Newspapers, like radio, have done themselves no favors by taking a long time to adapt. It is true that most papers have had sites, even good sites for quite some time, but newspapers in the 90′s made very few steps to make these sites profitable. They were merely an almost-obligatory extension of the paper, simply to hopefully catch the attention of the online reader who may be thinking about going elsewhere. Papers spent very little time investing in making these sites profitable, and now they need them to be their main source of revenue. I just took a gander at the P-Is homepage and there is still almost no advertising. WHY? Come up with creative and innovative ways to get those ads on that page more visibly and more often. If they do this they can probably survive.

I was talking to a friend about this yesterday who is also making a run at a radio career. We came to the consensus (although in fairness without hard numbers to back it up) that if the PI cut the print side of the business, became a net-only paper, and buckled down on generating online revenue, they could probably be profitable. Cutting the print business would eliminate A LOT of overhead. The printing facilities, the delivery people, those annoying circulation salespeople; they could cut down on quite a bit of spending. Could this still make them enough money to survive? Like I said, I don’t have the numbers, but I really believe that if they made some changes they could survive this way.

As for the unbiased media thing; sorry but the media has been biased for a very long time. A friend of mine was fired some time ago from a very prominent media job in Seattle supposedly because he made a passing joke about an advertiser. He didn’t attack them or go on some sort of crusade against them, it was just a casual comment that caused the company to feel that the relationship with the client was threatened. If you work in the media, you better know who your sponsors are and NEVER say anything slightly negative about them. Granted, this wasn’t a news story, but you better believe that same thing happens if you report something negative about one or your advertisers. It happens now, and it will always happen as long as there is someone keeping track of who is giving them the money. This doesn’t make it right but that is how it is. To be fair, I’m sure it doesn’t happen like that 100% of the time, but believe me t happens.

Don’t get me wrong, we are well on our way to that situation already, but having journalists around the world reporting on things that we otherwise wouldn’t know about (not just disasters, but economics, politics, agreements, wars, etc.) is insanely expensive. No blog I know of is going to send foreign correspondents to Georgia (former USSR Georgia), or Kenya, or anywhere else.

I really hate the big news outfits at times, but I know that without them, and a viable alternative model for sending reporters out to places we otherwise wouldn’t know about, we will be informationally impoverished.

I have no answers, but keeping alive businesses that actually do send reporters around the world seems pretty important, and having government funded news organizations is cool on the one hand, but scary on the other. We need gadflies, and we need them to have enough money to do their job. News organizations these days are doing a poor job in many respects, but it is really depressing to think that no one will be around to fund the reporters if things continue to go down the drain financially for them. What we have isn’t great, but having no reporting due to lack of funding would be a lot worse.

The critical problem is the loss of independence that can come with public funding, but systems can be set up that create a wall of separation between the newsroom and the government. Matt the Engineer makes a good point though, namely that the existing model is far from unbiased. One need only look at this blog’s opinion of the Seattle Times coverage of Sound Transit to prove this point.

The BBC and NPR, both of which receive public money, actually do a lot of really good reporting and are often critical of their government sponsors.

A public model, in which public funds are available to any organization that does news reporting could work really well. The key is that the money needs to be available to a wide range of reporting organizations, not just a single one, and that the money must be tied to readership and separated from political meddling.

1) Remember the modern model of supposedly “unbiased” journalism in the US is a recent invention. For most of their history newspapers have been rabidly partisan and made no bones about pushing the agenda of their owners. In many parts of the world papers still do this.

It wasn’t all so bad though, in addition to various business interests owning papers, so did political parties, unions, and various civic and social organizations. The newspaper was essentially their mouthpiece.

2) Similar to the above the idea of a ad supported newspaper is relatively new as well, especially one that gets most of its revenue from classified ads. While newspapers published with the idea of making money, this wasn’t always the case. Furthermore paid readership used to account for much more of a papers revenue. However papers in those days were a few pages only at most and operated with a far smaller editorial and reporting staff than the typical big-city daily does today.

I doubt it.

But either everyone is going to need to become a blogger, or cooperatives of some kind are going to end up being formed, to report local and national news with any competency.

I would hope, if news ends up going to a publicly-funded model, it doesn’t infringe on First Amendment rights or stifle criticism of the government. We could end up seeing the American equivalent of the BBC or CBC arise in this country.

Regarding the fear that a non-profit model could be more biased or corrupt than a privately funded model: are you serious?

*Ah, Now with Bill Moyers was so good before the Bush administration stepped in and fired him. Did you know our president can do that?

TV news organizations have already cut their reporting budgets to the bone, and most blogs just borrow the reporting from TV or newspapers. For blogs to survive in the future, someone will have to come up with a new business model to support reporting of every kind, from daily news to in-depth investigative journalism.