The problem is that news organizations didn't just get disrupted by digitization (more specifically the adtech innovation), they got disrupted without replacement.
In an era of rent-seeking digital business models, where trillion dollar digital oligopolies have become the only viable option to operate in the economy, nobody wants to do the hard work of news collection, processing and dissemination with its rather precarious economics. Adding insult to injury "AI" threatens to squeeze the last drop of blood left.
This slow motion disruption (with uncertain and ugly end-states) plagues most other industries that deal heavily with information (finance, insurance etc.), more or less for the same reasons: digital illiteracy of management, short-termism and complacency from protected market silos etc.
There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that drives the entire digital universe. One can imagine a combination of "newstech" and "banktech" [1] and many other "industry-techs" that collectively reflect more accurately all the diverse services people need.
What would a fit-for-purpose "newstech" platform look like? There are plenty of well-remunerated execs whose job is to figure it out. Free hint: open source software will eat the world.
[1] Not everybody in the information spreading business is a digital laggard. Bloomberg built an empire on his early incarnation of "trader-tech" - but this is more an exception confirming the rule.
> There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that drives the entire digital universe.
Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that scales to cover the production costs.
Advertising money is (a) abundant and (b) seeks the broadest possible delivery.
The WWW (e.g. browsers, WWWtech) is an optimal match for ad money.
For decades before, Advertisers and Journalism maintained one another in a state of equilibrium. Journalism cultivated an audience and was gatekeeper of what was "printable" (tolerable to its paying audience); Advertisers were gatekeepers of marketing gimmicks and brand reputation.
These two tensions were complementary. An audience with education and money to spend represented value to journalism; the audience, together with advertising, paid the salaries, business costs, and legal fees of journalism. QED.
But then came WWWtech, which gave Advertisers everything the latter ever wanted: access to motivated spenders, day and night, all the time, everywhere. WWW ads are relatively cheap to produce and fast to market; WWWtech provides a deluge of fascinating facts about the market.
Journalism was jilted. So it reworked its channels.
But good journalism is important to Democracy. People care about their communities, voters do need factual information. There should be astute, principled, critical evaluation of social and economic events, of government policies and corporate activities.
Today, the only ways journalism is surviving (hardly) are through i) funding by the state and subscribers, or ii) by consolidating journalistic brands to deliver monetisable content that is unhitched from stabilising principles.
State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. Otherwise, we see that Anything Goes, as Cole Porter said.
Now the citizens of Democracy itself are struggling to understand why peace, order, good government, and factual information are so hard.
> Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that scales to cover the production costs.
Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. Even with a dynamic site, such as a wiki, you can serve millions of occasional readers for $20/month.
As a 'newspaper' class resource, Wikipedia's all-in hosting for fully read/write content (meaning, visitors can edit, it's not static), is about $0.03 CPM, handling ~6.74B visits a month (80B visits a year) for $2.4M a year or $200,000/month.
So that's 8 million visits a month for $20, as a R/W membership wiki instead of a RO static site.
To be clear, this is not salaries. "Production costs" depend on whether someone has something to say and feels compelled to say it. The less meaningful the message to the messenger, they more they only say it for the money, and the more money it takes.
Adding salaries to wikipedia's number drops from 8 million visits per $20 per month, to 400,000 visits per $20 per month.
> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.
It's certainly enough, even de minimus.
Even with salaries baked in, costs remain low enough for patronage, public funding, or subscription models instead of advertising models.
At most any scale, the cost of saying something to the public is a rounding error.
> State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.
State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good journalism. It just means journalism is biased in favor of the state, instead of biased in favor of whatever ideology the private owner has. If anything, bias in favor of the state is worse. Pravda and Isvestia in the Soviet Union were even less reliable than our mainstream media is now.
Can we at least try to acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between:
- news funded by oppressive regimes with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
- news funded by extremely rich and powerful people with an explicit goal of furthering their own agenda
If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful?
At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
This setup shouldn't pose a problem for any nation and government that considers themselves democratic.
> There needs to be publicly funded journalism - who else is going to report on stories that would threaten the status quo of rich & powerful?
The way to enable stories that threaten the status quo of the rich and powerful is to enforce freedom of speech for everyone, so anyone who is being screwed by the rich and powerful can say so, publicly, and not get canceled.
"Publicly funded journalism" does nothing of the kind, because the funding of "publicly funded journalism" comes from...the rich and powerful. Either through the government (who do you think runs the government? certainly not the poor and powerless) or through "nonprofit" organizations that can't survive, let alone pay the costs of journalism, without donations from the rich and powerful.
Yes, the government is powerful, but you ignored the 2nd part of my comment which addressed the concern you're repeating again.
> At the same time, there need to be strong protections in place that make it hard for the government to meddle with day to day operations of the press, allowing them to freely report on things that reflect poorly on the government.
