From Zach Seward on October 21, 2008 at 7:34 PM

Your idea reminds me of a line from Larry Summers, originally in reference to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

"It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too."

From Terry Steichen on October 21, 2008 at 9:14 PM

The major forms of journalism are largely owned by profit-oriented corporations, who quite naturally demand that journalism operate as a means to generate profits (and not offend its corporate owners or advertisers).

As long as this remains the case, journalism, in the traditional sense (such as investigative reporting) will continue to suffer. There's simply no logical way of getting around this fact of life.

If journalism organizations could somehow shift from corporate ownership to being independent and sponsored by donors, that could change.

But convincing profit-oriented owners to let journalism business go out on its own will be a very hard sell. Perhaps it will be possible (particularly if its profit potential becomes so clearly deficient), but it will take a major effort by the major players in journalism, to pull off.

I frankly don't see the courage (or desperation) being high enough for that to happen.

From Geneva Overholser on October 22, 2008 at 7:13 AM

Thanks for two interesting comments. Love the Summers line!

From 24.158.140.64 on October 22, 2008 at 1:07 PM

In the southern vernacular..... this is dumber than a fence post.

The mission is the reason. The cancer of liberalism that pervade the product is disgusting to enough readers to stop reading.

Your papers are not necessary and especially when the mission and advicy transcends news.

Your industry is dying and is leading the recession

From 138.163.0.44 on October 22, 2008 at 1:27 PM

Off topic.... but please SHOOT the design geek who thinks black text on blue-gray background is a good idea!

For those of us with OLD eyes, it's misery.

From Neal Pattison on October 22, 2008 at 5:55 PM

Over their careers, some old newspaper editors perfected the art of dealing with angry advertisers. (Or so I hear. I’ve never had the gift.)

After listening patiently to an unhappy local merchant, the wise editor replied: “I understand that you didn’t like this story, and there may be future stories you won’t like. But we hope you buy advertising because it is a good business choice – because ads in our paper bring customers to your business.”

And that, I guess, reflected the old business model: The news side worked independently to keep readers interested and connected … and the business side “sold” this audience to its advertisers.

But, wait, is this really such and “old” model? Most discussions of web revenue seem centered on “monetizing traffic.” Which, I think, means selling the audience to advertisers.

Yes, some things have changed. The tools for measuring responses to web ads, for instance. And assumptions about what web readers want. (And there’s no denying that many MSM newsrooms whittled away at their readership by practicing lazy and conceited journalism.)

But in most U.S. metro areas, the local newspaper’s web site is the top news site – and among the market's leaders. Which tells us the “brand,” the substance that traditionally kept readers interested and connected, is still viable.

Pew’s “State of the Media 2008” concludes that newsrooms are showing renewed levels of initiative and evolutionary vigor, both in print and on-line.

So, the basic proposition is intact: Our work is attracting a measurable audience.

So why do we keep hearing that the “model” is broken? Broken so completely, in fact, that thoughtful observers now suggest that good journalism may need to be performed as a charitable undertaking, not a profitable business?

It is not web-based journalism that is failing. It is the newspaper companies themselves that need mending.

They have not squarely faced questions about overhead, legacy costs, distribution systems and sales strategies.

Thoughtful publishers realize that the challenge is not how to deliver flavor-of-the-month content gimmicks in place of solid journalism; it is how to manage the transition from a manufacturing business to an information business.

From Geneva Overholser on October 22, 2008 at 7:47 PM

Thanks for the comments, including many thoughtful points from Pattison. And BTW, re the black on grey, I believe change is coming!

From Guy Baehr on October 22, 2008 at 7:51 PM

The business model for most mass audience newspapers is broken and can't be fixed. I’m talking about the papers that are genuine news organizations that serve both a business purpose and the social/political/cultural mission we, like Geneva Overholser, are concerned about.

This is because, until the Internet came along, large metro newspapers were quasi-monopolies for their advertisers. Department stores, car dealers, super market chains, big box stores, banks and anyone who wanted to place a classified ad had to go to the dominant newspaper in the area.

Normally there was only one paper that would effectively reach their customers -- and that one paper had no fear of any direct competition because the cost of starting a paper that could compete for the advertising was prohibitive. As a result most of these newspapers could routinely make annual profits of 20 to 30 percent.

The enlightened publishers used part of their monopoly profits to create strong newsrooms that could carry out the journalistic mission described by Geneva. They did this partly because they believed in the mission and partly to make their monopoly positions even stronger.

Other publishers, both family and corporate, just took the money and ran, putting as little as possible into their newsrooms, caving in to advertisers and avoiding investigative reporting and the lawsuits that are sometimes needed to keep the press free.

Now, with the internet, the monopoly on readers and advertisers is gone, and with it the traditional 20 and 30 percent profits. Why should we as journalists (or citizens) care?

Because, while there’s still a market for news and a market for advertising, there’s no longer a viable business model that can generate the kind of monopoly profits on which the strong newspaper journalism of the last 50 or 100 years was built.

