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Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a p

Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a panel where people could ask them questions. I asked them, given that journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why does the business model instead align on advertising? The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism. Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways: 1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it. 2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce. And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for. Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting. So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective. The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.

at_a_remove 3y ago
I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures. As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap. We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever. Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.

at_a_remove 3y ago

I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures. As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap. We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever. Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.