After months of hunting for a buyer, The New York Times Company said on Wednesday that it had decided not to sell The Boston Globe, the newspaper it threatened last spring to close because of mounting losses.
The Globe did not draw high bids, and the company chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said last month that the paper’s finances had improved enough that the company no longer believed it had to sell if the offers were not attractive enough.
Executives said this year that the paper was on track to lose $85 million in 2009, before making painful cost cuts that included wage, benefit and job security concessions from union employees. But even after those expense reductions, analysts say, The Globe probably does not operate in the black.
Two bidders made preliminary offers for The Globe and another paper, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, of about $35 million and the assumption of pension obligations. At least one prospective buyer, a local group led by Stephen E. Taylor, a former Globe executive whose family owned the paper for most of its history, submitted an updated offer last week. The other bidder was Platinum Equity, a private equity firm based in Beverly Hills that recently bought The San Diego Union-Tribune.
People briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly, said that Platinum lost confidence that it could close the gap between its offer and what the Times Company wanted, and that Times Company executives, who would have preferred to sell to Mr. Taylor’s group, had raised questions about how solid its financing was.
Platinum declined comment.
Mr. Taylor said, “I wish that it had happened, but it’s The Times’s prerogative to make whatever they feel is the best decision for them,” adding, “I want the very, very best for The Globe in the future.”
The company broke the news that it would keep The Globe to the paper’s employees just after 5 p.m. by e-mail. The message said the Times Company was still looking at the possibility of selling The Telegram & Gazette, and that Janet L. Robinson, the company’s chief executive, would be in Boston on Thursday to address Globe employees. Company executives declined to make any other statement.
Even before this year’s crisis, The Globe, like most major American newspapers, had sharply trimmed its staff through buyouts and layoffs, and it had frozen salaries for several years. The contract concessions were a hard pill to swallow for workers, many of whom said they felt mistreated by the company.
There was a particularly bitter showdown with the largest union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, whose members voted in June to reject the first contract proposal, only to have the company respond with a unilateral 23 percent pay cut. The guild accepted a modified proposal weeks later.
Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who has closely followed The Globe’s troubles, said it might be better for The Globe to remain with the Times Company than to go to a new owner that might do more cutting or replace top executives. “But the company has its work cut out for it in terms of rebuilding credibility with the employees and the community,” he said.
“I’m really just happy the uncertainty is over,” Patricia Wen, a reporter, said. “It’s not a statement about whether I preferred one owner over the other.”
Another reporter, Beth Daley, said the decision was not a surprise, given Mr. Sulzberger’s comments and the lukewarm response from buyers. But she said she hoped the company would try to earn good will with employees by restoring some health care cuts.
The Times Company paid $1.1 billion for The Globe in 1993. It was by far the highest price paid for a single newspaper to that time, and it was solidly profitable during that decade. But in the last few years, as a steep advertising downturn has battered the industry, The Globe has suffered more than most, in part because of the loss of crucial New England-based advertisers.
There's no doubt that news in America is in trouble. Of the 60,000 print journalists employed throughout the nation in 2001, at least 10,000 have lost their jobs, and last year alone newspaper circulation dropped by a precipitous 7 percent. Internet, network and cable news employ a dwindling population of reporters, not nearly enough to cover a country of 300 million people, much less keep up with events around the world. It is no longer safe to assume, as the authors of the Constitution did, that free-flowing news and information will always be available to America's voters.
It's time for the public discussion to focus less on what has caused this swiftly escalating crisis--the mass migration of readers to the Internet and the effects of the economic meltdown feature in most explanations--and start talking seriously about solutions. Saving journalism might seem like an entirely new problem, but it's really just another version of one that Americans have solved many times before: how do we keep a vital public institution safe from the ups and downs of the economy? Private philanthropy and government support are the two best answers we have to this question.
One of the best-known examples of philanthropy's response to the news crisis is ProPublica (propublica.org), which was founded in 2007 by editor in chief Paul Steiger with retired banking tycoons Herbert and Marion Sandler. The group, which relies mainly on grants from the Sandlers to stay in operation, maintains a staff of thirty-five reporters and editors, who specialize in hard-hitting investigative journalism with a long memory, the kind that cash-strapped commercial media have always been wary of supporting. With stories on Hurricane Katrina and Guantánamo already published in places like the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Nation [see A.C. Thompson, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," January 5], the group exemplifies how valuable the nonprofit news sector can be.
The group's finances and the scope of its operations, however, are a perfect example of why philanthropy can never be the sole answer to America's news crisis. ProPublica's annual budget of $10 million is exceptional by philanthropic standards, but it is still less than a single newspaper, Denver's Rocky Mountain News, was losing per year before its owners shut it down. An army of ProPublicas is needed before America can replace the capacity for good journalism it has already lost.
That said, the private, not-for-profit news sector is worth paying attention to. Some of the new organizations cropping up might be models for others, if they're successful. Two representative examples are the Investigative Network (currently a for-profit, with plans to become a hybrid not-for-profit and for-profit entity) and the Under-Told Stories Project. Founded to fill a void in coverage of the multibillion-dollar Texas Statehouse budget, the Investigative Network (pressforthepeople.com) aims to use the revenue it gets from selling subscriptions to niche information streams to fund investigative journalism in the general public interest. The group's founder, investigative reporter Paul Adrian, hopes that funding will also come from story syndication and philanthropy. Groups with such a diverse mix of support as part of their initial business plans are likely to become more common.
The Under-Told Stories Project (undertoldstories.org) is devoted to increasing public awareness of underreported international topics. The group is funded partly by sale of its stories, most of which end up on public television and radio, and partly by its institutional partner, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Organizations that get some support from endowed nonmedia institutions might also become more common.
It's also worth noting that in an environment of diminishing opportunities for young journalists, the Under-Told Stories Project arranges internships. Ensuring that good reporting will be around in the long term is just as important as preserving what we have now, and the private, nonprofit media sector would do well to pursue it more vigorously. (Full disclosure: I am an unpaid adviser to both the Under-Told Stories Project and the Investigative Network.)
Because such fledgling enterprises are potentially so valuable to the health of our media, they should be loudly and publicly encouraged at this stage, even though there will never be enough of them to solve the news crisis on their own. At Harvard's Hauser Center, I've launched a database of nonprofit news efforts (hausercenter.harvard.edu/medialist). Many of the listed organizations are in the early stages of development, and now is the time when publicity and donations can make a decisive difference. If you're looking for somewhere to donate, or if you know of a group that we haven't found yet, I urge you to get in touch. But for a nation in the midst of a crippling news crisis, my list is still alarmingly short, and, as a potential replacement for our commercial media, it can never really be long enough.
I would love it if supporting the news were seen as a routine civic obligation--"this month's city hall coverage adopted by the Elks Club" is easy to imagine--but those days, if they ever come, are likely far in the future, and adopting a stretch of highway is a far cry from building it in the first place.
To survive the current crisis, we need bigger, faster solutions. We need to do what other mature democracies have long done: fully fund our public media with tax dollars. Calling in the resources of the central government to bear on any national problem is sure to be obscured by the fog of ideological and partisan distractions permeating the debates about the climate crisis and healthcare. I can already hear the hysterical, clamoring opposition to "socialized media" or "government takeover of the news."
Better funding for All Things Considered on NPR or NewsHour on PBS will not turn either program into a propaganda outfit for the government. The BBC is not Pravda, and Japan and most of Europe, which have enjoyed extremely well-funded public media for decades, are not a network of totalitarian states. German public television, for example, is amply funded with revenue collected under the aegis of the central government but administered through a decentralized system designed to preserve regional independence. There are numerous democratic nations with public broadcasting systems that are both well funded by their central government and also well shielded from its political influence.
