Showing posts with label press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label press. Show all posts

Apr 4, 2010

MediaShift . Magazines Require Innovation, Experiments in Digital and Print | PBS

Public Broadcasting ServiceImage via Wikipedia

by Susan Currie Sivek

Some magazine fans may feel like their favorite publications are dissolving into fragments of their former selves: fractured content distributed throughout the web, social media, digital editions and the surviving print versions.

But something unique to magazines does still hold at the center, and a new report on the future of magazines suggests that the future for both print and digital magazines will be strong.

The Innovations in Magazines 2010 World Report, prepared by Innovation Media Consulting in conjunction with the International Federation of the Periodical Press, was released March 1 and contains 100 pages of ideas gathered from around the world that could change the magazine industry.

Within the report are 30 short profiles of creative methods of making magazines fresh and new in an increasingly competitive media environment. The entire report can be purchased online in printed format for 100 euros or as a PDF for 75 euros.

For example, one chapter describes the integration of small video screens into the September 2009 print edition of Entertainment Weekly that played previews of CBS shows, engaging more of the reader's senses in a "hybrid" medium. Another chapter details how magazines have developed online games that entice readers to engage with their brands in new ways. National Geographic's game "Herod's Lost Tomb" alone has been downloaded 15 million times.

FIPP, a London-based industry organization whose 800-plus members represent over 6,000 magazine titles, co-sponsored the report with Innovation, whose international group of researchers gathered creative approaches to magazine content, advertising and sales being tested around the world. The report mimics a similar yearly publication on new ideas in the newspaper business that Innovation has been creating for the last 11 years.

Finding Magazines' Future

The co-editors of the report, Juan Señor and John Wilpers of Innovation Media Consulting, both come from traditional media backgrounds. Señor, a partner at Innovation, has worked for Wall Street Journal TV, CNBC Europe and the International Herald Tribune Television, and was nominated for an Emmy for his work as a reporter at PBS' NewsHour. Wilpers, who is a consultant for Innovation, worked for a variety of U.S. newspapers and most recently has consulted with newsrooms including The Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times on the integration of blogging into their content.

juan senor.jpg

Juan Señor

Though the innovations contained in the report come from around the world, Señor notes that many "came from more innovative markets in Europe, London and New York -- not accidentally, but coincidentally, because a lot of titles are in trouble" in those places.

Señor and Wilpers together formed their researchers' collected ideas into a cohesive and provocative report on the remarkable variety of ways magazine publishers are experimenting with content, advertising and sales, both in digital and print forms.

"We asked publishers, what are you doing that other magazine publishers should know about? Really it was just doing the kind of research that a good reporter would do," says Wilpers, who had a group of 25 freelance researchers working with him on the project. The focus of the report, according to Wilpers, was "initially supposed to be digital innovations, but print still drives so much of our revenue that we wanted to include that."

Whether for digital or print, each innovation described in the report is individually fascinating. Perhaps more compelling, however, is the realization that taken together, these innovations will result in nothing less than the transformation of the magazine industry -- and of the concept of the magazine itself.

Magazine Experimentation

Both Señor and Wilpers were impressed by magazine professionals' willingness to experiment with new storytelling styles, platforms, formats and revenue streams.

"In the newspaper industry, for so long, we saw paralyzing fear," says Wilpers. "And so people, out of fear, did nothing. They hoped that things would get better by going away."

The magazine industry, though, has embraced digital formats and played with creative opportunities, without forgetting its print roots. "Digital is fun, it's exciting, it's sexy, and it's one of the many answers to publishing going forward. But print's going to be around for a while. We just need to figure out how to make it work," Wilpers says.

That isn't a clear-cut process. Today's magazine transformation will never be complete, and shouldn't be, says Señor.

"To be successful, you should be in a constant state of beta," explains Señor. "If you're not, it's very difficult to move things forward."

Aggregation and Curation

Magazines have experimented with both social media and user-generated content. Yet although magazines should engage with social media, Señor says, social media are "the platform, not the message."

"Very few people out there are producing quality stuff," he says. "For spot reporting, [social media are] fantastic, but still somebody has to quiet the noise and tell me what's happening. There's nothing like the role of a journalist to do the editing and selection for you."

