In the U.S., the gutting of newsrooms has largely already happened, with disastrous consequences for democracy. There is simply too little actual investigative journalism, particularly at the local level, being done today. There are too few independent newsrooms.
Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.
The papers being organized are those that found a business model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms, which requires employing journalists at a living wage and having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether they will become essentially hollow brands with little original content.
But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.
I don't think folks appreciate just how tetering-on-the-edge local corruption already was before local newspapers started to die. Expect to see a lot more crazy stories coming out when small towns and small cities go so far into private-fiefdom territory that someone outside notices. The only remaining significant bulwark to ruining-the-country levels of corruption is state auditors—and that's if they're not corrupt themselves.
Larger cities may be OK a little while longer since they usually still have some local investigative reporting.
It's one of several reasons I'm no longer sure the Web is compatible with healthy democracy.
One thing I have read about though, is that, since unlike radio or tv stations there is no real regulator of who owns how many websites, conservative media networks are creating news sites for towns using a local contractor for local stories, and then having national or international stories be presented with a conservative slant.
There is more than one solution to the problem. As the problem gets worse, the need for a new solution will overcome the friction that was preventing that solution from taking place. Upper government ought to be proactive about helping those solutions along, so fixing the problem doesn't involve killings.
I think a big part of the problem with funding the news is the way papers handle online payments. I would happily pay a dollar or two to have online access to the NY Times, WSJ, or even my local town paper for a day. What I absolutely do not want to do is spend $500+ on 3 or more subscriptions that I will not read, or not read much of, on most days. For papers that still have a print edition, you can buy the day's paper. I don't know why you can't do the same thing online.
You misunderstand. The subscriptions are not the key to revenue. The dollar even per article would be even less so. They are qualifiers for the ad demographic.
Just because the NYT was successful doesn't mean that model translates at all to local independent newsrooms. It doesn't even necessarily translate to other large national news papers.
The resulting problem is exactly why people complain about too many streaming services. You could easily have to juggle national, state, and various local-level subscriptions. Maybe multiples at every level. Plus any other publications specific to other hobbies or interests you might have.
Just because it works once, doesn't mean it will work for everyone.
I see your point, but I don't think it's a good counter-example. News needs a new paradigm entirely most-likely. The NYT isn't "the news" and the only options seem to be subscriptions and/or ads. For smaller operations, the problem gets a lot harder a lot faster since there's an upper-bound on the number of people they serve.
At the end of the day, I think the answer is that local news rooms just aren’t going to be viable, by and large. This is a consequence of a century long trend to begin with.
The way I see it, either you have a broad enough reach, or you have to niche yourself into the broader content generation ecosystem. Local news publishing that just reprints of AP stories or talking about some new pop health study of the week isn’t going to survive. To the degree that local investigative journalism is valuable, it’s going to have to find an entirely new model to sustain itself.
corruption is an endless feature of human communities. one way to keep it somewhat under control is to publicize it to the broader community rather than allow it to remain secret. the corruption doesn't need to be extreme enough to warrant legal action (though it might); it could just be "bad for most people, good for a few".
stupidity has most of the same properties.
the main feature of those human communities that we've used for a few hundred years to try to accomplish that control is called "a free press".
I feel like the NYTimes could take more papers under its subscription - e.g. give subscribers the option to bundle in a state and municipal paper, that the NYTimes essentially vets as a local affiliate (I’m guessing this would probably lead to substantial overhead on their end, though).
I absolutely agree. I've had some conversations with my local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican about this, since their subscription cost seems sort of absurd for the value. They point out (correctly, IMO) that the really small upper bound on their potential subscriber base really forces their hand a lot, a problem that the NYT does not face and likely never will (given its national and international reach).
The New York Times is the only legacy media company to successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at that. In 2014, an internal innovation report [1] laid out the challenges the Times faced and what it needed to do to be successful. To the Times’ immense credit, it succeeded and then some. I worked at a digital publication that was cutting edge on the types of digital and audience engagement work the the Times was trying to chase and used to say that “we are trying to become the New York Times before the Times becomes us.” And in 2016, we had layoffs and the company “pivoted to video,” and as I said to some colleagues the night of the layoffs (I was spared but many other were not), the Times won. (The pivot didn’t work and the company would sell for 1/5 of its valuation 18 months later. But at this point I’d just left media for tech.)
The Times is the exception. It’s the Apple amidst a sea of Commodores and Ataris and DECs. The Times is the exception and is exceptional as a business reinvention story, but it is the outlier, not the norm.
(The Journal has always had a paywall (even in the mid 1990s when it sold digital editions over dial-up), tho its porousness has ebbed and flowed, and as such, has never had the same degree of challenges that faced local papers or the national papers like the New York Times, WaPo, and the LA Times)
> The New York Times is the only legacy media company to successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at that.
I'm more familiar with the UK media market, where quite a few legacy media publications have pivoted into digital successfully. Whatever you think of the Daily Mail/Mail Online, it's very successful. The Guardian is doing well without a paywall (although it has a large endowment to sustain it). Smaller publications such as the Spectator (which is about legacy as it gets) are doing well with a digital subscription model. And then there's The Economist, of course.
I think the Daily Mail is a good example and this is a reminder to never speak in absolutes.
That said, I don’t think any of those other examples pivoted the way the Times pivoted. The Times didn’t just digitize the newspaper or combine the newsrooms. It started to do real digital first and product first investments. The Cooking app, the Games vertical, the investment into audio and video, the tremendous investment in data tools for its journalists for multimedia storytelling (consider the impact of Snow Fall, even a decade later).