In America, more robust public media won't weaken or constrain our commercial media. No matter how well funded PBS and NPR become, American cable news will still be free to devote 22 percent of its total coverage to stories like the death and burial of Anna Nicole Smith, as it did in February 2007.
Even though it goes against habits of American governance, and even though the Obama administration and its allies are mired in the slow advance of other ambitious projects, now is the moment to advocate greatly expanding our public media. The rapid corrosion of our commercial news demands that something be done soon, and it is still early in the administration of a popular, progressive president, when sweeping changes are possible.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney have correctly deemed efforts to solve the news crisis a national infrastructure project [see "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers," April 6]. We don't leave it up to private nonprofits to maintain our roads and bridges, outfit the Army or provide public transportation. Volunteer militias and private fire departments rightly did not survive the progressive reforms of the nineteenth century. You can still hire a private security firm or travel in a private jet, but the government also assures a basic measure of protection and mobility to every taxpaying citizen. Why shouldn't it be the same for the news and information whose circulation the founding fathers saw fit to protect in the First Amendment?
Total federal support for American public broadcast media in 2007 was about $480 million. That might seem sufficient or even impressive until you compare it with the BBC, which serves a nation with one-fifth the US population but which received the equivalent of $5.6 billion in government money in 2007. When it comes to public media, the United States is decisively outspent by the governments of most other major democracies. Japan, whose population is less than half the size of the United States', spent the equivalent of $6.8 billion for public broadcasting in 2007; Germany, with one-third the size, spent about $11 billion; and Canada, a tenth the size, spent $898 million. Even Denmark and Ireland, with populations smaller than New York City, far outspent the United States per capita, with respective budgets equivalent to $673 million and $296 million.
The amount the government now sets aside for public broadcast media is about what it costs the military to occupy Iraq for two and a half days. Taking into account the hundreds of billions lavished on the interim survival of our elite financial institutions, funding our news infrastructure won't be a hardship. Just a small fraction of the $45 billion--that's billion with a "b"--Citigroup alone has received since October 2008 would give NPR and PBS all the money they need.
Unlike the benefits that come from bailing out investment banks and insurance conglomerates, a stronger investment in public media would give all citizens a concrete and valuable service. Turn on cable TV news to find out about an event overseas, and you are likely to see a panel of well-coiffed pundits sitting in a studio in New York, Washington or Los Angeles debating what might be happening on the other side of the world. Switch to the same story on the BBC, and you are likely to see a correspondent on the ground where the event is actually taking place. The BBC's forty-one permanent foreign bureaus are more than twice the number maintained by ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS each. This isn't a difference of national character; it's simply a matter of money. For commercial TV, paying pundits is a lot cheaper than doing the real work of reporting. And for public media, chronically small budgets often make extensive original reporting too expensive, even for respected shows like NewsHour.
To discern the real view the American people hold toward public media, it is necessary to pay attention to one fact: voluntary viewer donations provide the biggest chunk of the money that keeps public media in business, and have done so for a very long time. The phrase "supported by viewers like you" is more than a marketing bromide. Except for stalwarts like the Ford and MacArthur foundations and Mutual of America, and in years past Exxon and AT&T, foundation and corporate giving has never provided as much to public television as small individual pledges. But despite its reliability, voluntary public subscription is no way to fund a major public service.
Throughout the two decades I was president of WNET, New York's PBS station, I spent a lot of time standing in front of cameras asking viewers for money, so I don't feel ashamed or unqualified to say that even though it has essentially saved the medium and mobilized millions of Americans, the drawn-out, droning pledge drive may finally be reaching a point of diminishing return. After factoring in the salaries of development departments, the costs of direct mail and on-air solicitation, premiums, thank-you letters and the requisite tote bag, a sizable portion of every dollar that comes in to public television is already spent. There is also the less quantifiable cost in viewers who, when faced with a pledge drive, simply change the channel.
For more than fifty years the American people have shown, through their generous donations, that they support the idea and the reality of public media. The government should acknowledge those decades of widespread support by funding NPR and PBS both more extensively and more efficiently.
By increasing direct allocations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is responsible for disbursing funding to public TV and radio affiliates across America, the inherent inefficiencies of fundraising via public appeal would be eliminated, and countless hours of airtime would be liberated from pledge drives. It would also mean that Americans would get more in return for the money they already pay to maintain the public media distribution network, which delivers NPR and PBS to 100 percent of the country.
Perhaps most important, pumping more money into our public media infrastructure could fortify the eroding foundation of print journalism, on which the rest of news media depend. News shows on PBS and NPR already routinely call on newspaper and magazine reporters to provide coverage. Expanding this practice could mean jobs for the rapidly growing number of unemployed print journalists, or even the survival of entire newsrooms in cities with closed or downsizing papers.
Once a newspaper or magazine is lost, its particular blend of institutional history, editorial and reporting expertise, and its ties to the community are never fully recoverable. But an expanded public media network, capable of deploying reporters across the nation and around the world, would at least make sure that someone is always available to gather the news, and keep government and business responsible to the public interest.
The costs of letting our journalistic institutions decay aren't visible like collapsed bridges or tent cities, but they're just as dire. A thriving news media, which America is in real danger of losing, is the unspoken assumption behind not only the First Amendment but the whole idea of self-government. It shouldn't seem radical to expect the same government that recognizes the freedom of the press to also ensure the survival of the press.
About William F. Baker
William F. Baker, president emeritus of WNET, the country's largest PBS station, is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor and Journalist-in-Residence at Fordham University
This article initially characterized The Investigative Network as a private, not-for-profit group. The article has been corrected to reflect the fact that the organization is a for-profit that intends to become a hybrid for-profit and not-for-profit.
Evan Leatherwood, a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York, helped research and write this article.
The American news business today finds itself trapped in a grim paradox. Financially, its prospects have never seemed bleaker. By some measures, the first quarter of 2009 was the worst ever for newspapers, with sales plunging $2.6 billion. Last year, circulation dropped on average by 4.6 percent on weekdays and 4.8 percent on Sundays. Earlier this year, Detroit's two daily papers reduced home delivery to three days a week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its print edition, and the Rocky Mountain News shut down altogether. This summer, The Boston Globe, which is losing more than $50 million a year, survived only by giving in to the draconian cutbacks demanded by its owner, the New York Times Company, while the Times itself, weighed down by the Globe, had to take out a $250 million loan from Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico's richest man, at a junk-bond-level interest rate of 14 percent a year.
Yet amid all this gloom, statistics from the Internet suggest that interest in news has rarely been greater. According to one survey, Internet users in 2008 spent fifty-three minutes a week reading newspapers online, up from forty-one minutes in 2007. And the traffic at the top fifty news Web sites increased by 27 percent. While this growth cut across all age groups, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found, "it was fueled in particular by young people." The MTV generation, known for its indifference to news, has given way to the Obama generation, which craves it, and for an industry long reconciled to the idea of its customers dying off, the reengagement of America's young offers a rare ray of hope.
How could the financial fortunes of a $50 billion–plus industry decline so swiftly while its product remains so prized? The most immediate explanation is the collapse of what has long been the industry's economic base: advertising. The traditional three staples of newspaper advertising—automotive, employment, and real estate—have all drastically declined, thanks to Craigslist, eBay, the travails of Detroit, and the consolidation of department stores (resulting in fewer retail ad pages). Meanwhile, the steady expansion of space on the Internet has caused online ad rates to crash, and these are not expected to recover even when the economy as a whole does.
