citizen journalism

This third, and final, post on this theme addresses an issue that has been the subject of intense discussion in the few weeks since I posted the first two parts: a new business model for journalism.
The debate, while not new, was triggered by the bankruptcy filing by Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. That event clearly has caused a great deal of anxiety in the highest ranks of American journalism, not to mention widespread paranoia that newspapers really are in a death rattle.
There appears to be growing acceptance, even amongst arch-conservatives stoutly defending the once-proud but now-crumbling ramparts of newspaper journalism, that the traditional business model based on capitalist media corporations is failing — and that new models must be found fast. Much of the teeth-gnashing, it should be pointed out, is going on mainly inside established journalistic precincts (managerial suites at daily newspapers and J-School faculty lounges). The young generation actually out there using Web 2.0 platforms doesn’t care a whit about the professional doom and gloom of their tenured elders. The kids are busy reshaping the world, and more power to them.
What interests me here, in particular, is the debate about the role of the state (in the form of subsidies) in rescuing the ailing journalism business. This is a subject that merits serious attention, not only as a practical matter but, more importantly, because it raises larger philosophical questions about fundamental values in liberal democratic societies.
I confess to being surprised that the issue of state funding for newspapers has even come up in a country like the United States, with its long libertarian tradition of freedom of the press, especially from government control. The idea gained currency about a year ago when things were looking grim for newspapers. One notable advocate of state funding has been Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, who held up Britain’s BBC as an example of excellent government-funded journalism. 
In the current crisis, the American journalism establishment doubtless believes the timing is right. Maybe, they must be thinking, their beleaguered industry can sneak into the line, behind the banks and auto giants, with cap in hand for a government bailout.
Government intervention in the media has been institutionalized in other Anglo-American countries such as Britain, Canada, and Australia. In those countries, thousands of journalists are, in effect, on the government payroll as employees of state-owned public broadcasters. The fact that most of these state-owned TV networks actually behave just like their commercial rivals (despite the venerable mythology they perpetuate about their high-minded “public service” mission) makes state ownership all the more contestable.
The hypocrisy goes even deeper in the media establishments of these countries. Whenever governments have floated the idea of restrictions on newspaper ownership, the knee-jerk reaction in the press has invariably been a chorus of indignation about the danger of government controls. In many instances, the same newspaper scribes who have energetically defended the press against the threat of state regulations are married to someone working as a journalist on the state payroll at the BBC or CBC.
The United States has been largely spared these hypocritical convulsions because the American government does not own or directly finance TV networks and newspapers. The PBS model in America is completely different from the state-owned, taxpayer-financed BBC.
And yet, today, we are hearing voices in the corridors of the American journalism establishment in favour of state financing for newspapers.
Geneva Overholser, a veteran newspaper editor and J-prof, wrote a report in 2006, “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change”, which raised the issue of state financing for newspapers. In her report, she recommended public discussion about a “government role in protecting, regulating, and supporting a free and responsible press”.
Overholser was recently appointed director of the Annenberg School of Journalism in California. She therefore joins Nicholas Lemann at Columbia’s J-School amongst the institutional patricians of the American media establishment who are not particularly troubled by the prospect of state intervention in the news business. They frequently evoke high-minded notions about journalism as a “public good” that should not be subject to market forces (an indirect way of advocating state subsidies). Today they can add to these claims the fact that newspaper journalism is now a victim of market failure (though they will almost certainly neglect to mention that Old Media newspaper managers are largely to blame for this).
J-School deans can reliably find support for their views from media critics in the Marxist tradition, many of whom are their academic colleagues. One is Robert McChesney, the author of a significant body of literature which, on the whole, challenges the structural effects of corporate media control. “I don’t think there’s any question, legally or constitutionally or theoretically, that journalism is a necessary public good for our constitutional system to work,” says McChesney, a professor of at the University of Illinois and founder of the media-reform organization called Free Press.
Left-liberal advocates of state intervention are correct to point out that, libertarian free-speech values notwithstanding, governments (including in America) already regulate and finance journalism through a complex arsenal of indirect fiscal and other mechanisms. These include reduced postal rates, sales-tax exemptions, government advertising, to name only a few.
