7 ms·

Journalism Needs Government Help

37 points by grellas 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
JacobAldridge 16y ago
I don't think this is the solution, but not because it will negatively impact the 'objectivity' of the press. The BP example is strong, and as an ex-jounro myself who's been around the newsroom, I know that for the vast majority of writers the memory of a free lunch fades by the time you need to write about it. I think this will fail in the way that all welfare-dependent industries must inevitably fail. If the business model is such that it requires significant, ongoing government subsidies then it isn't sustainable. You can prop up the US Auto industry, some agricultural sectors, and even the media for only so long. If the end result is an inferior product, what's the point?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Doesn't the US Postal Service get a ton of subsidies? I rather appreciate them, and the only reason they may be becoming less relevant is not through a fault of their own.
  - JacobAldridge 16y ago
    There are plenty of businesses that become less relevant through no fault of their own (see 'buggy whip manufacturers'). That doesn't mean they require subsidies - it reminds me of Clevinger's father (?) in Catch-22 who made his fortune not growing parsley, investing government subsidies into buying more land on which to not grow parsley! But the USPS is a good example of a point I've been lingering on since making my earlier comment - at what point does something become a basic right (or expectation, to prevent confusion with the Bill of Rights) in our society? Is postage a basic expectation? Is a home town newspaper a basic expectation? And if so, should we expect our taxes to subsidise them as we do with roads or healthcare?
  - inanimate 16y ago
    The US Postal Service gets virtually no subsidies and is a self-sufficient organization. It borrows money, however. "Since its reorganization into an independent organization, the USPS has become self-sufficient and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. However it is currently borrowing money from the U.S. Treasury to pay its deficits."
    - roboneal 16y ago
      I don't equate "currently borrowing money from the U.S. Treasury to pay its deficits" as being "self-sufficient".
      - inanimate 16y ago
        Then you're using a different definition. In this context, self-sufficiency refers to its financial and organizational position within the United States government as an agency to manage its own finances externally from the Congressional Budget Office and has nothing to do with its bottom line. The USPS is currently running a deficit but has also ran a surplus: "Despite record gross revenue of $60.1 billion, the U.S. Postal Service ended fiscal 1998 on Sept. 30 with a $600 million profit, $100 million more than projected, but leading industry officials were hoping the USPS could at least match, if not better fiscal 1997's $1.2 billion surplus, which was less than the $1.6 billion recorded in 1996 and significantly lower than the $1.8 billion achieved in 1995." http://directmag.com/news/marketing_observers_fear_end/ http://directmag.com/news/marketing_observers_fear_end/ Corporations borrow money, especially when they run a deficit. Yet unless they're a larger part of some organization or the government, most people would call them self-sufficient--the ability to manage their own financial resources. Sure the most strict definition of "self-sufficient" is to have absolutely no reliance on any external entity for anything, but by that definition then not a single organization in this country is self-sufficient.
        lionhearted 16y ago
        > ended fiscal 1998 on Sept. 30 Wrong decade. They lost 3.8 billion last year and expect to lose billions more this year [1]. They claim to have operational independence, but the Senate cuts them a check for losses that the Post Office will never pay back because its current form becomes less relevant and necessary every year. Fedex and UPS can do better package shipping, and electronic could take over for almost all documents now. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111603629.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11... I say close it down. Auction the assets off, pay post office workers a year or two's pay for no work to appease them, and give some kind of buyout to people with pension plans. Keeping the Post Office running to preserve jobs is a farce and massive waste of important resources.
chrismealy 16y ago
Information is a public good[1] so there's a standard case for subsidizing it. To preserve choice and competition other folks have proposed giving everybody a $50 voucher that they can give to the news source of their choice. That would guarantee a minimum level of aggregate news production but not specify the particular producers. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
- joecode 16y ago
  That's an interesting idea, but doesn't that mean the government has to regulate what is and is not a real "news source"? Otherwise folks could just spend the $50 on a style magazine or such.
- nickpinkston 16y ago
  Haha - the road to economics hell is paved with public goods.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    there are many roads to economic hell, others include Monopoly Highway and the once scenic Tragedy of the Commons Express
- rjett 16y ago
  That would guarantee a minimum level of aggregate news production but not specify the particular producers. Given how information is dispersed and consumed these days, there are literally thousands of information producers (or at least sources to view that info). In the world of $50 vouchers, there are either thousands of producers competing for pennies if the system is open or a few big producers specified who can receive the vouchers. If it's the former, information producers will probably still be in the sorry state they are today. If it's the latter, I think people might have a problem with the idea of getting their news from an oligarchy of producers.
- hugh3 16y ago
