2 pages essay

DIGITAL DISCONNECT

HOW CAPITALISM IS TURNING THE

INTERNET AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Robert W. McChesney

THE NEW PRESS

NEW YORK LONDON

© 2013 by Robert W. McChesney All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2013 Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA McChesney, Robert Waterman, 1952-

Digital disconnect : how capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy I Robert W. McChesney.

p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-867-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-59558-891-3 (e-book)

l. Internet-Political aspects. 2. Capitalism. 3. Democracy. I. Title. HM8 5 l .M393 2013

302.23'1-dc23 2012035748

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6

Journalism Is Dead! Long Live Journalism?

"Journalism is dead! Long l ive j ournal ism!" So goes th e mantra of the nevv

conventional wisdom . The bad news is that the Internet has taken the eco­

nomic basis away from commercial j ournalism, especially newspapers, and

left the rotting carcass for all to see. The I nternet is providing intense com­

petition for advertising, which has traditionally bankrolled most of the news

media. In 2000, daily newspapers received nearly $20 billion fro m classi­

fieds; in 20 l l the figure was $ 5 billion. A free ad on Craigslist generally gets

more responses. Display advertising fell from around $ 30 billion to $ 1 5 bil­

lion in the same period. Combined newspaper advertising revenues were

cut in half from 200 3 to 20 1 1 . 1 In 20 l l newspapers still rec eived 2 5 percent

of all advertising expenditures despite getting only 7 percent of consumers'

media ti me. By all accounts, the industry remains in free falP

The Internet has also taken away readers, who can find online for free

much of the j ournalism they might want. A large and growing number of

Americans, especially younger ones, get their news fro m comedy programs. j

A 20 l l Pew Research Center survey found that computer tablets were boom­

ing among traditional newspaper readers, and 5 9 percent of the respondents

said the tablet had replaced "what they used to get" from a newspaper.4 And

as the content of newspapers gets skimpier, the product becomes that much

more unappealing, making it that much more difficult to get people to sub­

scribe to cover the lost advertising revenues . A 20 l l survey determined that

only 28 percent of American adults thought it would have a major impact

on th em if their local newspaper disappeared; 39 percent said it would have

no impact whatsoever. 5 By any reckoning, this o netime ubiquitous medium

is in its death spiral .

It is not j ust newspapers, though they are being hit hardest; all commercial

172

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 173

news media are in varying stages of decay. But newspapers are by far the most

important, because they are where the vast maj ority of original reporting is

done, and no oth er media have emerged to replace them. Harvard's Alex S .

Jones esti mates that 8 5 percent o f all professi onally reported news originates

with daily newspapers , and he notes that he has seen credible sources place

that figure closer to 95 percent.6 C ommercial radio news barely exists at all,

and much of what remains on commercial television can be called news

only by a l oose definition of the term .

But fear not, we are told. Here's the good news: The same I nternet that

has slain the news media will provide ample j ournalism eventually, in an

almost c erta inly superior form . In no other area have the celebrants been

so emphati c . 7 Jeff Jarvis asserts, "Thanks to the web . . . j ournal ism will not

only survive but prosper and grow far beyond its present l imitations. " 8 All

we need to do i s get out of the way and let free markets work their magic on

revolutionary technologies.

C lay S h irky wrote in h i s influential 2009 essay, "Newspapers and Think­

ing the Unthinkable, " that "this is what real revolutions are l ike , " adding,

"the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its plac e . " Shirky

counsels patience. "Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the

ti me for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of wh ich will seem

as minor at launch as C ra igslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did . "

He adds, "In the next few decades, j ournal ism will be made up of overlap­

ping special cases . . . . Many of these models will fai l . No one experiment is

going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper,

but over time , th e collection of new experiments that do work might give us

the j ournalism we need . " 9

Yochai Benkler suggests that the new j ournalism will b e s o radically dif­

ferent from the old that traditional concerns about resource support are no

longer of pressing importance. We can have a leaner journal ism, and it will

still be much better, thanks to the Internet. He writes: "Like other infor­

mation goods, th e production model of news is shifting from an ind ustrial

model - be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or M i­

crosoft, or Britannica - to a networked model that integrates a wider range

of practices into th e production system: market and non market, large scale

and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual . We already

see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided

in the networked public sphere . " 10 Likewise, Shirky, in a major address on

174 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

the state of the news media at Harvard in 20 l l , basically ignored the issue of

resources and economic support. 11

The enthus iasm of the celebrants for the Internet as the basis for j ournal­

ism's revital ization is understandable, for four putative reasons. First, there

are an exponentially greater number of people who are able to participate as

j ournal ists onl ine because barriers to entry are all but eliminated. "We are all

journalists, now, " as th e saying goes. 1 2 Second, newly c hristened journalists,

l ike everyone else, can have access to the world's information at a second's

notice, far beyond what anyone could have accessed in the past. All they

need to do is develop their skills at surfing the Web. Third, j ournalists will

be able to collaborate and draw from the intelligence and labor of countless

others in a networked environment, so that the whole will be far greater than

the sum of its parts. Fourth, the Internet dramatically lowers the cost of pro­

duction and effectively eliminates the cost of distribution , so a journal ist can

have a digital readership in the tens of millions with barely any budget at all.

So while the Internet might undermine the viability of the existing com­

mercial news media, unless they change , it will also provide a far m ore glori­

ous and democratic replacement. All that needs to be done is to keep the

government censors at bay, and even the censors will have a very difficult

time wrestling th is magical technology to the groun d .

T h i s is an intoxicating prospect. There a r e numerous great j ournal ists,

like Glenn Greenwald, whose work exists only because of the factors above.

Concerned citizens can locate a treasure trove of information online. The

Arab Spring demonstrates that the powers-that-be fac e an unprecedented

threat to their existence from aroused and empowered populations. For the

most exuberant among us, the newest wave of technologies may have already

ushered in the next glorious period. "There's no longer any need to imagine

a media world where you create , aggregate and share freely and find cred­

ible, relevant news and information by using recommendations from peers

you trust, " Rory O'C onnor writes, "because that world is already here." 1'

Peter D iamandis and Steven Kotler write that "th e free flow of information

enabled by cell phones replaces the need for a free press." 1 4

Perhaps no issue is of greater importance to the future than how accurate

these hopeful perspectives prove to be. Two matters are beyond debate: First,

j ournalism in the manner I described it in chapte r 3 is mandatory, not only

so people can participate in the central political and communication pol icy

issues outl ined in th is book, but also so there can be a democratic society

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 175

wherein individual l i berties are meaningful. Second, current j ournalism is

in decline and disarray. If there are any doubts about the second point, the

evidence presented below should eliminate th em. We are in a political crisis

of existential dimensions.

Two outstanding questions arise . First, will the Internet, the profit motive ,

citizens, and assorted nonprofit groups combine in some manner to gener­

ate a higher grade of j ournal ism sufficient to empower self-government? I

argu e herein , drawing from the foundation I provided in chapter 3, that the

celebrants h ave either greatly undervalued the importance of havi ng i nde­

pendent competing institutions and resources to do j ournal ism - especially

l iving wages for reporters - or they have overestimated the capacity of the

market to produce such a system , or both . Moreover, the celebrants tend to

be naive about th e endemic problem of commercialism for democratic j our­

nalism, in the form of both private ownership and advertising support. As I

assess the state of j ournalism in the United States today, it becomes evident

that the I nternet is not the cause of j ournal ism's problems. D igital technol­

ogy has only greatly accelerated and made permanent trends produced by

commercialism that were apparent before the World Wide Web , Craigslist,

Coogle, or Facebook existed.

I then look at the various efforts at generating digital j ournal ism by the

traditional news media, entrepreneurs, citizen j ournalists (a colloquial term

for unpaid j ournal ists ) , and nonprofit organizations. Although I find scant

evidence that what is occurring online today could plausibly generate a

popular j ournalism sufficient for a free and self-governing society, th e notion

that the I nternet could provide the basis for a radically improved democratic

j ournalism is another matter altogether. There I believe th e celebrants are

clearly on to something very big.

This l eads to the second outstanding questio n : if the market, philan­

thropy, and new technologies are inadequate , how can we have a j ournalism

system sufficient for a free and self-governing soci ety? I return to the point

first made in chapters 2 and 3: th e solution to the problem of generating

sufficient j ournalism begins with the recognition that it is a publ ic good.

Journal ism is someth ing society requ ires but that the market cannot gener­

ate in sufficient quantity or qual ity. The market is incapable of solving the

probl em, no matter h ow fantastic the tech nologies . Advertising disguised the

public-good nature of j ournalism for the past 12 5 years, but now that it has

found superior options, the truth is plain to see. That means that any real istic

176 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

notion of a credible Fourth Estate will requ i re explicit publ ic policies and

extensive public investments, or what are also termed subsidies. I look at the

enormous and striking role of j ournalism subsidies i n American h istory - es­

pecially in the "pre-advertising " era - as well as the continued importance

of public investments in j ournalism in the most democratic nations in the

world today. I conclude by assessing what a powerful digital free press might

look l ike .

Farewell to Journalism?

Th e notion that j ournalism was in severe crisis became common by 2006 or

2007, then escalated into a major theme following the economic collapse

of 2008-9, when hundreds of newspapers and magazines shut their doors.

Optimists hoped the economic recovery would put commercial j ournalism

back on solid footing and allow breath ing space for a successful transition

to the I nternet; instead newspaper layoffs increased by 30 percent in 20 1 1

compared to 20 1 0. 15 The next recession could devastate the remaining com­

mercial news media.

In 20 1 2 the President's Council of Economic Advisers described th e

newspaper industry as "th e nation's fastest-shrinking industry. " 1 6 A survey

of two hundred possible careers by CareerCast. com l isted "newspaper re­

porter " as the fifth worst j ob one could have in terms of making a l iving. The

worst j ob? A lumberjack. Broadcast j ournal ists hardly fared better, ranking

as the ninth worst j obY Some sense of the collapse : i n 20 1 2 the legendary

Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister properties sold for j ust 1 0 percent of what

they sold for in 2006. 1 8

Speaking of Ph iladelphia, consider the fi ndings of the Pro j ect for Excel­

lence in Journalism in 2006 on the changes i n Philadelphia's j ournalism

over th e preceding three decades:

There are roughly half as many reporters c overing metropolitan Phila­

delphia, for instance, as i n 1 980. The number of newspaper reporters

there has fallen from 5 00 to 220. The pattern at the suburban papers

around th e city has been similar, though not as extreme. The local1V

stations, with the exception of Fox, have cut back on traditional news

coverage. The five AM radio stations that used to cover news have been

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 177

reduced to two . As recently as 1 990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46

reporters covering the city. Today it has 24. 1 9

As bad as it seemed at the time, 2006 looks like a golden age for j ournalists

compared to today. In 20 I 0- 1 2, I visited two dozen American cities to dis­

cuss the state of j ournal ism . In virtually every city I would ask veteran news

professionals what was the percentage of paid j ournal ists in th eir community

working for all media compared to th e 1 980s. The general response, after

serious contemplation, was in the 40 to 50 percent range, with several cities

considerably l ess than that. In June 20 1 2, in one fell swoop, Advance Publ i­

cations eliminated over one half of the remaining editorial positions - some

four h u ndred j obs - at three newspapers that served three of the four largest

cities in Alabama.20 Such drastic layoffs have become so common that they

are barely news stories any longer - or maybe there j ust aren't people left to

cover them .

