Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Honesty compels us to acknowledge that an overly cozy relationship with
advertisers, when there used to be more of them, was hardly unknown at
papers, small and not-so-small, and local television. It was a perennial
topic in ethics discussions: Would the paper run something unflattering
about the local department store (when there used to be department stores)
or some other key business that bought a lot of column inches or 30-second
spots?

Often, probably not. And that's not anything to wax nostalgic about.

But it enabled the town to have a reporter at the board of ed meeting, to
look squarely at the candidates for city council or the zoning board, to
look at where the donations for X cause went. Maybe that was a reasonable
tradeoff.

Now, charging for a lot of what used to be free -- obits, marriage and birth
announcements, listings of various sorts -- cannot bridge the gap and pay
salaries. Events bring in money for the WSJ and even The Nation, but the
Littletown Daily is not going to sell wine or cruises or conferences
effectively.

I think a lot of the surviving enterprises are likely to rely on local or
regional philanthropy, will be online only, will publish less often. It
seems the way things shake out.
  

    
Phil Bronstein, when he was running the SF Examiner, once told me
that if there was a scandal at Macy's (as a stand-in for the big
advertisers) they would report it, but they wouldn't go digging for
it.
  

    

I remember when Robert O'Harrow wrote a big story in the 90s on Giant
supermarkets collecting pharmaceutical data on customers, an editor greeted
him the next day with a "way to piss off our biggest advertiser!" But Bobby
kept writing those stories.

   There's no single website for my students' work, but you can see a lot of
great stories by UT journalism students at Reporting Texas
<https://www.reportingtexas.com/> and at The Daily Texan
<https://thedailytexan.com/>
  

    
Sorry to bust in and break this ongoing thread, but I wonder whether
the news veterans here have an opinion about the WSJ opinion piece
on Feb 2 calling Dearborn MI "America's Jihad Capital." 

It seems like a break from the usual for what is (in my opinion) a
respected publication.  Did Ford pull their ads?  Just kidding.  

I understand that "nobody reads the Journal for its non-financial
news", let alone their non-financial opinions, but it struck me as a
big change.  It's the number one opinion piece according to their
web site, so it's generating clicks. 
  

    
Slippage, but public funding for political journalism doesn't give
me the willies at all. We do it now, just not at scale. And much of
the journalism we underwrite that way is for foreign consumption
only. Last time I checked, we spent more tax dollars on Voice of
America and similar outfits than on the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting.  

We have to get away from the idea that political journalism is just
another product. It's a public good, like defense or infrastructure,
and we should fund it that way. That's how they do it in the U.K.,
Canada, Germany, etc. And that's how we did it in the U.S. before
the ad-based model took off. 

How bad does it have to get before we realize that's our best
option?  
  

    
I'm of mixed opinion

Both sides have the same problem: Pandering to those who write the
checks.

Government journalism, though, the sponsor wouldn't be too
capricious in yanking their funding, though criticizing the
government might become forbidden over time. And there are a lot of
stories that you KNOW would have been quashed if the government was
paying the checks.

However, commercial journalism, the sponsors may be more controlling
and demanding as well, as well as quick to yank ad campaigns if they
didn't like what was being said. However, this also means we have
multiple sources for news as well. If news show A won't report on
something because of a sponsor, news show B, who doesn't have that
sponsor, will.

The big problem is, journalists are the watchdogs of freedom. So
many times it's been dedicated journalists who brought the truth
into the light, regardless of the consequences to those in power.
(Or, sometimes, because of those consequences.)

I would love to see publicly funded journalism, as long as there was
a decent quality standard and the government COULD NOT influence the
news being reported.
  

    
>but public funding for political journalism doesn't give
me the willies

Scares the living shit out of me.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Thu 8 Feb 24 07:38>
  

    
Doc Searls is working on the "News Commons":
<https://doc.searls.com/news-commons/>

Doc references the B Square Bulletin in Bloomington, Indiana:
<https://bsquarebulletin.com/>, local news supported by community
contributions. He lists a set of blog posts that develop ideas about
a news commons. I haven't read the posts yet, but I suspect he's
onto something.
  

    
I think public funding could be workable, if done thoughtfully. 

It actually existed at one time, in the form of those legal notices
in the classifieds. (There was occasionally some competition to be
the “newspaper of general record” selected to receive that
contract.)

It would be safest for news organizations to have multiple funding
streams. Even in the good old days, the big problem was when one
company dominated the advertising buys, like the Macy’s example
above.
  

    
NPR is not a bad example, though the government part of its budget is fairly
modest. Public television, ditto, though it rarely functions as a news
organization.