  The least offensive version of this idea would be the one where the Government promises to buy advertising in every newspaper every day at a price proportional to its readership. To keep it nonpolitical, the advertising could be of the form of a full-page daily report laying out the which bills are being considered by which houses, what the Supreme Court is doing, the President's agenda for the day, and other strictly-true government business.
GrowWebs 16y ago
Why not a nonprofit model instead? NPR has been operating successfully on donations for years! News organizations are already basically not making a profit. By reorganizing and paying back their debts, they can go back to focusing on what matters instead of increasing the bottom line. Why not take the meager revenues that news organizations are currently earning, deposit them into an endowment and supplement with a huge yearly fund-raising campaign, or a one time large insanely public grant from the federal government. If managed responsibly, something like this could sustain a decently sized news organization for a long time. Especially if we begin to rethink and reorganize how it might be done.
- roboneal 16y ago
  "a one time large insanely public grant from the federal government" There is one spot-on word in that phrase: INSANE-ly.
hristov 16y ago
It is somewhat shocking to see this editorial in the wall street journal of all places. I have to say I strongly disagree. Subsidized press will just encourage more conflicts of interest in coverage of politics, will waste taxpayer money, and is unlikely to result in better journalism. About newspapers losing money, I suspect the main reason for this, and the reason nobody mentions is that newspapers and media companies in general borrowed through the nose to buy out other papers to reduce competition. It is the interest payments for all that borrowing that is causing most problems in the top papers. Otherwise a paper that gets large viewer ship online should not have any problems funding news gathering. But nevertheless, it is disturbing to see this in the WSJ. That means it is seriously being pushed. I hope Obama does not support it, there will be no profit for him in it, the right wing papers will use this to once again call him a socialist while still pocketing their subsidy.
- bobbyi 16y ago
  The conflicts of interest for a corporate-owned news outlet are worse than those for a news source that receives some government support.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    How's that? Each country has millions of sources of private-sector income, but only one government. There's the occasional potential for conflict of interest when a news outlet has to report on the doings of its own parent company, but news stories about news companies are quite rare and news stories about the Government happen every day.
    - philk 16y ago
      That's because news companies are beholden to their advertisers rather than their readership. It's something you can see in (for example) the video games industry where the major magazines often handed out curiously high review scores to games coming from publishers that bought lots of advertising. Another example would be newspapers which rely upon real estate advertisements for a large portion of their revenue; you won't see an article that's critical of the real estate industry in these papers.
ajg1977 16y ago
It would be one thing if news organizations were independent entities, arguing for government subsidies to remove any conflict of interest from accepting advertising or corporate ownership. With complete transparency, I would be fully behind this idea. However, the suggestions of subsidies that some news organizations are beginning to float really boil down to "we're losing money in todays market, and we don't like it.". Aside from keeping their profit margins, it would be business as usual.
dantheman 16y ago
Standard rent seeking behavior, people don't want our product so let's force them to buy it.
Groxx 16y ago
<strikeout>Journalism needs</strikeout> News agencies need government help because they fucked up. Royally. Repeatedly. With technology, with competition, with content, with Q.A.. As badly as much of the Media industry has, but they're less entrenched. They have resisted change so strongly they've built up a momentum of backpedaling that probably can't be reversed enough to even reach stagnation. Capitalism says "die", I say "good riddance", because something will rise from the ashes. As long as people want info on (scandal|war|economic|reader's digest|the history of) X, someone will attempt to provide. Heck, they already are, we just need to lose the horrendous setup we currently have to allow the progressive ones to make enough money to continue and improve.
austiniteye 16y ago
Since insolvent businesses (banks, newspapers) keep figuring out ways to get my money using government, I think I need to figure out a way to stop paying taxes. Problem solved.
usaar333 16y ago
Perhaps there are just too many newspapers? If 2/3 went bankrupt, wouldn't the remaining ones have enough increased readership to become profitable again?
javajones 16y ago
If old technologies die out because of newer and better technologies then that's called progress. Why should the newspapers be immune to this? If they can't make a product that people want to purchase then they need to adapt or die.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I grant the premise that most modern mainstream news organizations would require subsidies in order to survive unchanged indefinitely. I refute the notion that this is in any way a desirable state of affairs, however. The invention of the modern media institutions has been due to historically anomalous conditions and has largely been deleterious to the quality of news gathering and dissemination. I won't be sad to see these dinosaurs dead and gone, replaced with a cacophony of competing and contrary individual voices serving as mulch for cultivating the capacity for critical thinking and skeptical inquiry of the modern world's minds. P.S. http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html