The Daily Mail may have successfully managed profitability, but I wouldn’t put it on par with the transformation that happened at The Times. The Times looked at the innovation happening at BuzzFeed and Mashable (where I worked for many years) and Vice and Vox and has not just been able to compete with them, I would argue that it has largely vested them. Whatever else you think of their journalism, that alone, is nothing short of remarkable. And I cannot think of another legacy media company that has transformed itself the same way.
Well, success in this context means digital+profits. There's nothing particularly digital about the Guardian's work - it's just ordinary text - and they are incredibly unprofitable. They really shouldn't count.
The Economist is so small (staff of 75 writers, not sure how large the whole organization is but it’s still very small) that I don’t think it counts the same way something like the Times counts. That isn’t to take anything away from The Economist, but a magazine isn’t the same scope, to me. Especially since the magazine has changed hands a few times. And if I’m going to be brutally honest, The New Yorker is actually the magazine that has adapted to digital the best and if it were its own business and not one of the things propping up Condé Nast, I’d list it alongside the Times.
(Thinking about it more, The Atlantic is close to successfully pivoting but I don’t know if I can say it has done it quite yet. And again, it had to sell itself)
FT is a fantastic newspaper but I think it’s much more akin to WSJ, where its paywall and subscriber base insulated it from the challenges than a lot of other papers. But that’s a good call-out as a paper that has done its part to pivot like the Times has. (It has also been sold, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but is worth noting).
The Times, to me, is unique in that it’s investment in its tech has been as significant as it has. And not just for the apps like Cooking and Games, but the commitment to the full stack within its storytelling, its video, its audio. It is really remarkable from a product perspective, as much as from a journalism perspective. The core product it offers is still news, but it has managed to really change the medium and packaging of its offerings in a very demonstrable way.
I’m glad they were able to figure that out, and now the question that arises in my mind is whether there is any hope for finding a model that props up local investigative journalism. Even if all those local news organizations became non-profits and had access to a very effective digital media platform that made it effortless to produce online content (including mobile-friendly functionality), and maybe even charge micro-payments for some of the individual articles, would it be enough? Or would it not work? Can they only survive if they do real news while selling other stuff?
Totally, and WSJ never had the same challenges because it never took down its paywall/had a different subscriber profile/etc. But yes, those are the two that have managed to stay successful and that’s a testament to both of their teams.
The NYT has subscribers across the country (and beyond) as it covers broad US and world events. I doubt a local paper that principally covers local/state news will have that same reach.
The NYT, WSJ, FT, The Economist, and maybe a few others have a national and international (to greater or lesser degrees) audience who are willing to pay $100/year or so for a subscription. That's a much tougher sale when your audience is almost entirely just, say, Philadelphia.
And for the same reason, local papers are going to have paltry ad sales.
At the end of the day, none of this looks good for local news, but that doesn’t been that subscription sales aren’t a viable business model to some degree.
Lest we forget NYT being used as a mouthpiece for Dick Cheney and forming the foundation of the invasion of Iraq. I'll stump for the importance of journalism at any level (esp. the local level) but the willingness of major outlets to accept and regurgitate anything from cops/3-letter orgs is absolutely confounding.
Reminds me of when every US newspaper basically plainly copied what the gov said about the strikes against Kata'ib Hezbollah being in response to a hit and run toyota-rocket attack of theirs on a US base.
Not a soul that took note of the fact that Kata'ib had denied any involvement or that this happened very far away from where they held power and deep in territory with an enemy local group that had instantly claimed the attack.
Thank you to post about this important issue. The demise of diversity in news sources is that local politics will lose its Fourth Estate (media) that acts as a check-and-balance. National politics will continue to be closely monitored by national papers. To all readers of any nationality: This issue will affect any democracy that sees a sharp decline in local news sources.
I would love to buy a subscription to a newspaper. As far as I can tell, nobody wants to sell me one without ads and trackers. It does not appear there is a big enough market for a publication that serves the interests of subscribers.
I canceled all of my subscriptions after asking politely that they do something about the third party tracking.
“Journalism” has never been good when it comes to covering anything that didn’t effect the White middle class.
Journalist reflexively took the word of the police department and prosecutors and didn’t believe minorities when they complained about police misconduct. It was only when everyone could film the police that it became apparent.
On the other side, the rise of Trumpian populism came about because everyone ignored rural White America including journalist.
I think Walter Lippmann covered this pretty well 100 years ago in his book Public Opinion (an excellent book by the way, I highly recommend it). Newspapers get money from the public through a hidden commodity tax by way of advertisements. In order to get this to work, they need to sell their circulation, and the value of the circulation depends on the buying power of those in it. As such, the goal of a newspaper has to be to keep it's target audience happy by giving them what they want:
> Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through indirect taxation of the reader. The kind of circulation which the advertiser will buy depends on what he has to sell. It may be "quality" or "mass." On the whole there is no sharp dividing line, for in respect to most commodities sold by advertising, the customers are neither the small class of the very rich nor the very poor. They are the people with enough surplus over bare necessities to exercise discretion in their buying. The paper, therefore, which goes into the homes of the fairly prosperous is by and large the one which offers most to the advertiser. It may also go into the homes of the poor, but except for certain lines of goods, an analytical advertising agent does not rate that circulation as a great asset, unless, as seems to be the case with certain of Mr. Hearst's properties, the circulation is enormous.
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
Especially relevant today, with the number of advertisement driven companies.
Also from the book, how newspapers will often let erroneous stories die rather than correcting them and angering passionate readers:
> The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.
> But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.
It's been funded by for profit organizations, that have a vested interest in controlling what is newsworthy and what is ignored, and who gets discredited and maligned. Unbiased news died with Operation Mockingbird in the 60's and it's corpse has been dancing along like Weekend at Bernie's.
Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.
The papers being organized are those that found a business model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms, which requires employing journalists at a living wage and having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether they will become essentially hollow brands with little original content.
But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved for now.