Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
The fact that young people are getting the news from Tik Tok and
they want it to be about celebrities and fashion is less disturbing
than it sounds. 50 years ago, young people were getting their news
from the funny pages, Seventeen and Tiger Beat. 

Young people, as a mass audience, are not that interested in
turn-of-the-screw coverage of Congress and city government. That
doesn’t mean they will NEVER be interested in serious stuff.

I’m also not that troubled by layoffs at the Texas Tribune: We are
coming off a pandemic and many many many nonprofits in many many
many sectors have had difficulty maintaining donor support. Simply
being a nonprofit doesn’t guarantee financial stability in tough
times.

I think news, like entertainment, will be a fractured market in the
future. Probably only a handful of national organizations will cover
Congress and international developments. Some organizations will be
successful in one specific area and may be for profit, like Ars
Technica, or nonprofit, like the Marshall Project, depending on how
ad-friendly their content is.

Some news sites will be extremely local and by necessity nonprofit,
like Berkeleyside or the Hyde Park Herald, which my 20-something kid
donates to and reads regularly.

What we see happening to TV channels, in terms of the breakup of
large providers, the specialization, the bundling AND THE INCREASE
IN PRICE TO CONSUMERS: That’s also happening in news.
  

    
something i have long sighed over is the proliferation of newsy
websites; not only can i not keep up with reading all of them, i
cannot be acquainted with them all. frinstance, just came across
'404 media' --- which evidently does/has done a lot of meaningful
reporting. had never heard of it before.

i would say 1/3 of my media diet consists of links posted by
connections I have on LI and FB, the friend-of-a-friend phenom.
Also, nonprofits and arts orgs and govt agencies i have Liked (tm)
or whatever end up in my feed, often with news that would no longer
make it into newspapers.

Weirdly Nextdoor -used- to be a similar source --- that no longer
seems to happen.
  

    
By the way, as we have been chatting, the Wall Street Journal laid off 20
reporters in its Washington bureau. In a presidential election year.

Plus The Messenger blew up, but that was forseeable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/media/messenger-closing-
down.html

The biggest loss, in terms of information and democracy and like values, is
the deaths of hundreds of local papers, leaving news deserts in many
counties. No one reporting on the school board, the cops, the zoning board.
To be fair, not all small papers were fearless truthtellers or could
undertake investigations, but SOME one was watching the powerholders.

It would not take tens of millions to keep such publications going
digitally, but there's also no ad base. Their readers are not wealthy, by
and large. And events -- increasingly part of the revenue stream for
magazines and big national publications -- are not going to bring in much in
semir rural or suburban communities. Here's where Report for America has
concentrated its efforts.

A novel approach: the Daily Iowan, a known and respected campus daily, just
acquired a couple of nearby weeklies, allowing them to keep publishing while
also giving students reporting opportunities. This Nieman report points out
that there have been other town/gown journalistic efforts. Again, not a
model that works all over but one that can help here and there.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/01/a-student-newspaper-in-iowa-just-bought-
two-local-weeklies/
  

    
We need a viable alternative to ad-driven media. We've needed it for a long
time, content-wise, and now we need it, survival-wise. I
  

    

And might I suggest that one idea tht gets tossed around a lot, government
funding, gives me the willies?.
  

    
for sure. i suppose this has worked with broacast networks such as
the bbc and the cbc --- but not applicable here.
  

    
in Britain and Canada it's always fraught. Not from a
government-control-of-content standpoint but from a
starve-the-service-into-submission standpoint.
  

    
As a former GM of an FM station that had to depend on CPB grants, I
imagine, if such a thing ever got onto the table, it would take a
huge amount of compliance for what would only ever be part of the
funding.  I can't picture newspapers wanting to go that route. If it
existed.
  

    
Speaking of nonprofits, applause to Pro Publica.
  

    
For many decades newspapers and broadcast journalism in the USA were paid
for by their parent companies using the platforms to sell advertising -
the newspapers simply ran ads in the paper, and broadcast had ads within
the news shows but also subsidized the news with money from ads sold
against entertainment programming.

As far as I can tell journalism for the most part did not in itself
garner sufficient income to pay for the cost of doing good journalism
on its own merits from the public.

The subsidies from advertising placed in non-news positions have mostly
dried up (Fox would be an exception: by turning all of their news into
entertainment they continue to sell a lot of ads within their "news"),
and there is now very widespread distrust of news media, and many
alternatives for sources of information (of hugely varying quality.)

I myself find news pieces to read from many sources, often by starting
at an aggregator called Ground News which is a free/paid service (I
subscribe) that shows multiple ratings for each news source, for example
this story:
https://ground.news/article/claims-that-jan-6-rioters-are-political-prisoners-
endure-judges-want-to-set-the-record-straight_a614ee
shows 18 sources right now with varying rating on left/center/right bias,
factuality, and ownership. I do notice that a disproportionate number
of news outlets use the AP service for a lot of their content.
  