A familiar story came when I visited Peoria, Illinois, i n 20 1 1 and learned

that the once h ighly regarded Peoria Journal-Star had its editorial staff slashed

i n half since 2007 when GateHouse Media had purchased it. This led to

p olitical controversy as the mayor and city council realized that the citizens

of Peoria had far less chance to understand what was going on in their com­

munity. At the same time that Gate House was claiming dire circumstances

forced it to slash budgets to the bone, it paid out $ 1 .4 million in executive

bonuses and $ 800,000 to its C E0.21 Jim Romenesko noted that corporate

CEOs at nine of the largest newspaper-owning firms had compensation

packages in 20 1 1 ranging from $3 million to $25 million each - with the

average around $9 . 5 million - and in nearly every case corporate revenues

and earnings had fallen . 22 Perhaps the only good news is that the j ournalism

crisis has yet to reach the boardroom. That is hardly consolation for anyone

else. "I don't know anybody from my profession , " a former Seattle Times

reporter said in 20 1 1 , "who isn't heartbroken, devastated, terrified, scared,

enraged, despondent, bereft. " 23 As bad as it is, all signs point to it getting

even worse, if that is possible. "Most newspapers are in a place right now that

they are going to have to make big cuts somewhere and big seams are bound

to show up at some point, " a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute

said in July 20 1 2.24

It is hard to avoid what seems l ike the obvious conclusion : corporations

and investors no longer find j ournalism a profitable investment. 25 If anyth ing,

178 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

they are stripping what remains for parts and milking monopoly franch ises

until they run dry. That leads to an immediate problem for a society that has

entrusted its news media to th e private sector: a 20 1 1 FCC study on th e crisis

in journalism concluded that "the independent watchdog function that th e

Founding Fathers envisioned for j ournalism - going so far as to call it crucial

to a healthy democracy - is at risk." 26

In addition, "the falling value and failing business models of many Ameri­

can newspapers," as David Carr of the New York Times puts it, is leading to a

situation in which "moneyed interests buy papers and use th em to prosec ute

a political and commercial agenda ." Carr cites San D iego as exh ibit A; the

U-T San Diego (formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune) was purchased in

November 20 1 1 by right-wing billionaire Douglas F. Manch ester, whose

anti-gay rights politics ga ined h i m notoriety. "We make no apologies," Man­

chester's ch ief executive states. "We are very consistent - pro-conservative,

pro-business, pro-military." The newspaper also has a tendency to equate

what is good for San Diego's future with what is good for Manchester's net

worth . "There is a very real fear here ," a San Diego j ournalist said in 20 1 2,

that the U-T San Diego "will not be advocating for the public's good, but

the owner's good instead." 27 David Sirota has chronicled the return of mo­

nopoly press lords and their effect on communities ranging from San Diego

and Denver to C h icago and Philadelph ia: "Private newspaper owners have

vaulted themselves into a historically unique position, wh ich enables th em

to sculpt the news to serve their personal interests while circu mventing th e

costs that come with true adversarial j ournalism." 28 It was this type of jour­

nalism that produced the crisis that led to the rise of professional j ournalism

a century ago . The system is unraveling.

Let's look more closely at what the crisis means in terms of actual re­

porting. The point is not to romanticize what is being lost; as discussed in

chapter 3, U . S . professional journalism even at its peak in th e late 1 960s and

1 970s had significant flaws. Many of the problems with j ournalism today can

still be attributed to some of the weaknesses of the professional code, such

as rel iance upon official sources to set th e boundaries of legitimate debate .

That being said, it also had its virtues, not the l east of wh ich was a relatively

serious commitment to covering much of public l i fe , from small communi­

ties to major cities and th e world. There was "a firewall between the news di­

visions and the corporate structure," veteran broadcast j ournalist Dan Rather

recalls from the 1 960s and 1 970s. "That's all gone now. Out the window."

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 179

The flip side of corporatization of the news, to Rather, is the "trivialization"

of th e content. An increasing portion of news has gone over to inexpensive-to­

cover enterta inment, celebrity, gossip, crime, and lifestyle j ournalism - "soft

news ." C o mmercial values have increasingly permeated - or, to old-timers

l ike Rather, subverted - the professional code .29

A study o n the crisis was released by the Pew C enter for the People and

the Press i n 20 1 0; it examined in exhaustive detail the "media ecology" of

the city of Baltimore for one week in 2009 . 30 The obj ect was to determine

how, in th is c hanging media moment, "original" news stories were being

generated, and by whom. They tracked old media and new, newspapers,

radio, television, websites, blogs, social media, even Twitter tweets from the

police department.

Despite the proliferation of media, the researchers observed that "much

of th e ' news' people receive contained no original reporting. Fully eight out

of ten stories studied simply repeated or repackaged previously published

informatio n ." And where did the "original" reporting come from ? More than

9 5 percent of original news stories were still generated by old media, particu­

larly th e Baltimore Sun newspaper. It gets worse : The Sun's production of

original news stories was down more than 30 percent from ten years ago and

a whopping 73 percent from twenty years ago .

Back in th e 1 9 80s and 1 990s, Ben Bagdikian c hronicled the declining

numbers of independent news media due to the wave upon wave of mergers

and acquisitions and th e entrance of large conglomerates as central players.

He warned of the dire consequences for j ournalism and democracy caused

by media monopoly. Internet celebrants consigned Bagdikian and other old­

media fuddy-duddies to h istory's dustbin; they believed that the last th ing

anyone had to worry about now was a lack of distinct voices or competition.

H ow ironic then that the Internet appears to have all but finished off the job

that the market began. By 20 1 2, the newspaper industry was "half as big as it

was seven years ago," according to Carr of th e New York Times. "Quite a few

of the mid-size regional and metropolitan dailies that form the core of the

industry have gone off a cl iff." 31

In th e Internet era, th e New York Times probably plays a much larger

role in national and international j ournalism than it ever did in previous

generations, despite its own significant cutbacks . 32 It does so because most

of th e other major news media have abandoned their networks of national

and international bureaus altogether. 33 As a rec ent history of the Times from

180 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

1 999-2009 concludes, it has become "the worst newspaper in th e world ­

except for all others." 34

Dan Rather counted in his research between forty and fifty independent

news media organizations that had the resources and a commitment to cover

politics at the national level in the 1 9 5 0s and 1 960s . M ost of th ese businesses

did journalism as their exclusive or primary undertaking. That world is long

gone, as a handful of conglomerates dominate th e few rema ining national

newsrooms, and news is generally a small part of a broader corporate empire.

As Rather put it in 20 1 2:

Whether you're a conservative or a liberal or a progressive , a Democrat

or a Republican, everybody can be and should be concerned about

th is: the constant consol idation of media , particularly nati onal distri­

bution of media . . . few companies - no more than six, my count is

fou r - now control more than 80 percent of the true national distri­

bution of news. These large corporations, they have things they need

from th e power structure in Wash i ngton, whether it's Republican or

Democrat, and of course the people i n Washington have things they

want [ in] the news to be reported. To put it bluntly, very big busi ness

is i n bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do

with what the average person sees, hears, and reads than m ost people

know. 3 5

Rather's words are particularly striking i n l ight of t h e conclusion of chap­

ter 5: if the news media are to be the i nstitution that protects the publ ic

from the collusion of very big business and the government, especially th e

very big national security state , its current industrial structure seems to be

precisely the opposite of what is needed.

The shri nkage has had devastating implications for pol itical j ournal ism .

The numbers of foreign bureaus and correspondents, Wash ington bureaus

and correspondents, statehouse bureaus and correspondents, down to the

local city hall , have all been severely slash ed, and i n some cases the coverage

barely exists any longer. 36 In an era of ever greater corruption, th e watchdog

is no longer on the beat. Some of the biggest political scandals in Washing­

ton in the past decade - the ones that brought down Jack Abramoff, Tom

DeLay, and Randy "Duke" C unningham - were all started by a daily news­

paper reporter's investigation. Those paid reporting positions are now gone,

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 18 1

and those reporters no longer draw a paycheck to do such work. This means

th e next generation of corrupt politicians will have much less difficulty as

they fatten their bank accounts while providing their services to th e h ighest

bidder. Throughout the nation, most govern ment activity is taking place in

the dark compared to j ust one or two decades ago .

Everywhere it is the same: far fewer j ournalists attempting to cover more

and more .17 It's l ike an N FL team trying to stop the Green Bay Packers with

only two players l ined up on the defensive side of the line of scrimmage .

B roadcast j ournalism hardly h a s any players either. B y 20 1 2 i t was common

p ractice for competing broadcast stations to pool their news resources and

provide th e same news on different channels in the same market. This prac­

tice is of dubious legality but takes place in at least 83 of 2 1 0 television

markets; it allows stations to slash their labor costs . As th e FCC observes, the

remaining reporters and editors "are spending more time on reactive stories

and less on labor-intensive 'enterprise' pieces. " Television reporters "who

once j ust reported the news now have many other tasks, and more newscasts

to feed, so they have less time to research their stories. " 38

For a chilling account of what the l oss of j ournalism means, consider the

explosion that killed twenty-nine West Virginia coal miners in 20 1 0. Follow­

ing the disaster, the Washington Post and New York Times did exposes and

discovered that the mine had had 1 , 34 2 safety violations in the preceding five

years, 50 in the previous month alone. This was big news. "The problem, "

the FCC notes, "is that these stories were published after the disaster, not

before - even though many of the records had been there for inspection . " 39

Josh Stearns perceptively writes that "we are entering an era of 'hindsight

j ournal ism,' where some of the most important stories of our time emerge

after the fact. Th is kind of j ournalism shines a spotlight on critical issues, but

serves as more of an autopsy than an antiseptic . It dissects issues l ike speci­

mens, instead of shining a l ight on problems before or as they emerge . " 40

It is especially disastrous at the local level, where smaller news media

and newsrooms have been wiped out in a manner reminiscent of a plague .

Research affirms that there is "an explicit relationship between local and

community news, local democracy, community cohesion, and civic engage­

ment. " When people l iving in a community no longer have credible news

that covers their community and draws it together, the American system is

suddenly on qu icksand.41 In 20 1 2 the New Orleans Times-Picayune became

the first maj or daily newspaper to restrict publication to three days a week.

182 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

What does that mean for the roughly one third of New Orleans residents

who have no Internet access? 42 The Los Angeles Times is now the primary

news medium for eighty-eight municipalities and l 0 million people, but its

metro staff has been cut in half since 2000. The staff "is spread th inner

and there are fewer people on any given area," M etro editor David Lauter

laments . "We're not there every day, or even every week or every month .

Unfortunately, nobody else is either." 43

Consider the farcical nature of American elections. Local elections, in­

deed nearly all non-presidential elections, barely get any news coverage , and

what coverage they do get is generally inane, often d riven by the TV ads and

comprised of assessments of PR strategies, gaffes, and polling results . As for

the presidential election, its coverage is generally endless and meaningless.

Those with the most money to purchase the most ads can dominate political

discourse. How can people effectively participate i n electoral pol itics if they

have little idea about the candidates, not to mention the issues? The logical

course is to opt out, rather than be drowned in a pool of slime , spin, cl iches,

and idiocy. Where does that leave governance?

In a nation like the United States, the poor and marginalized a re hardest

h it. They are the least attractive group commercially, so labor news and news

aimed at the bottom third or half of the population began to decline decades

ago. Communities of color, which have traditionally gotten short shrift i n the

mainstream commercial news media, have seen many of the hard-won gains

in diversifying newsrooms wiped out in the past five years. A 20 1 2 Ameri­

can Society of News Editors report stated, "Across all market sizes, minority

newsroom employment is still substantially lower than the percentage of

minorities in the markets those newsrooms serve ." 44

The Pew Center conducted a comprehensive analysis of the sources for

original news stories in its 2009 study of Baltimore . It determined that fully

86 percent originated with official sources and press releases. A generation

earlier, PR accounted for more like 40 to 50 percent of news content. These

stories were presented as news based on the labor and j u dgment of profes­

sional j ournal ists, but they generally presented th e PR position without any

alteration. As the Pew study concludes, "the official version of events is be­

coming more important. We found official press releases often appear word

for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such ."45

So there may not be much j ournal ism, but there still is plenty of "news."

