Let The Strib, The Globe, Whoever, Collude
By Brian Lambert
If I were working for the Star Tribune, how would I rank the downer topics of the day on a grim to grimmer scale?
The Obama administration sees no likelihood of a federal bailout of newspapers? Mmmmm. Pretty low. Maybe if and when the government makes a profit off all that AIG dough but not now. No one is even wishful thinking on that one.
John Kerry calling newspapers "an endangered species?" Dismaying but hardly news to anyone.
Arianna Huffington telling bedraggled newsies to figure out a way to get paid for clicks, not subscriptions? Again, no new news there. Hell, not even a decent idea of how. Thanks a lot, toots.
The New York Times-owned Boston Globe's union considering something on the order of 23 percent compensation cuts just to stay alive? AAAA---OOOOOO-GAAAAHHHH! We have a winner!
The latest beard-stroking symposium—a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, actually—on how and what to save in American journalism featured some feisty back and forth between Huffington and Wire-creator, ex-Baltimore Sun writer David Simon, but nothing in the way of Eureka! moments.
I'm not saying I have the journalism equivalent of the formula for cold fusion, but I think maybe that we need here is a bit of the Obama/Rahm Emanuel "sequencing" strategy, wherein one "radical" idea, like say, health care reform, has to fit in ahead of, say, "cap and trade," because until you get a grip on all the problems associated with raging medical costs, nothing is going to function properly anyway.
With newspapers, the first order of business may be to let the inevitable collapse happen, if for no other reason that until papers such as The Globe and the Strib and the Seattle Times are actually gone—or reduced to fifty-person staffs cranking out copy between shifts at Wal-Mart—the average schmo and schmo-ette aren't going to care how bad off the journalism business is. This being America, we should have learned by now that we never lock the barn door until the horse has galloped away.
Besides, the actual—not imagined—oss of big city papers all over the country would create one of those crises Emanuel, Obama's legislative tactician, never likes to see go to waste. But until operations such as the Strib and PiPress stop cranking out ninety inches of copy a day on the NFL draft and what Brett Favre sprinkled on his oatmeal this morning, no one is really going to believe, much less care, that newspapers have gone full mastodon.
Letting everything go to hell in a hand basket is the easy part. We're great at doing f**k-all.
So doom is pretty much a given.
But then what?
Well . . . if collapse is Job #1 . . .
Job #2 would be cobbling together legislation that would allow anyone stupid enough to want to make a living off reporting the news and writing about important civic issues a way to collect some dough. A first step would be a quick re-write of the laws covering collusion so that every newsroom everywhere could agree that at the stroke of midnight they'd all seal off their websites and start charging for every story you wanted to read—or Google and Arianna Huffington wanted to link to. Micro-payments, whatever. The point is to remove any fear of litigation over "collusive behavior."
Job #3 would being allowing nonprofit news gatherers to wade into political endorsements—if they wanted—and any other provocative stuff that people like to read and get worked up over. I mean, if churches all over the country can constantly advocate for neanderthal politicians and issues without any risk to their nonprofit status, why should something like an online Strib or MinnPost have to worry about it? Those are rules for a bygone era.
And let's face it, if the same sort of people currently running papers such as the Strib and Pioneer Press survive into the next generation of news production . . . (let's pause here for a silent prayer that THAT doesn't happen) . . . they'd happily skip all that provocative endorsement stuff anyway. Or, like the PiPress circa 2000, they could endorse BOTH candidates in every election.
Job #4 would be to establish tax-deductibility for everyone making micro-payments for news copy. The software to track this doesn't strike me as all that difficult.
Job 5# would be the establishment of some kind of National News Trust, through which "papers" meeting basic standards of coverage would be able to receive underwriting from a taxpayer pool of money.
This one presumes a lot. The economy has to recover to the point where agitating citizens, demanding someone cover the crime, corruption, and high school hockey in their cities, can convince Congress to pass a minimal National News and Information Fee—a la BBC funding in Britain—to maintain a base level of support. Startlingly successful enterprises, such as MPR here in Minnesota, would receive less and less from the pool until they achieved full self-sufficiency.
Once established, the fund would be set off under a sturdy set of checks and balances that would allow no partisan intervention or gaming.
Obviously, universal health care would be a huge cushion for this sequence. But that's running a different track.