The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which dominated the industry for decades, helped drain money out of newsrooms and into the pockets of shareholders. It also shifted the locus of decision-making from locally based citizens to distant corporate boards. Most harmful of all, efforts to build large media conglomerates have saddled newspaper companies with astounding levels of debt, much of it taken on to buy other newspaper companies. The Tribune Company has been in bankruptcy court since October, wrestling with the fallout from Sam Zell's highly leveraged purchase of Times Mirror, while McClatchy Newspapers, having paid top dollar for the Knight Ridder chain, has been selling off papers to keep its creditors at bay.
When it comes to mismanagement, then, the newspaper business seems in a class with Detroit. Unlike GM, though, newspapers offer a product that consumers still value. But how to cash in on it? As the old business models fade, new ones are urgently being tested. Surveying the blackened landscape, I searched for new buds—and stumbled upon something much larger.
1.
In April, The Christian Science Monitor became the first nationally circulated newspaper to end its daily print edition and concentrate on the Web. Having lost nearly $20 million in 2008, the paper wanted to shed the onerous costs associated with printing and delivery. (It still prints a weekly edition.) Some observers saw this as a harbinger for the industry, the start of a mass migration from print to digital. A look at the numbers, however, suggests otherwise. For all the growth in visitor traffic to newspaper Web sites, most online readers don't linger there. According to one study, of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web. Similarly, of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web. With numbers like these, print is not going away anytime soon.
For publishers, the key is to find a way to maximize revenues from print and the Web. And here a great sea change is occurring. Since the late 1990s, when the first news sites were introduced on the Internet, most papers have offered untrammeled access to them. "Information wants to be free," the digirati proclaimed, and publishers dutifully went along. And for a while, that strategy paid off: as traffic grew, ad revenues did, too. With the steady fall-off of advertising since 2006, however, the free-for-all philosophy has lost its appeal.
Adding to the disillusionment is the growing recognition of the part that free access to the Web has played in the hemorrhaging of circulation. "When we look at why people quit buying the newspaper, it's overwhelmingly because 'I can get it for free online,'" William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, the nation's fourth-largest newspaper company, recently said. Whenever the Times's Bill Keller and other top editors speak in public, they invariably encounter readers who, expressing amazement at being able to read the paper online for free, plead for ways to donate to it. In 2002, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette started charging for online content. While it has signed up only 3,400 subscribers, the circulation of its daily print edition has held steady at around 180,000 at a time when that of most other papers has fallen, and its owner, Walter Hussman Jr., has traveled around the country describing how charging for Web content can help stop the bleeding.
Publishers are taking heed. In the next year, many are expected to erect "pay walls"—i.e., charges for access—around their sites. The challenge is getting the height right. Receiving the most attention are "hybrid" models that, part pay and part free, seek to gain subscribers while maintaining a steady flow of online readers.
There are two main models. The Financial Times uses a "meter," or quota, approach. Visitors to FT.com are allowed access to a few free articles a month; to get more, they have to subscribe. This has netted the FT 117,000 subscribers paying up to $299 a year. Affluent and educated, those readers are very attractive to advertisers and so generate considerable ad revenue as well.
The Wall Street Journal' s policy is much less restrictive. Visitors to WSJ .com are allowed free access to all articles about politics, culture, and other general-interest topics. Only those seeking entry to the Journal's business and finance reports must pay. Soon after Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal, in 2007, he announced that, to draw traffic to its Web site, he was going to make access to it completely free, but, seeing the softness of the ad market, he quickly reconsidered, and reports on business and finance have remained behind a pay wall. Today, WSJ.com has 1.1 million subscribers paying $100 to $140 a year. And with the number of unique visitors to the site surpassing 12 million in April, traffic remains brisk. As Murdoch recently acknowledged, the Journal's digital revenues "are not a gold mine," but, he added, "People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change." In recent weeks, executives at Murdoch's News Corp. have been meeting with other publishers about forming a consortium to charge for news delivered online.
Such moves rankle advocates of free access to the Internet. Among the most vocal is Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor in chief of the popular Internet news-and-blog site The Huffington Post. "Walled gardens," she insists, don't work; the "link economy" is here to stay. (Free links, it must be noted, are vital to The Huffington Post's health.) As evidence that pay walls don't work, Huffington and others point to TimesSelect. Introduced by The New York Times in September 2005, it placed the paper's columnists behind a pay wall and charged online readers $49.95 a year for admission. Two years later, the Times, concerned by the fall-off in traffic, reinstated its free-for-all policy.
Even that limited test, however, attracted 220,000-plus paying subscribers. If the Times were to place even more, or different, content behind a pay wall and find the right entrance fee, it would no doubt gain many more. For months, the paper's executives have been studying various pay options, and they plan to offer one or more in the fall.
A lot will be riding on what they decide. Aside from being the nation's top newspaper, the Times has devoted far more money and manpower to its digital edition than any other paper. At its Midtown office, teams of cybergeeks, futurists, and "creative technologists" have worked feverishly to combine traditional journalistic practices with the protean powers of the Web. Their imprint is apparent in the welter of videos, multiband graphs, sumptuous pie charts, slide shows, and time lines at NYTimes .com. Now, in addition to reading Nicholas Kristof's descriptions of malnutrition in Africa, you can watch a video of him interviewing some of the victims. On an interactive photo feature titled "Casualties of War," a click on a montage of photos of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan summons up mini-profiles of each. A "word train" offers a snapshot of what's on reader's minds by displaying in varying type sizes the adjectives they send in based on the frequency of their mention.
There are blogs galore—Andrew Revkin on the environment, Paul Krugman on the economy, Errol Morris on whatever's on his mind—plus leisurely features like "One in 8 Million," an audio slide show about ordinary New Yorkers (linked to a regular feature in the print edition), and "The Puppy Diaries," managing editor Jill Abramson's weekly musings on her new pet.
For an institution long known as the "Gray Lady," it's a dazzling mix. But is it on the right track? Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, told me:
The prerequisite for establishing a pay-for-content model is good content—must-read content. It's extremely important in the modern news business to be clear on what your comparative advantage is. If you want to be everything to everybody and spread your resources too thin, you're going to get into trouble.
The FT's comparative advantage, he added, "is business and financial." The New York Times's advantage, he argues, is its "global network" and its "deep and original reporting." While some observers maintain that the FT and The Wall Street Journal are uniquely able to charge for content because the information they offer is so valuable to businessmen, Barber believes that a high-quality general-interest paper like The New York Times can charge as well.
(The FT, by the way, has introduced a number of specialized services, like "China Confidential," which offer inside information on high-value subjects to readers willing to pay a premium. This points to another potentially lucrative revenue source for news organizations.)
The Times site does offer much excellent content. Too often, though, it seems overwhelmed by gadgets and gizmos, features and fluff. Technologically in a class by itself, the paper has seemed less adept at grasping the Web's potential to spotlight issues and stir debate. This summer, for instance, the blogosphere lit up over "The Great American Bubble Machine," Matt Taibbi's provocative Rolling Stone article about the political and financial power of Goldman Sachs. On the few occasions on which the Times took note of the story, it was with Olympian disdain. Imagine the stir it would have created had it hosted a Web forum on the piece under a headline like "Is Goldman Sachs a Bubble Machine?" In the long run, such features would, I think, draw far more traffic than word trains or puppy diaries.