On the surface, it can seem as though we are inundated with endless news.

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 183

Increasingly, though, it is unfiltered public relations generated surrepti­

tiously by corporations and governments in a manner that wou ld make Wal­

ter Lippmann - wh ose vision guided the creation of professional j ournalism

in the 1 9 20s - roll in his grave. In 1 960 there was less than one PR agent for

every working j ournalist, a ratio of 0. 7 5 to l . By 1 990 the ratio was j ust over

2 to 1 . In 20 1 2, the ratio stood at 4 PR people for every working j ournal ist. At

the c urrent rates of change, the ratio may well be 6 to 1 within a few years .46

Because there are far fewer reporters to investigate the spin and press re­

leases, th e l ikel ihood that they get presented as legitimate news has become

muc h greaterY "As a direct result of changing media platforms," one 20 1 1

media industry assessment of the future of j ournalism put it, "PR pros are

now a part of the media in a way they have never been before ." 48

Is it a surprise that Gallup found that Americans' confidence in television

news dropped to an all-time low i n 201 2 and is not even half of what it was

less than two decades earlier? 49 Or that there has understandably been an

i ncrease in the number of people, to nearly one in five, who state they have

gone "newsless" - not even glancing at I nternet h eadlines - for the day be­

fore the poll? Who could blame them? By 2009 nearly a th ird of Americans

aged eighteen to twenty-four years were th us self-described . 5° Forty years ago,

young Americans followed the news at the same rate as their parents and

grandparents.

Note that the decline of j ournalism was well established long before the

Internet had any effect. 51 The big change came i n the late 1 970s and 1 980s,

when large corporate chains accelerated their long-term trend of gobbling

up daily newspapers and becoming conglomerates, sometimes with broad­

cast stations and networks under the same umbrella as newspaper empires.

Family owners sold for a variety of reasons, and corporations came in to

milk th e cash cow. The corporations paid top dollar to get these profit ma­

c h i n es, and they were dedicated to maximizing their return. They quickly

determined that one way to increase profits even more was to sl ice into the

editorial budget; in a monopoly there is little pressure to do otherwise, and

with the money flowing, who worries about the long-term implications? 52

It was then, when they were still swimming in profits, that managers

began to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by

cutting j ournalists and shutting news bureaus . By the late 1 9 80s and early

1 990s, prominent mainstream j ournalists and editors l ike Jim Squires, Penn

Kimball, John McManus, and Doug Underwood were criticizing the news

184 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

industry or l eaving it in disgust because of the contempt corporate manage­

ment displayed toward j ournal ism . 53 By the end of the century, th e trickle

out was more l ike an exodus.

The 1 990s were a period of tremendous profitability for newspapers and

broadcast networks, as well as rapid growth for the economy. It was also a

decade of considerable population growth . The Internet had become a big

deal on Wall Street but had yet to do much more than h ypothetical damage

to j ournalism business models. Yet from 1 99 2 to 2002, the editorial side was

reduced by six thousand broadcast and newspaper j obs. 54 By th e end of the

1 990s, the number of foreign correspondents working for American news­

papers and television networks had already been greatly reduced, as had the

number of investigative reporters. 5 5 At the dawn of the new century, editors

and observers were vocal, at times almost apoplecti c , in their alarm at the

policies that were devastating newsrooms . 56 In 200 1 a team of leading j our­

nalists and scholars concluded, "Newspapers are increasi ngly a reflection of

what the advertisers tell the newspapers some of us want, which is what th e

financial markets tell the newspapers they want." 57 It was already clear that

this was a recipe for disaster. 58

This is the actual h istory of j ournalism under really existing capitalism.

Celebrants who th ink the market will rej uvenate journalism online and pro­

duce better results have yet to come to terms with this record and explain

why digital commercial news media would be any different or better. Right

now it looks a whole lot worse.

Digital Journalism: Gold Mine or the Shaft?

The decline of j ournalism over the past generatio n , which has accelerated in

the last decade , would be a less pressing concern if the existing news media

were making a successful digital transition , or if the Internet was spawning a

credible replacement in the manner Benkler envisions. The evidence pro­

vided above suggests on balance that emerging digital news media are hav­

ing a negl igible effect upon the crisis in j ournalism. It certa inly is not due

to a lack of effort, as commercial news media have been obsessed with the

Internet since the 1 990s; they understood that it was going to be th e futu re .

For traditional news media, it has been a very rocky digital road. A 20 1 2

report based on proprietary data and in-depth interviews with executives at

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 185

a dozen major news media companies found "the shift to replace losses in

print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more

difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers con­

tinue to contract at alarming speed." For every seven dollars of print advertis­

ing lost there is only one new dollar of Internet ad revenues; the executives

said it "rema i ns an uphill and existential struggle." 59 The newspaper indus­

try's percentage of overall Internet advertising fell to 1 0 percent in 201 1 , an

all-time l ow; it had been 1 7 percent in 2003.60 "There's no doubt we're going

out of business right now," one executive said.61 By all accounts, the "clock

continues to tick" for old media to find a way to survive online in the inexo­

rable transition to the lnternet. 62

It is both tragic and pathetic to see dedicated j ournal ists obsessing over

h ow to keep their newsrooms alive. "We have to find a business model that

works - we have to," Christian Science Monitor editor Marshall lngwerson

told NYU media scholar Rodney Benson . "Th is is the word I hated but in

the last five years has become universal - we have to monetize. How do we

monetize what we do? Same as everybody else." 63 Journalists have been in­

undated with lectures that they "require an embrace of new technologies

and a ruthless but necessary shedding of the old ways of doing business . It

should have happened already. It must happen now." 64

The assumption is that there has to be a way to make profits doing digi­

tal j ournalism if j ournalists and owners simply wise up and get with the

progra m . Over the past few years, many American newspapers have been

purchased on the cheap by hedge fun ds - nearly a third of the twenty-five

largest dailies are now so owned - the subtext being that these business ge­

ni uses can generate profits where dummkopf j ournalism industry types have

failed.65 As John Paton, the j ournal ist-cum-C EO for a newspaper company

purchased by the Alden Global C apital h edge fund in 201 1 , put it: "We have

had 1 5 years to figure out the web and, as an industry, we newspaper people

are n o good at it." 66 Apparently, neither are the hedge fund managers . David

Carr wrote i n July 201 2 that " hedge funds, wh ich thought they had bought

in at th e bottom, are scrambl ing for exits that don't exist." 67

Few wish to consider the obvious question : what if it is simply impossible

to generate commercially viable popular j ournalism online, let alone j our­

nalism adequate for a self-governing people? What then?

I n the meantime, news media corporations work furiously to find their

digital Shangri-La. The primary course for traditional news media has

186 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

been to pursue digital advertising dollars, with disappointing results . Most

websites for publishers and broadcasters primarily run generic banner ads,

"among the least trusted sources of commercial information ," according to

consumer surveys .68 These are rapidly falling out of favor with adverti sers .

Digital news sites have been laggards in "using techn ology that would cus­

tomize ads based on their users' online behavior."69 M oreover, as much as

80 percent of digital newspaper advertising is placed through networks that

take a 50 percent cut of the action . This means a paper's revenues for a thou­

sand viewers (CPM in industry parlance) can be as little as 2 or 3 percent

of its C PM for print readers.70 Worse yet, as discussed in chapter 5, much of

local marketing - once the bread and butter of news m edia - as it goes digi­

tal does not support media content sites or independent content sites of any

kind.7 1 " A consensus has emerged that website adverti sing," a respected 20 1 1

industry report said, " its rates driven down by mass ive available inventory,

will probably never sustain a comprehensive daily news report." 72

However, digital advertising provided newspapers over $ 3 billion in rev­

enues in 20 1 1 , far exc eeding all other forms of Internet revenues. It is not

going to be abandoned even if no one expects it to grow very much .

With the possibility fading for digital advertising to serve as a panacea, at­

tention has returned to making people pay for their news online .7' This has

worked for a handful of prominent newspapers like the Wall Street Journal

and Financial Times, with well-heeled readers and specialized business con­

tent. The New York Times has also done well , enrolling nearly four hundred

thousand subscribers since it introduced its pay system in 20 1 1 . The Wash­

ington Post, on the other hand, dismisses paywalls as "backwards-looking."

CEO Don Graham claims they can work only for papers like the Times

and the Journal that have paid circulation spread across the nation .74 Pay­

walls have been a flop otherwise, and a study of three dozen papers that at­

tempted to do so found only 1 percent of users opted to pay.75 Nevertheless,

by 20 1 2 some 20 percent of America's 1 ,400 daily newspapers were planning

to charge for digital access, and some firms, such as Gannett, claimed they

were generating significant revenueJ6 They are inspired by th e success of

dailies doing so in places l ike Finland and Slovakia. 77 The key, apparently, is

to be able to offer a lot of content at a low price - ideally by numerous news­

papers combined - wh ich might be easier in a small nation with a distinct

language than in the United States, where English-language material grows

l ike kudzu online. Whether there is an endgame is unclear- subscribers

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 187

have never provided suffi cient revenues for news media-and it appears as

much an act of desperation as vision . Of course , there is no time to be con­

cerned with the externality that paywalls invariably cut many people off from

access to the news , with all that suggests about th eir undemocratic character.

The l atest hope is that the rapid emergence of mob ile communication

will open up new ways to monetize content. By 20 1 2 a clear maj ority of

Americans are getting some local news on their cell phones, and that num­

ber is growing. Best of all, the mobile world is increasingly proprietary, so

there might be sufficient artificial scarcity to encourage people eventually to

pay for news apps. Rupert Murdoch announced his iPad-only newspaper,

The Daily, in 20 l l , and by 20 1 2 the price had been lowered, some con­

tent was being offered for free, and it had been extended to smartphones.

With a hundred thousand subscribers paying a couple dollars per month ,

"it's going to need more than that to move from interesting experiment to

profitable." 7s The news app idea still has a long way to go before it can be

realisti c . In 20 1 1 , 1 1 percent of the American adult population had a news

app , but nearly 90 percent of them got the app for free. Only l percent of

the adult population paid for one . There is little reason yet for th inking news

apps could get anywhere close to supporting the network of newsrooms that

once dotted the landscape . It did not help th e case that News Corporation

laid off 29 percent of The Daily's full-time staff in 20 1 2. But it may be the

last best h ope?}

The point of professional j ournal ism in its idealized form was to insulate

the news from commercialism , marketing, and political pressures and to

produce th e necessary information for citizens to understand and participate

effectively in their societies. In theory, some people were not privileged over

others as legitimate consumers of j ournalism. That is why it was democratic.

There was one set of news for everyon e . It was a public service with an am­

b iguous relationship with commercial ism; hence the professional firewall.

Journalists made their j udgment calls based on professional education and

tra ining, not commercial considerations. That is why people could trust it.

The core problem with all these efforts to make j ournalism pay online is that

they accelerate the commercialization of j ournal ism, degrading its integrity

and its function as a public servic e . The cure may be worse than the disease.