Señor and Wilpers believe this editing and selecting process will increasingly be the role of magazines in the future.

John Wilpers headshot.JPG

John Wilpers

"You'll see magazines like The Nation curating the best political content, even if they didn't write it," says Wilpers. He notes that a magazine's reputation for quality carries over to other content editors choose for readers, and that as magazine staffs shrink, editors can selectively draw upon a wide variety of skilled outside authors and curate the best of their work for the magazine's audience.

"There's such a blog fog out there, so many people producing rubbish," Señor says. "Just tell me what I should be listening to. Tell it to me with the independence and credibility of journalists. That's the importance of an editor as a curator."

The Magazine as 'Content Proposition'

As magazines differentiate their content for multiple platforms, include a variety of content from their staff and other external sources, and use creative new approaches to their content, there is still a center that holds to define magazines.

Señor argues that today's magazines each have their own "content propositions" that define their subjects and styles.

"The magazine doesn't become a paper product, but a brand of journalism," he says. "The magazine can still have a digital destination. It has a design. It has a masthead. It's a brand proposition as opposed to a platform proposition, but it's still doing a specific kind of storytelling."

Each magazine expresses its content proposition in its own unique way, across multiple media and even through different business models.

"Every publication will have a quiver of opportunities, and no two quivers will be the same," says Wilpers. "Everyone's going to have lots and lots of different tools."

Saving Paper

Paper can still be one of those tools. However, paper editions of magazines may no longer be a mass medium. Instead, they could become a special experience distinctive from what digital magazines provide.

Señor compares paper and digital editions to the levels of clothing in the fashion world. Today's digital magazine editions, he says, are like the expensive, rare, high-end haute couture offered by fashion designers to generate public interest in their brands. Print editions are like the cheap, widespread, lower-status prêt-à-porter clothing they offer for a mass market. However, this analogy, Señor says, is about to be reversed.

"[Print] circulation is definitely going to go down, but if you make the magazine a quality product on paper, a premium product, you can charge much more. I see easily charging $10 for the paper version," he says. "In time, the prêt-à-porter will become digital, and paper will become haute couture. But you have to make the paper experience have tremendous quality, not something you offer in other platforms."

As magazines innovate, then, it's not about leaving paper behind. It's about experimenting with the best ways to gather a defined, branded set of content and to distribute it in the most fitting platform. Though all these simultaneous innovations may feel to observers like fragmentation and weakness, it may be the case that some essential quality of magazines will help them survive and even flourish through their transformation.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Mass Communication and Journalism Department at California State University, Fresno. Her research focuses on magazines and media communities. She also blogs at sivekmedia.com, and is the magazine correspondent for MediaShift.
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Jan 18, 2010

Shisaku: Media Shifts Make Japan A Harder Read

SANKEI Newspaper for iPhone.Image by MJTR (´・ω・) via Flickr

A note on sources of information...

I was watching the news on the resignation of Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa on Thursday night, flipping in between the various terrestrial channels. As I flipped back and forth, I was struck by how similar the reports were on the Fuji TV and Nippon TV networks. The two newscasts were nearly identical, except for the clothing and the sets. The editorial stance, the rumors, even the vocabulary were indistinguishable. If not for the bug in the corner of my television’s screen, I would not have been able to tell which network broadcast was which.

This is a new development. Until the election of August last year Fuji TV, which is a part of the Fuji Sankei Group, and Nippon TV, which is owned by the Yomiuri Shimbun, offered the news in distinct flavors. Fuji Sankei Group news, which includes the reporting in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, offered conservative iconoclasm with a bias toward free markets and a gnawing worry about the growing power of China. As such, Fuji Sankei news reporting found itself frequently at odds with Liberal Democratic Party government decisions. Yomiuri-flavored news, however, was strictly conformist conservatism, in near complete agreement with the course of action of the current administration, save during the years when Koizumi Jun’ichiro was prime minister.

Since the ouster of the LDP from power, however, the two formerly separate identities have grown closer to one another. Tobias Harris has already documented the glee at the Sankei Shimbun when the editors realized that the LDP's election loss made the paper a candidate to be the voice of the opposition. The Yomiuri Shimbun, bereft of the government it had seen itself as serving, has seemingly reversed a previous caution about printing every rumor, plausible or otherwise, it has in the company inbox.

