I’m a little ashamed that I contribute so unabashedly to the massive pools of ink bits spilled over the death of traditional journalism and what it means for our democracy, but in truth it’s a crucial question. As a young writer who has more or less committed myself to reporting the news for the rest of my life the topic fascinates me. To paraphrase a quip heard from the CEO of a big media company, “journalists can’t resist reporting their own demise. The story is too good.”
I’ll also admit that I’m the first to gush uncontrollably when I hear about big magazine companies and newspapers developing interactive reading formats for the iPad. I think there is a huge potential source of revenue there, but I also know that this doesn’t go very far towards solving the day to day problem of getting the local news reported. The beneficiaries of the iPad will be Conde Nast and the New York Times. What about the struggling SacBee, which does some of the best reporting on California state politics? If it goes under you lose the top watchdog over the government running the world’s fifth biggest economy.
Which brings me to a book near the top of my to-read list. The Death and Life of American Journalism by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols is out now from Nation Books. Over the last year, the authors have written a few sobering cover stories on the subject for The Nation ultimately arguing that the only way to save journalism as we know it is through government subsidies. Despite the knee jerk reaction most people have about this solution, McChensey and Nichols point out that it’s a solution with historical precedent. In the early republic, the government considered the voice of the fourth estate so important that they funded it as a top budget priority. According to their research it was funded at modern day equivalent of about $30 Billion a year. Yikes.
Will the government and the people be willing to pay this much? It’s hard to say.
While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out one of the more salient points from McChensey and Nichols’ book excerpt in The Nation because I think it does a nice job of dispensing with one of the central myths about democratized media:
The main source of great journalism is compensated human labor, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. We’re long time advocates of citizen journalism and the blogogsphere, but our experience tells us that volunteer labor is insufficient to meet America’s journalism needs. The digital revolution has the capacity to democratize and improve journalism, but only if there is a foundation of newsrooms all of which will be digital and have digital components with adequately paid staff who interact with and provide material for the blogosphere.
The dangers of failing to see that the volunteer contributions touted by citizen-based models of journalism like The Huffington Post is apparent in “The Story Behind the Story” by veteran reporter Mark Bowden, which appeared in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden traces the origins of the “wise latina” attacks levied against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomyor last spring after her nomination was announced by President Obama. “[The Reporting] was not the work of journalists, but of political hit men.” These hit men, of course, were citizen journalists who’d done the hard work of sifting through hundreds of hours of speeches to find the political weaknesses of an otherwise moderate and qualified judge. Did these citizens have the right to do this? Of course. But professional journalists should have seen this information as the irrelevant propoganda that it was. Bowden moves quickly to polemics similar to those of Nichols and McChensey:
…those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism⎯the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight.
Citizen journalists work for free, and as such, their only payoff is advancing the largely biased reasons that made citizens want to be journalists in the first place. Bowden concludes, “Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch… the web may yet bury [the profession].”