S o it is that top editors at the venerable Washington Post "have embraced

the view that studying [Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to

determine where to focus the paper's resources." 80 They are desperate to

188 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

find the content that will appeal to desired consumers and to th e advertisers

who wish to reach affluent consumers. In this relationsh ip, advertisers hold

all the trump cards, and the news media have little leverage . In the emerg­

ing era of "smart" advertising, th is means shaping the content to meet the

Internet profiles of desired users, even personal izing news stories alongside

personalized ads. The best stories for selling tend to be soft news . "The chal­

lenge ," Joseph Turow writes, has been "trying to figure out how to carry

out editorial personalization in a way that wouldn't cause audiences to freak

out." He points out that all the logic of th e system points to advertisers de­

manding that they get sympathetic editorial mention as wel l . Research shows

that that makes for a far more successful sales pitc h . As one frustrated editor

put it, "Th is crap may be groovy, but it still stinks." 81

Nothing much changes when one looks at the new companies that have

emerged to use the Internet as a battering ram to enter the news media in­

dustry. "All these people who forecast the end of newspapers because of th e

decline in advertising and users being unwilling to pay for content can't

explain how the new Internet j ournalism websites are going to survive or

even thrive - since most of them , too, need paid ads and/or subscribers,"

said Greg M itchell, the longtime editor of Editor 6 Publisher. "I j ust don't

get it." 82

The new commercial ventures range from "content farms" to apps to

major efforts to establish newsrooms and re-create a sense of news media

online. The content farms, like Demand Media and Associated C ontent,

have "embraced the attrition of th e church-state boundary and turned it into

a business model." 83 These firms h i re free lancers to produce articles quickly

and cheaply to respond to popular search terms, and then sell advertising

to appear next to the article. The needs of advertisers drive th e entire pro­

cess .84 The key to commercial success is producing an immense amount of

material inexpensively; the leading content farms can generate th ousands of

pieces of text and video on a daily basis. 85

Pulse has emerged as one of the leading commercial news apps, with

1 3 million smartphone users who get it for free. Pulse aggregates other fi rms'

news and makes its money working with advertisers and merchants . It is

moving into "branded-content advertising," by which ads get slotted next

to appropriate stories for individualized users. The outstanding questi on is

whether Pulse will generate a workable business model and then can estab­

lish a monopoly position due to its scale and network effects, l ike Twitter. By

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 189

20 1 2 it moved aggressively to provide local news - with the ab ility to place

advertising i n real time that addresses one's exact location - and become a

global operatio n ; the service is already available in eight languages. Pulse

does not generate original news, and its founders concede that they don't

know much about j ournal ism.86 Nor do any of th e other mobile aggregators

generate any original j ournal ism,87 but some of their revenues will probably

end up in the hands of other news media and may eventually contribute to

paying actual j ournal ists.

The j ournalism company that has made the greatest i mpact online has

been AOL, which was tenuously married to Time Warner for a decade until

it went independent aga i n i n 2009 . AOL purchased Patch around then, to be

a "hyperlocal" digital news service, with branches in some 860 communities,

supported by advertising. In other words, it would be l ike a digital newspaper

but without the massive production expenses . A detailed and largely sympa­

thetic Columbia Journalism Review account of a Patch editor in upstate New

York described h ow the service logically focused on more affluent communi­

ties. After months of keeping the editorial and commercial sides distinct, that

strategy was thrown overboard as the enterprise foundered; editors worked

with th e ad staff, among other th ings "drumming up ad sales leads." The

editors were then directe d to favor content that would get people to the site

and also to cultivate "user-generated free content." Patch lost $ 1 00 million in

20 1 1 , and is estimated to have lost another $ 1 5 0 million in 20 1 2. As David

C arr puts it, Patch "is no closer to cracking th e code ." 88 While it may eventu­

ally get into the black, it will do so at the expense of sacrificing much of the

j ournalistic vision it had at its launc h . 89

Patch is evolving toward the Huffington Post business model: rely on vol­

unteer labor, aggregate content from other media, emphasize sex and celeb­

rities to j uice the traffic, and generate some of your own content if you can

afford to do so.90 As fate had it, AOL purchased the Huffington Post in 20 1 1 .

An i nternal memo on j ournalism from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong at the

time capture d the commercial logic: he ordered the company's editors to

evaluate all future stories on the basis of "traffic potential , revenue potential ,

edit quality and turnaround time." All stories, he stressed, are to be evaluated

according to their "profitability consideration ." 91 As one 20 1 1 media indus­

try assessment of the future of j ournalism put it, th is is "good news for public

relations professionals who are trying to pitc h stories," because "these sites

will be looking for more content to fill their pages." 92

190 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

Armstrong's memo raises th e question: What h appens wh en a story ­

l ike that of a distant war or the privatization of a local water util ity-fails to

achieve proper "traffic potential , revenue potential"? What if no PR spin­

meister wants to push it and provide free content? Does it disappear off th e

radar-and with it the ability of citizens to know what is being done in their

name but without their informed consent? That might be a smooth ride for

the CEOs, but it's a clunker for a democratic society.

Two aspects of capitalism and the Internet loom large in digital j ournal­

ism. First, if anyone can make money doing online journalism, it will almost

certainly be as a very large, centralized operatio n , probably a m onopoly or

close to it. The I nternet has proven to be more effective at centralizing cor­

porate control than it has been at enhancing decentralization, at least in

news media. "We are probably far more centralized than we were in th e

past," one executive said.93

To some extent it is because human beings are capable of meaningfully

visiting only a small number of websites on a regular basis. The Coogle

search mechanism encourages concentration because sites that do not end

up on the first or second page of a search effectively do not exist. As M ichael

Wolff puts it in Wired, "The top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US

pageviews in 200 1 , 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent i n 2010." 94 By

20 1 2, according to the Web traffic measurer Experian H itwise , 3 5 percent

of all Web visits now go to Coogle, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Fac ebook. (The

same firms get two th irds of online ad revenue.) And , ironically, as Matthew

Hindman points out, personalization of websites "systematically advantages

the very largest websites over smaller ones." 95 A paradox of the Internet, John

Naughton writes, "is that a relatively small number of websites get most of

the links and attract the overwhelming volume of traffi c ." If your site isn't in

that elite group, it will l ikely be very smal l , and stay very small.96

As Matthew Hindman's research on j ournal ism , news media, and pol iti­

cal websites demonstrates, what has emerged is a "power law" distribution

whereby a small number of political or news media websites get the vast ma­

jority of traffic.97 They are dominated by the traditional giants with name rec­

ognition and resources. There is a "long ta il" of millions of websites that exist

but get little or no traffic, and only a small number of people have any idea

that they exist. Most of th em with er, as their producers have l ittle incentive

and resources to maintain them. There is also no effective "middle class" of

robust, moderate-size websites; that segment of the news media system has

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 191

been wiped out online, leading H indman to conclu de that the online news

media are more concentrated than in the old news media world.

This seems to be the way of the digital world. Because the returns are so

low and the marginal costs of adding new users are zero, profits are possible

only by h aving massive scale . The "best bet for making money," The Econo­

mist states, " is to pull in more readers for the same content." And when a

player gets that large , there usually isn't much room for anyone else. "There

will be fewer national news outlets" i n the digital world.98 The grand irony of

the Internet is that what was once regarded as an agent of diversity, choice,

and competition has become an engine of monopoly. As to j ournal ism, it is

u nclear if anyone can make a go of it commercially, beyond material aimed

at the wealthy and the business community.

The second aspect of the capitalism-Internet nexus at the h eart of the

online j ournalism business model is an understanding that the wages paid

to j ournal ists can be slashed dramatically, while workloads can be increased

to levels never before seen. Armstrong's memo states that all of AOL's j our­

nalistic employees will be required to produce " five to 1 0 stories per day."

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times captured the essence of th is require­

ment in his assessment of AOL's 201 1 purchase of the Huffington Post: "To

grasp the Huffington Post's business model , picture a galley rowed by slaves

and commanded by pirates." In the "new-media landscape," he wrote, " it's

already clear that the merger will push m ore j ournalists more deeply into the

tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy." 99

With massive unemployment and dismal prospects, the extreme down­

ward pressure on wages and working conditions for j ournal ists is the two-ton

elephant that j ust climbed into democracy's bed. " I n the new media," Rutten

concludes, we find "many of the worst abuses of the old economy's indus­

trial capital ism - the sweatshop, the speedup, and piecework; huge profits

for the owners; desperation, drudgery, and exploitation for the workers. No

child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it . . . " 100 David Watts

Barton left the Sacramento Bee in 2007 to work at the Sacramento Press, a

hyperlocal digital news operation. In the Columbia Journalism Review, h e

described t h e extreme diffic ulty of producing credible j ournal ism based o n

volunteer labor. "Editing costs money. C itizen journalists are cheap and

they can even be good. But even great j ournalists need some editing; citi­

zen j ournalists need a lot of it. . . . Without j ournalism j obs, we don't have

journalism." 101

192 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

Commercial media's attitude toward j ournalism labor became apparent

in the Journatic brouhaha following a wh istleblower's expose aired on public

radio's This American Life in the summer of 2 0 1 2 . Journatic is a shadowy

"hyperlocal content provider" that reportedly eschews publ icity to th e point

where its site contains code that lessens its appearance in Coogle search

results. It contracts with dozens of U . S . commercial news media to provide

local coverage, i ncluding Newsday, the Houston Chronicle, th e San Fran­

cisco Chronicle, and the Cate House newspaper chain . The Journatic busi­

ness model is premised on the idea that doing routine local news with actual

paid reporters is no longer a viable option for many American news media,

so it provides a discount alternative.

Journatic's local coverage is provided by low-paid writers and freelancers

i n the United States and, ironically enough , the Philippines, where Jour­

natic h ires writers "able to commit to 2 5 0 pieces/week minimum" at 35 to

40 cents a piece. Journatic CEO Brian Timpone says that th e compensation

was "more than most places in the Ph ilippines." They produce stories under

bogus "American-sounding bylines" that make it seem as if they are based in

the local community running the stories . Part of the reason aliases are used

is that it would be suspicious to readers and other j ournalists if they saw th e

number of articles a single writer produced, not to mention the importance

of maintaining the illusion that these are local reporters.

Not surprisingly, these stories are "little more than rewritten news re­

leases," as the whistle blower put it. They also contain a considerable number

of errors, fabrications, and instances of plagiarism . 1 02 But to the casual reader

of a Journatic client, it would seem the newspaper or website was chock-full

of original local material .

The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, invested in

Journatic in April 20 1 2 and outsourced coverage for the C h i cago area's

ninety TribLocal websites and twenty-two weekly editions to it. TribLocal

laid off half of its forty staffers when it contracted with Journatic, and its

output tripled. When word got out, ninety members of the Chicago Tribune

newsroom presented a petition protesting Journati c's role. On July 1 3 th e

company indefinitely suspended use of ]ournatic in its papers , but the hyper­

local content provider is still very much in action in other markets, waiting

for th e bad publicity to blow over.

This is hardly the end of the story. A Pasadena publisher, James Macpher­

son , stated he wanted to "defend th e concept" of outsourcing, claiming

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 193

that "Journatic has done it quite shabbily." His firm had begun outsourcing

j ournalism to India i n 2007 , but the program was postponed soon thereafter

as he was apparently ahead of his time . Macpherson uses Internet software

developed by Amazon in 20 1 2 to contract with freelance reporters all over

the world and says , "I outsource virtually everyth ing. I am primarily looking

for individuals who I can pay a lower rate to do a lot of work." He concedes

there are l im itations: "There is no way someone in Manila can possibly un­

derstand what is happening in Pasadena." But th e economics are such that

Macpherson argues outsourcing is inevitable : "The real lesson of Journatic

is that outsourcing is not going to go away." 103

As j ournal ism becomes increasingly rote, the logical question becomes

who needs human labor at all ? StatSheet, a subsidiary of Automated In­

sights, uses algorith ms to turn numerical data into narrative articles for its

4 1 8 sports websites. Automated Insights now also computer-generates ten

thousand to twenty thousand articles per week for a real estate website, and

th e emerging computer-generated content industry is convinced that algo­

rithms will become a key part of writing news stories in the near future. "I

am sure a j ournalist could do a better j ob writing an arti cle than a machine,"

says a real estate agency CEO who contracted with Automated Insights, "but

what I 'm looking for is quantity at a certain quality." 104 Who knows-maybe

we will someday look back at Journatic as a golden age of j ournalism.