The consequences of this shift toward a unitary conservative reportorial voice are appearing in the non-Japanese press. The Economist’s article this week on the Fujii resignation and Blaine Harden’s Washington Post account of the purported emergence of Ozawa Ichiro from the shadows both show a lack of skepticism toward story elements being trumpeted by the emerging unified Fuji Sankei/Yomiuri opposition news. The explanation that Fujii quit because he had lost a policy battle with Ozawa, rather than one with his own frail constitution, and that he was terrified of being called to testify in the Diet about a financial scandal involving Ozawa, are reported as fact. That Fujii had sworn that he was giving up politics last summer, only to be begged by Hatoyama to run again via a campaigning-free position on DPJ proportional list, is ignored.

Harden is at least aware of the possibility that he may be passing on a skewed version of events, although he buries this admission down in the eleventh paragraph:
But Japan's two most influential newspapers -- which are not friendly with the new government -- have detected a new form of two-headed rule. The Yomiuri newspaper calls it "dual-governance." The Asahi suggests "there is another prime minister outside the cabinet."
The Asahi Shimbun's position in the new order is an ambiguous one. It is frequently characterized as being a center-left publication. In truth, it is aspires to being a non-partisan publication, modeling itself seemingly on The New York Times. Along with its affiliated but independent TV Asahi network, it has tried to maintain a near Olympian position, criticizing the current government for failing to live up to what most ordinary persons would consider impossible standards of achievement. In terms of its purported politicial bias, the Asahi should be gentle on the new government, having waged a long, bitter war against LDP rule. It has, however, been sharply critical.

In trying so hard to remain above political partisanship, however, the Asahi editors have had trouble avoiding the trap of false equivalence. Given the length of tenure of the new government, it is impossible that every DPJ foible is equal to the multitudinous sins of the LDP. However, by failing to take the extra step of saying “we remain suspicious of the current crop of leaders but they at least better than continued rule by their predecessors” the aggressively skeptical reporting of the Asahi has worked hand-in-glove with its now strictly partisan reporting of the paper's conservative competitors.

The strong anti-DPJ government stance of the working-class oriented Mainichi Shimbun is inscrutable, at least from a readership standpoint. The owners seem convinced that the antagonistic segment of the media market can support three players. Unfortunately, Yomiuri and Sankei are set to dominate this segment. An aggressive anti-government, anti-Ozawa line only threatens the Mainichi group with ever greater marginalization. That the Mainichi Shimbun still maintains a translation department, a peculiar luxury for a downscale news organization, has been granting the Mainichi's aggressive reporting and its editorials international stature out of proportion to the organization’s status in the domestic media market.

The shift in news reporting has not gone universally against the government. While The Asahi Shimbun and TV Asahi have struggled to find an admirable independent stance, the national newscaster NHK has surged forward and become the government's most supportive news conduit. This shift is not out of sycophancy to the new power in the capital, however. NHK lived in terror of government retaliation during the LDP years. As a consequence its reporters and editors did their very best to avoid offending the government. Freed by the election from a fear of retaliation from the LDP, NHK news has responded by working with the government to rapidly dismantle the intellectual edifice that kept the LDP in power and NHK cowed. NHK and its legions of talented reporters are now free to report what they know – and they know plenty.

Given the power of NHK’s 7 pm and 9 pm newscasts to determine the national conversation on the news, the relative durability of the Hatoyama Cabinet’s popularity becomes less perplexing. Someone just reading the translated reports from the major newspapers would come away with a vision of the popular mood in Japan as being fixedly anti-Ozawa and anti-Hatoyama and rueing the results of the August election. The truth is that despite serious ongoing investigations of financial fraud in the political offices both the prime minister and the secretary-general of the DPJ, the government and the party still enjoy a large measure of public support.

In an ideal world, foreign reporters with long memories would notice the rapid shifting about in the Japanese media and adjust their sourcing accordingly. However, with most non-Japanese media organizations cutting back staff or pulling out of Japan entirely, the world is relying more and more on unfiltered retransmission what Japanese media outlets are producing. Rather than giving a clearer view of what is going on in Japan, this direct transmission has instead reflected the prejudices and weaknesses of the original outlets, resulting in the broad dissemination of reporting which is potentially more harsh and negative than the on-the-ground reality would require.

