So what next for the paper? Rumours that it will be given away free like Lebedev’s other newspaper, The London Evening Standard, continue, despite its new owner apparently assuring Prime Minister Gordon Brown that it won’t be.

Yet what will happen? Certainly Lebedev will invest a considerable amount of money in the paper, not least because his media properties back home in Russia have always had both his wallet and his backing to rely on, though presumably avoiding any conflict with him. Yet whether this will translate into a viable – let alone profitable – newspaper remains to be seen.

As a broadsheet (despite being tabloid-sized since 2003), The Independent sells only 183,547 copies a day, its Sunday edition a mere 155,661. Compare this to its closest rival, given their shared centre left outlooks, The Guardian, with 284,514 a day, or the right wing ‘qualities’ – The Times and The Telegraph – with 505,062 and 685,177 respectively. It is perhaps with good reason that The Sun’s* notorious ex-editor Kelvin McKenzie described this sector as the ‘unpopular press’ – certainly even The Times makes a yearly loss, whilst The Guardian continues to haemorrage money.

It may simply be the case that there are too many titles in an already over-crowded and undervalued sector of the press. A cynical observer may at this point argues that Lebedev’s actions are those of a billionaire oligarch who has just bought an expensive toy, perhaps evidenced by his son, Evgeny, being placed in charge of the operation. Yet this misses one important point – quality journalism costs money and may in fact be economically nonviable in today’s climate. Outside of rich benefactors and public bodies, how else is it to be funded?

This brings us to the online angle. One possibility Lebedev could pursue is to simply close the newspaper’s print arm altogether and focus on its online version, much as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Christian Scientist Monitor have already done. This does however still pose problems. Apart from the difficulties of making a profit from advertising alone, the centre left web news market has arguably already been colonised, by The Guardian whose site attracts 20,499,858 unique visitors a month versus Independent.co.uk’s paltry 7,215,928. The TV licence-funded BBC News Online also poses a considerable obstacle – not least with its 350 million page impressions a month. It has better resources, an internationally renowned brand and, some critics argue, a left-wing bias that competes with the Independent’s own similar editorial line. What niche can an online-only Independent occupy?

One suggestion comes from an unlikely source. Libertarian politics blogger Paul Staines, also known as ‘Guido Fawkes’, has always been scathing at what he refers to as ‘The Dead Tree Press’. Yet he also seems to have an attachment to The Independent – going so far as to suggest the paper should go completely digital and become moderate conservative, but also embrace technology the other newspapers have so far not explored – namely an application that allows it to be read by iPhone subscribers, an option Staines sees as a possible financially viable future for print media. Though, perhaps simply by dropping out of print altogether, The Independent could both save a small fortune and provide some room for the other broadsheets to expand into.

If not, then there is the possibility that The Independent may simply fade away, as other UK newspapers such as The Daily Sketch and The Sunday Correspondent** have done. A sometimes innovative newspaper’s final legacy may be that it is the first major UK casualty of the post-print age.

* The Sun’s present circulation is 2,972,763 – almost five times as much as The Telegraph, which is the UK’s most popular broadsheet.

** This publication closed down in 1990 with a circulation of 149,241 – dangerously close to The Independent’s present circulation.

In Murdoch’s world, the new model of journalism is one where people pay for journalism online.

Murdoch said: “In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.”

Murdoch is right when he asserts that the old model based on classified advertising is a failure, but he is wrong to suggest that people will actually pay for news. They never have paid for general interest news – not really, anyhow – and there’s little to suggest that this historical precedent will change.

Murdoch is sitting pretty because he can charge for specialized content. His mix of financial news brings a product to a specialized audience that couldn’t get this information elsewhere. Other financial news outlets remain similarly well-positioned, such as Bloomberg and Reuters, where information provided really does equal financial decisions.

But general interest news faces a different reality. As far back as Walter Lippmann, writing in Public Opinion, it was abundantly clear that news readers were fickle and not willing to pay for news.

It’s worth noting in-depth the astute observations Lippmann made that are still relevant today.

“Nobody thinks for a moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself.”

“He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him. Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be reelected every day.”

Lippmann’s words are increasingly relevant when it is not just newspapers competing for the attention of fickle customers but a wide variety of blogs and aggregators and personalized RSS feeds that scan news. If one newspaper starts charging, another newspaper source can easily be found that does not. The observation that in a competitive news environment, brand loyalty is a misnomer is an important one – especially now.

Lippmann makes some other key distinctions worth mentioning about the attitude between the reader and his news source. First, readers believe that news should be free, “supplied gratis” and that readers “expect the newspaper to serve us with the truth however unprofitable the truth may be.” In other words, don’t look to readers to start paying for expensive investigative stories.

Maybe the dearth of investigative news will continue to inspire public radio-style donations for Spot.us to continue to produce crowd-funded journalism. But Lippmann was careful to note that most people don’t think of journalists in the same category as they do other institutions, such as public schools, law, medicine, religion, or engineering, for example.

In journalism, the business model works like an anti-business as far as the news organization is concerned, since the reader pays for the product below cost. Readers also expect journalism to be held to the ethical standards of journalism is compared ethically along with a church or a school.

But a church is supported by collection and subsides, and schools supported by the taxpayer or tuition fees, so people are paying, in a sense for a product. And, Lippmann argues, you can’t compare journalism to law, medicine or engineering, because the consumer is actually paying for the service.

As Lippmann smirks, “A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away.”

The business model is broken, we know that. And it’s always been broken – as far as the reader has been concerned – no reader has ever paid for their full share of what it takes to actually produce that day’s newspaper. And now we give content away for free.

So therein lies the dilemma – we expect the truth to come for free, but it comes at a price. And without anyone paying for the truth, how will it be delivered to news consumers?

[Editor's note: OJR will not publish on Friday, due to the Christmas holiday. But we will be back next Wednesday.]