For good or ill, the internet does not permit monopoly. Competition is unrelenting and costs much be kept as low as possible. The ideal is to get compelling content for free, as in YouTube, MySpace, eBay or Google News, and sell cheap targeted ads to those who come to see this cost-free content. The internet has yet to produce a stand-alone news organization. Yahoo was proud when it hired one reporter. No other internet operations followed its example.

Newspaper-style newsrooms, with or without their “legacy” presses, will not survive in this environment – although the wire services and perhaps two or three national brand-name news organizations like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, may be able to find a way to survive. Within five years, most cities and towns in the United States will not have a local for-profit daily newspaper. Worse, most cities and towns will not have a local for-profit professional news organization capable of fulfilling the traditional journalistic role of a newspaper. (There will be lots of enterprising bloggers, citizen journalists and interesting websites and lively discussion board, but very little solid professional journalism.)

Assuming enough people feel this is a loss – which is not certain – how could our society continue to maintain such news organizations in the absence of a viable for-profit business model?

There are at least two broad alternatives to the for-profit model, both of which have been tried successfully as ways to make up for some of the inherent deficiencies of the for-profit model.

The first is the non-profit model, in which a not-profit organization subsidizes a news organization either as a service to the community or to advance its goals. Successful examples range from the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Times, sponsored by religious groups, to the St. Petersburg Times, the Anniston Star and The Guardian (in England), all published by non-profit foundations. Would it be a bad use of the Ford Foundation’s money to buy the New York Times rather than let it go out of business or be bought by Ruppert Murdoch?

The second is government ownership. This is guaranteed to raise objections from most newspaper people, especially in the United States, but certainly there are examples of solid, independent news organizations owned by the government, such as the BBC in England or NPR here in the US. New York City, the state of New Jersey and numerous other states own and operate public radio and television stations that produce distinguished news and public affairs programming.

The usual objections to government ownership and subsidy are that such news organizations would lose their independence, but can’t institutional structures and professional standards be developed to guard journalistic independence. Journalists created just such structures and traditions to protect their ability to produce honest and independent journalism while working for large profit-making companies owned by a wealthy families or large corporations that made most of their money by selling advertising to other large companies owned and operated by powerful individuals and interests. The protections they developed over the last century didn’t always work, but there’s no reason to assume similar protections could not be developed by journalists working for news organizations owned or subsidized by governments.

It will be interesting to see if some city or town decides sometime in the next five years that it would be too great a blow to its civic culture to let its local newspaper go out of business just because the market can’t support its continued existence. And it will be interesting to see if we in journalism can work with the community to find a way to make a publicly supported local news organization work.

Or we can all just give up and become bloggers.

From Emmanuel K. Dogbevi on October 23, 2008 at 1:29 AM

Thanks Geneva,

This is well said. The issues you raised are so relevant to my country Ghana.

At the dawn of multiparty democracy in 1992 also came a proliferation of the media as never before in the history of the country.

But by and large, they are mostly set up to make money and so the focus of journalism has greatly shifted from telling the news as it is to projecting personalities, businesses and politicians.

This trend has rendered journalists and media organizations that want to serve the fundamental purpose of journalism redundant.

From 217.21.112.22 on October 23, 2008 at 5:30 AM

As an online editor, this issue confronts me daily. Just today, we have been discussing how to implement a news-breaking service in consultation with the advertising department. A few years back, advertising would be informed about a year after the launch of such a thing.

If society is unwilling to support journalism, and it has demonstrated that amply, who cares about ethics and professionalism?

From 70.119.137.165 on October 23, 2008 at 6:39 AM

"Oh we're all shifting to new ways to reach new audiences with new approaches to new issues.." um, what on earth does this mean? Most of us work for newspapers, wires, etc. go into newsrooms were we write, edit, shoot and so on. We get paid for this and receive benefits.
With the massive layoffs, and more predicted, it is hard to see how a pink-slipped journo will vault into this world. Yet deriding them as dinos who are out of it seems flip and dismissive. How many bread and butter journalists will successfully start profit-making sites or blogs? Should they all have to?
More specific advice, ideas and examples would be more productive for me.

From Geneva Overholser on October 23, 2008 at 8:26 AM

Thanks so much for this rich thinking in response to my post. So much comes down to whether traditional newsrooms can buck the predictions and do the innovation that is so needed. i've long written about alternatives http://genevaoverholser.com/?q=node/14 and am intrigued and hopeful about them. But i don't think we'll see any time soon widespread replacement for legacy media when it comes to the big stories on big business and big government.

From Elaine Clisham on October 23, 2008 at 9:46 AM

'K, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that journalism has NEVER been a business model. Journalism is a product. (A very necessary product.) Any business model newspapers adopt needs to support great journalism, but journalism isn't a business model. And there's nothing magical about a newspaper -- it's just the best technology that's historically been available to deliver that product. The fact that it happened also to be the best technology to deliver commercial messages -- i.e., advertising -- was nothing more than a happy coincidence.