Still, the Times seems likely to attract many readers even after it begins charging for content. In view of its unique place in American journalism, it seems certain to weather the current crisis. The same seems true of America's other nationally read papers, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. (The Los Angeles Times might be able to join them if it is able to find ways to exploit its own comparative advantage—coverage of the entertainment industry.) Many of the nation's smaller papers have their own advantage—they're the only news source in town—and many are thriving. It's the large metropolitan dailies like The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and The Miami Herald that, contending with both large staffs and brisk competition, are the most endangered, and it's widely feared that one or more will go under in the coming years.
Such a development would be catastrophic for the public. As gatherers and purveyors of information, newspapers are without peers, and the retrenchment they're undergoing is seriously eroding their ability to enlighten and expose. At the same time, the industry's travails are serving as a stimulus. A restless array of entrepreneurs, innovators, and idealists—taking advantage of the Internet's low entry barriers—has emerged, testing new ways of delivering the news. Are any succeeding?
2.
So far, the attention paid to new Web ventures has focused mainly on the for-profit sector. Most of these sites are pursuing roughly the same strategy—building sufficient Web traffic to attract advertisers. And most are after the same market—the 25 million or so affluent, educated Americans who roughly overlap with the audience for NPR. Three of these enterprises in particular seem to be making a go of it. One is Slate. Founded in 1996 with the help of Microsoft, it initially struggled, but since being purchased by the Washington Post Company, in 2004, it has generally been profitable. Deriving 95 percent of its revenue from ads, Slate owes its success both to the Post's backing and to its own journalistic formula—sharply written contrarian pieces offered for free on its site and promoted with clever headlines (for example, "Where Are the Jewish Gangsters of Yesteryear? Or, what we can learn about 'respectability' from Bernie Madoff and Meyer Lansky"). In an effort to replicate Slate's success, the Post in 2008 created the Slate Group, and since then it has introduced several spin-offs, including The Root (African- American affairs), The Big Money (business), and ForeignPolicy.com.
The online arm of Foreign Policy magazine, ForeignPolicy.com is in some ways the most interesting, offering free access to both punchy articles from the magazine and a roster of contentious, thoughtful blogs written by such disparate figures as the military reporter Thomas Ricks; the Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy ; and Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at George Washington University. It also has offered some original reporting in the form of "The Cable," Laura Rozen's behind-the-scenes look at US foreign policy making. (In late August, however, it was announced that Rozen was leaving ForeignPolicy .com to work at Politico.) The model, according to executive editor Susan Glasser, is the newspaper Roll Call, which has long offered advertisers a cost-effective means of reaching a select Capitol Hill audience. Glasser says she's optimistic but acknowledges that, to date, "We haven't cracked the code."
Politico seems to have. After not quite three years, Politico attracts on average about 3.2 million unique visitors a month. Its founders say it's in the black, though by how much is difficult to say, since it's owned by Allbritton Communications, a privately held, TV-rich conglomerate. Politico's hundred-person staff works out of Allbritton's office building in Arlington, Virginia, and it's hard to separate Politico's overhead from that of its parent. Fully dependent on ad revenue, Politico gets much of it from its print edition, which is published five times a week when Congress is in session and—distributed free of charge—has a circulation of 32,000. In other words, Politico, one of the Web's success stories, remains in no small part dependent on print.
The one site that has turned a profit without the aid of print or a sponsor is Talking Points Memo. In nine years, Josh Marshall has built it from a one-man blog into a bustling political journal with 1.5 million unique visitors a month. TPM relies mainly on advertising—everything from Comcast to T-shirt companies—and its combination of low overhead and an engaged readership has enabled it to thrive. Over the summer, Marshall agreed for the first time to accept outside capital—between $500,000 and $1 million from a group of investors that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. With it, he plans to expand his site from its current eleven employees to about twenty, with the possibility of adding more if the site's traffic—and revenues—expand sufficiently.
The challenge TPM faces is evident from the experiences of a younger, flashier sibling. The Huffington Post seems in a state of constant motion. In just four years, it has conjured up a cast of bloggers numbering in the thousands, a Washington staff of seven, an investigative unit, and local editions in Chicago and New York. The company has been coy in discussing its earnings, saying only that it is profitable in some months and not profitable in others. In June, the company announced that it was replacing its CEO of the last two years, Betsy Morgan, with Eric Hippeau, one of its original investors. The reason, Arianna Huffington has said, is that the company was not sufficiently "monetizing the traffic." Though ad revenue has been growing briskly, the company feels it needs to attract far more display advertising—a challenge facing all sites.
Of all the for-profit experiments out there, the most intriguing, perhaps, is Global Post. Launched in January with close to $10 million in start-up funds from private investors, this site already has seventy-four part-time correspondents in fifty countries. The co-founder and editorial chief, Charles Sennott, a former Boston Globe correspondent, says that the "void" created by the cutbacks in foreign reporting has created "an opportunity. We want to be one of the sites that Americans regularly go to when they think about the world." In June, Sennott and a photographer spent nearly three weeks in Afghanistan, producing a multimedia medley of articles, podcasts, videos, and slide shows about the US fight against the Taliban. (To date, the site seems to lean more toward straight reporting than in-depth analysis, focusing on questions like "Who are the Taliban?" rather than "Should we be in Afghanistan?")
The service does not come cheap: in addition to paying most of its correspondents $1,000 a month for four stories, it has a full-time staff of sixteen in Boston. To help meet that payroll, Global Post foresees three revenue streams: advertising, membership, and syndication. Of these, the last seems the most promising; already, it has signed contracts with ten papers to run its stories, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (a five-figure deal) and The Newark Star-Ledger. In the course of a long phone conversation, Sennott grew animated as he described his experiment and its potential for radically transforming foreign reporting, offering global dispatches at a fraction of the rate charged by the AP. Yet as I listened, I couldn't help but think of the huge sums needed to keep his operation afloat and to wonder where they'd come from. The same was true for the commercial sector as a whole. For all the impressive projects out there, their economic base seems tenuous, and my encounters with them left me feeling sobered by the obstacles they face.
3.
My inquiries into the nonprofit world, by contrast, left me heartened. Here I found all kinds of excited activity. Much of it, I discovered, had been set in motion by an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the Times in late January. David Swensen, the chief investment officer for Yale's endowment management team, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst there, argued that in light of the struggles of newspapers, they should consider turning themselves into nonprofit endowed institutions, like universities. "Endowments," they wrote, "would enhance newspapers' autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down." Taking the Times as an example, they estimated that, with a newsroom costing somewhat more than $200 million a year to run, and with some additional outlays for overhead, the paper would need an endowment of around $5 billion. "Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance," they declared.
Swensen is widely known as an expert on university investing, and the article set off a storm of speculation. On his blog at The New Yorker, Steve Coll, calculating that The Washington Post (his former employer) would need an endowment of $2 billion, called on Warren Buffett to write a check to the paper in that sum. In Washington, Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, designed to make it easier for newspapers to qualify as nonprofits under federal law, and John Kerry convened hearings in the Senate on how to save America's newspapers.
The image of the Times and the Post protected by huge endowments seems comforting indeed. Unfortunately, it's entirely unrealistic. Turning those papers into nonprofits would require the Sulzbergers and the Grahams to voluntarily give away their wealth. Even if they were so moved, where would all those billions come from? They simply aren't out there. In light of the dramatic fall-off in the value of Yale's own endowment, Swensen's proposal seems doubly unpersuasive.