There will always be a need for the reporting of current events, but because of the Internet, journalism is undergoing revolutionary change in terms of how news is distributed and accessed. Conventional newspapers are thus in crisis, and there are some who propose a Federal bailout. No way!

Back in the 1980s, a couple of newspapers investigated the prospects for electronic information through a service known as videotex.¹ I was involved while working at AT&T with the planning of a trial of videotex jointly conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder Newspapers in Florida. AT&T and Knight-Ridder correctly saw the coming of a day when news and information would be accessed and obtained electronically over telecommunication. However, the use of the home TV set for display and the concept of a single large centralized database of information were all wrong – and videotex ultimately failed.²

After the failure of videotex, newspapers became smug and mostly ignored the coming of the Internet. They did not seem to realize that although much of their profits came from classified ads, this was exactly the kind of information that could best be obtained on-line over the Internet. When they finally woke up, it was too late.

Newspapers also seemed unable to determine how to charge for on-line access. Thus many newspapers offer today’s news for free over the Internet, but charge for past articles – thus implying that they place no real value on today’s edition.

Access of music over the Internet – such as the Apple iTunes store and Amazon – proves that consumers are willing to pay, if access is easy and relatively inexpensive. This model is now being extended to books and magazines, using such products as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone. Will on-line journalism soon follow? Will a new breed of electronic on-line journalism evolve? Will conventional newspapers on paper disappear?

The response of many newspapers to Internet competition has been to fire journalists, reduce the size of the paper, and increase prices. At this rate, they will ultimately be printing one paper at a price of a few $100,000.

Technology is one factor that shapes the future, shaped by the needs of consumers and what makes good economic sense. Old industries evolve, and some which are unable to adapt, die. But Federal bailouts of dying industries only delay the inevitable and impede progress.

¹ “A Bell System View of Videotex,” (with Dennis J. Sullivan, Jr.), Telecommunications Policy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September 1982), pp. 237-241 and “Teletext and Videotex in North America: Service and System Implications,” Telecommunications Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (March 1980), pp. 17-24.

² “Videotex: Anatomy of a Failure,” Information & Management, Vol. 9, No. 2 (September 1985), pp. 99-109.

Geoffrey Cowan is university professor at the University of Southern California and dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. David Westphal is a senior fellow at USC’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and former Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.

A mythology about the relationship between American government and the news business is again making the rounds, and it needs a corrective jolt. The myth is that the commercial press in this country stands wholly independent of governmental sustenance. Here’s the jolt: There’s never been a time in U.S. history when government dollars weren’t propping up the news business. This year, federal, state and local governments will spend well over $1 billion to support commercial news publishers through tax breaks, postal subsidies and the printing of public notices. And the amount used to be much higher.

This topic is back in the news because of the rapid economic decline of newspapers, news magazines and many broadcast outlets. Amid deepening concern about the impact on our democracy, some are calling on the government to get involved. Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson were among the latest, urging limited government aid to support the cause of news and information. The Federal Trade Commission is among the federal agencies wading in, scheduling discussions Dec. 1-2 to gauge whether government intervention is needed.

The truth is that American government and the news business have always been joined at the hip, and not just through the government’s copyright protections, restrictions on anti-competitive practices and regulation of the public airwaves. It’s also through the infusion of tax dollars.

The Postal Service’s subsidy of mailing costs for newspapers and magazines, which dates back to colonial America and the Postal Act of 1792, is often raised as Exhibit A. Less well known is just how large this subsidy was – and how much it has shrunk. As recently as the late 1960s, the government was forgiving roughly three-fourths of print publications’ periodical mailing expenses, at a cost of about $400 million annually (or, adjusted for inflation, about $2 billion today). Much of that disappeared with the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 and in subsequent cutbacks. But the Post Office still discounts the postage cost of periodicals by about $270 million a year.

Postal subsidies, though, are just the start of the story. Federal and state governments forego about $890 million a year on income and sales tax breaks to the newspaper industry, most of it at the state level. The actual figure is probably much higher because many states don’t report tax expenditure details.

Another major form of government support comes through public-notice requirements, which also have their roots in colonial America. These laws require cities, counties and school districts, along with state and federal agencies, to buy advertising space in newspapers to disclose a range of government actions – such as plans for a new school. Take a look at the Wall Street Journal, for example, and you’ll usually find a page or more of federally paid and mandated ads – in impossibly small print — announcing property seizures. Those are public notices, and nationwide they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

But all three of these categories are shrinking. For example, legislation has been introduced in 40 states to move public notices to the Web, and the Department of Justice has already announced it will shift property-forfeiture notices from newspapers to its own Web site. The impact would be another blow to newspapers, especially small ones: In 2000, the National Newspaper Association estimated that public-notice billings accounted for 5-10 percent of newspaper revenue.

Postal subsidies, tax breaks and public-notice requirements only begin to describe the ways governments at every level have supported the American news industry. Municipalities provide newspapers with enormous sales and marketing benefits by allowing vendor boxes on public sidewalks at little or no cost to the newspaper companies. Drug advertising regulations by the Food and Drug Administration have been a boon to magazine publishers because they require TV ads to be accompanied by more specific disclosure, and magazines are one of the approved outlets. Commercial broadcasting has also benefited mightily, via the free use of government-licensed airwaves.

After backing the news industry for more than 200 years, the government should assess how it can be most helpful now, when the future of news and information is so uncertain. As it debates possible forms of support, the government should consider these principles:

First and foremost, do no harm. A cycle of powerful innovation is under way. To the extent possible, government should avoid retarding the emergence of new models of newsgathering.

Second, the government should help promote innovation, as it did when the Department of Defense funded the research that created the Internet or when NASA funded the creation of satellites that made cable television and direct TV possible.

Third, for commercial media, government-supported mechanisms that are content neutral — such as copyright protections, postal subsidies and taxes — are preferable to those that call upon the government to fund specific news outlets, publications or programs.