37 points by grellas 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

I don't think this is the solution, but not because it will negatively impact the 'objectivity' of the press. The BP example is strong, and as an ex-jounro myself who's been around the newsroom, I know that for the vast majority of writers the memory of a free lunch fades by the time you need to write about it. I think this will fail in the way that all welfare-dependent industries must inevitably fail. If the business model is such that it requires significant, ongoing government subsidies then it isn't sustainable. You can prop up the US Auto industry, some agricultural sectors, and even the media for only so long. If the end result is an inferior product, what's the point?

sliverstorm 16y ago
Doesn't the US Postal Service get a ton of subsidies? I rather appreciate them, and the only reason they may be becoming less relevant is not through a fault of their own.
- JacobAldridge 16y ago
  There are plenty of businesses that become less relevant through no fault of their own (see 'buggy whip manufacturers'). That doesn't mean they require subsidies - it reminds me of Clevinger's father (?) in Catch-22 who made his fortune not growing parsley, investing government subsidies into buying more land on which to not grow parsley! But the USPS is a good example of a point I've been lingering on since making my earlier comment - at what point does something become a basic right (or expectation, to prevent confusion with the Bill of Rights) in our society? Is postage a basic expectation? Is a home town newspaper a basic expectation? And if so, should we expect our taxes to subsidise them as we do with roads or healthcare?
- inanimate 16y ago
  The US Postal Service gets virtually no subsidies and is a self-sufficient organization. It borrows money, however. "Since its reorganization into an independent organization, the USPS has become self-sufficient and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. However it is currently borrowing money from the U.S. Treasury to pay its deficits."
  - roboneal 16y ago
    I don't equate "currently borrowing money from the U.S. Treasury to pay its deficits" as being "self-sufficient".
    - inanimate 16y ago
      Then you're using a different definition. In this context, self-sufficiency refers to its financial and organizational position within the United States government as an agency to manage its own finances externally from the Congressional Budget Office and has nothing to do with its bottom line. The USPS is currently running a deficit but has also ran a surplus: "Despite record gross revenue of $60.1 billion, the U.S. Postal Service ended fiscal 1998 on Sept. 30 with a $600 million profit, $100 million more than projected, but leading industry officials were hoping the USPS could at least match, if not better fiscal 1997's $1.2 billion surplus, which was less than the $1.6 billion recorded in 1996 and significantly lower than the $1.8 billion achieved in 1995." http://directmag.com/news/marketing_observers_fear_end/ http://directmag.com/news/marketing_observers_fear_end/ Corporations borrow money, especially when they run a deficit. Yet unless they're a larger part of some organization or the government, most people would call them self-sufficient--the ability to manage their own financial resources. Sure the most strict definition of "self-sufficient" is to have absolutely no reliance on any external entity for anything, but by that definition then not a single organization in this country is self-sufficient.
      - lionhearted 16y ago
        > ended fiscal 1998 on Sept. 30 Wrong decade. They lost 3.8 billion last year and expect to lose billions more this year [1]. They claim to have operational independence, but the Senate cuts them a check for losses that the Post Office will never pay back because its current form becomes less relevant and necessary every year. Fedex and UPS can do better package shipping, and electronic could take over for almost all documents now. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111603629.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11... I say close it down. Auction the assets off, pay post office workers a year or two's pay for no work to appease them, and give some kind of buyout to people with pension plans. Keeping the Post Office running to preserve jobs is a farce and massive waste of important resources.

chrismealy 16y ago

Information is a public good[1] so there's a standard case for subsidizing it. To preserve choice and competition other folks have proposed giving everybody a $50 voucher that they can give to the news source of their choice. That would guarantee a minimum level of aggregate news production but not specify the particular producers. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

joecode 16y ago
That's an interesting idea, but doesn't that mean the government has to regulate what is and is not a real "news source"? Otherwise folks could just spend the $50 on a style magazine or such.
nickpinkston 16y ago
Haha - the road to economics hell is paved with public goods.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  there are many roads to economic hell, others include Monopoly Highway and the once scenic Tragedy of the Commons Express
rjett 16y ago
That would guarantee a minimum level of aggregate news production but not specify the particular producers. Given how information is dispersed and consumed these days, there are literally thousands of information producers (or at least sources to view that info). In the world of $50 vouchers, there are either thousands of producers competing for pennies if the system is open or a few big producers specified who can receive the vouchers. If it's the former, information producers will probably still be in the sorry state they are today. If it's the latter, I think people might have a problem with the idea of getting their news from an oligarchy of producers.
hugh3 16y ago
The least offensive version of this idea would be the one where the Government promises to buy advertising in every newspaper every day at a price proportional to its readership. To keep it nonpolitical, the advertising could be of the form of a full-page daily report laying out the which bills are being considered by which houses, what the Supreme Court is doing, the President's agenda for the day, and other strictly-true government business.