In short, the Internet does not alleviate the tensions between commercial­

ism and journalism; it magnifies th em. With labor severely underpaid or

unpaid, research concludes that the original j ournalism provided by the In­

ternet gravitates to what is easy and fun , tending to "focus on lifestyle topics,

such as entertainment, retail, and sports, not on hard news ." 10 5 As traditional

j ournalism disintegrates, no models for making Web j ournalism-even bad

j ournalism - profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible

popular news media have been developed, and there is no reason to expect

any in the future . 1 06

There is probably no better evidence that j ournal ism is a public good

than th e fact that none of America's financial geniuses can figure out how to

make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­

ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative

public service, not a business. C orporatized schools throw underachieving,

hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­

dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the

194 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

main impediment to "success." 107 No one has ever made profits doing qual­

ity education - for-profit education companies seize publ ic funds and make

their money by not teaching. 108 That's why the elite managers send their

own ch ildren to nonprofit schools , generally private but sometimes public

in the afflu ent suburbs, while oth er children are hung out to dry in th e mar­

ketplace. Education is, in short, a public good . In digital news, th e same

dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to th e same conclusi on.

Fighting for t h e Public Good

The severity of the crisis in j ournalism is difficult to ignore , especially for

those in politics who have seen the number of reporters following th em di­

minish rapidly. By 2008 many politicians were commenting on how difficult

it had become to get press coverage in their districts or on the issues they

cared about. On the campaign trail , U. S . senators who once had entourages

of reporters following them l ike they were heavyweight champions suddenly

found themselves traveling with one or two staffers and few others. By 20 1 0

the FCC and the Federal Trade C ommission had each created task forces to

study the crisis in j ournal ism and propose solutions. The Democratic Cau­

cus in Congress establ ished an informal inquiry too . Hea rings were held in

both the House and Senate . Noth ing has resulted, but these inquiries were

unprecedented in American h istory.1 09

The lack of action was due in part to a lack of public outcry and pres­

sure . The extent of the crisis in j ournalism is underappreciated by most

Americans, including many serious news and political j unkies. The primary

reason may well be the Internet itself. Because many people envelop them­

selves in their favored news sites and access so much material online , even

surfing out onto the "long tail ," the extent to which we are living in what

veteran editor Tom Stites terms a "news desert" has been obscured . 1 10 More­

over, using dissident websites, social media, and smartphones, activists have

sometimes "bypassed the gatekeepers" in what J oh n Nichols calls a "next

media syste m ." 1 1 1 Its value i s striking during periods of public protest and

uph eaval .

But the illusion that th is constitutes satisfactory j ournalism is grow­

ing th inner. Noth ing demonstrates the situation better than the release by

WikiLeaks of an immense number of secret U . S . govern ment documents

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 195

between 2009 and 20 1 1 . To some th is was investigative j ournalism at its best,

and WikiLeaks had established h ow superior the Internet was as an informa­

tion source. It clearly threatened those in power, so th is was exactly th e sort

of Fourth Estate a free people needed. Thanks to the Internet, some claimed,

we were now truly free and had th e power to hold leaders accountable. 1 1 2

In fact, the WikiLeaks episode demonstrates precisely the opposite .

WikiLeaks was not a j ournal istic organization. It released secret documents

to th e publ ic, but the "docu ments langu ished online and only came to the

publ ic's attention when they were written up by professional journalists," as

H eather Brooke put it. "Raw material alone wasn't enough ." m Journal ism

had to give the material credibility, and j ournalists had to do the hard work of

vetting the material and analyzing it to find out what it meant. That requ ired

paid, full-time j ournal ists with institutional support. The United States has

too few of these, and those it has are too closely attached to th e power struc­

ture , so most of the material still has not been studied and summarized for a

popular audience-and it may never be in our lifetimes .

Moreover, there was no i ndependent j ournalism to respond when the

U . S . govern ment launched a successful PR and media blitz to discredit

WikiLeaks. Attention largely shifted from the content of these documents to

overblown and unsubstantiated claims that WikiLeaks was costing innocent

l ives, and to a personal focus on WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Glenn

Greenwald was only slightly exaggerating when h e stated that "there was

almost a full and complete consensus that WikiLeaks was satanic." The on­

slaught discredited and isolate d WikiLeaks , despite the dramati c content that

could be found in the documents WikiLeaks had published. The point was

to get U. S . editors and reporters to th ink twice before opening the WikiLeaks

door. It worked.

Many journalists elsewhere rallied to defend basic principles about trans­

parency and speaking truth to power. The material they assessed and made

public energized a wave of global democratic movements, even contribut­

ing to peac eful political revolutions. In the U nited States, noth ing of the

kind occurred, and WikiLeaks has had no effect on democratizing our poli­

tics or calling o u r leaders to account. The responses of U. S . j ournalists and

commentators to the WikiLeaks revelations were often indistingu ishable

from those of the government spin doctors . Greenwald ended up defending

WikiLeaks on numerous broadcast news programs and discovered that his

on-a ir opponents were often working reporters: "Th ere wasn't even really

196 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

a pretense of separation between how j ournal ists think and how political

functionaries think." 1 H

When the U. S . government and the Internet giants took steps to render

WikiLeaks ineffective , even though no one connected with it had been

charged with , or convicted of, any crime for its publish ing activities, what

passes for U . S . j ournalism stood by meekly. How revealing that a news media

that almost never does investigative work on the national secu rity state or its

relations with large corporations does not come to the defense of those who

have the courage to make such information publi c ! As th e Obama admin­

istration , l ike those before it, has pursued extraordinary measures to l imit

publi c access to information and to punish wh istleblowers, a c redible inde­

pendent news media in a free society would have led the charge to publ icize

its secrecy and actively oppose it. 1 1 5 All the signs suggest that Wiki Leaks,

rather than being th e harbinger of a new era, may have been the last gasp of

an old one.

This also touches on the l imitations of blogs, wh ich not long ago were

heralded as "l ittle First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of th e

press to more actors ." 1 1 6 Blogs provide commentary, sometimes expert com­

mentary, but they tend to rely upon others' reporting upon wh ich to com­

ment. Without a credible j ournal ism, blogs have value only to the extent

they produce original research, which is difficult unless one can do it full­

time with institutional support. Moreover, Hindman's research on online

media concentration appl ies j ust as muc h , if not more, to th e blogosphere .

He found its traffic is h ighly concentrated in a handful of sites, operated by

people with astonishingly elite pedigrees. 1 1 7

There is one exciting new h ope for digital j ournalism that has emerged in

the past few years: onl ine nonprofit news media. A number of outlets have

been created that are dedicated to doing j ournal ism in the publ ic interest.

What we have done "was out of seeing where the business model is headed,

off a cliff," the editor of the Voice of San Diego told NYU's Benson, "and if

we want to keep th is public service alive we needed to fund it i n a different

way." "I say good riddance" to having to rely on advertising and generati ng

profits, the editor of the SF Public Press told Benson. "It was a bad mar­

riage to begin with and it skewed coverage. And it foreclosed discussion of

people and communities who were not targets of advertising." 1 1 8 Founders

of these organizations see the gaping void in American j ournalism and wish

to fill it.

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 197

The great question, then, is whether this new wave of nonprofit news

media can re j uvenate American j ournalism and steer it away from the com­

mercialism that was eating at its foundations. If it can, public ennui and

governmental inaction are j ustified. Yankee ingenuity will have l icked the

problem. Best of all, there will be l ittle government or commercial involve­

ment with j ournal ism; it will be a genuine public sphere. 1 19

Some of these nonprofit ventures are local, like MinnPost and the afore­

mentioned Voice of San Diego, and some are national, l ike ProPublica,

which , in 201 0, was the first digital news medium to win the Pulitzer Prize

for reporting. Many are staffed by superb j ournalists who once worked in

commercial news media. Young and enthusiastic new j ournalists are en­

tering the field in this sector. A 201 1 study by the Investigative Reporting

Workshop determined that the top seventy-five nonprofit news operations

had 1 , 3 00 employees and combined annual budgets totaling $ 1 3 5 million.

(Th is includes Consumer Reports, which accounts for nearly half the total

staff and one thi rd of the budgets.) 1 20 S ince 2008, there has been a spike in

Internal Revenue Service ( IRS) applications for nonprofit status from j our­

nal ism organizations, almost entirely for digital operations. 1 21 "Th is sector

has absolutely ballooned," I was told by J osh Stearns, the Free Press activist

who works in the area. 1 22 How many of these new nonprofit digital news

ventures are th ere? "It's scores, not dozens, maybe hundreds, probably a lot

more than anyone knows," says the Knight Foundation's Eric Newton, who

monitors and encourages such activity for a l iving. 1 23

Neverth eless, the i mpact of the nonprofit sector may be less than the sum

of its parts. "Investigative non profits," as Newton put it, "are 'punching above

their weight,' " meaning that "the total community reached is still not close

to the for-profits." 1 24 They are usually most successful when a mainstream

news organization picks up their work. That is often the approach of Pro­

Publica, which won the first of its two Pul itzers for a piece that ran in the

New York Times Magazine. In this scenario, the nonprofit sector is providing

a subsidy to commercial news media.

There is also a push for nonprofit activist groups - nongovernmental or­

ganizations, or NGOs - to become direct producers of online j ournal ism

in the areas where they have expertise . 1 25 With th e collapse of traditional

newsrooms, public interest NGOs are doing their own reporting so they can

pursue stories relating to their work. "What's a nonprofit digital news opera­

tion? C onsumer Reports onl ine? " asks Newton. "The h ighly eth ical digital

198 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

info gath ering part of Human Rights Watc h ? " 126 In 20 1 1 , for example , the

C enter for Media and Democracy ( C M D) produced award-winning exposes

of the secretive and corporate-dominated American Legislative Exc hange

Council (ALEC) . A few years earlier, th e work might have been done by

traditional journalists, but there were simply too few left to take on that

assignment.

As exciting as it is to have NGOs get into the j ournalism business, we

should not romanticize the development and make a virtue out of a neces­

sity. In my experience , most of these groups would prefer that there be inde­

pendent j ournalism organizations doing the hard investigative work they are

being forced to do. It would allow them to use their very scarce resources for

their core research, advocacy, and service. Most important, it would give the

findings far more legitimacy and have greater public impact than when they

come from an interested party. In a world where most journalism emanates

from interested parties, it will be hard for NGOs to rise above the clatter that

the corporate-funded groups produce, because the latter have exponentially

greater resources. The work of the CMD on ALEC , for example, went main­

stream when it was picked up and pushed along by the New York Times a full

year after the CMD broke the story. m

The good news for both NCO j ournalists and the new sector of digital

nonprofit news media is that by dispensing with print, they lop off at least

30 percent of the costs of production and distribution for a traditional news­

paper or magazine. 1 28 This is one of the factors that allows celebrants to wax

rhapsodic about the postmaterial nature of networked j ournalism. The bad

news is that losing 30 percent of costs still leaves this sector well under water.

These digital nonprofit news media are underfunded, and there is no reason

to th ink they will ever generate much more resources than they currently

have . To put th is sector in context, it has, at m ost, a few thousand employees,

compared to th e 1 20,000 full-time paid j ournal ists our country had two de­

cades ago . 1 29 Moreover, none of these ventures is pointed toward large-scale

growth . Even in the assessments of their most enthusiastic supporters, they

are far more l ikely to go under. In fact, th is is probably about as good as it

gets, barring the sort of radical policy proposals I make in th e next section .

Once one gets past the seventy-five largest nonprofit news organizations, one

is deep in the weeds of very small, marginal shops. " None has developed a

clear business model," a Knight Foundation study concluded . ' '0

Individual donations and foundation grants have been the basis of

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 199

revenues, but these have distinct l imits and invite problems. Experience

with public broadcasting shows that people will pay, but there is an upper

l imit that is far below the money needed. Individuals gave $7 30 million to

all public and community broadcasting stations in 2009. The total has not

grown as a percentage of public media revenues over the past decade, and

only a fraction of that went toward j ournalism . m The SF Public Press made

a concerted effort to establish a " P B S model" for donations to support itself,

but th e donations amount to only between 7 and 1 2 percent of its meager

$80,000 annual budget. m Even if the donation approach were to become

viable, there is an additional concern: it tends to extend the privileges of the

upp er-middle and upper classes into the digital future .