However policymakers proceed, they should do so based on facts rather than myth. The government has always supported the commercial news business. It does so today; and unless the government takes affirmative action, the level of support is almost certain to decline at this important time in the history of journalism.

My kids are big fans of the “National Treasure” films, so, like thousands of other visitors, we had to stop at the National Archives in Washington. While my kids rushed to see the Declaration of Independence (once we slogged through a 90-minute wait), I slid over toward the more legally profound Constitution, then spent the bulk of my time with the Bill of Rights.

As a journalist, I find it thrilling to look upon the original First Amendment (actually, “Article the third” on the document). Straining to see those famous words, now faded almost to obscurity on the page, I was reminded that their power draws not from their presence on that piece of paper, but from the affect that they had upon a new nation, and have to continued to have since.

Words fade from paper. Websites fall offline. Books are sometimes lost to the ages. But those works’ influence endures in the people that they affected – people who copy and reference and change their lives as result of the words that they read or heard.

That was the first lesson I took from my recent trip: That the power of journalism lies not in its presence on a printed page or on a website, but in the influence that it has upon the audience who reads it. We protect journalism not by restricting access to it, but by extending its influence by spreading its reach.

After visiting D.C., we drove down to Colonial Williamsburg, where we spent a day walking around the recreation of Virginia’s 18th-century capital city. Dozens of craftspeople make up the bulk of the exhibits there, and, predictably I suppose, I chose to spend the most time at the print shop.

A solitary young lady inked and, literally, pressed the day’s paper in a small shop, no more the size that three cubicles in a modern newsroom. There were no typesetters on duty that morning, though the young lady said that no more than two or three people would ever be working in the shop at a time, back in the day.

Watching the colonial press in action, it reminded me far more of what my wife and I do at home to put out a couple of websites, than what corporate news publishers such as Fox or Gannett do today to run their business empires. (And, by the way, those folks back in the day in colonial print shops made money and plenty of folks publishing in small online shops today are making money, as well. So let’s lay that counter-argument to rest, shall we?)

In the 18th century, the power of the corporation was the power of the crown. Corporations in colonial America were charted and sustained by the King of England. Frankly, given the power that modern corporations extend, through their lobbyists, over the writing and enforcement of U.S. law, not all that much as changed today.

Some modern journalism industry executives are fond of claiming that the journalism industry is the only one in the U.S. to enjoy constitutional protection, through the First Amendment. How wrong they are. The First Amendment’s freedom of the press did not endow corporations the right to make a profit, or protect their market share. Nor did it select a class of businesses to keep watch over others, something that they’ve too often failed to do, anyway.

The First Amendment instead endowed the people – individuals like those who worked the press in Williamsburg – the right to publish, and by doing so, to challenge their government and institutions, even corporations.

The words printed on that fading document in the National Archives retain their power only so long as individuals exercise the rights those words describe. As certain news publishers attempt to use the power of government to change the rules – to restrict access to information and the ability to publish and distribute it – others of us ought to remember the lessons of Washington and Williamsburg, and to raise our voices – in print, online and on air – to protect our existing freedom of publishing for individuals who wish to exercise it.

I’ve written about how legal precedents shaped the thinking of early online news managers. Today, I’d like to suggest that early online publishing technology affected industry thinking in profound, and, ultimately, tragic, ways as well.

For those of you who weren’t working on a newspaper website around 1996, let me take you on a trip into the pensieve (or, down memory lane, for those of you overdosed on Harry Potter references this week). I started on the Rocky Mountain News website in November 1996, and was the only person at the paper updating and maintaining the news side of the website. Every morning, I came in around 5 am, selected a couple dozen stories from the newspaper, then called them up on the paper’s ATEX terminals. One by one, I sent a copy of each story to a queue we’d created which interfaced with the Pantheon Bridge program on a Windows NT box in the paper’s computer room.

Pantheon was a set of programs used by many newspapers at the time to port copy from the papers’ publishing systems into flat HTML files. One by one, I’d call up each story in Pantheon, to make sure that it had come over and then to assign the story to the appropriate section in which it would appear on the website.

Pantheon built index pages for each section, in addition to create an HTML page for each article. To do those things, it had to read the head, deck, byline, publishing date and story copy into fields in an Access (!) database, from which it would push each article into page templates. (Heaven forbid that anyone on the copy desk had decided to use a different way to mark up a head or byline, because that would break the parsing process.)

I pulled whatever photos I needed from the paper’s photo server (on a Mac) and Photoshopped them to the specs I needed. After that, I fired up Notepad to hand-code the paper’s front page.

Finally, I would use two FTP programs to manually transfer each JPG image and story and index file to the Rocky’s webservers, then at Scripps headquarters in Cincinnati (Fetch for the images from the Mac, and WS_FTP for the HTML files from the Wintel box).

When I moved to the Los Angeles Times website in January 2000, I was delighted to find that the Times staff (which numbered in the dozens) had written a series of scripts to move every article and some images from the paper’s print publishing systems onto the Web. But human staff needed to check the feed every morning, to see that it had come through uncorrupted. Several mornings, it hadn’t, and tech staff needed to debug and restart the feed.

Still, Times online editors hard-coded most top stories in HTML, manually editing images in Photoshop and building index pages by hand.

By today’s standards, the work was ugly and mundane. But it had to be done. Online readers wanted to see the newspaper online. They wanted the freedom to read the paper on their computers at work, so that they could hit the road from home a few minutes earlier each morning.

On the advertising side, automated scripts at both papers helped bring classified ads online. And at the Rocky, inside sales reps “upsold” classified advertisers to put their ads online. At the Rocky and at many papers, that incremental revenue from upsold classified ads paid for the online production staff, in both editorial and advertising.

Why does this matter now? Shouldn’t those of us who remain at newspaper websites just be thankful that we don’t have to go through that hassle to get our sites online everyday?

Let’s remember that arc, though, and how what happened then has shaped what is happening in the industry now.

