The American Press on Suicide Watch
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Everyone would receive $X of money with a mandate to give it to any news organization they wish. A condition of the money is that the organization receives it blindly, e.g. they don't reward you with anything in exchange (this isn't a subsidy for you to buy a daily newspaper).
The primary difficulty with this solution is that under such a system, how do you ensure the money is spent on news? As one example, how do you prevent Bob from spending his voucher on his neighbor's sham "news organization", and his neighbor doing likewise on Bob's sham "news organization"? You can easily craft legal language to remove a one-level tit-for-tat situation like that, but how do you do so robustly for the many other manifestations?
If you allow the government to choose who constitutes a real news organization and who doesn't, the voucher system loses many of its advantages (the primary one being proportional representation through the "individual choice" a voucher system provides, rather than monolithic "majority choice"; of course in both cases there is still a monolithic decision made on how much funding will go towards news).
If our society really does need exhaustive, deep journalism from large-ish organizations (which seems to be an underlying consensus among articles on the topic), then it's probably the government's duty to keep these institutions and practices alive.
Perhaps all this hubbub arises from a lack of vision though, and investigative reporting and in-depth analysis of current events are not in jeopardy at all - they'll simply come from different sources that most of us would expect.
The other option is something like "the daily show" where in depth news is just one type of content and you don't need to yammer on about every new case of H1N1 to fill an hour of news every single day.
PS: The reality is paying 10,000 or so journalists is just not that expensive a proposition and assuming the current system is the only way to fund them is probably missing the point.
News seems like a case where the time constraint was beneficial, and the product has become less valuable (more noise) ever since that constraint was dropped by the 24 hour news networks.
When I was a kid, we watched the 10 o'clock news every night before bed. The first half hour was world news, the second half hour was local news, and it always wrapped up with some local human interest piece. Yeah, it was a staid format, but it also meant the signal to noise ratio was high, because you really only had time to say what was actually important/informative.
With 24 hour news, we basically have the same information, but it's diluted by 23 hours of commentary on "what might happen" and "what's your view on what is happening". Why do we want to listen to people speculate all day? If the speculation was at least honest and intelligent, you might be able to learn from it, but I'm fairly sure you could find a higher level of discourse in your local high school debate class.
Really?
As for "ambitious news gathering", there I kind of agree with them; I'm not sure that there's much of a future in the broad, frequent and relatively superficial net that the New York Times and similar papers throw. Newspapers are set up on the premise that broadly disseminating a variety of news is hard, and requires a mediator, but that's not the case anymore.
Blog-level coverage is just fine for a lot of things in the popular sphere. In depth and investigative stuff I'll get from The New Yorker or The Economist (which I would pay for).
And it's a cheap shot to tell the journalists: "Go find yourself a better business nodel, you old-media turkeys hahaha." People who used to pay for content stop doing so, advertisers will not pay for content that they can't control and that might investigate their own companies, and we're loosing independent journalism that way. There's a bit too much joking about this for my liking.
That kind of attitude lets news-people stay high browed & complaining about how suits are ruining their content, so long as they are bringing in the ad-dollars. The new paradigm (as the author goes on to explain) has the dumb suits replaced with the dumb public ("The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news,...?") The constant is 'real news.' The world better hurry up and find them a business model or you'll be sorry.
If I step back and look at the whole thing from the outside I'm not worried about democracy and the flow of information being destroyed by a mostly free web.
Taking a step even further back, I would note that there is systemic risk in a business model where you're main advantages are disconnected from your revenue sources. They were never selling news. People have never bout news. They were a way for companies to interact with their customers. They are no longer such a good way of doing this.
Seriously: Who uses words like "never" in serious opinion pieces -- especially pieces that run in the NYT?
I guess it could be worse - all the NYT content could be paid subscription.
If it wasn't obvious: everyone has different morning rituals. I've never had yours, and I'm not a teen.
No need to worry
After that it's just a matter of really bored people trawling through the investigations looking for juicy information.
So, fundamentally, we want a distributed Big Brother. Always watching, always judging... everything.
Yet
Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq).
How is such journalism protecting democracy when it can not hold accountable its government when it matters the most. These papers are hardly journalism they are the establishment and this is clearly shown by: Colbert’s routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it “fell flat.” The Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, Clearly therefore it seems that newspapers are not doing their job of informing the public and the public seems to find the information without their help. Hence if newspapers die then so be it. Their upholding of the spirit of democracy is only empty rhetorics when the actions show that they do nothing of the sort. Their drums of death to democracy if they die is utter hypocrisy when looking at the facts. When there is a void to be filled I doubt there will not be brave journalists to fill it without the help of the newspapers.
P.S Funny huh, yesterday we read about Murdoch wanted to charge for papers, today we read a propaganda piece exactly to convince people to pay. I would not pay for New York Times and the sooner they die the better not least because their boss seems to have the power to meet with any leader he wishes promptly. This is not journalism, this is propaganda.
There is nothing they can do. If it can be electronically consumed, it will be.