Well, the happy coincidence is over, and we're going to need to face some harsh realities. Here at Newspaper Next Central we've spent a lot of time looking at other industries that have gone through what the newspaper industry is going through at the moment, and we've found the experience of Kodak particularly enlightening. Some of the things that Kodak has experienced are directly translatable:
1. Our newspaper businesses will be smaller, just like Kodak's film business, which shrank dramatically. That doesn't mean our overall businesses will necessarily be smaller, although certainly that will be true for the near term. (See item 2, below.) Kodak is smaller than it used to be, but wildly profitable again, because they figured it out in time.
2. It will be a while before new revenue streams make up what will be lost from print advertising, and we need to face that as a reality. Kodak's digital revenue didn't grow as fast as its film business shrank, but if they hadn't made digital a priority that revenue wouldn't have grown at all. We can't dismiss new revenue streams because they're not big enough.
3. Half of a typical market has already voted that the newspaper is not its preferred source of information, just like Kodak film employees were using digital cameras at family gatherings. Instead of beating them up to change their minds, which they're not really inclined to do, let's focus on what other information, which might be nothing like news but will be just as critical to their daily lives, our organizations can provide. This effort doesn't necessarily have to fall to newsrooms, but if we don't do it somehow, another player will and we will have lost yet more of our local footprint.
4. There ARE new revenue streams out there, but there's no one silver bullet. We'll need to look at an aggregation of small-bore solutions rather than one big behemoth like print advertising. That means new capabilities on the sales staff, new ways of charging customers, new ways of interacting with them, etc. Most newspapers have been really slow off the mark with this, and they continue to resist it at their peril.

So, now that the happy coincidence is over, I would suggest the question should be, How can we assemble an array of revenue streams and an array of information products that support and enhance our journalism functions and expand our value and utility among our constituencies?

From Michael Odza on October 23, 2008 at 2:55 PM

Many thoughtful and accurate observations, but methinks the elephant is too large to be described usefully by the blind men and women around it. It's true that advertising has been bled off from print newspapers by Web-based businesses; it's also true that a smaller and smaller percentage of the population has been reading newspapers over the last several decades -- whether they cared more about the news or the advertising -- or the community stuff. I hear from people who tell me the only reason they're still getting the paper is that doing the crossword is still easier (or more familiar, more likely) on paper than on screen. Nevertheless, many many businesses do make money even on Wall Street while maintaining a social mission. And if the mission of companies weren't strong, all companies would be market manipulators, pornographers, drug dealers or casinos -- wherever the margins are highest. I do endorse the "think of journalism as a tool" to accomplish social goals -- comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable-- as well as the Christensen-inspired "what 'jobs' do people want done, that one's business assets can be mustered to help them with -- but the latter only helps a business adapt to radical change. It doesn't further the social goal of enabling a democratic society -- the ultimate mission of journalism. So do I have the answer? Well, no...but I do agree that newspaper companies, many of them, resisted the disruptive changes too long, and are panicking and giving up on the low revenues of alternate models too soon. Have I agreed with and disagreed with everyone yet? Nope -- there's the canard about the liberal media, which apparently has taken firm root. Visit Project Censored or FAIR to see how many times mainstream media has taken the conservative position, from not challenging the rationales for the war in Iraq to repeating the ridiculous charges about Rev. Wright...But I've got to go. Now that I've escaped from the clutches of the newspaper world (with their not-so-gentle nudge), I have work to do!

From Geneva Overholser on October 24, 2008 at 1:06 PM

We tend to think of the changes sweeping journalism as economic and technological. But I keep being reminded how much deeper they go.

Forms of discontent about journalism that weren’t able to gain much traction while traditional media dominated are finding footholds in today’s open forum and perhaps making us think about new ways to approach our craft. Some of these new approaches will be part of the variegated landscape that journalism is fast becoming.

Thursday night I heard some of that discontent in extraordinarily powerful remarks from Ron Sims, Kings County (Seattle) Executive. Sims addressed our California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, led by the extraordinary Michelle Levander. Here are some quotes from his exhortation to the journalists gathered in downtown L.A.:

“Journalists’ responsibilities are to make us better and to challenge us. When we look back on history, we will realize what did not get covered. It is your job to pick up those subtle things that become the changes in the world.

“You’ve got to find new tools. There’s got to be another way to present the solutions. The idea of continuing to report [everything as] conflict means that, as a black man, I lose.

“If journalism continues as it is today, I can tell you that lives will continue to degrade...The issue is to begin to report the solutions. Journalists can call us to something that is noble, in a country that needs nobility. You can call us to be more than we are.

“The journalists in some ways have got to tell us, ‘there’s the path.’ Don’t just report the problems anymore. It’s just burdensome. I don’t want any more burdens. All I want to do is participate in the solutions and that’s what journalists can help us do.”

You could sense now and then in the crowd a silent “you don’t quite get our role” or “you’re not acknowledging the power of shining light in dark places.” But those sentiments seemed overpowered. This was a moment to listen.