I believe that the hoops we had to jump through to get newspaper stories online influenced newspaper managers’ perceptions about the difficulty of online publishing. Sure, many of us had personal websites and knew how it easy it was to slap together a page in HTML (or by using an early page editor). But senior newspaper managers, the people plotting the business future of the industry, saw online publishing only through the prism of getting their content from their proprietary print systems through programs like Pantheon and onto the Web. That led many of them to see online publishing as something difficult, creating a high barrier of entry for potential competitors.

If newspapers were worried, it was about big-money rivals such as Microsoft’s Sidewalk. Individually published websites and blogs, when they started to appear, weren’t n anyone’s radar as competition. Managers saw online publishing as demanding complicated, expensive, technical solutions.

So online staff were put to that task, not to noodling around with online-only content, independently conceived and produced. Today, we can look back and see the opportunity missed. What if the Bay Area newspapers had developed a free online classified service, and attempted to upsell some of those free advertisers into a paid print ad – the opposite model of what so many newspapers pursued? If they had, perhaps there wouldn’t have been a Craigslist, and the future of the news industry could have developed along a radically different arc.

What if more managers had paid attention to the ease with which so many of us were cranking out our personal websites and charged us, on company time, to develop tools to allow all newspaper readers to do the same? Can you image what could have happened had newspapers developed and controlled the first blogging tools?

What if newspaper ad sales teams sold ads into those bloggers’ webpages, before Google got into that game with AdSense? What would the industry’s market share look like today?

But, of course, none of those things happened. Because, I suggest, 1990s newspaper managers looked at us, toiling with the likes of Pantheon and hacked-together Perl scripts, and concluded that online publishing was complex, frustrating and difficult. So by the time that online jockeys who didn’t have to struggle getting newspaper copy online had developed tools like Craigslist, Blogger and AdWords, the competition they unleashed overwhelmed the industry before newspaper managers could change their thinking.

While the newspaper industry struggles to find new definition in an Internet age, the population most at risk of being left behind is low-income communities. Local newspapers are suffering significant losses in the industry, and yet the medium is still heavily relied upon as a source of information for poorer areas where Internet access is minimal. Many of these communities are already under-served by the media, and as their newspapers disappear, the void is likely to widen. Eventually, these communities may benefit greatly from the communication tools the Internet and mobile news delivery will provide. But during this period of turbulence the digital divide could impede progress. In affected areas, the wealthy will be gaining a medium while the poor are losing one. Meanwhile, in areas with more universalized Internet access, impoverished communities will be given access to news on a scale never before extended by traditional media.

Community Journalism and Hyper-Local Markets

Communities in South Los Angeles have long been starved of media attention. Since the collapse of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1989, the newspaper industry in Los Angeles has been dominated by a single, powerful newspaper. The Los Angeles Times overshadows local newspapers such as the Los Angeles Wave and the Los Angeles Daily News, creating a monopoly on news coverage that favors broader stories over community-sensitive pieces. Stories from South Los Angeles are rare, and the Los Angeles Times has been criticized for limiting its coverage of the area to tragic or violent breaking news stories.

“The LA Times covers breaking news that they deem worth covering,” said Don Wanlass, news editor for the Los Angeles Wave, one of three newspapers based in South Los Angeles that makes an effort to cover news significant to residents in cities like Compton, Watts and Inglewood. “There’s a lot of sentiment out there that the Times only reports bad news, like political corruption scandals and shootings. They don’t go into the small communities and get some of the stories that are there to be had.”

In the mid-1990s, the Times established suburban sections, including the City Times section, as a response to the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was partially due to the consistent lack of South L.A. coverage by the mainstream mass media that the riots were provoked, according to Henry Watson, a South L.A. resident and one of the “LA Four” responsible for beating a white truck driver almost to death on April 29, 1992. “April 29th allowed the world to come into South Central for the first time and take a look around and see,” said Watson.

The Los Angeles Times responded by attempting to bridge the information divide between L.A.’s diverse communities and extend conversation across cultural barriers. Since then, not only has the Times folded its suburban city sections, but it has also shut down its California section, folding its remaining local news into the “A” section of the paper. Watson says that lessened local coverage in the mainstream media inevitably breeds more tension in South Los Angeles. “The media only want to show the negative,” said Watson. “But they need to come here and see the positive.” It would not be inconceivable, he warned, for a repetition of the 1992 riots to emerge if South L.A. continues to be consistently ignored. Another resident, Tony Falley, says that the lack of balanced media attention has left the area to physically stagnate. “Our environment needs to be built up,” said Falley. “As far as Florence and Normandie, where the riots happened, we don’t have anything but the same stuff: a gas station and a liquor store.”

In some South L.A. cities, the Los Angeles Wave and other small community newspapers have attempted to fill the coverage gap, but declining circulation is threatening to destroy these smaller institutions faster than their national counterparts. “We try to cover the community the best way we can with the man power we have,” said Wanlass. “We have 21 cities and two reporters.”

Ironically, it is not for lack of reader interest that smaller newspapers are struggling. Although every traditional, offline news medium is suffering losses, a recent study of media consumption shows that local newspapers are more valuable to the public than national newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the public are still consuming local newspapers compared to 18 percent reading national dailies, according to the global public relations firm Ketchum. This makes local newspapers the second most valuable of the traditional journalistic mediums behind major network television, while national newspapers lag behind in 8th place. Local newspaper readership also reaches a wider age breadth, with 34 percent of people under the age of 24 reading community newspapers compared to 11 percent of the youth population reading national dailies. The disparity is dramatic in every age range, but perhaps the most extreme statistics are for the age range with the highest consumptive rate of national newspapers. A total of 26 percent of men and women between the age of 55 and 64 are dedicated to national newspapers, while 81 percent are reading local dailies.