The Obama administration sees no likelihood of a federal bailout of newspapers? Mmmmm. Pretty low. Maybe if and when the government makes a profit off all that AIG dough but not now. No one is even wishful thinking on that one.
John Kerry calling newspapers "an endangered species?" Dismaying but hardly news to anyone.
Arianna Huffington telling bedraggled newsies to figure out a way to get paid for clicks, not subscriptions? Again, no new news there. Hell, not even a decent idea of how. Thanks a lot, toots.
The New York Times-owned Boston Globe's union considering something on the order of 23 percent compensation cuts just to stay alive? AAAA---OOOOOO-GAAAAHHHH! We have a winner!
The latest beard-stroking symposium—a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, actually—on how and what to save in American journalism featured some feisty back and forth between Huffington and Wire-creator, ex-Baltimore Sun writer David Simon, but nothing in the way of Eureka! moments.
I'm not saying I have the journalism equivalent of the formula for cold fusion, but I think maybe that we need here is a bit of the Obama/Rahm Emanuel "sequencing" strategy, wherein one "radical" idea, like say, health care reform, has to fit in ahead of, say, "cap and trade," because until you get a grip on all the problems associated with raging medical costs, nothing is going to function properly anyway.
With newspapers, the first order of business may be to let the inevitable collapse happen, if for no other reason that until papers such as The Globe and the Strib and the Seattle Times are actually gone—or reduced to fifty-person staffs cranking out copy between shifts at Wal-Mart—the average schmo and schmo-ette aren't going to care how bad off the journalism business is. This being America, we should have learned by now that we never lock the barn door until the horse has galloped away.
Besides, the actual—not imagined—oss of big city papers all over the country would create one of those crises Emanuel, Obama's legislative tactician, never likes to see go to waste. But until operations such as the Strib and PiPress stop cranking out ninety inches of copy a day on the NFL draft and what Brett Favre sprinkled on his oatmeal this morning, no one is really going to believe, much less care, that newspapers have gone full mastodon.
Letting everything go to hell in a hand basket is the easy part. We're great at doing f**k-all.
So doom is pretty much a given.
But then what?
Well . . . if collapse is Job #1 . . .
Job #2 would be cobbling together legislation that would allow anyone stupid enough to want to make a living off reporting the news and writing about important civic issues a way to collect some dough. A first step would be a quick re-write of the laws covering collusion so that every newsroom everywhere could agree that at the stroke of midnight they'd all seal off their websites and start charging for every story you wanted to read—or Google and Arianna Huffington wanted to link to. Micro-payments, whatever. The point is to remove any fear of litigation over "collusive behavior."
Job #3 would being allowing nonprofit news gatherers to wade into political endorsements—if they wanted—and any other provocative stuff that people like to read and get worked up over. I mean, if churches all over the country can constantly advocate for neanderthal politicians and issues without any risk to their nonprofit status, why should something like an online Strib or MinnPost have to worry about it? Those are rules for a bygone era.
And let's face it, if the same sort of people currently running papers such as the Strib and Pioneer Press survive into the next generation of news production . . . (let's pause here for a silent prayer that THAT doesn't happen) . . . they'd happily skip all that provocative endorsement stuff anyway. Or, like the PiPress circa 2000, they could endorse BOTH candidates in every election.
Job #4 would be to establish tax-deductibility for everyone making micro-payments for news copy. The software to track this doesn't strike me as all that difficult.
Job 5# would be the establishment of some kind of National News Trust, through which "papers" meeting basic standards of coverage would be able to receive underwriting from a taxpayer pool of money.
This one presumes a lot. The economy has to recover to the point where agitating citizens, demanding someone cover the crime, corruption, and high school hockey in their cities, can convince Congress to pass a minimal National News and Information Fee—a la BBC funding in Britain—to maintain a base level of support. Startlingly successful enterprises, such as MPR here in Minnesota, would receive less and less from the pool until they achieved full self-sufficiency.
Once established, the fund would be set off under a sturdy set of checks and balances that would allow no partisan intervention or gaming.
Obviously, universal health care would be a huge cushion for this sequence. But that's running a different track.
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
Your timing for this column is, um, perverse. Good work.
I read it as I learn of the closing (again) of the Little Wagon while listening to the MPR folks in full begging mode once again.
(Yes, I know they need to do it, but when is Bill Kling going to take a salary hair-cut? That would, at least, make me feel better.)
You have some interesting post-holocaust ideas.