Yet by highlighting the industry's struggles, the article "sort of rang the bell," I was told by John Thornton, an Austin-based venture capitalist turned philanthropist and news entrepreneur. Last year, Thornton, seeking investment opportunities in the news business, couldn't find any. The golden era of commercial news, which had lasted from 1960 to 2005 and which had been based on the confluence of a booming population with an explosion in advertising, seemed gone for good. Where journalism is concerned, he came to believe, "you can't serve God and Mammon at the same time." Alarmed by the sharp decline in the number of journalists covering Texas politics, Thornton set out to raise money for a nonprofit online service. He didn't get very far—until the Times article appeared.
In the months since, he's been able to raise more than $1 million from wealthy friends, in addition to $1 million he's put up himself, toward a goal of about $4 million. The Texas Tribune is scheduled to begin operations in November. Already, it's snapped up some of the state's top journalists, including Evan Smith, the respected former editor of Texas Monthly. Thornton has since become an evangelist for non-commercial news, urging his fellow philanthropists to invest in it because "the bang for the buck"—the satisfactions of improved coverage—is so high.
Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego, shares his enthusiasm. Founded in February 2005 by Buzz Woolley, a retired venture capitalist disturbed at the cutbacks taking place at The San Diego Union-Tribune, this community-based nonprofit Web site offers a daily dose of local and regional news and commentary. Its nine professional journalists have broken many stories, including the existence of a clandestine bonus ring at a San Diego development corporation. It does all this on an annual budget of $1 million. "If we could get to two or three million, we could do amazing things," says Lewis, who, in addition to running the site, writes a popular political blog. And he thinks that's very attainable. "I'm bullish that reporting can survive and even thrive in a nonprofit model," he said. Currently, the site gets 40 percent of its revenue from foundations such as the Knight Foundation and the San Diego Foundation, 30 percent from large donors, and the rest from corporate sponsors and smaller donors giving $50 or $100. The potential of smaller donors to give more is huge, says Lewis, adding that "we're being contacted by people from all around the country who want to start something like this."
In the last two years, similar non-profit sites have sprung up in the Twin Cities, New Haven, Seattle, St. Louis, and Chicago. The same entrepreneurial spirit has led as well to a surge of interest in investigative reporting not seen since the days after Watergate. The standard-bearer here is ProPublica, the national team of investigators backed by a well-endowed club of donors, but there's also been a proliferation of smaller start-ups, like Investigate West (based outside Seattle), the Watchdog Center (San Diego), and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, all seeking to expose corrupt officials, corporate crime, and exploitative working conditions. Investigative reporting has also caught fire at the nation's journalism schools, with institutes committed to teaching and supervising such work established at American, Brandeis, Boston University, and Columbia. Sheila Coronel, who runs the Columbia center, says that this year 120 students applied for the fifteen spots in her class —double the number of a year ago—a development she attributes to a new wave of idealism among America's young.
In early July, the representatives of two dozen such centers met at Pocantico, the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown, New York, to discuss ways of collaborating. In a unanimous resolution, they committed themselves to establishing, "for the first time ever, an Investigative News Network of nonprofit news publishers throughout the United States of America," with a mission "to foster the highest quality investigative journalism, and to hold those in power accountable, at the local, national and international levels." Following up, subcommittees are now studying ways to foster cooperation in conducting investigations, displaying work on the Web, and—most importantly—securing funding. "I've been doing investigating reporting for thirty years," says Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and an architect of the new network, "and this is by far the most interesting time I've seen."
"There's a big pool of money in the nonprofit world—we need to see if we can tap into it," says Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost, the community-based site in the Twin Cities, who stresses how challenging it is to make an Internet news operation work. "Even on a nonprofit site, you have to find ways to make enough money to cover the costs." To date, the funding of nonprofit journalism has been led by the Knight Foundation, under the direction of former Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen, with added support from Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, and George Soros's Open Society Institute. Benjamin Shute Jr. of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which hosted the Pocantico meeting, says that more foundations are showing interest, but, he warned, most
don't see themselves in the sustaining business. They're like venture capital firms—they like to get things started but then want to see them take on lives of their own. At least a significant proportion of income has to come from other sources.
When it comes to cultivating such sources, everyone looks to one organization for guidance: NPR. At a time when not only newspapers but also commercial broadcasters are struggling, NPR has thrived. In 2008, the cumulative weekly audience for its daily news shows increased by 9 percent, to a record 20.9 million listeners. Though not immune to the economic downturn—in December 2008, it eliminated sixty-four jobs, or 7 percent of its workforce, and in April, it cut thirteen more positions and announced five-day furloughs for all remaining staff—NPR remains robust enough to maintain seventeen bureaus abroad and another nineteen at home. To keep all that afloat, it draws on several money sources: its endowment, foundations, corporate underwriting, and dues and fees from its more than 860 member stations, all of which are noncommercial. This last stream is the largest, making up 43 percent of the total. Most of that money is raised from listeners during those annoying pledge drives. In short, NPR is supported mainly by those who actually consume its product—a huge advantage at a time of anemic advertising.
NPR is planning an ambitious campaign to boost the reporting capacities of its member stations. "We're trying to raise money on behalf of not just NPR but journalism at local radio stations—to raise the level of reporting both on radio and the Web and to step up the coverage that local papers can't produce," I was told by Vivian Schiller, NPR's chief executive. Eventually, she says, NPR hopes to connect these stations into a national network anchored by its Web site. Accomplishing this, Schiller says, would be expensive—the news operations at many public stations are primitive—"but not," she adds, "as expensive as a start-up—we don't need bricks and mortar."
Listening to Schiller, I began to envision the outlines of a new type of news system in the United States, one rooted in the public radio stations that reach into nearly every town and county in the country. If the news-gathering abilities of these stations were truly fortified, they could help fill in the gaps in local news being left by the downsizing of daily papers. They could also provide nodes of collaboration for all those innovative Web sites out there, both for- and not-for-profit.
These sites and stations, in turn, could enter into relationships with daily newspapers. The information-gathering functions of those papers cannot be replaced, but, as their staffs shrink, they could receive a valuable boost from collaboration with nonprofits. The network could also provide a home for all those enterprising bloggers out there, drawing on their knack for instigation, indignation, and outrage, as well as a place for nonjournalistic organizations like Human Rights Watch and the National Security Archive that are carrying out their own forms of investigation and documentation. Finally, if PBS were to expand its operations and mesh them more tightly with NPR's, there could finally begin to emerge in America a truly national noncommercial news system, akin to the BBC.
America will never have a BBC. The government funding isn't there. What we do have, though, is a tremendous increase in enthusiasm and initiative that, in the age of the Internet, counts for more than transmitters and printing presses. The retreat of the giant corporations and conglomerates is creating the opportunity for fresh structures to emerge. It remains to be seen whether foundations, wealthy donors, and news consumers will step forward to support them. (Nonprofit Web sites and public broadcasters, it is worth noting, are, in effect, partly subsidized by the public, through the tax deductions taken for the grants and donations made to them.)
The opening won't last forever. Lurking in the wings is a potential new class of media giants. Google, Yahoo, MSNBC, and AOL, all have vast resources that could finance a new oligopolistic push on the Web. Sheila Coronel, who directed an investigative reporting center in the Philippines before joining the Columbia faculty, sees parallels between what's occurring here and what took place there after the fall of Marcos. As the old media monopolies crumbled, a host of smaller players rushed forward, offering a new plurality of voices. Before long, however, the rich and powerful regained control, and those new voices were snuffed out. "There's a historic opportunity to create a noncommercial sector in the media in the United States," Coronel says:
But my experience, after having undergone a somewhat similar transition, from controlled to free media after the fall of a dictatorship, is that the window is narrow. We need to grab the moment now, because if the old order begins to reassert itself, it will be a long time before such a moment comes again.