Beyond the Anglo-American world, many Western governments directly subsidize newspapers. In France, where I live, state protection for newspapers and their unions is a vast racket of feather-bedding, gold-plating, and institutionalized cronyism. The French state provides some $400 million in direct subsidies and nearly $1.5 billion in indirect fiscal incentives (including funding for the Communist Party’s house organ, L’Humanité). The French state also controls much of the national television industry. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, however, and anybody who believes that French journalists work without fear or favour obviously have never lived in this country.
That, I believe, is the major flaw in the belief amongst America’s left-liberal journalistic patricians in the virtues of state financing. While undoubtedly sincere, American newspaper managers and J-profs are naive about state financing because they have no hard-nosed experience with its inevitable pressures, effects, and outcomes. It’s a purely theoretical proposition in their thinking and, when you mix that with misguided normative notions about the laudable BBC, it actually starts to sound like a good idea.
It is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that calls for a state rescue of the newspaper industry would gain any legitimate political traction in the United States. Firstly, there is no cultural appetite for it; and secondly, it would be bad public policy.
The real problem, as noted, is that newspaper managers and J-Schools were the ones whose short-sighted, self-interested, and over-complacent behaviour got newspaper journalism in this mess in the first place. In that respect, American newspapers would resemble the Big Three auto makers. They appear to want massive government bailouts to rescue them from a disater of their own making; and what’s more they want the money to help them re-finance a business-as-usual solution.
Indeed, if you follow the debate among newspaper editors and J-School professors, they’re no different. They’re not planning to reinvent the news business; they’re looking for a solution to save the newspaper business as they know it. True, some newspapers, desperate to find a way out of the crisis, are starting (slowly) to adopt Web 2.0 features. But many newspaper managers and J-profs are merely talking a good game about embracing New Media. The uncomfortable truth is that their time has gone. Yet they’re stubbornly hanging on to all the top spots in the industry and J-Schools, preaching the virtues of the old religion, instead of stepping out of the way and letting the new generation re-invent the business. In time, the inexorable process of creative destruction will sort this out. But the forces of resistance are powerful and well-entrenched. And now, it seems, they might want state subsidies so they can stay in the game.
But it won’t happen — not, at least, in America. It would be folly, both philosophically and as a practical matter, to run to the rescue of the newspaper industry with taxpayer funds. When assessing potential business models, you have to first accept that the current model might die and vanish — and doesn’t deserve to be rescued.
As I noted in a previous post, the current model of “professional” newspaper journalism is only a half-century old, dating from the period after the Second World War. Mass-circulation newspapers have only been around for a century or so. There is nothing absolute about these platforms for the distribution of information and opinion. There was news and opinion before newspapers appeared, and there will be news and opinion after newspapers vanish. The only people who are panicking are those with something to lose in the short-term — namely sinecures, position, and prestige.
There is already a lively discussion about potential business models for news, including some interesting reports coming out of research centres like Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The debate about the fate of newspapers and magazines as businesses finds its origins in despair, but many of the prescriptions emerging from this discussion are pointing in the right direction.
One business model is non-profit journalism financed by well-endowed foundations. Another, of course, is networked, Web-driven “citizen” journalism. We already have many inspiring examples of this model championed by advocates like Jeff Jarvis. If local newspapers actually started serving their own readers, via websites, instead of parading like national/international papers to satisfy the ego and career-building strategies of their editors, they may discover that there’s a good business in local news and information.
I predict a major shakeout among Old and New Media companies in the next few years, and from that flurry of M&A activity we will see the emergence of a new business model for news, information and opinion. That doesn’t mean that other business models – like non-profit journalism financed by foundations – won’t emerge. But smart money, in my opinion, would bet on a mega-merger reconfiguration of the media industries, driven by Web-based content, to fill the vacuum left by the death of printed newspapers.
Journalism schools, too, are going to have to get with the programme, because if the status quo is allowed to persevere in those precincts, pretty soon the students are going to know more about media production than their professors. A lot of unpleasant stable-cleaning is needed, but I’m not sure incumbent deans in those institutions have the stomach, or the inclination, to get the job done.
It will be interesting to follow over the coming months the voices in favour of state subsidies for newspapers, and to see whether they organize themselves politically and actually make a formal case for government intervention. The spectacle of their curious contortions will be intriguing to behold, though difficult to applaud.