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Dec 28, 2009

Howard Kurtz on the evolution of media in the Awful Aughts

‘‘Various Selections,’’ a packet of news artic...Image via Wikipedia

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 28, 2009; C01

Are you better off, as a media consumer, than you were 10 years ago?

Having lived through the Awful Aughts -- which began with news organizations vowing to get serious after 9/11 and ended with Jon and Kate, Octomom and Balloon Boy -- do you feel better served by the news establishment?

The easy answer, of course, is you must be kidding. Shriveling news operations seem increasingly seduced by the sensational, at least when they're not boring people with inside political baseball.

But tilt the picture just a bit. On Jan. 1, 2000, there was no Huffington Post or Daily Kos or National Review Online or Politico or Facebook or Twitter. There were a relative handful of bloggers -- I joined their ranks that summer -- but nothing like the tens of millions who permeate cyberspace today. If you had a BlackBerry, it was a two-way pager. The iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs's eye. The only mass medium for downloading music was six-month-old Napster. The fledgling Google was covered mainly by tech writers.

Fox News was the third-place cable network in prime time, averaging 248,000 viewers. Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather drew nearly 30 million viewers. In short, while the Internet had delusions of grandeur -- AOL was 10 days away from swallowing Time Warner in that ill-conceived marriage -- the old gatekeepers still reigned.

SEATTLE - MARCH 16:  The cover of the last eve...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There are many reasons why the 2000s have been hard on the dinosaur media, but I, for one, would not want to return to the days before instantaneous search, smartphones, online video, Wikipedia and the rowdy, raucous arena known as the blogosphere. This eruption has drawn the masses into the maelstrom, enabling them to do what the pros do, sometimes faster and better.

But first let's examine what Time, in one of a spate of similar pieces, calls the "Decade from Hell." The media scorecard wasn't all bad. Chronicling the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks helped reassure and comfort a shaken nation. Newspapers exposed George W. Bush's domestic surveillance program and secret CIA prisons abroad and the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. The aggressive approach to Hurricane Katrina revealed negligence and ineptitude on a stunning scale. And war correspondents have shown incredible bravery, in some cases paying with their limbs or lives.

* * *

But the two biggest disasters of early-21st-century coverage remain a permanent stain on journalism. The failure to challenge the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq -- and an accompanying tendency to dismiss antiwar voices -- is now regretted by the news organizations themselves. And having served mainly as cheerleaders for the tech bubble that popped in 2000, the press fell way short on the housing and lending bubble that nearly sank our economy in 2008. I know a few financial journalists sounded warnings, but, collectively, the media did far too little to spotlight a shadow banking system built on preposterously exotic risks and federal regulators who blithely looked the other way.

Live CNN | Internet TV ChannelsImage by Las Valley 702 via Flickr

It was complicated and dull, yes -- much like the year-long effort at health-care reform that finally passed the Senate on Christmas Eve. I would credit the media with a valiant attempt to explain and examine this legislative morass, even to the point of declaring that the high-decibel charges about death panels were bogus. But polls showed that many Americans believed the kill-Grandma theme nonetheless, just as a stubborn minority persists in believing that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite the media's dismissal of such nonsense.

If news organizations have lost much of the public's trust, some have themselves to blame. Over the past decade, the breathtaking fabrications of Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today revealed dysfunctional newsrooms that missed the flashing red lights. Rather's reliance on suspect documents in challenging Bush's National Guard service, which cost Rather the CBS anchor chair, was a huge setback as well. That story was driven in part by conservative bloggers, just as the scandal over Alberto Gonzales politicizing the selection of U.S. attorneys was galvanized by the liberal site Talking Points Memo.

