ b) Below automakers ❑ c) Below department stores ❑ d) Below banks ❑ e) None of the above 9. The number of journalists working in papers is ❑ a) About the same as in 1970 ❑ b) 25 percent lower than in 1970 ❑ c) 50 percent lower than in 1970 ❑ d) 25 percent higher than in 1970 ❑ e) 50 percent higher than in 1970 10. The overall financial conditions of the newspaper industry is ❑ a) Worse than in the 1990s ❑ b) Worse than in the 1980s ❑ c) Worse than in the 1970s ❑ d) Worse than in the 1960s ❑ e) Worse than ever in its history

CORRECT ANSWERS 1) e 2) e 3) a 4) e 5) b 6) d 7) b 8) e 9) d 10) a SCORE 8-10 You have a realistic view of the industry’s situation 4-7 You have an incomplete understanding of the industry’s situation 0-4 You have an unrealistic view of the industry’s situation

— Robert Picard News Consumption and the Business of Journalism

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Stemming the Decline in Public Affairs Reporting: An Eight-Step Approach Public-affairs reporting continues to decline, especially at the local level. The causes are complex, but I believe there are three primary reasons worth noting here: changes in technology and costs structure that make it harder to generate revenue for newspapers (competition from Internet, demise of classifieds); a lack of expressed demand for some hard news, even if citizens would benefit from the information; and changes in ownership structure that mean fewer families/media company founders exist who are willing to trade off profits for doing the right thing and covering government.

What is to be done? Unfortunately many of the frustrations people feel with journalism are often phrased in good guy/bad guy analysis (e.g., owners are too big, too greedy), when many of the downfalls of journalism simply arise from profit maximization and market forces. Here are eight suggestions made by policy advocates on how to alter the playing field so public affairs reporting can regain some traction: Relax cross-ownership restrictions: Newspapers really do provide the local information that most people get, even if they watch local TV (since local TV gets its facts from local newspapers). Local newspapers are still profitable, but investors are upset because the profits are below the anticipated levels that shareholders had when they bought in. IF relaxation of cross-ownership strengthened newspapers by allowing them to get better video for their websites and use their information in another platform, then the FCC might want to consider even greater relaxation of cross-ownership provisions. Ultimately both TV and newspaper outlets are demand driven, so if the same person owns both in a town, they still might offer diverse coverage if the audiences for print and TV were different.

Inheritance taxes and newspapers: Families sometimes tradeoff profits for high quality coverage. Historically the record is mixed on individual influence on papers, but changes in the inheritance tax for media properties might help preserve a subset of newspapers in family hands.

Nonprofits and news provision: More cities/wealthy investors are talking about running newspapers as nonprofits (or as for profit entities owned by nonprofits).

At times people talk as if a family would have to “give it all away� to establish a new Poynter Institute, but an entity could buy a paper from a family and promise payments over time in debt as the paper was run, so the family would not be giving it away. It would be getting payments (perhaps lower than profit max) from a paper owned by a nonprofit. More attention should be focused on what legal changes would be necessary to encourage nonprofit media ownership.

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Public interest requirements and satellite/digital: Requiring all broadcasters to provide certain levels of public affairs programming may not work well, because the First Amendment correctly prevents the FCC from being highly specific about public affairs programming. But there may be ways to require organizations using the airwaves to provide some dedicated channels with nonprofit public affairs programming (e.g., PBS, CSPAN).

Freedom of Information Act: FOIA lowers the cost to reporters of really finding out what is going on in government. The upcoming presidential election opens up an opportunity to press a new administration to revitalize the FOIA process, which underwent a deliberate slowdown under the Bush administration. The new Congress should hold hearings on how to protect and even enhance FOIA. Campaign Finance Reform: While people often fret about the appearance of impropriety when it comes to campaign funds and information, in fact partisan sources can be productive outlets for political information. The press, public and government need to be open to rethinking the rules that govern the use of campaign funds for the dissemination of political information.

Hands off the Web: The FEC sometimes creates fear about chilling speech on blogs, as people begin to worry about whether campaign finance laws apply to them. To the extent that the FEC can clarify/stay out of regulating Internet speech that would help discussion of public affairs proceed (even if it is subsidized by campaigns).

Support Digital Trust Fund legislation: Public affairs information should fall under the umbrella of the Digital Trust Fund legislation currently under consideration in Congress. Right now the legislation targets infrastructure and digitalization of some types of information, but the market failures involved in public affairs coverage mean that the fund could be used to subsidize the creation of public affairs information. — James T. Hamilton A Free and Subsidized Press: Updating the 2004 Breaux Symposium Proposals

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We would like to thank the following individuals, corporations and foundations for their support of the Breaux Symposium endowment: AT&T Donald “Boysie” Bollinger Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, P.C. CenturyTel Chevron Cox Communications Ted Forstmann Freeport-McMoRan Noel Gould Jones Walker Dr. Chip LaHaye Edward and Rosanne Martinet Nancy Marsiglia Murphy Oil Corporation Southwest Computer Bureau Syngenta Crop Protection The Friends of Adam Smith Walton Family Foundation, Inc. Thank you to the following people for their leadership in making this symposium and report possible: Heather Herman, Renee Pierce and Steve Radcliffe.

The Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs The Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs was established in 2000 by the Manship School of Mass Communication. Its mission is to generate thoughtful programs and research about mass communication and its many-faceted relationships with social, economic and political issues.

The Breaux Symposium is central to the programming of the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. Past Breaux Symposia include “The Press at the Turn of the Century,” “Voting Alone,” “Parties, Pacs, and Persuasion,” “Freeing the Press,” “News in the Public Interest: A Free and Subsidized Press,” “We Hold These Truths? How New Technology is Changing Foreign Affairs Reporting,” and “A Tool Kit for News Consumers.”

The Manship School of Mass Communication The mission of the Manship School of Mass Communication is to produce highly competent communicators with broad knowledge and training in liberal arts and the media. The school promotes effective communication, critical thinking and ethical responsibility. Overall, and especially in the graduate program, the school is committed to leading the study and practice of media and public affairs. Believing that media should reflect and provide leadership to society, the school seeks diversity in its outlook, student body and faculty.

Photos Page 1 top: The New York Times: The Model of Decent and Dignified Journalism. Easter. De Yongh. Poster, color lithograph by Lieber and Maass Lith., New York, 1896. Artist Posters. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZC4-1429.

Page 168 bottom: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection . Hilda Kassell, E. 53rd St., New York City. Father reading newspaper, two children viewing television. LC-G613- 57609.

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