> If you squint a little, these are essentially the same.
So are all the "shades of gray" in between. Every source of journalism we have is funded by someone who wants to further their own agenda. We have no source of journalism whose purpose is to just report the truth and let the public draw their own conclusions. Let alone one that can actually stick to that purpose in the face of the temptation to push a favored narrative.
State-support for media can take a wide range of forms, several of which are fairly resistant to control, coercion, and/or curruption:
- Distribution supports, as with discounts on US postal rates for printed matter, a policy dating to Benjamin Franklin.
- Tax breaks for publsihers.
- Legal notices and other advertising. Legal notices are simply an obligation put on third parties to take out box ads within newspapers. Other advertising might be for government services by some governmental unit. As with other forms of direct payment, there are both multiple levels of government (local, regional, state, federal), and numerous independent units. A larger city/metro paper might well represent numerous towns and cities, as well as multiple counties, and even possibly multiple states if near a state-line. Each of these could contribute independently to the news organisation, and cutting off or controlling all such spend would be difficult to coordinate.
- Direct tax-based subsidies for news. As with ad spend, again a news organisation would have numerous sources of support, with a strong degree of independence amongst those.
Many people seem to jump straight to "one level of government providing 100% support to one global news organisation". That's not at all what I'm envisioning; there would and should be a multiplicity of both funding sources and funded organisations.
While I would agree that there is a hole for certain news and information that isn't being filled (specifically investigative journalism and foreign affairs), I think there is a valid point to be made that, in the age of smart phones and social media, what use is there for the local newspaper and news network when if something happens close to you there is raw footage of it all over social media that shows exactly what happened without editorial. And that footage gets to you much quicker. Before the media companies can publish an article and find a way to spin it for sensationalism, complete with ads.
In this regard, I think there is a replacement. And for local news, I would argue that in many instances the replacement is far better since it is quicker to publish and has the potential to be far more objective.
EDIT: actually I think that hole is being filled, at least in part, by independent documentary filmmakers. What got disrupted were the mega conglomerates like Fox, CNN, MSNBC etc. And while spin and misinformation will always exist, because news is published by humans, I don't know why we would trust those conglomerates any more than any other random joe.
Investigative journalism is something rather more than happening to be in the right place with a camera and mic.
Hard-hitting investigative journalism takes a long time, much research, analysis, interviews, FOIA requests, document leaks, etc., etc. It also all but inevitably requires some reasonably well-funded legal defence capacity as well. Publishers are known for their prodigious ink and paper budgets, but also legal retainers.
I've watched some brilliantly produced independent documentaries where the filmmakers procured funding, went on the ground and did the hard work. MY point was that you don't need the backing of some biased mega-corp to greenlit these types of things.
Local journalism is key to fighting corruption and malpractice by firms, government, nonprofits, and individuals. Taxes are higher and more regressive. Voter turnout is lower. And the impacts are regressive, hitting poorer households and communities more than wealthier ones. Local journalism provides insights and accountability.
After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce firm monitoring by the press. This effect is not driven by the underlying economic conditions, the underlying local fraud environment, or the underlying firm conditions. Taken together, our findings indicate that local newspapers are an important monitor of firms’ misconduct.
"When the local newspaper leaves town: The effects of local newspaper closures on corporate misconduct"
"We are becoming a nation of local news haves and have nots"
We have known for some time that the decline of local news hurts local communities — lower voter turnout, more corruption, higher taxes, etc. What’s now clear is that the spread of news deserts is happening unequally. It has hurt poorer and older communities most — and is creating a nation of local news haves and have nots.
Individual producers can undertake some of these functions, but to a far lesser degree than a well-funded journalistic institution with a mission of serving the public.
(There are of course so-called "news" organisations which don't take a public-serving mission. That doesn't take away from the fact that there are also those which do.)
In an era of rent-seeking digital business models, where trillion dollar digital oligopolies have become the only viable option to operate in the economy, nobody wants to do the hard work of news collection, processing and dissemination with its rather precarious economics. Adding insult to injury "AI" threatens to squeeze the last drop of blood left.
This slow motion disruption (with uncertain and ugly end-states) plagues most other industries that deal heavily with information (finance, insurance etc.), more or less for the same reasons: digital illiteracy of management, short-termism and complacency from protected market silos etc.
There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that drives the entire digital universe. One can imagine a combination of "newstech" and "banktech" [1] and many other "industry-techs" that collectively reflect more accurately all the diverse services people need.
What would a fit-for-purpose "newstech" platform look like? There are plenty of well-remunerated execs whose job is to figure it out. Free hint: open source software will eat the world.
[1] Not everybody in the information spreading business is a digital laggard. Bloomberg built an empire on his early incarnation of "trader-tech" - but this is more an exception confirming the rule.