GrowWebs 16y ago

Why not a nonprofit model instead? NPR has been operating successfully on donations for years! News organizations are already basically not making a profit. By reorganizing and paying back their debts, they can go back to focusing on what matters instead of increasing the bottom line. Why not take the meager revenues that news organizations are currently earning, deposit them into an endowment and supplement with a huge yearly fund-raising campaign, or a one time large insanely public grant from the federal government. If managed responsibly, something like this could sustain a decently sized news organization for a long time. Especially if we begin to rethink and reorganize how it might be done.

roboneal 16y ago
"a one time large insanely public grant from the federal government" There is one spot-on word in that phrase: INSANE-ly.

hristov 16y ago

It is somewhat shocking to see this editorial in the wall street journal of all places. I have to say I strongly disagree. Subsidized press will just encourage more conflicts of interest in coverage of politics, will waste taxpayer money, and is unlikely to result in better journalism. About newspapers losing money, I suspect the main reason for this, and the reason nobody mentions is that newspapers and media companies in general borrowed through the nose to buy out other papers to reduce competition. It is the interest payments for all that borrowing that is causing most problems in the top papers. Otherwise a paper that gets large viewer ship online should not have any problems funding news gathering. But nevertheless, it is disturbing to see this in the WSJ. That means it is seriously being pushed. I hope Obama does not support it, there will be no profit for him in it, the right wing papers will use this to once again call him a socialist while still pocketing their subsidy.

bobbyi 16y ago
The conflicts of interest for a corporate-owned news outlet are worse than those for a news source that receives some government support.
- hugh3 16y ago
  How's that? Each country has millions of sources of private-sector income, but only one government. There's the occasional potential for conflict of interest when a news outlet has to report on the doings of its own parent company, but news stories about news companies are quite rare and news stories about the Government happen every day.
  - philk 16y ago
    That's because news companies are beholden to their advertisers rather than their readership. It's something you can see in (for example) the video games industry where the major magazines often handed out curiously high review scores to games coming from publishers that bought lots of advertising. Another example would be newspapers which rely upon real estate advertisements for a large portion of their revenue; you won't see an article that's critical of the real estate industry in these papers.

ajg1977 16y ago

It would be one thing if news organizations were independent entities, arguing for government subsidies to remove any conflict of interest from accepting advertising or corporate ownership. With complete transparency, I would be fully behind this idea. However, the suggestions of subsidies that some news organizations are beginning to float really boil down to "we're losing money in todays market, and we don't like it.". Aside from keeping their profit margins, it would be business as usual.

dantheman 16y ago

Standard rent seeking behavior, people don't want our product so let's force them to buy it.

Groxx 16y ago

<strikeout>Journalism needs</strikeout> News agencies need government help because they fucked up. Royally. Repeatedly. With technology, with competition, with content, with Q.A.. As badly as much of the Media industry has, but they're less entrenched. They have resisted change so strongly they've built up a momentum of backpedaling that probably can't be reversed enough to even reach stagnation. Capitalism says "die", I say "good riddance", because something will rise from the ashes. As long as people want info on (scandal|war|economic|reader's digest|the history of) X, someone will attempt to provide. Heck, they already are, we just need to lose the horrendous setup we currently have to allow the progressive ones to make enough money to continue and improve.

austiniteye 16y ago

Since insolvent businesses (banks, newspapers) keep figuring out ways to get my money using government, I think I need to figure out a way to stop paying taxes. Problem solved.

usaar333 16y ago

Perhaps there are just too many newspapers? If 2/3 went bankrupt, wouldn't the remaining ones have enough increased readership to become profitable again?

javajones 16y ago

If old technologies die out because of newer and better technologies then that's called progress. Why should the newspapers be immune to this? If they can't make a product that people want to purchase then they need to adapt or die.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I grant the premise that most modern mainstream news organizations would require subsidies in order to survive unchanged indefinitely. I refute the notion that this is in any way a desirable state of affairs, however. The invention of the modern media institutions has been due to historically anomalous conditions and has largely been deleterious to the quality of news gathering and dissemination. I won't be sad to see these dinosaurs dead and gone, replaced with a cacophony of competing and contrary individual voices serving as mulch for cultivating the capacity for critical thinking and skeptical inquiry of the modern world's minds. P.S. http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html