Media Curmudgeon

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January 29, 2010

The Medium With the Twisted Lip

I have a cool, free app on my Blackberry Tour – WattPad – that offers “100,000 free e-books.” I downloaded The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and have been reading it occasionally on the subway or when I’m waiting in a doctor’s office.

The background on the Blackberry screen is a medium-dark gray and the type is white, making it easy to read, and scrolling is easy, so the reading experience is pretty good.

“The Man With the Twisted Lip” is adventure number six of the twelve original Sherlock Holmes short stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote for the Strand Magazine and that ran from July 1891 to July 1892.

The story is an unusual one for Holmes because no crime is committed and part of the story is set in an opium den, which was a legal operation – there were no laws against smoking or selling opium in England at the time.

The story is about a Mr. St. Clair, who, as summarized by Wikipedia,

…has been leading a double life, one of respectability, and the other as a beggar. In his youth, he had been an actor before becoming a newspaper reporter. In order to research an article, he had disguised himself as a beggar for a short time, during which he was given a very large amount of money. Later in his life, he returned to the street to beg for several days in order to pay a large debt. Given a choice between his newspaper salary and his high beggar earnings, he eventually became a professional beggar. His takings were large enough that he was able to establish himself as a country gentleman, marry well, and begin a respectable family. His wife never knew what he did for a living, and Holmes agrees to preserve Mr. St. Clair's secret as long as no more is heard of Hugh Boone.

After reading the story, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the current state of the newspaper industry – that it is often more lucrative for reporters to beg (work freelance, for AOL’s Seed.com, or ask for donations on their blogs) than to work for a newspaper.

And begging isn’t limited to individual reporters or bloggers; it’s utilized by journalism institutions, too. The majority of the funding for the NPR affiliate WNYC in New York comes from listener support, as it does for all NPR affiliated stations, whose semi-annual “begathons” drive listeners nuts, but bring in the dollars.

Also, leading media scholar Robert McChesney and The Nation columnist John Nichols make a convincing case for journalism (legitimate news) organizations asking the government for subsidies in their book The Death and Life of American Journalism.

Subsides can come in many forms, such as tax breaks, changing the laws about Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs), free postage, or paid advertising and notices. Critics argue that government subsidies would mean government control – the specter of Pravda dances in their heads.

But our government is broken. It can’t pass a health care bill, it can’t limit outrageous bonuses to greedy Wall Street bankers, and it can’t create jobs. If it can’t agree on how to fix a system that is obviously broken and patently unfair, it can’t possibly censor the press to which it might give reasonable subsidies.

The government is broken and so is American journalism. However, like then man with the twisted lip, journalism will find a way to live and prosper. Some local newspapers are beginning to come back to life without begging by employing the principles using Wayne Reuvers’s theories and strategies as espoused in “Own Your Own Backyard,” available at LivePlatform.com.

Frankly, I have more hope for journalism than I do for the U.S. government. I never thought I’d say this, but most journalists are smarter and less self-absorbed than politicians – and that’s a twist.

Posted by Charles Warner at 8:08 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 20, 2010

How to Save Journalism: Part III

In Part I I suggested that a $10 billion foundation be set up to save responsible journalism and that The NY Times be wrested away from the Sulzberger family, put into bankruptcy, and emerge as a mean and lean non-profit organization with the purpose of producing great journalism that makes citizens more informed, not with the purpose of creating profits to make stockholders wealthier.

In Part II I suggested that The NY Times and other important newspapers had to realize that journalism was not about union-feather-bedded printing presses and distribution systems and that these papers had to start charging for content. One way to get paid for their content was to make a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing to pay them for links to their content and block Google from linking to it free. They can also charge based on a Wall Street Journal-type subscription model or a Financial Times-type metered model. (It is rumored that The Times has decided on a metered model and will start charging soon.)

But saving journalism needs more than getting funding from a foundation, being lean non-profit organizations, and getting paid for content, either from subscribers or from Bing. It needs financial support from local communities similar to what NPR and its local affiliates receive and to be given increased financial support from local communities and the Federal government in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.

In the January 25, issue of The Nation, communication scholar Robert McChesney and The Nation Washington correspondent John Nichols wrote an article titled “How to Save Journalism” in which they made a logical case for government subsidies.

The authors suggest that the Internet is not the answer to saving journalism: “There is no business model or combination of business models that will create a journalistic renaissance on the web. Even if the market and new technologies were to eventually solve journalism's problems, the notion that we must go without journalism for a decade or two while Wall Street figures out how to make a buck strikes us, frankly, as suicidal.”

They also write: “House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Henry Waxman was right when he told December's FTC workshop on journalism, “This is a policy issue. Government is going to have to be involved in one way or another. Journalism, like other public goods, is going to require substantial public subsidy if it is to exist at a level necessary for self-government to succeed. The question, then, is not, Should there be subsidies? but, How do we get subsidies right?””

The Founding Fathers knew the importance of a free press and an informed citizenry, which is why they set up the system that the Post Office delivered newspapers free and give publishers subsidies in the form of paying them to print public and legal notices. So, subsidies are nothing new.