This brings us to foundations. As the newspaper meltdown unfolded early

in 2009, a movement was afoot to establish nonprofit newspapers and/or en­

dowed newspapers, to be supported by philanthropy. As the longtime head

of the Center for Public Integrity, Charles Lewis, put it, "It's time for civil

society, especially the nation's foundations and individuals of means, to col­

laborate with j ournalists and experts who understand the changing econom­

ics of j ournalism in an imagi native, visionary plan that would support our

precious existing n onprofit institutions and help to develop new ones ." 1 33

S i nce 200 5 , Jan Schaffer of American University estimates that foundations

have donated at least $ 2 5 0 million to U . S . nonprofit j ournalism ventures. 1 34

The problems with foundations as a form of support are threefold . First,

they do not have anywhere near enough money to bankroll even a large

chunk of j ournalism. They have a l ot of other issues on their plates. The

Economist notes that foundations "can only be a partial solution to the woes

of newspapers ." 1 3 5

Second, foundations a r e hardly value-free or neutral institutions. They

have their own pet causes and axes to grind, and they are often associated

with powerful people and i nstitutions. Sometimes they will fund coverage

only of certain types of stories that they have an interest i n . Foundations are

generally acc ustomed to h aving their grantees give them what they want.

Exceptions notwithstanding, they are not going to cut big checks and th en

head off to the beach . In an environment where many nonprofit j ournalists

are wondering where their next meal is coming from, that gives founda­

tions extraordinary implicit or explicit power over th e content - largely unac­

countable power.

Th ird, most foundations provide only limited-term support, often for

200 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

periods of three years or less, to new enterprises. Foundation boards and

directors l ike to spawn groups , not ba nkroll them i n perpetu ity. " It is worth

noting that many of these are start-ups withi n their first three years," Stearns

said when chronicling the state of nonprofit news ventures . "Once the start­

up funding disappears it is unclear how many will survive ." 1 36 John Bracken

of the Knight Foundation , the leading funder of nonprofit journalism , warns

start-ups that "we will not be providing perpetual support." 1 n

It is striking that the leading foundations involved in funding and studying

nonprofit news ventures apparently have n o idea, after years of experience,

how these operations can ever become sustainabl e . Foundation officials are

reduced to recycling platitudes and buzzwords l ike those that hedge fund

managers are directing at old-fash ioned newspaper people on the commer­

cial side. The Knight Foundation president said, "We're interested in new

and different ways of doing things . . . . Folks who can be nimble and change

are going to do better in the future than those who are slow to change." ns

Jeff Jarvis told grantmakers in 201 1 that digital nonprofit news media need

to focus on figuring out "which financial models work." A 20 1 1 Pew Re­

search Center report says the most "promising experiments in community

news" are "coming from people who embrace business entrepreneurship

and digital innovation." 1 39 Newton argues that "digital non profits need a di­

verse revenue stream to survive." 140 He says the days of getting a grant and

concentrating on doing great j ournalism are over. Digital nonprofits must

spend "substantial amounts of money on such items as technology, sales

and marketing." 14 1 He bel ieves digital nonprofit media should embrace th e

use of unpaid labor: "The new digital models are different types, citizen/

volunteer/freelance/traditional/mixed." 1 42

In effect, this approach admits defeat and then tries to declare victory. 1·n It

clings desperately to the faith-based conviction that everyth ing will somehow

eventually work out in the absence of any public policy intervention , wh ile

conceding that there will be an indefinite period during wh ich th e resources

going to j ournalism are certain to decline precipitously. During that inter­

regnum , anywhere from one to five decades, we apparently will have to get

by on chewing gu m and baling wire. Newton, to h is credit, has pondered th e

i mpl ications of th is approach:

News, l ike life , finds a way. My long-term opti mism is tinged with

worry about the current state of th ings. Eventually is not the same as

JOURNALISM IS DEA D ! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 20 1

i mmediately. While we are waiting for the huge new age - two-way,

not one-way; digital , not industrial ; networked, not broadcast - to take

hol d , a l ot of bad things are happening. Whenever traditional journal­

ism decreases, for example, public corruption increases. Sometimes I

wonder: H ow much corruption and confusion can one cou ntry take? 144

Newton is right: th is is a dubious strategy. I n view of the immense problems

before us, it strikes me as tantamount to social suicide.

Perhaps the most sobering development of recent times concerns The

Guardian, arguably the best English-language newspaper in th e world, with

an enormous online readersh ip. As a report by The Economist's More In­

telligent Life notes, "The Guardian has been having an astonishing run."

Few newspapers have embraced the Internet with such fury and apparent

success. In terms of reach and impact, "the Guardian is doing better than

ever." The success is due in part to The Guardian being a nonprofit, with a

singular devotion to j ournal ism above all else . There are no investors weigh­

ing their stake in The Guardian against other more profitable options. The

Scott Trust - established in the 1 9 30s by the family owners - has been well

m anaged and has a "war chest" of roughly $ 2 5 0-300 million to cover operat­

ing losses, though C E O Andrew Miller says that amount will cover at most

anoth er three to five years. But even The Guardian cannot find a way to

break even without cutting resources or commercializing its operations be­

yond the traditional role of advertising. Both options undermine quality and

put the paper and its website on a downward spiral . Guardian employees are

aware of th e dilemma; reporter N ick Davies says it is impossible to see how

investigative j ournal ism can survive on the current trajectory. If an operation

l ike The Guardian, with its support structure, vast resources, enormous scale ,

and popularity, cannot transition to th e digital age and maintain quality ­

a n d might n o t even survive - what hope is there for anyone else? 145

In my view, we are better off admitting what is plainly obvious : there is

no business model that can give us the j ournalism a self-governing society

requires. What we need is a significant body of full-time paid j ournal ists, cov­

ering their communities, th e nation, the world, in competition and collabo­

ration with other paid j ournalists . There need to be independent newsrooms

where j ournal ists who are secure enough in their l ivelihoods to focus on

their work can collaborate and receive professional editing, fact-checking,

and assistance. There needs to be expertise, developed over years of trial

202 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

and error, in vital areas of specialty, and paid j ournal ists accountable for

those beats . We need j ournal ists trained in languages, h istory, and culture to

work international beats with the credentials to protect them from govern­

ment harassment. Great media institutions need to compete with other great

media institutions, givi ng citizens solid choices and distinct perspectives.

And all of th is media must be digital, perhaps with an old-media overlay

during the interregnum . Digital technologies can make th e system much

more accessible and economically cost-efficient, and it can allow a much

larger role for citizens to participate. That is what is so exciting about the

world Benkler and th e other celebrants envision . I can see a new and dra­

matically superior caliber of j ournalism emerging as a result of the Internet.

It will be a j ournalism that will overcome the great limitations of profes­

sional j ournalism as it has been practiced in the United States : among oth er

th ings, reliance upon the narrow range of opinion of people in power as the

legitimate parameters of political debate , with a bias toward seeing the world

through upper-class eyes. It will be a j ournalism that can truly open up our

pol itics in the manner democratic theory envisions.

However, for this to happen there must be major publ ic investments ,

and these funds must go to the development of a diverse and independent

nonprofit sector. The future of journalism otherwise will likely approach

wh at education would be like if all public investments were removed. With

no such investments, our education system would remain excellent for the

wealthy, who can afford private schools, mediocre for the upper-middle class,

and nonexistent or positively frightening for the increasingly i mpoverished

middle and working classes, the majority of th e nation . To the extent it even

existed, it would depend upon volunteer labor. It would be a nightmare un­

suitable for any credible democrati c or h umane society. We wouldn't accept

th is model for public education. Nor should we for j ournal ism.

But wait, don't government subsidies for j ournalism violate everyth ing

America stands for? Aren't they an affront to the most elementary notions

of freedom and democracy? Isn't it better to risk going down in flames as a

fa iled state than to open that Pandora's box?

JOURNALISM IS DEAD ! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM?

B aseball, H ot Dogs, Apple Pie . . . and Public Investments in

Journalism?

203

In 1 7 87, as the C onstitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, Thomas Jef­

ferson was ensconced in Paris as th is young, undefined nation's minister to

Fran c e . From afar he corresponded on th e matter of what was requ ired for

successful democratic governance. The formation of a free press was a cen­

tral concern. Jefferson wrote:

The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of th e people is to

give th em full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the pub­

lic papers , and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole

mass of the people . The basis of our governments being the opinion of

the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were

it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without

newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesi­

tate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man

should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

For Jefferson, having th e right to speak without government censorship is a

necessary but insufficient condition for a free press and therefore democracy,

\vh i ch also demands that there be a literate publi c , a viable press system, and

easy access to th is press by the peopl e .

B u t why, exactly, was th is s u c h an obsession t o Jefferson? In the same

letter, he praised Native American societies for being largely classless and

happy, and h e criticizes European societies - like the France he was witness­

ing fi rsthand on the eve of its revolution - in no uncertain terms for being

their opposite . Jefferson also h ighlighted th e central role of the press in stark

class terms when he described its role in preventing exploitation and domi­

nation of the poor by the rich:

Among [ European societies] , under pretence of governing they have

divided th eir nations into two classes, wolves and sheep . I do not exag­

gerate. Th is is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit

of our people, and keep alive their attention . Do not be too severe

upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they

204 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

become inattentive to th e publ ic affairs, you and I, and Congress, and

Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems

to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions;

and experience declares that man is the only animal which d evours

his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of

Europe , and to the general prey of th e rich on th e poor. H6

In short, the press has the obligation to undermine the natural tendency of

propertied classes to dominate politics, open the doors to corruption, reduce

the masses to powerlessness , and eventually terminate self-government.

James Madison was every bit J efferson's equal in h is passion for a free

press . Together they argued for it as a check on militarism, secrecy, corrup­

tion , and empire. Near the end of his life , Madison famously observe d , "A

popular government without popular information or the means of acqui ring

it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both . Knowledge will

forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Gover­

nors, must arm themselves with th e power knowledge gives." H l

They were not alone. In the early republi c , with no controversy, the gov­

ernment instituted massive postal and printing subsidies to found a viable

press syste m . There was no illusion that the private sector was up to the

task without th ese investments. The very thought would be unthi nkable for

generati ons. For the first century of American history, most newspapers were

distributed by mail, and the Post Office's delivery charge for newspapers was

very smal l . Newspapers constituted 90 to 95 percent of its weighted traffic,

yet provided only 10 to 12 percent of its revenues. The Post Office th en was

by far the largest and most important branch of the federal government, with

80 percent of federal employees in 1 860. 1 48

In the haze of the past century of commercially driven news media, we

have lost sight of the fact that the American free-press tradition has two com­

ponents . First is the aspect everyone is familiar with , the idea that th e gov­

ernment should not exercise prior restra int or censor the press. The second,

every bit as i mportant, is that it is the h ighest duty of th e government to see

that a free press actually exists so there is someth ing of value that cannot be

censored. Although th is second component of the American free-press tradi­

tion has been largely forgotten since the advent of the corporate-commercial

era of j ournalism, the U. S . Supreme C ourt, in all relevant cases, has asserted

its existence and preeminence. Justi ce Potter Stewart noted, "Th e Free Press

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 205

guarantee is, in effect, a structural part of the Constitution " (Stewart's em­

phasis) . "The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press

was," he added, "to create a fourth institution outside the Government as

an additional c heck on the three official branches." Stewart concluded,

" Perhaps our l iberties might survive without an independent established

press. B ut the Founders doubted it, and, in the year 1 974, I think we can

all be thankful for their doubts." 149 In h is opinion in the 1 994 case Turner

Broadcasting System v. FCC, Reagan appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy

concluded, "Assuring the publ ic has access to a multiplicity of information

sources is a governmental purpose of the h ighest order." 1 50

How big were these public investments in j ournalism (or press subsidies)

i n contemporary terms? I n The Death and Life of American Journalism,

Nichols and I calculated that if the U . S . federal government subsidized j our­

nalism today at the same level of GOP that it did in the 1 840s, the govern­

ment would have to invest in the neighborhood of $ 30 billion to $3 5 billion

annually. I n his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote with

astonishment of the "incredibly large" number of periodicals in the U nited

States and concluded that the number of newspapers was in direct propor­

tion to how egalitarian and democratic the society was. 1 5 1 The robust press

had little to do with free markets and everyth ing to do with subsidies that

dramatically lowered the costs of publishing and provided additional reve­

nues from printing contracts . As late as the 1 9 1 Os, when Postmaster General

Albert Burleson questioned the need for newspaper and magazine postal

subsidies , he was roundly dismissed as someone who knew little about news

industry economi cs. 1 52 To Americans of all political persuasions - and espe­

cially to progressive political movements l ike the abolitionists , populists, and

suffragists - even during the most laissez-faire periods in American h istory,

the necessity of a large public investment in j ournal ism was a given.