In possession of a seemingly dependent readership, community newspapers have lost circulation at a slower pace than has, for example, the Los Angeles Times. The Daily Breeze, which serves South Bay Los Angeles, saw a 4 percent drop from September 2007 to September 2008, while the Los Angeles Times suffered a 5 percent cut in circulation. Another community newspaper, the Glendale News Press, saw a 3 percent decline, and the rural Antelope Valley Press, maintained its readership without loss.

But one of the major concerns for newspapers serving poorer communities, like the Los Angeles Wave, is the slow pace at which they are migrating into the virtual realm. Their online resources are minimal when compared to newspaper companies that serve more affluent parts of Los Angeles, and their readership still relies heavily on the print version of the newspaper. In South Los Angeles, in the urban, low-income areas that newspapers like the Los Angeles Wave serve, more than half of the residents do not have access to the Internet.

And yet, the Internet is the perfect medium for under-served communities craving attention. Already, local groups are finding ways to fill the historical media gap in their cities from the ground upward. “There are all kinds of blogs springing up in small cities,” said Wanless. “It’s becoming more and more a trend and way for people to keep up with what their city government is doing.” Blogs such as Lynwood Watch, which aggregates news from the city of Lynwood, have encouraged a new level of dialogue to emerge between residents. “It steers people to news they might not normally know is out there and encourages commentary,” Wanlass explained.

As a communication tool, the Internet has the potential to unite and integrate isolated communities with wider society and bypass some of the barriers traditional news organizations encounter, such as language. In Los Angeles, diverse cultures are alienated from the traditional media. “There’s a language barrier,” said Wanlass. “There are a lot of recent immigrants from Mexico and South America.” Not only are many of these immigrant communities cut off from media streams but, according to Wanlass, their isolation makes them more vulnerable to inaccurate or unreliable information. “They don’t speak English and they fear government intrusion,” said Wanlass. “They’re also willing to believe anything anybody tells them, and sometimes the rumors on the street aren’t always accurate.”

Being able to interact easily with one another in their own language could benefit these under-served communities greatly. In Lynwood, for example, the main form of communication is ground mail, and with so few reporters covering the area, lobbyists and politicians have seized the opportunity to exploit the lack of public awareness. In 2006, when the city government was contemplating a deal with a redevelopment agency to uproot thousands of families and build a football stadium, real estate agencies began mailing the community offering potential buy-out deals. According to one resident, some families sold their homes for fear of being evicted when the redevelopment agency took over. However, the deal with the agency was never completed. Instead, government officials were indicted for misappropriating public funds and the incomplete contract for development was overruled. Yet, a year after the indictment proceedings, Lynwood residents were still living in fear. The informational void had not only left the community “out of the loop,” but was seriously threatening their way of life. Families were contemplating selling their homes, and some already had, for lack of up-to-date news. Up to a year after the contract had been overthrown and the threat of a football stadium abolished, real estate agencies continued to play on public ignorance and scare them into quick sales.

The same thing happened during local government elections in 2007. Accurate information about the candidates was virtually non-existent, and instead, political action committees inundated the community with mudslinging campaign fliers. One candidate was accused of being a drug dealer. Another was accused of tax evasion and harboring illegal immigrants. Whether the accusations had basis in truth, it didn’t matter. Without a viable “watchdog” presence in the city, the uninhibited PACs could publish anything they wanted. Coupled with a lack of information from any other sources, these materials became the sole influencers in the campaign for much of the community. Unshakable rumors became ingrained in the public mindset, and still form much of the basis for opinion today.

Eventually, blogs may become a platform for under-served communities to create much-needed public dialogue, but until then, local newspapers remain the most important source of information for lower-income communities. Almost 50 percent of people with incomes lower than $25,000 rely on local newspapers as their main source of news, according to research by the Norman Lear Center at USC. Right now, Lynwood Watch is simply a news aggregation site, using newspapers like the Wave to provide content for users to comment on. Although it has been successful in encouraging more interaction between residents and local news topics, the site does not produce original content and much of the commentary is driven by rumors and bickering. The site is also controlled by a completely anonymous source. “The problem is that nobody knows who’s behind it,” said Wanlass. “You don’t know where they’re coming from or what their biases are.”

Grassroots Journalism

According to the blog search engine Technorati, a new blog is created every two seconds, bringing the running total in 2009 to more than 200 million individual blogs. One million blog posts are published across the world every day, and as the world of online publishing continues to flourish in accessibility and mass, a new species of journalist has emerged with it. The “citizen journalist,” belongs to no formal media outlet, has usually had little or no journalism training, but reports on the world he knows and self publishes his findings. Many mainstream media outlets have embraced this new journalistic democracy as a means of increasing the breadth of information. By syndicating reporting done by the general public, traditional media have access to a seemingly infinite store of content. Breaking news can be more fully reported immediately, thanks to photographs, video and information provided by “citizen journalists.”

“I think it’s marvellous,” said Geneva Overholser, director the journalism school at the University of Southern California. “The free press is a medium of democracy and involving people is terribly important. I like to believe in a collaborative, participatory process that will enrich the news report wherever you find it.”

Opinions vary as to the rights and qualifications of Citizen Journalists. Some, like Overholser, believe that the term “journalism” automatically assumes a certain set of ethics and practices. “What’s the point of calling someone a journalist unless they’re attempting to be reliable in their gathering of facts, attempting to present a picture as close to the truth as they can, and attempting to be transparent about their newsgathering, as well as making themselves accountable?” asked Overholser. But others say that any form of journalism, whether adhering to the formalized standards of most professional journalism or not, is better than nothing at all. “It’s just good that people are willing to participate in journalism and are interested in finding information,” said Marc Cooper, associate director of USC’s Institute for Justice and Journalism and former editor of The Huffington Post. “The more voices there are, the less oppression there will be.”