Epilogue update: On Dec. 23, the Pew Research Center released survey results showing that, in the United States, the Web now surpasses newspapers as a source for news. Meanwhile, for those with a morbid interest in the newspaper industry’s death rattle, there is author Paul Gillin’s “Newspaper Death Watch” site, which tracks the agonizing process of economic necrotization like a running autopsy. And here are some predictions for 2009; and a feature in Atlantic magazine reflecting on the potential death of the New York Times. And here, finally, is an unmistakably polemical article, published in The Nation, that represents the old-guard leftist view that newspapers should be rescued by government subsidies.

In yesterday’s post, I addressed some of the structural dynamics of the newspaper business that are rendering the industry obsolete. In this second post, I will address a more controversial issue: the pervasive corporate culture in newspaper journalism that, by resisting new market realities, is accelerating the industry’s decline and obsolescence.

 Let’s start with a question. Why do so many established journalists dismiss the Web-driven technological revolution that is transforming their industry? The answer, I believe, is the way journalism is organized as a quasi-profession. In other words, the origins or this resistance can be found in journalism’s conservative and self-interested corporate culture.

Journalism is not, in fact, a “profession” according to any formal definition of that term. Professions like law and medicine are characterized by barriers to entry based on formal exams and credentials. Professions moreover enjoy monopoly entitlements, restrictive arrangements, and self-regulatory powers. Members of professional bodies are subject to discipline, and even expulsion, for malpractice or misconduct. Professionals, as we know, tend to enjoy high material and status rewards. Not surprisingly, professionals organize themselves to protect and promote their specific interests – especially their monopoly power.

The uncomfortable truth for journalists is that, whatever their pretensions, they are not professionals. So-called “professional” journalism is also relatively recent. It emerged after the Second World War, mainly through the creation of journalism schools which attempted to bring quasi-professional standards to a business that was, at that time, far from prestigious or glamorous.

Then journalists got their big break with Watergate. Indeed, the professional pretensions of journalism picked up powerful momentum when the Washington Post effectively brought down President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s disgrace and downfall was a great triumph for American journalism. Following the Watergate scandal, enrolment in American and Canadian J-Schools soared. Journalism was now the “fourth estate”, a player in the system, a powerful force in public life.

That was undoubtedly true. But what journalism was not – and still is not – was a profession. What is true, however, is that journalists – especially in North America – have appropriated the status attributes of professions. Thus the journalism establishment, with its close institutional ties to J-Schools, feels strongly motivated to defend its “professional” status and interests just like lawyers and doctors do when their monopoly entitlements are threatened.

It is for this reason that established journalists regard citizen journalism as a usurpation of their professional monopoly and the status benefits it confers. Journalists argue that, since they are educated and trained, they possess professional credentials. Citizen journalists on the Web, by contrast, are rank amateurs.

For an illustration of this conservative reflex, let’s visit the Ivory Tower of journalism education in America. At Columbia University’s prestigious School of Journalism, the school’s dean Nicholas Lemann published an article in The New Yorker magazine titled “Amateur Hour: Journalism Without Journalists”. This is what Lemann had to say about citizen journalism:

“To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.”

Lemann was admirably diplomatic, but not enough to conceal his unmistakably condescending attitude. No one should be surprised that the dean of a well-known American journalism school that serves as a gatekeeper into the highest ranks of the “profession” is sceptical about the rise of citizen journalism. Journalism schools are part of the same institutionalized quasi-professional elite that preserves, and defends, the material and status benefits of its members.

