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Journalism Needs Subsidy

Submitted by Joshua-Michéle on February 13, 2012 – 4:15 amView Comments

A fascinating NY Times article about how the Washington Post is struggling to redefine itself in the digital age.   One thing that caught my eye was this quote:

“The Post has expanded its Web presence by trying to meld what was great about the old Post with new traffic-baiting tricks of online start-ups — creating new, high-minded blogs like Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog,” along with “Celebritology 2.0” where news about the Kardashian sisters and Justin Bieber can be found. That has many inside the paper starting to wonder if online growth has come at too high a cost.”

Too high a cost?   Journalism has never paid for itself.  It has always been a subsidized activity.   In the past it was advertising and classifieds and there were large departments exclusively focused on the commercial enterprise of selling the real estate that came with paper.  The Internet has destroyed the classifieds and nearly destroyed its print advertising base.  In short, the Internet has removed the subsidies that paid for journalism.    The Washington Post was using Kaplan (another business line) to fund its money-losing paper until Kaplan ran into financial difficulty.   The question that anyone inside the news business should be asking is “what is the cost of NOT looking for new models to subsidize journalism?”

via The Washington Post, Recast for a Digital Future – NYTimes.com.

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  • Greetings Joshua-Michele, Jeff Gaines pointed me to you after I emailed him Jimmy Kimmel's zinger at the Correspondents' Dinner in Washington last weekend...

    "Some people say journalism is in decline, they say you've become too politicized, too focused on sensationalism, they say you no longer honor your duty to inform America but instead actively divide us so that your corporate overlord can rake in the profits," Kimmel said. "I don't have a joke for this, it's just what some people say."

    My thought is that the media should use technology to move one step closer to the actual reader in the news supply chain and start mediating content for each individual... Here are some comments from a couple of years back... http://askdrjohn.wordpress.com... 

    ...revolutionary times call for revolutionary measures...

    One of my favorite examples is Guy Kawasaki's example of the generations of the delivery of ice to the home: how the first generation cut ice from the frozen lakes, how the second generation put the first generation out of business by freezing large blocks of ice closer to the uses of ice, and how the third generation put the second generation out of business by putting the icemaker in the home/business...

    Well the news print business put the town crier out of business and the internet is putting newsprint out of business... but this does neither criticize the journalistic quality of the vessel nor suggest the lessening of demand for quality journalistic content...In this age of virtually $0 distribution cost, good journalism is in greater demand than ever before especially when there is sooooo much garbage out there (as an electrical engineer, we would suggest that the 'signal to noise' ratio is decreasing... not because there is less signal but because there is much more noise)... My suggestion is that the news organization help me filter out the noise and give me increased depth in areas where I have an interest... I would pay for that.

  • joshuamross

    @jhlundin:disqus - Thanks so much for this,  - and pass along my best to Jeff. 
    Indeed the topic of how to fix news carries on unabated (and I am no exception).  At its highwater mark in 2009 I wrote this: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/... - paraphrased here for brevity:Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry. 

    Why? 

    Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change. The failure of newspapers is not a failure of imagination or foresight nor is it a failure of individuals. This kind of failure is the hallmark of all institutions in the face of tectonic disruption. Institutions are a set of agreements that perpetuate a social order beyond individual intention or tenure. Changing those agreements is costly and time-consuming. So when the rate of change accelerates beyond the institution’s adaptive capacity - extinction follows. 

    The question is not “what should newspapers do?” but “how can a large institution effectively organize in response to disruptive change?” Taken thus, it is not only the fundamental question to ask of newspapers - but to ask of ourselves in relation to a host of big-ticket game-changers such as peak oil, environmental collapse and climate change that simultaneously require and defy our capacity for institutional response. 

  • Seems that both of our discussions question the institution ability to change in both a timely and effective manner... almost to the extent that part of the definition of 'institution' is its inability to effectively change...

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