Catch-all websites, targeted at a more generalized audience in a way that emulates traditional mass media, will not replace disappearing newspapers. Instead, the future of community journalism lies with the citizens themselves. The “mass” in mass media is quickly vanishing and being replaced with niche markets and hyper-local news services. Newspapers hoping to migrate online will need to become hybrids of their former selves, involving the community they serve by opening up the news process with citizen journalists and becoming forums for public discourse. “Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community, says Robert Legrand, contributor to the PBS and Knight Foundation-sponsored ideas lab, Media Shift. Community news coverage is fast becoming a two-way street, an intersection between those who tell the stories and those who live them.

Investigative and literary journalism are among the forms in danger. Both rely on deep-dive reporting methods: the former usually tackling political and economic institutions and the latter focusing on sociological trends. As such, these long-form species fall into the category of “deeper understanding” and are a means of information management – a way to navigate – according to Barry Siegel, former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and head of the literary journalism program the University of California, Irvine. “I’d describe it as a form of subterranean news,” said Siegel. “We’re writing about human nature, the nature of our community, and about the things that are most important in those communities, which are not always the obvious breaking news headlines.” Literary journalism, which Tom Wolfe described as journalism that reads “like a novel,” concentrates on context above immediacy, and as a result, requires more time and resources than hard news. Siegel says that he spends four months to a year on his own pieces.

In a world of infinite information, it would seem that providing context is more relevant than ever. Investigative journalism, the detective agency of the people, has acted as a “watchdog” presence, independent of government and big business, since its inception. Literary journalism, often bundled with terms like “long form” and “feature,” has meant sociological understanding and on-the-ground experience of the human condition in all its varying colors.

Tightened revenue streams have encouraged quick fixes, such as re-assigning long-form journalists to cover “short-form” news and reducing funds for contextual reporting. But for the newspaper industry, this could be a counterproductive move. The entire experience of narrative story telling is changing, according to Sue Cross, an AP news executive who oversees the wire service’s digital operation. Video and audio are feeding the experience of long-form journalism online, and instead of attempting to emulate the speed of the Internet, the newspaper industry should be embracing the change and using technology to enhance deep-dive reporting. By cutting immersive journalism in favor of less expensive, superficial forms, the newspaper industry risks losing everything that has made it a valuable medium for 300 years.

Subterranean News

Newspaper companies are in consensus about the solution to all their problems: they must shed the cellulose pulp and find a way to make content work online. But perhaps forms like investigative and literary journalism, which both have roots in print technology, are more attached to their traditional medium than innovators would like to accept. At a very basic level, the connection between these journalistic forms and the technology from which they arose has been overlooked.

What both investigative and literary journalism have in common, beyond their immersive reporting practices, is the attention they require of their audience. Even more than investigative journalism, literary pieces ask for a level of dedication from the reader that the Internet as a medium does not seem to facilitate. “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice,” Nicholas Carr examined in his July 2008 Atlantic article Is Google Making us Stupid? “But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking.” This new style of reading is one based on productivity, gleaning as much information as effectively as possible. For Siegel, this newly formed habit poses a threat to journalism that requires more concentrated attention. “The bigger problem is that people in this instant age might be losing the ability and inclination for the kind of sustained, focused effort that long-form reading requires,” said Siegel.

The traditional print newspaper, as a medium, is especially at odds with this new style of information consumption. Compared to the multiplicity of the Internet, the technology of paper is a highly inefficient medium. Content is limited, and readers are trapped within the confines of the pages themselves, rather than being able to browse through various links and sources. The efficiency and expedience provided by the Internet are qualities well-suited to a medium of mass communication. Accessibility and expansiveness succeed in attracting the broadest audience. But in many respects, paper still serves as the best medium for “subterranean news.”

According to a study of online reading habits in the U.K. by University College London (UCL), Internet users do not read online the same way they do with print media. “There are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts looking for quick wins,” the study surmised, adding: “it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” This form of “horizontal information seeking,” as UCL labels it, is indicative of a medium that lends itself to quick and shallow information consumption. For journalistic forms that require patience, concentration and time, it would seem that the Internet is not as adequate a medium as print. By reading predominantly online, we “may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace,” writes Carr, referring to the conclusions deduced by Tufts University psychologist Maryanne Wolf. “When we read online, [Wolf] says, we tend to become ‘mere decoders of information.’ Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

While newspapers desperately struggle to compete with the Internet and breed their own online forms, the difference between the two mediums is being underplayed. The “horizontal” reading habits inspired by the Internet, coupled with the sheer volume of information available online, could potentially increase the need for printed, “subterranean” news. Long-form investigative and literary journalism, journalism that exists to “make sense of the world” on a deeper level, may be the answer to balancing the unmanageable amount of information unlocked by the Internet. And navigating information, learning context and studying deeper implications requires a level of reading concentration that only the print medium seems able to inspire. So while the newspaper industry attempts to shed its long-form content and emulate the Internet, the fact that sales of non-fiction books have been continually increasing seems to have gone unnoticed.

Traditional mediums are not being eliminated, but updated. Journalistic forms that appear to be disappearing, may just be trying to find a new comfort zone in a broadening landscape. In order for the print medium to do this successfully, it must embrace the qualities that make it unique, not similar, to other mediums. Paper is, after all, a technology. And after 300 years, competing mediums may be calling for a re-invention, rather than elimination, of the form.

A New Model

There is no telling what Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern will look like when it arrives in the mailbox or at the local book store. It could be a palm-sized journal made from ominous, grainy material with fold-out parts, complete with lock and key, or an epic piece of art with Asian patterns illuminating the broad jacket, a magnetic strip concealing dozens of tiny manuscripts. The quarterly literary journal, started in 1998 by author Dave Eggers, prides itself on utilizing the medium of paper in the most creative ways possible.

“I’ve always thought that if something is going to be on paper, if it’s going to be a physical object, it has to earn that existence and at least take into account the features and specifics of that existence,” said publisher Eli Horowitz. “But it’s not just preciousness; it’s also about taking advantage of things that you can do with paper. There are still things that you can do in a book that you can’t do on a computer screen.”