I haven't read that Dearborn piece in the Journal, but the paper has a long
history of bifurcation, a responsible and aggressive news operation and an
editorial and op-ed section that's a font of right-wing lunacy. This sounds
in keeping.
  

    
thanks!
  

    

Yeah, the WSJ opinion section has long been posting from out past where the
buses run.

As for VOA being an example of an org that does well with government
funding, there was this guy? Trump?

<https://www.npr.org/2023/05/21/1177208862/usagm-michael-pack-voa-voice-of-
america-investigation-trump-abuse-of-power>
  

    
There are ways the government can help fund local journalism that
make it harder to exert editorial pressure.

Wisconsin, surprisingly enough, is considering a tax credit to
offset individuals’ news subscriptions.

California is using the UC system to fund fellowships for
journalists to work in “underserved” communities.

New Jersey has formed a nonprofit consortium through its public
universities that will offer grants to newsgathering projects.

All of these approaches put buffers between elected officials and
media content. And again, in the case of public universities, there
is a long history of handling pressure to stifle or control speech,
and a corresponding body of case law. 

(h/t to Dan Kennedy on Mastodon, who keeps track of these kinds of
things: https://journa.host/@dankennedy_nu)
  

    
Peter, say more about "that's how we did it in the U.S. before
 the ad-based model took off."
  

    
Jswatz just supplied me with an excellent new pseudonym
  

    

MY WORK HERE IS DONE

but really i'm here all week and til whenever we're done

--also, I like Kennedy's list, and want to see lots of ideas and to see
them tried out. Worrying about government interference is natural, but I'm
open to imaginative ways of dealing with this crisis.
  

    

One more thought for this evening: I don't always agree with Jay Rosen of
NYU, but his analysis of what's gone wrong with the news business is worth
reading, for those who can stand to look at Twitter:

<https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1751614877230125087?s=42&t=Kb1xk-8ciLK
9onqXNhR7Mw>
  

    <scribbled by af Tue 6 Feb 24 11:44>
  

    <scribbled by af Tue 6 Feb 24 11:40>
  

    
An Axios story about news orgs changing their revenue models to more
flexible approaches.  Noted is how The Guardian has done so well
with its voluntary pricing.

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/06/great-subscription-news-reversal
  

    
And legislation introduced -- with bipartisan support in Congress, at least
early on -- to rebuild local news with tax credits for advertisers and for
hiring reporters:

https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/community-news-small-business-support-act/
  

    
I suppose we should be mildly encouraged that so many different kinds of
folks -- publishers, philanthropists, journalists, legislators -- are trying
so many different approaches to trying to ...prop up? re-establish?
independent journalism.

Mildly.
  

    
An example of why so many people rip on the NYT for their
"bothsiderism" headlines: "Biden Tells Congress to 'Show Some Spine'
as Border-Ukraine Deal Falters."  He was specifically telling
Republicans who are caving to Trump.  I know they have to put up
these headline quick but come on.
  

    
i'll just post this here: came thru on my LI feed (no am not
acquainted with its author, megan bungeroth)


How many students will be graduating with journalism degrees this
year? 

The news industry lost 2,681 jobs in 2023. The first month of 2024,
we've lost hundreds more. 👎 

A quick estimate of class sizes at Medill, Columbia, NYU, UC
Berkeley and Mizzou adds up to about 1,300. And that's just from
five of the top journalism schools in the country. 

There are thousands more.

What are we telling these students? To start a Substack?? 

I don't have the answer, but I think it's time for journalism
schools (specifically graduate programs) to take a hard look at the
curriculum and start preparing their students for
journalism-adjacent work.

💥 Journalism schools can teach content marketing.
💥 Journalism schools can teach PR.
💥 Journalism schools can teach entrepreneurial skills to
launch agencies.
💥 Journalism schools can teach influencer marketing.
💥 Journalism schools can teach social media management.

All of these fields require journalistic skills. And I wish we could
get through this by doubling down on journalistic principles.

But if I hear one more Ivory Tower media theorist start a
proclamation with "Now, more than ever, we need journalism!" I will
hurl. 

It's not that it isn't true.

But people need jobs. Now, more than ever, as the economy spirals
and layoffs continue. 

It's unethical to keep churning out students who aren't prepared to
branch out from the path to their dream reporting gig that just
doesn't exist anymore.

I earned my Master's in Journalism from Craig Newmark Graduate
School of Journalism at CUNY in 2010. I think CUNY did a better job
than most at preparing us to actually land jobs in journalism. I
started as a local news reporter and editor (for PRINT!) in
Manhattan for four years, and I got that job thanks to my experience
at CUNY. 

I'd love to know how my alma mater and other schools are preparing
their students for the 2024 media hellscape.

If you're a J-school student and want to talk about what it's like
to work in content marketing, DM me.