Federal press subsidies - e . g . , postal subsidies and paid government

n otices - have diminished in real terms to only a small fraction of their

nineteenth-century levels, though they remain to the present day. Public

broadcasting is the most visible investment by government in media , and it

receives approximately $ 1 billion i n public support, but only a small portion

of that supports j ou rnal ism . State and local governments, as well as public

universities, provide much of this public subsidy, with only about $400 mil­

l ion coming from the federal government.

There are legitimate concerns about government control over the content

206 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

of j ournal ism, and I reject any investments that would open the door to that

outcome. I also understand that a government with a massive mil itary and

national security complex, like the U nited States, could be especially dan­

gerous with the keys to the newsroom , but we could fu nd real journal ism

with some of the roughly $5 billion currently used annually by the Penta­

gon for public relations. 1 53 Moreover, th e United States , for all of its fla\vs ,

remains a democratic society in the conventional modern use of the term .

Our state is capable of being pushed to make progressive moves as well as

regressive ones.

Th is is a crucial distinction. Most opponents of press subsidies assume

that the places to look for comparison purposes are Nazi Germany, Stalin's

Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Idi Amin's Uganda . If a dictatorship or au­

thoritarian regime subsidizes j ournal ism, the "news" will be propaganda de­

signed to maintain an antidemocratic order. But that does not mean the same

outcome necessarily occurs when democratic nati ons i nstitute press subsi­

dies. What happens when we look at nations with multiparty democracies,

advanced economies, the rule of law, electoral systems, and civil liberties ? ­

places like Germany, Canada, Japan, Britain, Norway, Austria, the Nether­

lands, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, France, and S witzerland.

For starters, all these nations are huge government investors in j ournalism

compared to the United States. If America subsidized public media at th e

same per capita rate as nations with similar political economies, l ike Canada,

Australia, and New Zealand, U. S . public broadcasters would have a govern­

ment investment in the $7 billion to $ 1 0 billion range . If America subsidized

public media at the same rate as nati ons along the l ines of Japa n , France, or

Great Britain, the total would be $ 1 6 billion to $ 2 5 billion; if at th e same

rate as Germany, Norway, or Den mark, $ 30 billion to $ 3 5 billion . 1 54

These estimates do not even factor in the extensive newspaper subsidies

that several democracies employ. If the U . S . federal government subsidized

newspapers at th e same per capita rate as Norway, it would make a direct

outlay of approximately $3 bill ion annually. Sweden spends slightly l ess

per capita, but has extended th e subsidies to digital newspapers . France

is the champion at newspaper subsidies. If a federal government subsidy

provided the portion of the overall revenues of the U . S . newspaper industry

that France does for its publ ishers, it would have spent at least $6 bill ion in

2008. 1 5 5

I have h a d the privi lege o f traveling t o many o f these nations in recent

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 207

years, and my i mpression is that these nations are far from police states,

nor do their extensive public media systems and j ournalism subsidies evoke

comparisons to a sham democracy, let alone a one-party state . But appear­

ances can be deceiving, and one prefers harder evidence, from uni mpeach­

able sources that would not necessarily be incl ined to endorse public press

investments .

I start with Britain's The Economist, a business magazine keenly in favor

of capital ism, deregulation, and privatization, unsympathetic toward large

public sectors, labor unions, or anyth ing that smacks of socialism. Every year

The Economist produces a h ighly acclaimed Democracy Index, wh ich ranks

all the nations of the world on the basis of how democratic they are. In 201 1

only twenty-five nations qualified as democrati c . The criteria are : electoral

process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation,

political culture, and civil l iberties. The U nited States ranks nineteenth by

these criteria. Most of the eighteen nations ranking h igher had government

media subsidies on a per capita basis at least ten or twenty times that of the

U nited States. The top four nations on the list - Norway, I celand, Denmark,

and Sweden - include two of the top three per capita media subsidizers in

the world, and the other two are dramatically ahead of the United States.

These are th e freest, most democratic nations on earth according to The

Economist, and they all have perfect or near-perfect scores on civil liber­

ties. The United States is tied for the lowest civil l iberties score among the

twenty-five democracies, and on th is issue trails twenty nations described as

"flawed democracies" i n The Economist's rankings. 1 56

Although all of the Democracy Index criteria impl icitly depend to a large

extent upon h aving a strong press system - and the report specifically dis­

cusses press freedom as a crucial indicator of democracy - freedom of the

press itself is not one of the six measured variables . Is there a more direct

source on press freedom?

Fortunately, there is. The Democracy I ndex can be supplemented with

the research of Freedom House , an American organization created in the

1 940s to oppose totalitarianism of the left and right, which with the coming

of the C old War emphasized the threat of left-wing governments to freedom.

Freedom House is very much an establishment organization, with close ties

to prominent American political and economic figures. Every year it ranks

all the nations of the world on th e basis of how free and effective their press

systems are . Its research is detailed and sophisticated, particularly concerned

208 D I G ITAL DISCONNECT

with any government meddl ing whatsoever with private news media . For

that reason , all communist nations tend to rank in a virtual tie for dead last

as having the least free press systems in the world. Freedom House is second

to none when it comes to having sens itive antennae to detect government

meddling with the existence or prerogatives of private news media.

Freedom House hardly favors th e home tea m . In 20 l l it ranked th e

United States as being tied with the Czech Republ ic as having the twenty­

second freest press system in th e worl d . America is ranked so low because of

failures to protect sources and because of the massive economic cutbacks in

newsrooms that have been chronicled in th is chapter.

Freedom House's l ist is dominated by the democratic nations with the

very largest per capita journalism subsidies in the world. The top nations

listed by Freedom House are the same nations that top The Economist's De­

mocracy Index, and all rank among the top per cap ita press subsidizers in

the world . 1 57 In fact, the l ists match to a remarkable extent. That should be

no surprise, as one would expect the nations with the freest and best press

systems to rank as the most democratic nations. What has been missing from

the narrative is that the nations with the freest press systems are also the na­

tions that make the greatest public investment in journalism and th erefore

provide th e basis for being strong democracies. 1 58

Freedom House research underscores the fact that none of th ese success­

ful democracies permit th e type of political meddling that is common in

U. S . public broadcasting, particularly by those politicians wh o want to elimi­

nate public broadcasti ng, with no sense of irony, because it has been "politi­

cized." 1 59 Matt Powers and Rodney Benson conducted a thorough analysis

of media laws and policies in fourteen leading democracies and "found that

all of these countries have self-consciously sought to create an arm's-length

relationship between public media outlets and any attempt at partisan politi­

cal meddling." 160 They conclude :

What matters for both public and private m edia are th e procedures and

policies in place to assure both adequate funding and independence

from any single owner, funder or regulator. Inside corporate-owned

newsrooms, as profit pressures have increased, informal walls protect­

ing the editorial side from business interference have crumbled. In

contrast, th e walls protecting public media are often made of firmer

stuff such as independent oversight boards and multiyear advance

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 209

funding to assure that no publicly fun ded media outlet will suffer from

political pressure or funding loss because of critical news coverage . 161

''I'd like to th ink that this finding rather than our calculation of funding is the

major contribution of our study," Benson told me. 162

Although no nation is perfect and even th e best have limitations, these ex­

amples consistently demonstrate that there are means to effectively prevent

governments from having undue influence over public media operations,

much as i n the United States we have created mechanisms to prevent gover­

nors and state legislatures from dictating faculty research and course syllabi

at public universities. In other democratic nations, public broadcasting sys­

tems tend to be popular and are defended by political parties throughout the

political spectru m . Even in the U nited States, despite its paltry budgets and

spotty performance, public broadcasting routinely polls as one of the most

popular government programs . 163

One other annual survey presents supporting evidence. Since 2002 Re­

porters Without Borders has produced a h ighly respected annual world press

freedom i ndex that ranks all nations in terms of h ow freely j ournalists can

go about their work without direct or indi rect attacks. The survey does not

address th e quality of the j ournal ism, but only how unconstrained j ournal ists

are to cover their communities and beats without violence or harassment.

The U nited States plummeted to forty-seventh in the world in 201 2, largely

because of the mush rooming practice of police arresting and sometimes

beating up j ournal ists who dare to cover and report on public demonstra­

tions. As j ournal ism weakens, the state h as less fear of harass ing members

of the Fourth Estate , who are seen as unduly interested in issues the state

prefers not to be covered . The dozen or so nations that scored well above the

rest of the world in terms of press freedom were pretty much the exact same

nations that dominated the other two lists, those that have the largest public

investments in j ournalism. 1 64 Table 1 puts all these studies together.

Research also demonstrates that in those democratic nations with well­

funded noncommercial broadcasting systems, political knowledge is h igher

than i n nati ons without them and the information gap between the rich and

the working class and poor is much smaller. 1 65 Stephen C ushion's recent

research confirms this pattern. He notes that public servi ce broadcasters

tend to do far more election campaign reporting than th eir commercial

counterparts. One conclusion of C ushion's is especially striking: those

2 10 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

Table l . Journalism funding and democracy

Press Freedom Freedom of Press Democracy Index Funding for Public Media

( Reporters Without Borders) ( Freedom House) (The Economist)

Country Rank Country Rank Country Rank Country Rank Per

capita

Finland Finland Norway Norway S l 3 0 . 39

Norway Norway Iceland Denmark 5 1 09.96

Estonia Sweden Denmark Finland $1 O·t.I O

Netherlands 4 Belgium 4 Sweden 4 United Kingdom 4 $88.6 1

Austria Denmark New Zealand Belgium $74.00

Iceland 6 Luxembourg 6 Austra lia 6 Ireland 6 $6 1 . 2 8

Luxembourg 7 Netherlands 7 Switzerland Japan 7 $ 5 7 . 3 1

Switzerland 8 Switzerland Canada 8 Slovenia 8 $ 5 2 . H

Cape Verde 9 Andorra 9 Finland 9 Netherlands 9 $49. 5 0

Canada 1 0 Iceland 1 0 Netherlands 1 0 France 1 0 54 5 . 62

Denmark I I Liechtenstein I I Luxembourg I I Australia I I 5 3 5 . 86

Sweden 1 2 St. Lucia 1 2 Ireland 1 2 New Zealand 1 2 5 2 8 . 96

New Zealand ] ) Ireland 1 3 Austria ] ) Canada 1 3 5 2 7 . 46

Czech Republic 1 4 Monaco 1 4 Germany 1 4 Germany 1 4 $ 2 7 . 2 1

Ireland 1 5 Palau 1 5 Malta 1 5 South Korea 1 5 $9.95

U.S. rank 47 U.S. rank 22 U.S. rank 1 9 U.S. spending $ 1 .4 3

Sources: Th i s table i s reproduced from Josh Stearns, Adding It U p : Press Freedom, Democratic Health, and Public Media Funding (Wash i ngton, DC : Free Press, Jan . 26, 2 0 1 2 ) , savethenews.org/ blog/1 2/0 1 126/adding-it-press-freedom-democratic-health-and-public-media-fu nding. The data are from : "Press Freedom Index 20 1 1 -20 1 2 ," ( Paris: Reporters Without Borders, 20 1 1 ) , e n . rsf.org/press­ freedom-index-20 1 1 -2 0 1 2 , 1 04 3 . h tm l ; Karin Deutsch Karlekar and J e n n i fer D u n h a m , Press Freedom in 2 0 1 1 (Washington, DC : Freedom House, 2 0 1 1 ) , freedomhouse.org/sites/defa u l t/files/FOTP% 2 0 20 1 2 % 20Booklet.pdf ( t i e s n o t represented h e re ) ; "Democracy I n d e x 2 0 1 1 ," The Economist, eiu . com/ democracyindex20 1 1 ; and "Funding for Public Media," Free Press, based on 2008 budget numbers, fre epress . net/public-media. I thank Josh Stearns for the data and Jamil Jonna for the formatting.