For twenty-three years Sabin Russell worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. A top medical writer specializing in global health and infectious diseases, Russell covered subjects ranging from bioterror threats to the risk of avian flu and traveled throughout Africa to report on the AIDS epidemic. He won numerous accolades, including a 2001 Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers for his reporting on the flaws of the flu vaccine industry.
Chris Mooney: Withdrawing his bid for Surgeon General, CNN's Sanjay Gupta is headed back to TV. But his medical reporting, like his nomination, is worrisome.
Then came March 30, 2009--his last day on the job. Russell was at MIT, on leave from his paper for a fellowship. The struggling Chronicle had been cutting staff and now suddenly forced many older career journalists to either take a buyout or risk a reduced pension. At 56, Russell was at the peak of his game, but for him, as for many of his colleagues, there was really just one option. "We have not left journalism; journalism has left us," Russell remarked recently from San Francisco, where he is setting up a freelance office and looking for work.
Now the painful irony: Russell was pressured out of his job just as swine flu murmurs began to emerge from Mexico. This was his beat; few reporters are better equipped to tackle such a difficult yet urgent story, one so rife with uncertain but potentially severe risk. Russell even tipped off his old employer that the paper might want to get a jump on what was happening in Mexico City. "If I was covering this story now," he says, "I'd be all over the Southern Hemisphere. It's flu season there. How is Australia? How is the infrastructure to respond to a new strain holding up?"
Those are stories Russell won't be writing.
It's no secret the newspaper industry is hemorrhaging staff writers and slashing coverage as its business model collapses in the face of declining readership and advertising revenues. But less recognized is how this trend is killing off a breed of journalistic specialists that we need now more than ever--science writers like Russell, who are uniquely trained for the most difficult stories, those with a complex technical component that are nevertheless critical to politics and society.
We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you'd expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.
Take Mark Carreau, until recently the space reporter for the Houston Chronicle. He spent more than twenty years covering NASA, whose Johnson Space Center (JSC) lies in the Chronicle's backyard. Such expertise, however, failed to outweigh the need for newsroom cuts, and Carreau was laid off earlier this year. As one space wonk lamented on a blog on the occasion of Carreau's departure: "I'm guessing there are now more people in space than there are reporters in the JSC newsroom."
Or take the ailing Boston Globe, situated in a global center of science that leads the biotech industry. In March the paper dumped its specialized Monday "Health/Science" section, transferring health coverage to its arts and lifestyle pages and folding science reporting into its Monday business section. Soon after, the paper reduced staff significantly on its science desk. The Globe's decision wasn't about the relevance of science to readership; it was about the underlying economics.
The death of specialized newspaper science sections like the Globe's is a long-term trend--one that appears to be accelerating. From 1989 to 2005, the number of US papers featuring weekly science-related sections shrank from ninety-five to thirty-four. Many of the remaining sections shifted to softer health, fitness and "news you can use" coverage, reflecting the apparent judgment that more thorough science or science policy coverage just doesn't support itself economically.
And the problem isn't confined to newspapers. Just one minute out of every 300 on cable news is devoted to science and technology, or one-third of 1 percent. Late last year CNN cut its entire science, space and technology unit. The most prominent departure: Miles O'Brien, who covered the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster for the network.
How did the US media--serving a country that leads the world in virtually every aspect of science--reach this point? Certainly it wasn't always this way.
Science journalism began as a specialized beat in the early twentieth century but burgeoned in the United States after World War II. The 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik was an especially galvanizing event; in response, US newspapers ramped up their science content, and a generation of writers cut their teeth covering the "space race." Another boom came in the late 1970s and early '80s, when Carl Sagan's Cosmos series reached 500 million people globally, and fifteen new science magazines, eighteen new newspaper science sections and seventeen new science TV shows were launched in the United States.
This "popular science" movement sought nothing less than to bring science to the entire public, to mediate between the technical and the lay, the wonky and the approachable. The thinking was that translating scientific knowledge into a form everyone could understand would help forge a more enlightened citizenry and, ultimately, a stronger democracy.
That ambition didn't last: deregulation and technological change would soon dramatically reshape the media industry. Policy moves during the Reagan and Clinton years, epitomized by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, helped foster mass media conglomeration, as a relatively small number of corporations began to pull together diverse media sectors--movies, television, book publishing, music, magazines, radio and many newspapers--and cram them into massive firms. Serious science journalism often fared poorly in this climate. Producing it required seasoned, highly trained journalists who expected to receive salaries commensurate with their experience and expertise. The conglomerates had a different plan--more revenue, less cost, rising stock prices.
Even as science coverage became squeezed in service to the bottom line, another trend emerged that made it increasingly difficult to reach broad swaths of America with scientific information--the loss of common media sources shared by large segments of the populace. During television's so-called golden age, the broadcast networks--ABC, CBS and NBC--provided a shared cultural experience and news environment and featured plenty of science. PBS joined them: Carl Sagan's Cosmos, its greatest science program, was a product of this era.
Then along came cable TV, providing myriad channel alternatives for those who wanted to detach from serious news, and increasingly politicized platforms like Fox News and MSNBC for those who remained plugged in. And already the Internet's transformative powers seem likely to make cable's impact on the media seem trivial by comparison. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction, but we have millions of blogs to suit every interest and political persuasion, Google News to sift our headlines and Twitter to titillate.
In this context, science media outlets like the Discovery Channel still exist, as do programs like PBS's NOVA--but only as one niche among many. Even the pinnacle of newspaper science journalism, the New York Times's Tuesday science section, reaches only perhaps a million people once a week, a small slice of America.
The problem with the decline of science journalism is not just that there is less attention overall to science; it's that the remaining science coverage is less illuminating. Instead, it indulges in a variety of journalistic pathologies that thwart an improved public understanding of science.
As a rule, journalists are always in search of the dramatic and the new. When it comes to science, however, this can lead them to pounce on each "hot" new result, even if that finding contradicts the last hot result or is soon overturned by a subsequent study. The resulting staccato coverage can leave the public hopelessly exasperated and confused. Should you drink more coffee or less? Does global warming increase the number and intensity of hurricanes or not? Are vaccines safe, or can they cause an autism epidemic? Experienced science journalists know how to cover such topics by contextualizing studies and deferring to the weight of the evidence. Inexperienced journalists, though, are likely to leave audiences with a severe case of media whiplash.
Then there's the problem of "balance"--the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different "sides" of a controversy. When applied to science, especially in politicized areas, this media norm becomes extremely problematic. Should journalists really grant equal time to the small band of scientists who deny the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS when the vast majority of researchers accept the connection between the two? Should they split column space between the few remaining global warming "skeptics" and scientific experts who affirm the phenomenon's human causation? Again, experienced science journalists will know best how to cover such stories and will be aware of the scientific community's very justifiable abhorrence of unthinking "balance."
For a disturbing glimpse of what to expect from a media world with vastly fewer trained science journalists, we need only recount how much of the press managed to bungle the most important science-related story of our time: global warming. We were warned and warned again about climate change, yet for decades did nothing as the problem steadily worsened. In large part, that's because the US public continues to rate global warming as a low priority, and politicians respond to that public. Both have been getting their cues about what matters from the media.