Another way journalism outlets (we’ve got to stop calling them newspapers because they must be on the Web, not printed on paper) can increase revenue is to do what music companies are now doing – making 360 deals with talent. The music industry was decimated by file sharing on the Internet and by Apple’s iTunes and iPods, so record companies cut way back pressing CDs and selling them in record stores and found other outlets such as Starbucks. Today, when record companies sign new artists and agree to promote them, the companies insist that the talent sign a 360 deal that gives the record company a cut of all the money an artist makes in concerts, T-shirts, and other gear and peripheral items – anywhere and everywhere – 360º in other words.

So, for example, The NY Times could sign a deal with Frank Rich in which Rich agrees to give The Times a percentage cut of his off-the-job income from such items as speeches, books, and consulting gigs. The notion driving this concept is that Rich wouldn’t be famous and highly sought after if it weren’t for his exposure in The Times. He might be Rich, but he wouldn’t be wealthy if he wrote for the Point Reyes Light, even though it won a Pulitzer Prize.

Journalism outlets could do events and conferences that don’t appear to be influence peddling; their book reviewers could host book clubs and author readings, their movie reviewers could host movie preview events and discussions, their restaurant and food critics could host events and tastings, and cooking classes.

My wife, Julia, and I paid $75 each for a Dim Sum tour of New York’s Chinatown from the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE). We enjoyed it thoroughly and the guide, expert cook and teacher, Norm Weinstein, was terrific. But we would probably pay twice as much for a similar tour sponsored by The Times.

The Times and other newspapers in their state of journalistic head-in-the-sand ostrichitis would probably say that they are in the news business, not the tour or the event or the education business and that they have to remain “pure.” But they have forgotten what Harvard Business School’s Theodore Levitt said about the railroad business – that the railroads went out of business because they mistakenly thought they were in the railroad business.

Newspapers think like buggy whip makers thought in 1908, that they were in the buggy-whip business, but their business was killed by the automobile. If they had re-defined their businesses as the vehicle acceleration business, they might have survived. Newspapers need to similarly re-define their businesses and find multiple revenue streams to support their journalism.

These news outlets also need to exploit the new e-reader technology, as suggested by Alan Mutter in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog on January 8 in a post titled “Holy Moses! Media need to gear up for tablets.”

The point is that journalism outlets have to explore multiple revenue streams, including government subsidies.

Posted by Charles Warner at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

January 8, 2010

How to Save Journalism: Part II

In Part I I recommended that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put up a $5 billion challenge grant to set up a Journalism Preservation Foundation (JPF) and then pressure other media billionaires to contribute to get the fund up to $10 billion.

The next step I suggested was to wrest The New York Times away from the Sulzberger family, force the paper into bankruptcy, and then get some smart business people committed to journalism, not to maximizing profits, to set up a non-profit organization similar to NPR, renegotiate onerous union contracts, and run the Times like a lean start-up committed to continuing its tradition of journalistic excellence.

What should be the JPF’s next step? What about other failing newspapers?

Saving journalism is not about saving newspapers; many don’t need or deserve to be saved. Saving journalism is not about perpetuating deprecated printing and distribution systems. Saving journalism doesn’t mean saving the jobs of high-paying executives and managers who had no clue how to innovate once faced with the disruptive technology that knocked down the barriers to entry to their precious monopolies. Saving journalism is not about anything on commercial television, which is about entertainment, not news or journalism.

Saving journalism is about establishing, sustaining, and rewarding news organizations that practice journalism, the first principle of which is accuracy, not profits. Therefore, the goal of the JPF should be set up non-profit news organizations which maximize revenue in order to produce relevant, important journalism, especially investigative reporting, written by experienced, qualified reporters.

So how do news organizations generate revenue? Depending primarily on advertising (online or offline) is not a viable model that will keep news organizations independent, impartial, and dedicated to accuracy. The NPR and local station affiliate model is a good one because it provides multiple revenue streams, with listener contributions being the main source of revenue for local stations (which in turn buy their programming from NPR), followed by underwriting (advertising) and funding from foundations. Also, the JPF could help fund many worthy news organizations.

Inevitably a viable news revenue model will have to include charging for content. Major newspapers must charge for their content or make staff cuts so deep that the few reporters they can afford to hire will become cheap stenographers rather than crusading journalists.

One way to charge for content would be to follow Rupert Murdoch’s lead and try to work out a deal with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

Apparently Murdoch is in negotiations with Microsoft to work out a deal by which MS would pay Murdoch a fee and his newspapers’ Web content, primarily the Wall Street Journal’s, would be available only via Bing searches. The WSJ would put a snipped of code on its content that would block it from being available via Google searches.

If the WSJ, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and major newspapers and magazines were able to make a deal with Bing and keep their content from Google, people would add a Bing search box to their toolbar and use it instead of or in combination with Google.

Such a deal is the only chance Bing has to compete with Google and one of several ways major news content providers (other than television news, which is entertainment, not news) have for long-term survival – a win-win for everyone but Google, which doesn’t really need another win.

Posted by Charles Warner at 8:41 AM | Comments (0) | Print |