A subject that is truly crying out for serious investigation, however, is the role of journalism schools. It’s a widely known, but never admitted, fact that many J-Schools in North America are less committed to professional training as they are to ideological indoctrination (usually of the Marxist variety, though because journalism professors these days don’t actually read Marx, deference is usually due to Noam Chomsky and his disciples). I can’t count the number of times fresh-faced journalism students have come to “interview” me, regurgitating the vaguely formed Marxist notions of their esteemed professors. When you think about it, J-Schools should be natural allies of citizen journalism — and some J profs undoubtedly count among Web 2.0 evangelists — but most of them are too tied to the institutionalized values of the “profession” to make the break.

There are other troubling issues at J-Schools. Take Nicholas Lemann’s own school in New York. Columbia’s J-School has been shaken by an ethical scandal after students were caught cheating on an exam for a required course. And what was the course? Unbelievably, it was called “Journalism Ethics”. When students at America’s top journalism school are cheating even before they get real jobs, little wonder journalism has such a poor reputation with the public.

Now let’s visit one of the most prestigious journalism institutions in the world: the New York Times. The paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, wrote the following about citizen journalism: “I still think his concept of a minimally edited, largely self-regulating information world tilts too far toward a romantic’s vision of anarchy. And the proliferation of blogs, while wonderful in many respects, has yet to make a compelling case for the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes citizen journalism resembles mob journalism, or vigilante journalism.”

This is an intriguing point of view for a top executive at a newspaper that has been discredited by shocking ethical scandals and management fiascos. US News & World Report described the New York Times’ tarnished reputation a “crisis of confidence in American journalism”. When established newspapers like the New York Times lose the trust of their readers, no wonder many are embracing Web-based citizen journalism, which has the additional virtue of fostering and enhancing new forms of social capital and civic engagement.

Only last week, marketing guru Seth Godin was lamenting the decline of the New York Times. “Page by page, section by section, the influence of the New York Times is fading away,” noted Godin. “Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might.”

According to Godin, the malaise at the Times is that it’s living in the past. “The entire mindset of (every) newspaper has been driven by the cost of paper, the finite nature of paper, the cost of delivery and the cycle of a daily paper,” he observed. “You run enough articles to fit as many ads as you can sell. These are artefacts of a different age, one that today’s consumer doesn’t care a whit about. Lots of organizations go through this analysis. How do you leverage your brand or your customer base to get to the next level, to enter new markets or new technologies — and do it while running your old business. And almost without exception, organizations are run by people who want to protect the old business, not develop the new one.”

The problem at the New York Times pervades most newsrooms at largely daily papers: a corporate culture of complacency based on “professional” arrogance. It is astonishing, for example, how much time senior editorial managers spend mobilizing huge internal resources to “game” journalism awards – like the Pulitzer Prize – in order to enhance their own reputations and promote their own careers. Many newspapers managers are more interested in serving themselves than they are in serving their readers. The New York Times indeed paid a heavy price for that professional narcissism when it was revealed that its ethical breaches were institutionalized right up to senior management.

It still might be argued that only institutional forms of journalism – i.e. media corporations – can produce “excellence” by devoting significant financial resources to newsgathering by staff reporters working in vertical bureaucracies. Bill Keller makes this argument when he dismisses citizen journalism as “anarchy”. The same argument is often made about states. We need states, with their bureaucratic forms of social organization and coercion, because the alternative is anarchy. Proof is the tragic consequences of failed states and stateless societies in places like Somalia.

This argument, on the surface, has some merit. But there is one important difference. When states fail, the tragic consequences are due to the absence of an alternative. In journalism, however, there are substitutes to industrially-produced newspapers and the vertical corporations that manage the work of journalists who create and package their content. The alternatives are already available on the Web.

Newspaper journalists sidestep this by focusing on the qualitative aspect of citizen journalism. Retreating behind their credentials-based “professional” status, they dismiss citizen journalism as little more than a hobby. Though as we have seen, there is no formal legitimacy to these professional status claims. They are pure pretensions.