The mass media, however, got the climate story wrong in multiple ways--first, by covering it as a "he said, she said" controversy during the 1990s (bowing to pressure from special interests and their pet scientists, who strategically attacked the scientific consensus) and then, even after moving away from such "balanced" coverage, by providing far too little attention to the story overall--hardly proportionate to the grave planetary danger it poses. Climate change keeps worsening, yes, but how often is it the kind of news that can trump all the other urgent matters demanding media attention?
In fact, though coverage of climate change in the worldwide newspaper media rose sharply in 2005 and 2006, it declined after that, apparently overshadowed by the economic collapse. But scientists are growing increasingly terrified of what global warming could do--among other things, submerge coastal cities--and are now contemplating further meddling with the climate system (so-called geoengineering) as a last-ditch effort to reverse it. We may yet escape such worst-case scenarios, but if we do, it won't be thanks to the press.
Here an obvious question arises: if the Internet is most directly responsible for the decline of newspapers, then can science blogs and science-infused websites fill the gap?
Science content on the web is certainly booming. It's estimated that there are some 1,000 science blogs, and that's undoubtedly a very conservative figure. Science blogs often focus on hot-button topics such as vaccination, the teaching of evolution and the politics of climate change, and devote considerable time to parsing new research findings. Often written by scientists or science journalists, they're highly attuned to the many problems that have plagued the coverage of science, like phony "balance," and tend to avoid or even denounce them--with verve and attitude.
In other ways as well, the Internet has become the go-to place for science. According to the National Science Foundation, it ranks second only to television among the leading sources of science information for the average citizen and is leaving other, older sources far behind. In particular, when Americans want to find information about a specific scientific topic, they go to the web far more often than they open a research book.
Undoubtedly, one can find excellent science information on the web, but the question is whether most people will find it. Newspaper science journalists in their heyday wrote for a broad and diverse slice of the public. On the Internet, though, it's all about finding your particular micro-community. The web atomizes us--and while it certainly empowers, it empowers good and bad alike. Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side--anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.
This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers's Pharyngula (scienceblogs.com/pharyngula), the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That (wattsupwiththat.com), written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.
In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The "science" contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.
That's not to say blogs lack any benefits; they have many. But the Internet is not unifying our culture around a comprehensive or even reliable diet of scientific information, and it isn't replacing what's being lost in the old media. Perhaps Sabin Russell put it best, on the very day he took his buyout from the San Francisco Chronicle. At 4:44 pm he posted his second entry on a social networking site that some tout as journalism's future. It read: "This is the way my career ends. This is the way my career ends. Not with a bang, but a Twitter." Russell had fourteen followers at the time.
Given that the decline of science journalism is being driven by overwhelming technological and economic forces, it might seem unstoppable. But perhaps instead, the answer lies outside the free market: with the creation of not-for-profit sources of science journalism and commentary, meant to last for long periods safely insulated from market upheaval. An example might be Climate Central, a new nonprofit that supplies a variety of journalistic content relating to climate change, including footage for television programs like PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
Another group of nonprofits--universities--can take the lead in institutionalizing new priorities so that communication, a subject given notoriously short shrift among scientists in the past, becomes a focal point. Especially among the youngest generation of researchers--graduate students, recent PhDs and postdocs--there's a hunger for training in media outreach. These scientists want to obtain the skills that can help them explain their work to a broader public, and there is hardly a time when they will have greater need for them than now, when the journalists who might once have been expected to do this work simply don't have jobs any longer.
For such communication training to become more common, however, we'll need a paradigm shift among the nation's population of brilliant scientists. Immersed in vital research, they have paid relatively little attention to the business side of the media and how it affects them. They've tended to view the press as having a high moral "responsibility" to cover research--period. In some sense, they still think we're in the age of Edward R. Murrow. In fact, it's the age of Bill O'Reilly.
In light of the media upheaval, scientists can no longer assume that a responsible, high-minded press will treat their ideas with the seriousness they deserve, delivering them to policy-makers and the public for sober consideration. Instead, partisan media will convey diametrically opposed versions of where science actually stands on any contentious subject--consider, for example, the difference between how Fox News and NPR cover climate change--even as most of the public (and many policy-makers) will tune out science more or less completely, besieged by other information options.
That's the media reality we live with, and facing it head-on is necessary not only for scientists but for everyone who cares about the impact of science and good information on public policy. We must stop assuming today's media will dutifully carry the best and most reliable knowledge to policy-makers and the American public. Rather, it falls to us to shift gears and carry that knowledge to the entirety of the remaining media, and well beyond. In the latter endeavor, we may have to create media of our own.
When Larry Kestenbaum, clerk of Washtenaw County, Michigan, was in Lansing for a meeting recently, he saw something unfamiliar on the faces of the other clerks: pity. Colleagues from hard-pressed towns like Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo were offering sympathy because, despite everything, they still had a local newspaper, while Ann Arbor, his county seat, did not.
At first blush, Ann Arbor is an unlikely place to earn the dubious distinction of being the first good-size municipality in the U.S. to give up on its only daily newspaper. A2, as the town is known, is more or less the beauty queen of Michigan: pretty, confident and seemingly immune to the problems of her peers. It still has a downtown with sidewalk cafés and quirky local stores. Its biggest employers are two universities and two hospitals, and it has weathered the recession better than most of the rest of the state. Nearly half its residents have graduate degrees. How could the paper die in a place like this? (See 10 ways your job will change.)
The answer is that it didn't die. It was killed by its owners in a high-stakes gamble to try to create a new and more profitable enterprise. (In the past nine years, the paper lost more than half its classified-ad pages.) The Ann Arbor News ceased to exist on July 23. On July 24, AnnArbor.com was launched. The new website has a paper version — also called, oddly, AnnArbor.com — that comes out on Thursdays and Sundays. The News's owner, Advance Publications, is betting it can rebrand the 175-year-old News as a Web publication, turn a profit and still satisfy its readers' craving for local news. A lot of U.S. newspapers, and their readers, have a stake in whether the experiment in Ann Arbor succeeds.
A local newspaper is more than an organ for delivering news and information. It's a habit, a watering hole, a local landmark. It's a unifying force, even if that's just because, like a loud uncle, it gives everyone something to complain about. It's the hub that connects many people to their community. "The News was like an old friend. You weren't sure why you spent time with it, but you did, because it was such an old friend," says Charles Eisendrath, who runs the Knight-Wallace Foundation at the University of Michigan. How does a city deal with that loss? What, if anything, is irreplaceable in the transition from print to Web?
Death's paperboy has been tossing a lot of venerable titles onto the porch of history recently. The 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News are gone. Dozens more are shadows of their former selves, their revenues and resources gutted by the flight of classifieds, the gasping economy and the hordes of websites competing for readers' attention. The best that most print publishers can do is try to slow the drain-circling while frantically figuring out how to make money on the Web. This means cutbacks, layoffs, misery. (See the 10 most endangered newspapers in America.)
Instead of stanching the blood, the Newhouse family, which owns Advance — a group that includes more than 20 daily newspapers across the country — is using Ann Arbor as a lab subject to see if it might hurt less to tear the Band-Aid off quickly. Fixed costs such as paper, printing and delivery have been drastically reduced. From a staff of 316 at the News in May 2008, AnnArbor.com has a full-time staff of approximately 60, about 35 of them "content creators" (reporters) — plus some 80 from the "preferred blogging community," the majority unpaid — according to AnnArbor.com president and CEO Matt Kraner. Rather than looking like a news-media website, AnnArbor.com deliberately reads more like a social-media site, with equal weight given to reports on a new diner and the proposed city income tax. Ads — known as "deals" — are incorporated into the feed, and users can vote for their favorite, with the highest vote getter scoring a place on the cover of the Sunday hard-copy edition. Not exactly Pulitzer material — yet.
