Can print journalism be saved? Should it? by gimleteye

"Can journalism live without ads?" is the topic of Ed Wasserman's editorial in The Miami Herald.

It is a concern that absorbs eyeonmiami, too.

There is no question that the mainstream news media, especially print, is very ill: as ill as the Everglades and perhaps for the same reason. Neither can survive the distortions of moral obligation to certain principle. Credit The Miami Herald, at the very least, for entertaining to discuss the topic (not the Eveglades) on its editorial page.

"... new technologies are churning out better ways to reach customers who are shopping for cars, jobs or homes. The result is a calamity for the news business." Agree.

Wasserman is more diplomatic than I have been about the corrupting influence of ad revenues from--say for instance--production homebuilders and the Growth lobby in Florida that navigated our national economy onto the rocks.

Newspapers, like The Miami Herald, flinched--as a matter of revenues and profits--from looking straight into the nature of the credit bubble that germinated in the hands of some of its biggest advertisers. Nearly every week, we complain: like last week's placement of a massive development proposal by Lennar and powerful lobbyists for far West Kendall called Parkland 2012 in only one section of "neighbors".

Wasserman considers then swerves away from two alternatives that are increasingly discussed as solutions--private philanthropy (ie. newspapers owned by charitable foundations) or public financing, like license fees that British viewers pay to support their BBC. Where Wasserman finds most promise, is the idea of unleashing the power of data mining to calibrate advertising revenues to clicks.

It is the same kind of thorny issue that kept TV writers on strike for months: how to make a collective bargaining agreement with program producers on a business model that doesn't exist.

I would like to see the nation's leading thinkers on ethics and business set to the issue. Newspapers are a national treasure, an irreplaceable resource: their decline is a threat to democracy and accounts, to no small degree, for the difficult straits in which we find ourselves.

Surely there is some combination of charitable ownership and public funding through regulation of air wave auctions that could restore print journalism.

Wasserman notes the concern that "some philanthropies may even be obligated to ensure their money advances certain policy goals". Well, it couldn't be much worse, could it?

One area that is ripe for reform is the licensing of airwaves for telecommunications and wireless signal transmission. it is startling that no public benefit is derived from the auctioning of spectrum--a multi-billion dollar industry.

And what about the internet, where more and more people are choosing to get their news?

Under threat of new business models that have pushed the gathering of news and opinion into the same hopper that competes with Craig's List, print journalism can't survive. I don't think there is any way to harness the power of the internet to save print journalism; by the time a revenue model is established to parcel out clicks and revenue, I'm afraid that the only remaining newspapers will be gone.

Just read today's news, for a glimpse of how fast it is happening:

February 18, 2008
MEDIA TALK
The New Boss’s Salty Language Raises Eyebrows at His Papers

By JOANNE KAUFMAN
Samuel Zell, the new head of the Tribune Company, is known for colorful language — the sort that cannot be printed in his newspapers.

For instance, in a videotaped meeting last month with employees of The Orlando Sentinel, Mr. Zell swore at a photographer who asked about his “viewpoints on journalism and the role it plays in the community.” The question came up in the context of Mr. Zell’s desire to raise revenue.

According to L.A. Observed, a blog about the Los Angeles media world, Mr. Zell spoke favorably at another gathering about reinstating ads for “gentlemen’s clubs” in The Los Angeles Times, another Tribune property, then added some crude slang about female anatomy.

It was also reported that in a discussion of newsroom decorum at The Times, he told reporters that he saw no problem with their watching pornography at work as long as it did not get in the way of productivity. “Let me know if you find any good sites,” he said, according to MediaBistro, a journalism Web site.

The Times has been in flux; its top editor, James E. O’Shea, lost his job last month after refusing to cut more newsroom jobs, and on Thursday a successor, Russ Stanton, was named. But even during the interregnum, the back and forth over Mr. Zell’s comments continued.

Last Monday in a mea culpa memo to the paper’s staff, Mr. Zell characterized his language as “deliberately outrageous. My goal was to shock you, to shake you out of complacency.”

A follow-up memo issued the same day by the paper’s management said that “Sam is a force of nature,” but that “we still have the same expectations at The Times of what is correct in the workplace.”

An author of the memo, Susan Denley, The Times’s editor for hiring and staff development, said that the second note was meant as “more reassurance than anything. We’d heard a lot about people’s concerns. We wanted to be on record that people were to continue to treat each other appropriately.”

One reporter said that she and her colleagues “just laughed it off,” adding, “People have bigger things on their minds here. They’re more concerned about the new round of layoffs.”

JOANNE KAUFMAN