You must have been peering long and hard at your Hunter S. Thompson wall photograph. Probably after reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" on your recent vacation.
Rewriting collusion laws. It might help. But, I don't think they have been enforced much in the last 20 years, anyhow. So, a tweak or two shouldn't be a problem.
Yeah, allowing non-profit outlets to do endorsements might help. But would they even if they could? Ask Joel Kramer. That might be interesting.
Now, tax-deductibility for buying news off the internet strikes me as a neat idea. We hear the mantra about the importance of "Life-long Education." This sounds like it fits right in. It's such a good idea that it probably won't happen.
A National News Trust sounds good. It might be a tough sell, especially now in this economic melt-down. But I'd settle for a few crumbs off the table where they are serving up bank bail-outs to get something started. It would be money better spent. But watch out for the Chris Hartes and Dean Singletons swooping in to rob the future.
LAMBERT: The beauty of a low-profit/non-profit future is that it holds no appeal for "big media" pirates. Nothing to leverage. No chance of pagan profiteering. What's the fun?
Posted by: Paul Gustafson on May 7, 2009 at 9:11 AM
NPR had an item this morning stating that Amazon was releasing a larger format Kindle and that they had cut a deal with the Times, Post and Globe to try out some sort of subscription arrangement.
The story didn't say how a guy would do the crossword though.
LAMBERT: I think it is PlasticLogic that is preparing a similar ... with full HD color. The Amazon thing is a good jumping off point. But who needs the middle man? If I could get subscriptions to four or five of my favorite papers/magazines for $20 a month, I'd be in in a snap.
Posted by: john sherman on May 7, 2009 at 10:22 AM
Okay, I love the substance here, but little snarklets like "the average schmo and schmo-ette" are quite tasty.
This is true of most organizations, but particularly non-profits (deeply more particularly churches), boards of directors, etc. Thus is systemic toxicity kept brewing.
LAMBERT: Again, I suspect the dismally dull LBO pirates' interest in "journalism" would evaporate in a split second if the model was non-profit. They care about as much about accurate information as Carl Icahn does in airplanes.
Posted by: barbara on May 7, 2009 at 10:49 AM
Brain, I am sorry about the comment about "vacation" and "Las Vegas". I did not read that column, only the "Reno" in the headline. Not excusable. Please accept my apologies.
LAMBERT: No offense taken at all.
Posted by: Paul Gustafson on May 7, 2009 at 11:22 AM
Long informed piece on the decline of newspapers, "Newspaper Narcissism" by Walter Pincus in CJR. Thesis: "These two elements on the editorial side of journalism--a move away from expertise and the growth of public relations in government--have been facilitated, in part, by the changing nature of newspaper ownership."
LAMBERT: I'm down loading it. Sounds like wheelhouse stuff.
Posted by: john sherman on May 7, 2009 at 2:41 PM
Does this mean that we can look forward to pirated online news articles? Isn't that ironic, news being one of the oldest forms of media, and online pirating being the current hot topic of our digital era?
LAMBERT: Not only pirated, but lip-synched as well.
Posted by: Lando C. on May 8, 2009 at 9:10 AM
Wait a second, let newspapers die in order to save them??? Been watching too much Lost?
LAMBERT: It's an old 'Nam thing. Destroy the village to save it. ... More seriously, it'd be wonderful if someone would make a few significant proactive moves. But kind of like regulating Wall St., we aren't much for that proactive thing. So we might as well prepare for the inevitable. And damn, I missed "Lost" this week. Hulu, I guess.
Posted by: Lando C. on May 8, 2009 at 10:01 AM
Not to be critical, but I see eyes searching the corporate and government offices for solutions...and that is not where solutions are found, that is where people's solutions are defeated and compromised away.
I still don't see the real answer on the table yet. We all, especially the government, should give the news collapse more time to work its magic. Then the real need for news will be rediscovered and people without suits can work out a better solution.
Patience will open the mind to both the potential and opportunity for funds, but necessity is always the mother of invention.
LAMBERT: There are news corporations with more fundamental faith in and passion for journalism than the Strib's owners ... but even the New York Times is going to need a lifeline from somewhere -- tax legislation, relaxation of collusion laws, I don't know what. The people will get their chance when they have the opportunity to subscribe to an on-line paper -- and/or practice their own journalism chops, al la The TC Daily Planet and other community "papers".
Posted by: The Other Mike on May 8, 2009 at 12:58 PM