"Ann Arbor is an extremely Web-savvy market," says Kraner of why it was selected for this experiment, "probably the most Web-savvy Newhouse has. Secondly, with all the high-tech industries in this town, this market is very open to new ideas and new concepts. Third, we want to be the hub of connection. I don't know if you can find a market anywhere that has such passion for its community."
But passion cuts both ways. "It feels like they wrecked part of our community and built this shiny new thing," says Julie Weatherbee, 42, who works at the University of Michigan library. "And we don't want it." Weatherbee wasn't a huge fan of the old paper but thinks it could have been improved instead of destroyed — and that locals might stay away from AnnArbor.com because of what Advance did. (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession — and after.)
Besides, if there's anything Ann Arbor won't lack for, it's news. There's already at least one profitable local-news site in town. Mary Morgan, 48, a former News staffer, and her husband Dave Askins, 44, started the Ann Arbor Chronicle last September. It specializes in long-form accounts of local council, school-board and other civic-association meetings. "I hand-tooled most of the HTML myself," says Askins. (He learned on his other site, Teeter Talk — word-for-word transcriptions of interviews with local figures on the couple's teeter-totter.) The Chronicle, says Morgan, has about 20,000 unique visitors a month and draws enough advertisers and donations for the two of them to live off. "A lot of people don't want to read an 8,000-word piece on the city council," says Askins, smiling gently behind his foot-long beard and granny glasses, "but they want it to be there."
Some locals are seeing the loss as an opportunity. The folks behind the Ann Arbor Observer, a 33-year-old free monthly, hope to pick up some of the News's journalists and advertisers. Then there's the Ann Arbor Journal, a free weekly paper/website that started circulating to 20,000 homes three weeks before the News closed. Plus, the university has the Michigan Daily, which doesn't cover the town but keeps an eye on its biggest employer. All in all, there may eventually be more reporters covering Ann Arbor than before the newspaper was killed.
Still, for residents like Dave and Micki Moray, it's not the same. Every day they'd come home from work — he as a manager and she as a nurse at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital — pick up the paper, take it to the back porch and read. Dave, 58, was a News paperboy. The couple sold and bought cars for themselves and their daughters through the classifieds. The Morays are employed, active, avowed news junkies and won't read a newspaper online, because it feels like work. "We're not against change. But just to have the rug pulled from under us like that — why didn't they tell us how bad it was?" says Dave. "I would have paid more for it." Now Dave buys one of the Detroit papers, usually at the newsstand because they deliver only three times a week. But it's not the same.
In a fragmented media universe where the battle will be fought for every eyeball, dedicated readers like the Morays are treasures. But their loyalty is hard-won. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Ann Arbor community-content experiment, it's already proved one thing: the content part is easy; the community part is not.
SEATTLE — When The Seattle Times became this city’s only surviving daily newspaper in March, even The Times itself could not muster much optimism about its chances.
Frank A. Blethen, the publisher, said then that the demise of the rival Post-Intelligencer, known as The P-I, was no guarantee that his money-losing paper would make it. In an article in March on Seattle’s becoming “a one-newspaper town,” The Times asked, “will it become a no-newspaper town?”
But less than five months later, a nearly forgotten word has crept back into Times executives’ vocabulary: profit. “On a month-to-month basis, we are starting to operate in the black,” Mr. Blethen, who is also chief executive of The Seattle Times Company, said in an interview last week.
How much black ink and by what measure, the privately held company will not say, and amid a sharp advertising downturn, no one denies that its situation remains precarious. But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.
Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.
Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.
The Times and The P-I had a joint operating agreement, sharing production and delivery expenses, an arrangement that is meant as a life raft for failing papers but that has often turned into concrete shoes for the stronger partner. The Times had been fighting for years to get out of its pact with Hearst, arguing that it drained resources and artificially kept a weaker competitor afloat.
Joint operating agreements “delay the inevitable death of the second newspaper, which becomes a drag on the operation,” said John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst. “It’s not too surprising that The Times is doing better on its own.”
The Times, long seen as one of the best regional papers in the country, has had an unusually big newsroom for its circulation, and a devotion to time-consuming investigative work. Mr. Blethen resisted cutting the staff or the size of the paper long after most big papers started to shrink.
But cuts became unavoidable, and the newsroom has dropped to 210 people, from about 375 five years ago. Now, Times executives have an unexpected hope that the cutting has stopped, at least for a while.
“We’re about at the floor of what we feel we can have and still put out a Seattle Times we can be proud of,” said David Boardman, the executive editor. “We’ve had to be more thoughtful in choosing what we do, but I’m not one to claim that less is more. Less is less.”
SeattlePI’s news staff of 20 people, down from The P-I’s 165, covers only a few subjects closely, like crime, the aerospace industry and transportation, while offering links to news on other sites. Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer, said the site, rather than resembling a traditional news organization, “is trying to be Seattle’s home page.”
Other news sites populated by former P-I staff members have also cropped up, expanding Seattle’s already-vibrant range of alternative news choices, and turning the city into something of an online news laboratory.
“There’s still a lot of competition, but only in certain niches,” said David Brewster, publisher of Crosscut.com, a two-year-old news site. “The Times is weaker than it used to be, but a lot of the people who said the loss of The P-I was the end of the world, now they’re reading The Times and saying it’s better than they expected.”
The Times has repeatedly defied the odds just to get to this point.
It dominated its market as an afternoon paper, decades after conventional wisdom had pronounced afternoon papers dead. The Times switched to mornings in 2000, going head to head with The P-I, and suffered a seven-week strike less than a year later, without a significant circulation loss from either trauma.
The Times was more staid, more suburban and more polished than The P-I, often making it seem as if the arm of an international media giant was the scrappy underdog. But for years, the guessing in the industry was that the Blethen family, which controls the Times Company, would sell to Hearst, which would then close one of the papers.
But the family held on, turning down lucrative offers from Hearst and others. And in the decade before The P-I closed, its circulation dropped sharply, to 117,000, while weekday sales of The Times barely changed.
The Times is one of the last family-run papers in the country, controlled since 1896 by the Blethens. They own 50.5 percent of the company (the McClatchy Company owns the rest), and eight family members work in it.
But if the family’s commitment to journalism has been admired, its business acumen is another matter. The company borrowed more than $200 million in 1998 to buy three Maine newspapers, and it sold them this year, reportedly for less than $40 million. Its biggest mistake may have been the joint operating agreement struck with Hearst in 1983, before Frank Blethen, 64, took control of the company.
Under the arrangement, The P-I’s only operation was its newsroom. The Times printed and delivered The P-I, sold its subscriptions and ads, and paid all nonnewsroom expenses for both papers. Whatever revenue was left was split, 60 percent to The Times and 40 percent to The P-I, a division that Times executives came to see as deeply unfair.
But the joint operation had advantages when The P-I stopped printing, because The Times was able to simply switch P-I subscribers to The Times. Subscribers were free to cancel, but not many did. Times executives say that of those former P-I subscriptions that have expired, 84 percent have been renewed; time will tell whether it can sustain that rate in the long run.
The paper also raised its prices in March, increasing circulation revenue.
With most P-I readers on board, Times executives say they have been able to maintain the ad rates they charged for space in both papers. The volume and revenue were down sharply, but Mr. Blethen said the decline was consistent with what had happened across the industry.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that we’ve been bouncing along the bottom for the last couple of months,” he said.
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