    
Slippage: yes applause for Pro Publica
https://www.propublica.org
  

    
>(Fox would be an exception: by turning all of their news into
entertainment they continue to sell a lot of ads within their
"news")

FOX earns more from carriage fees than from ad revenues. They could
post a 35% operating profit even if they sold no advertising at all.

I think this may offer a clue about revenue strategy. It helps to
explain why Facebook deplatformed Canadian news content rather than
pay the sources for their content.

Taking the long view going forward, it may develop that news content
creation and content delivery become separate, if interdependent,
enterprises.
  

    
I agree, Paula - the falloff of state house, city council, local
developers and local education-type coverage is one of the worst
impacts of losing local newspapers.

That's the first I've heard of the Daily Iowan's move, Paula - what
a great development.

Student papers all over are trying to fill news holes as local
newspapers vanish. This strikes me as a hopeful trend in a lot of
ways, since student newspapers are funded by their schools. That's
also fraught funding source sometimes, but in a very different way
from trying to keep a news business in the black.

Here are a few recent stories about it:

https://www.poynter.org/educators-students/2023/how-student-reporters-are-fill
ing-the-void-to-help-save-local-news-news-deserts/

https://www.ourtownsfoundation.org/a-student-newspaper-takes-on-community-resp
onsibilities/

https://apnews.com/article/college-journalism-students-investigations-e3239c97
4fee6455f36d5a0564049f54

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/learning/lesson-of-the-day-when-the-student
-newspaper-is-the-only-daily-paper-in-town.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S00.UQ
Sw.zBVxL9f2eAr5&bgrp=g&smid=url-share
  

    

 back in the day, the cantankerous chair of the UT Board of Regents, Frank
Erwin, wanted the Daily Texan to get in line. "We do not fund what we don't
control," he said. The paper ran a blank front page the next day with just
that quote on it. Astonishingly, Erwin backed off a bit. The Texan is still
here, and Frank is dead.
  

    
That's a great story, John!
  

    
John and Paula: Would you please point us toward your students'
reporting? I'd love your recommendation on what stands out among
their work.
  

    

Here's a link to the WELL's own T. Lee Brown's columns for The
Nugget Newspaper in Central Oregon, also: 

https://www.nuggetnews.com/author/t._lee_brown
  

    

Reminder: This topic is world-readable, and non-members of the WELL
are invited to participate by sending questions or comments to
inkwell -at- well.com. 
  

    
I think I'm the only one to mention Vox which afaik is a non-profit.
I find it very useful. Started by Ezra Klein before he became a NYT
superstar. Do none of you check it?
  

    
I do.  Yes it's quite good.

One thing the Chronicle used to do was charge movie theaters to list
their movies in the paper. And it wasn't cheap either.  The theaters
hated having to do it, but it was a well-produced guide and they
didn't have much of a choice.  But when the 'Net came along they all
felt liberated from having to pay.  One more important revenue
stream that helped pay for the newsroom went away.
  

    
<114> Case law is pretty clear that presidents of public
universities do not get to dictate the content of student
newspapers, but who knows how the First Amendment is applied by
Texas courts these days.

I got a schooling in this after my students wrote an endorsement for
the college board of trustees election that did not favor the
incumbent. Outcome: Tough noogies, it’s their constitutional right
to do so.
  

    

My reporting class publishes a hyperlocal site covering Harlem and
Washington Heights. The last time I taught this particular class was fall,
2022, so The Uptowner will feel out of date. (It appears in September and by
November, when the class ends, it goes dormant for a year like Brigadoon.)

It's been an online publication since 2009.
http://theuptowner.org/

Usually, though, I am encouraging students in my writing classes to pitch to
real world publications.

Those who choose can also publish through Columbia News Services, which I
imagine very few people who aren't friends and relatives of the authors see,
but it's still better than keeping your stories on your hard drive.

https://columbianewsservice.com/
  

    
I haven't attended post-Covid, but I heartily recommend the
International Symposium on Online Journalism held yearly in Austin,
organized by Rosental Alves of the UT School of Journalism and
Media: <https://isoj.org/> It's a pretty great conference and a
great way to gain knowledge of the broader state of journalism. CEO
of The New York Times Company and editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue are
the keynote speakers this year. 
  

    


> the Chronicle used to do was charge movie theaters to list

some local weeklies i know still do something similar. commercial entities
that are paying advertisers get to list their shows and such in the
entertainment calendar, which does not feature non-advertisers. 

The Nugget also has an announcements page and a meetings listing area.
these are free for nonprofits and churches to list their stuff, and AA to
list meetings, etc. 

a new advertiser might also rate a "new business article," though i am not
certain how that works. but basically, if you don't advertise in the paper,
you can't expect it to send out a reporter to cover the new expansion of
your restaurant. the paper might not even run your press release on the
subject. 

it's not like a wall of objectivity between editorial and revenue. and
without it, these small papers would likely go under.
  

    
>without it, these small papers would likely go under

And large ones, as we have seen, as well.