Rather than hastening the extinction of printed newspapers by moving attention away from the physical product to the online counterpart, Horowitz suggests that embracing the uniqueness of the paper form may serve to revive the industry. The future of print journalism is more likely to follow a philosophy closer to McSweeney’s than The Los Angeles Times. The literary journal survives solely on subscriptions and maintains a loyal readership, according to Horowitz. McSweeney’s also serves as a publishing house, selling books from affiliate authors through its website. Despite the competitive force of modern technology, such e-books and e-readers like the Kindle, the company continues to focus on producing high-quality, printed material. “We’re still trying to do things that the Kindle can’t give you,” said Horowitz. “Large things or folding things or cut-out things, things with textures… We’re always thinking: what are we making? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities?”

Creative printing options are spawning. One of the most exciting is the development of CreateSpace.com, which has the potential to turn the newspaper industry into a specification-based medium, like the Internet, without ceding its distinctive form. Currently, this on-demand printing service allows users to create their own books, free of charge. Every copy ordered through the website or through Amazon.com is printed on-demand and shipped to the consumer. The author earns 60 to 80 percent of the royalties for each sale, depending on whether the sale comes directly through CreateSpace.com or through Amazon.com.

What businesses like CreateSpace.com suggest is that on-demand printing is a very tangible possibility for the future of print journalism. For example, a new model for the newspaper industry could include customized printing, which would allow readers to pre-order the sections of the newspaper they would like to receive, the types of articles they wish to read and even the frequency of the printed edition’s delivery, minimizing waste and maximizing niche markets. Taking the specifications even further, users could choose their content by author, thus selecting to donate royalties specifically to the content-provider rather than the publication. Journalists would then, in themselves, become commodities. Even advertising could become more effective in this environment. The traditional model of print advertising, preferred by many advertising agencies, could still apply to this customized publication, but readers would be receiving news in a similar manner to which they seek it on the Internet: by interest and not obligation. Advertisers, too, could target a much more specific audience based on the selections made by the user. The process could potentially fuse the best of both print and Internet technologies: the ability for customization and the delivery of content through a traditional medium.

In honor of the possibilities for the print journalism industry, the next issue of McSweeney’s, Eggers announced, will be in newspaper form. “The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive,” wrote Eggers in an public email to anyone who needs “bucking up” about the industry. The future of newspapers, Eggers says, begins with “creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print.” The result will be a medium that not only allows space for the forms intrinsic to its centuries-long dominance, but that embraces a traditional economic model: using quality, not quantity, to encourage sales. “To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web,” said Eggers. “Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”

View this article on A Day Like This.

Coming Wednesday: Growing pains, part 2: Can grassroots journalism help underserved communities?

It should not surprise any OJR reader that I stand with those who blame newspaper management for the industry’s current woes, and not upon “the Internet,” Google or even the competition from all those new websites out there. (After all, those new websites have to compete with each other, too.) No, when confronted with the ride of the Internet, the newspaper industry’s owners and managers made a series of lamentable decisions that crippled the industry’s ability to engage and defeat its new competition.

The particular decision I wish to remind folks of today was the industry’s reaction to 1995 court case, one that prompted news managers across the country not only to dismiss opportunities to engage with their audiences online, but to directly order their employees not to do so.

Perhaps the (relative) old-timers among us will remember Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy. That 1995 case pitted a New York securities firm against the Prodigy online service. The plaintiffs argued that an anonymous poster on a Prodigy discussion forum defamed the firm and its president by claiming that they committed fraud during the IPO of another company.

Ultimately, a court held that because Prodigy had hired “board leaders” to monitor the forum, that made Prodigy the “publisher” of the information, and, thus, responsible for it. The court noted a distinction with a previous, similar case involving CompuServe: In that case, CompuServe did not hire anyone to monitor its forum, so it was simply a conduit, not responsible for what people posted.

The lesson the newspaper industry took from the case? Forums and comments are okay… only if newspaper staff do not edit, or even read, them.

Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy lasted just one year as precedent. The U.S. Congress, effectively, made the ruling moot the next year with its passage of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The CDA created a “Good Samaritan” exception that prevented people and businesses who hosted discussion forums from being treated as the “publisher” of information provided by participants on that forum.

But risk-averse newsroom and website managers weren’t persuaded. They continued to insist that their papers could be held liable for any defamatory statements made by readers on their website if newspaper staffers engaged in or managed those discussions. I heard that message from other employees at chains where I worked, as well at several industry conferences, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And with the guards pulled off duty, the crackpots moved in.

Few understood then, but the stakes were higher that the viability of message forums and comment boards on newspaper websites. The chilling effect of the Stratton Oakmont decision kept newspaper staffs from engaging with audiences (and potential sources) on the Internet at the precise moment when thousands of new Web communities were evolving, building relationships with those online readers that newspapers were choosing to ignore.

With no one from the paper engaging them at many newspaper-dot-coms, responsible folk looking for a conversation soon departed. And with no one from the paper to stop them, the cranks had an open forum in which to scream. Newspaper forums and comment boards were not communities, hosted by a trusted voice within the community. They were a blank wall, a virtual representation of a faceless institution. They weren’t your neighbor. They were “The Man.”

Little wonder so many frustrated, disempowered readers rebelled. And, worse, that so many smart voices simply clicked elsewhere to speak.

While many newspapers ignored their comments boards and forums, or shut them down, competing communities emerged. The most notable, Craigslist, ultimately helped destroy the newspaper industry’s highly profitable classified advertising business. But thousands of other niche topical and community forums demonstrated that the local newspaper would no longer be the best source for daily information on the issues and activities that readers held dear.

I can only guess why so many newspaper managers were eager to act upon Stratton Oakmont and slow to embrace the CDA. I suspect that some wished that Stratton Oakmont had held – it would have absolved the newspaper industry of the need to embrace interactivity online, and could have led to potential, reader-driven competitors being sued into oblivion. How convenient that future would have been to the newspaper business.