As the newspaper industry’s crisis deepens, these professional convulsions become even more elaborate. Only last month, some fifty top American newspaper executives held a “crisis summit” sponsored by the American Press Institute. This closed-door, invitation-only powwow in Virginia had the self-appointed mandate of “saving an industry in crisis”. It would be churlish to doubt the gravity of this event, or to question the sincerity of its distinguished participants. But let’s get real. This was hardly what the newspaper industry needed: a blue-ribbon, country-club meeting bringing together the same elder statesman of American journalism who are largely responsible, directly or indirectly, for the industry’s decline in the first place. Are these really the people who are going to “save” the industry? The proceedings, in the circumstances, must have resembled the moribund Third Republic voting its own dissolution in a Vichy casino.

Beyond status, the real issue, of course, is power. The Web is diffusing power away from bureaucratically organised forms of journalism that, traditionally, have required massive capital investment. Power is shifting towards spontaneously organised journalists who can gather and disseminate news with no barriers to entry. For established forms of journalism, the writing is on the wall – and on their balance sheets.

No wonder that the old guard is declaring a cautious truce, with dignity intact. Bill Keller at the New York Times even agrees that citizen journalist advocates like Jeff Jarvis may have a point after all.

“Over the years he and I have edged somewhat closer,” says Keller. “Not to put words in Jeff’s mouth, but he now, I think, acknowledges the utility of professional judgment, skills and standards in helping an audience navigate the new information world, and the advantages of having stable institutions to pay for such things as a Baghdad bureau and to protect First Amendment rights in court. In turn, I’ve embraced the value of the audience as a participant in gathering, truth-squadding and appraising information.”

Keller’s grudging concession, while commendable, requires scrutiny. No doubt that the audience – in other words, the public – is embracing information gathering and sharing thanks to the Web. Less certain is that we need “institutions” like the New York Times to report from Baghdad or protect our fundamental freedoms in the courts. Who says that only established newspapers can perform these functions?

Also, why do established journalists claim, as Keller suggests, a monopoly on “professional judgement, skills and standards”? This is absurd. For counter-evidence, take the example an unknown American journalist, Joshua Micah Marshall, who earlier this year won a prestigious George Polk Award for legal reporting. Marshall was not a salaried investigative reporter with the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times. He had published his tenacious citizen journalism on his own website, TalkingPointsMemo. Marshall has never attended journalism school. He holds a PhD in history.

What is certain is that the underlying notions about “news” must be seriously re-examined, if not entirely reinvented. Jeff Jarvis has contributed to this debate by pointing out that the newspaper “article” – journalism’s main unit of production – is outmoded. Articles are static, whereas news is dynamic. Others, like Steve Outing who writes about newspapers in Editor & Publisher, agree. Outing has called for a wholesale redefinition of “news”. Many other intelligent opinions have joined this discussion. The question is thus posed: What is “news”?

As that debate moves forward, you can be certain that the industry will rapidly reconfigure itself as the shake-out starts to get brutal. There will be big winners and losers. It’s always hard to predict merger-and-acquisition activity. But it’s possible that we will soon witness another round – successful this time – of multimedia “convergence” plays as news organizations look for New Media partners in an attempt to reinvent themselves.

News organizations like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones appear well positioned for the coming shakeout, if only because they don’t have a lot of ink on their fingers. By contrast, the newspaper-based cooperative, Associated Press, is already struggling. In fact, only this week we learned that CNN, the global news television network, is attempting to knock AP out of the box and drive it out of business by selling its own news as a wholesale provider. Who could have predicted, only a year ago, that CNN would take a run at AP? It’s a sign that more of these kinds of moves are in the works.

The big losers, of course, will be the ink-stained newspaper groups weighed down by layers of legacy assets – or so-called “whale shit”. Some of them, like the Wall Street Journal, may survive. Most will not. And the date of their extinction from the media landscape will likely come before 2043. Steve Rubel, in-house PR blogger/guru at Edelman, puts the date at 2014 — a decidedly more imminent and daunting deadline.

Established newspaper journalists meawhile will be swaggering without their customary self-assurance as the creative destruction of the Web 2.0 revolution sweeps through their once proud “profession”. In newspaper journalism’s senior management ranks, many will even have to endure the necessary task of shovelling a lot of whale shit out the door. It won’t be fun.

Here’s the good news. In 2043, newspapers may no longer be around, but we will still be consuming news and information. Only it might not be called journalism.