nations with strong public broadcasting have more substantive campaign

coverage, i . e . , news about policy that can help inform citizens about th e

relative merits of a political party or a particular politician. Moreover, good

public broadcasting holds commercial broadcasters to h igher standards than

they have in nations where public broadcasting lacks resources for campaign

coverage. 1 66

Likewise, in a manner that recalls the U. S . postal subsidies of the nine­

teenth century and that might baffle contemporary Americans cynical about

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 2 1 1

the possibility of democratic governance, newspaper subsidies tend to be

directed to helping the smaller and more dissident newspapers, without ide­

ological bias, over the large successful commercial newspapers. 1 67 Recent

research on the E u ropean press concludes that as j ournalism subsidies i n­

crease, the overall reporting in those nations does not kowtow but in fact

grows m o re adversarial to the government in power.168

The point is not to romanticize oth er democratic nations or put them on

a pedestal . Journalism is in varying degrees of crisis in nations worldwide .

Resources for journalism are declining in other countri es, too, even though

public investments provide a cushion. 169 Moreover, the quality of j ournalism

is hardly guaranteed even with greater resources. 170 Resources are simply a

necessary precondition for sufficient democratic j ournalism.

Publ ic investments i n j ournalism are compatible with a democratic soci­

ety, a flourish ing uncensored private news media, and an adversarial j ournal­

ism . The evi dence is clear: the problem of creating a viable free press system

in a democratic society is solvable. There may not be a perfect solution , but

there are good , workable ones. And in times l ike these, when the market is

collapsing, they are mandatory. The late James Carey - perhaps the dean of

American j ournalism scholars, and no fan of government involvement with

the press - said in 2002, "Alas, the press may have to rely upon a democratic

state to create the conditions necessary for a democratic press to flourish

and for j ournal ists to be restored to their proper role as orchestrators of the

conversation of a democratic society." 1 7 1

In my other works, I have outlined a number of concrete suggestions

to spawn a democratic j ournalism - including an immediate expansion of

public , community, and student media. It is imperative that we develop a

h eterogeneous system , with different structures and subsidy systems, and

significant nonprofit competition . There is little doubt that if Americans

spent one tenth as much time devising creative policy proposals and public

funding mechanisms as they do to trying to figure h ow to sell people stuff

online, we could have a boatload of brilliant propositions to consider. Here

I will mention only one, because it pertains directly to how best to capture

the genius of the digital revolution and harness that potential for a credible

j ournalism syste m .

T h i s i d e a was fi rst developed by t h e economist D e a n Baker a n d h is brother

Randy Baker; Nichols and I have embellished their core concept and called

it the citizenship news voucher. The idea is simple: every American adult

2 12 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

gets a $200 voucher she can use to donate money to any nonprofit news

medium of her choice . She will i ndicate her choice on her tax return . If sh e

does not file a tax return, a simple form will be available to use . She can spl it

her $200 among several different qualifying nonprofit media. Th is program

would be purely voluntary, like the tax-form check-offs for funding elections

or protecting wildlife . A government agency, probably operati ng out of the

IRS, can be set up to allocate th e funds and to determine eligibility accord­

ing to universal standards [ l ike those granting 5 0 1 ( c ) ( 3) nonprofit status] that

err on the side of expanding rather than constra ining the number of serious

sources covering and commenting on the issues of th e day.

This funding mechanism would apply to any nonprofit medium that does

exclusively media content. The medium could not be part of a larger organi­

zation that has any nonmedia operations. Everyth ing the medium produces

would have to be made ava ilable immediately by publication on the Inter­

net, free to all . It would not be covered by copyright and would enter th e

public doma i n . Th e government would not evaluate the content to see that

the money is going toward journal ism. My assumption is that th ese criteria

would effectively produce the desired result - and if there is some sl ippage,

so be it. Qualifying media ought not be permitted to accept advertising; this

is a sector that is to have a direct and primary relati onship with its audience.

Qualifying media could accept tax-deductible donations from individuals or

foundations to supplement th eir income.

With advertising banned from th is new Internet sector, the pool of ad­

vertising that exists could be diwied up among newspapers and commercial

media, especially commercial broadcasters. This would give commercial

media a better crack at finding a workable business model. I would also

suggest that for a medium to receive funds, it should have to get commit­

ments for at least $20,000 worth of vouchers. Th is requirement would lessen

fraud and also force anyone wishing to establish a medium to be serious

enough to get at least a hundred people to sign on . (In other words, you

can't j ust declare yourself a newspaper and deposit th e voucher in your bank

account. ) There will be some overhead and administration for th e program,

but it would be minimal.

The voucher system would provide a way for the burgeoning yet starving

nonprofit digital news sector to become self-sufficient and have the funds to

h ire a significant number of full-time paid workers. It could be as much as an

JOURNALISM IS DEAD ! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 2 13

annual $ 3 0 bill ion to $40 billion shot in the arm . All those nonprofit digital

news operations would finally have a prayer of survival and growth , because

this is a policy that recognizes j ournal ism for what it is - a public good.

Imagine a website in the blogosphere right now covering national poli­

tics, producing some great content, getting hundreds of thousands of regular

\·isitors, but depending on low-paid or volunteer labor and praying for adver­

tising crumbs or donations for revenue. Now the site goes formally nonprofit,

stops obsessing over advertising, and appeals directly to its readers. Imagine

th is outfit getting hventy thousand people to steer their vouchers into its ac­

counts. That is $4 million, enough to have a well-paid staff of fifty full-time

j ournal ists, as well as ancillary staffers. C onsider what a Web news service

could do with that. And then start thinking about how motivated the report­

ers and editors would be to break big stories, maintain h igh quality, and keep

attracting th e vouchers .

Or imagine that you l ive in a city with deplorable news coverage of your

community or neighborhood, as more and more Americans do. If someone

starts a l ocal news outlet and gets a thousand people to give her group their

vouchers , that would provide a nice start-up budget of $200,000. For that

m oney, a group can have several reporters covering the turf and build a real

fo llowing.

Vouchers also would allow newcomers to enter the fray and hence en­

courage innovati on . A group could raise start-up funds from donations or

philanthropy, get under way, and then appeal directly for voucher support.

In this model , philanthropists would have much greater incentive to put

money into j ournalism because there would be a way for their grants to lead

to self-sustaining institutions. The voucher system would produce intense

competition because a medium cannot take its support for granted. It would

reward initiative and punish sloth . It would be democratic because rich and

poor would get the same voucher. And the government would have no con­

trol over who'd get the money, whether left, right, or center. It would be

an enormous public investment, yet be a libertarian's dream: people could

support whatever political viewpoints or organizations they preferred or do

noth ing at all.

As Dean Baker puts it, this is an economic model that recognizes that

old-fashioned media economics no longer work in the Internet era . You

can't produce a digital product, take it to market, and sell it. And you can't

2 14 DIGITAL DISCONNECT

get advertisers to bankroll your operation . The rational policy solution is to

give media producers - j ournalists, in th is case - money up front and th en

make what they produce available to all for free online. Embrace the digital

revolution ; don't try to fight it with electronic barbed wire, paywalls, hyper­

commercialism, and spying on users. C itizenship news vouchers would fill

the Web with large amounts of professional-quality journalism and provide

a genuine independent j ournalism sector. M oreover, all the mate rial devel­

oped through the program can be used by commercial news media however

they see fit. They simply cannot monopolize it or restrict access to it. But if

they can add value, more power to them.

When Dean Baker first broached th is idea, well over a decade ago, it was

dismissed as utopian and absurd. After Nichols and I wrote about it in The

Death and Life of American Journalism, we visited officials connected to

both the FCC's and the FTC's formal panels that were studying the crisis in

j ournalism in 20 l 0. Each of them had read the book closely. Each stated,

al most immediately upon meeting us, that th e citizenship news voucher rep­

resented exactly the sort of th inking that was necessary if there was going to

be much j ournalism going forward . 1 72 In critical j unctures, once unthink­

able ideas can become thinkable in a hurry.

Regrettably, th is suggested reform, l ike many others, is not being con­

sidered. After acknowl edging its value, th e FTC and FCC j ournalism of­

ficials con ceded that they could not endorse such a "radical" proposal for

fear that political attacks would destroy their work altogether. There are two

main reasons for th is fear. First, there is the still-prevalent idea that "subsi­

dies are un-American but profits are all-American." One can only hope that

this response is weakening due to the severity of the crisis and the mount­

ing evidence that public investments in j ournalism are not only compat­

ible with democracy, but mandatory for its survival . There has been some

movement, but nowhere near enough . In 20 l l a comprehensive analysis

on th e j ournalism crisis by Columbia faculty members still concluded that

" it is ulti mately up to the commercial market to provide the economic basis

for j ournalism." 1 7 3 What Todd Gitlin said over three years ago is even more

urgent today: "We are rapidly ru nning out of alternatives to public finance.

It's time to move to the next level and entertain a grown-up debate among

concrete ideas ." 1 74

The second factor is the more intransigent one and goes back to Jeffer­

son's assessment of th e situation in 1 7 87. There is one group that definitely

JOURNALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE JOURNALISM? 2 1 5

benefits from a lack of j ournalism and from information inequality: those

who dominate society. They do not wish to have their privileges or affairs

examined closely, either in politics or commerce - if the two are still sepa­

rable . The Wall Street banks , energy corporations, health insurance firms,

defense contractors, agribusi nesses - powerful interests of all sorts - do not

want th eir operations or their cozy relations with the government exposed for

all to see, nor do the politicians who benefit from these relationships. These

are Jefferson's wolves. None of them desires a j ournal ism that will engage

the electorate and draw the poor and working class i nto the political system.

These powerful forces oppose anyth ing that would open and enhance our

news media, and they will aggressively oppose any campaign for press subsi­

dies like public media or citizenship news vouchers. They might not say so

in public, but their actions speak louder than words. Journalism? No, thank

you .

Not all wealthy people are content with a world that lacks democratic

j ournal ism. True free-market capitalism would even benefit from a strong

press system . But none of the rich have a material stake in pushing the cause ,

so it founders. Our political system has become so corrupt that it is losing

th e capacity to address problems that threaten its own existence. Instead, the

main issues placed before policy makers are making what seem l ike endless

cuts in social programs, lowering taxes on business and the wealthy, ignoring

necessary environ mental protections, i ncreasing "national security" spend­

ing, and corporate deregulation .

As of 2 0 1 3, it seems obvious that if the Internet is really reviving Ameri­

can democracy, it's taking a roundabout route . The hand of capital seems

h eavier and heavier on the steering wheel, taking us to places way off th e

democratic grid, and nowhere is the Internet's failure clearer or the stakes

h igher than in j ournal ism.