So when newspaper managers bemoan the poor quality of their user-generated content, blaming crude and offensive readers, please remember that the industry had the same chance that everyone else did to engage readers responsibly. And that the industry, for the most part, demurred.

Yes, some papers did the right thing. But not enough to create a critical mass that would have led the U.S. public to see newspapers as the best place to go online for interactive communities.

Nor was the failure to engage the audience online the only factor in the news industry’s decline. Conservative politicians for a generation have been encouraging their followers to disengage from newspapers. The Do-Not-Call list kept newspapers from using incessant telemarketing to keep ahead of high churn rates. Passionless, “he said, she said” reporting turned off readers looking for a source of truth amid the Internet’s deluge of information.

But how much stronger could the newspaper industry have been had more of its leaders decided in 1996 not to withdraw, but to engage? Plenty of employees within the industry urged just that. But fear of Stratton Oakmont ruled the day. And the decade.

The Internet did not make newspaper oblivion inevitable. Witness how Microsoft responded to the same threat, parlaying its market dominance in operating systems and desktop software into dominance in the Web browser market, protecting Microsoft’s market share for another decade. (Yeah, the government sued Microsoft, but the firm stood its ground and, ultimately, didn’t have to give up nearly as much as it would have lost had it allowed Netscape to continue dominating the browser market, thus potentially undermining Microsoft’s position in other markets.)

Vibrant online newspaper communities could have strangled competitors like Craigslist in their virtual cribs… if newspaper managers had not called off their online innovators. That missed opportunity is the newspaper industry’s fault. And no one else’s.

But innovation is sorely lacking in the new business models proposed; the truth is that many of them have been around since the early 1900s.

In 1923, historian James Melvin Lee outlined in his History of American Journalism alternative business models that newspapers had tried to remove themselves from dependence on advertisers and circulation growth and that now seem strangely prescient: the endowment model, the municipal news model, an adless newspaper, religious news, and what can only be called the “bazooka gum” approach to circulation.

Even before Pro-Publica could be imagined, our predecessors were strategizing how to create an endowment-supported newspaper. Hamilton Holt, editor of the New York City Independent outlined what such a model would look like to other newsmen at the first National Newspaper Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1912.

The endowment model immediately had its critics – with much the same response we hear today. James Kelley of the Chicago Herald argued that an endowment newspaper was an “impossibility” for only the “people” could truly endow journalism without it being disinterested. In other words, whoever provided the cash was likely to have the dominant influence.

Lee worried that the endowment model was championed by academics and was unlikely to work because no one was willing to front the cash. He wrote, “The nearest that the endowed newspaper has come to a realization in America was a promise of Andrew Carnegie to be one of 10 men to finance such a venture. It would take just about ten men of Mr. Carnegie’s wealth to establish successfully an endowed daily newspaper.” Looking around in today’s news environment, the St. Petersburg Times stands alone as an independent, endowed print newspaper.

Lee mentions another curious model that seems strangely reminiscent of the turn toward hyperlocal blogging: the municipal newspaper model.

Los Angeles in 1912 had evening and daily newspapers, but it also had the first, and possibly only Municipal News. Financed by the city of Los Angeles, 60,000 copies were distributed by newsboys and to homes. It was under the control of a municipal newspaper commission, composed of three citizens who served without pay and who were appointed by the mayor. They were to hold office for four years and were subject to recall and removal by referendum.

The mayor, the city council, and political party that had more than 3% of the vote were guaranteed column space. Financial support came from an appropriation of $36,000 set aside by the city of LA. Ad revenue was a second stream of income, but the newspaper did not support any major department store ads. Civic minded, it had a special student section.

The Municipal News was truly hyperlocal – it didn’t truly compete with any LA papers because it didn’t cover national or state news or carry wires. Lee is unclear on how long it actually lasted, but was voted down by the city council due to cost.

Some newspapers in the early 20th century tried to do without ads entirely. On September 28, 1911 the Day Book, an adless daily newspaper appeared in Chicago. It began with only 200 copies and sent personal agents of the paper to subscribers to generate revenue. Eventually, circulation got up to 22,938, but when the price was raised from one to two cents and the cost of paper increased due to World War I, it died a few short months later. A major downfall – the lack of department store ads failed to attract women readers.

Still, Lee suggested that people ought to be willing to pay for quality and that adless papers could be a reality: “The adless newspaper may possibly be a part of the journalism of to-morrow, if fifty thousand people will be willing to pay ten cents per copy for their daily paper and will agree not to cancel their subscription orders even through displeased with the presentation of the news or offended at the editorial policy adopted by the editors.”

One form of news that was increasingly popular was a turn toward news financed by religious organizations. Lee dismisses most of these for being too narrowly focused on spreading religion to attract a broad audience, with one exception – the Christian Science Monitor, which kept its religious news to the back and even then was noted for its international outlook. Other religious newspapers are still running strong: The Desert News, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, acts as a competitor to the Salt Lake Tribune. And the Washington Times‘ conservative stance pursues its agenda from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.

The Christian Science Monitor is reinventing itself as we speak as one of the first major dailies to switch from print first to an online daily with a print weekly. Lee’s refinement of religious newspapers as a distinct model may be reflected in the Monitor’s bravado: perhaps religious newspapers are hotbeds of innovation.

The final model Lee proposes and dismisses is what can only be called the Bazooka Gum Model and reeks of the gimmicks and cereal box circulation efforts ad departments have tried for years to boost revenue.

For Lee, these efforts were a lost cause. He told the sorry tale of the 1905 United States Daily of Detroit, which offered people little trading stamps that they could exchange for things like bicycles if they collected enough. Coupons failed to bring in enough circulation – and the newspaper died after 68 days.

A return to our history books provides a useful warning and reminder: we don’t have the answers yet. We didn’t have them in the 1920s, and we’re still searching for them now.

But even without answers, news innovators of times past were willing to experiment. We should take our cues from the past, and consider new business models as opportunities for our industry rather than signs of its failure.