Partisanship is unabashed on the Web, and increasingly on cable, as is evident from the prime-time parade of Republican lawmakers and commentators on Fox and Democratic lawmakers and pundits on MSNBC. This has fueled the fragmentation of a business that can benefit by reinforcing what its followers already believe. At the same time, the media mainstream played a central role in fostering sky-high expectations for Obama, which, inevitably, crashed into the messy reality of governing.

the moment of victory - BBC news website screencapImage by Scorpions and Centaurs via Flickr

The rise of niche journalism is taking place as old-line organizations more frequently chase tabloid melodramas. Cable television and morning shows breathlessly pursue narratives involving missing white women, a runaway bride, a mom with octuplets, a beauty queen who opposes gay marriage. Reality television manufactures faux stars -- remember the media mobs over Paris Hilton's brief jail term? -- who wind up on real newscasts. It is a mind-set that breathes life into celebrity deaths -- such as the two-week frenzy over Michael Jackson's -- and gorges on misbehavior by the likes of David Letterman and Tiger Woods. (Imagine if all the reporters chasing Woods's many mistresses had been assigned to study whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.)

* * *

As fate would have it, all this has coincided with the collapse of the business model that sustained mainstream outfits for generations. The digital revolution has killed off several newspapers and sent those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore into bankruptcy; the Washington Times, which is cutting nearly half its staff, has just ended its weekend print run. Plummeting revenue has killed off numerous magazines -- Portfolio, Gourmet and Vibe among the latest victims. And when Comcast struck a deal to buy NBC Universal, the television network itself was treated like scrap metal.

If the declining health of the traditional media is the barometer, the '00s have been an unmitigated bummer. But the past decade has also brought such digital delights as Twitter, where I learn new things every day. Those posting there provide links to stories that eluded my radar, striking observations about the news, zingers in ongoing debates, and perhaps a funny line or two. Many of those I follow are journalists and pundits, but some are regular folks who have dived into the rolling conversation, no credentials necessary.

Sometimes I think back to the cumbersome business of information-gathering when you actually had to call people rather than pinging them by e-mail. I can remember searching for ancient newspaper articles on microfilm; going to the Justice Department to pore over lobbying records; visiting C-SPAN to watch videotapes of campaign commercials from far-flung local races. Now huge storehouses of knowledge are available with a couple of mouse clicks.

What a head-snapping contrast: a low moment for old-fashioned journalism and a soaring moment for instantaneous information. Now those of us in the news racket have to figure out ways to exploit and organize this treasure trove while somehow getting people to pay for what we produce rather than Googling it for free. That's a big mountain to climb, and if we have another decade like the last one, we may be permanently stranded in Death Valley.

Kurtz also works for CNN and hosts its weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."

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Oct 6, 2009

Condé Nast Closes Gourmet and 3 Other Magazines - NYTimes.com

February 1974 issueImage via Wikipedia

It’s Rachael Ray’s world now — we’re all just cooking in it.

Gourmet magazine, which has celebrated cooking and travel in its lavish pages since 1941, will cease publication with the November issue, its owner, Condé Nast, announced on Monday.

Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion, a magazine with a rich history and a perch high in the publishing firmament. Under the stewardship of Ruth Reichl, one of the star editors at Condé Nast, Gourmet poured money into sumptuous photography, test kitchens and exotic travel pieces, resulting in a beautifully produced magazine that lived, and sold, the high life.

Ms. Reichl, formerly a restaurant critic at The New York Times, will most likely leave Condé Nast, though it is not entirely clear, a Condé Nast spokeswoman, Maurie Perl, said. The company will continue with the more recipe-focused food magazine Bon Appétit.

Condé Nast also announced it would shut three other magazines: the parenting magazine Cookie and the wedding publications Elegant Bride and Modern Bride. About 180 people will lose their jobs as a result of the four closings. For Gourmet’s legion of fans, the loss particularly stings — it is the end to a long relationship between readers and the magazine’s depiction of food as exploration.

In choosing Bon Appétit over Gourmet, Condé Nast reflected a bigger shift both inside and outside the company: influence, and spending power, now lies with the middle class.

Advertising support for luxurious magazines like Gourmet has dwindled, while grocery store advertisers have continued to buy pages at more accessible, celebrity-driven magazines like Every Day With Rachael Ray, which specializes in 30-minute meals, and Food Network Magazine.

It was an unexpected decision from Condé Nast, which said it closed the magazine because it was losing too much money.

“In the economics of the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.”

With the decline in luxury advertising, the company lost about 8,000 ad pages through the October issues, compared with the same period in 2008, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

With a 43 percent drop, Gourmet was among the hardest hit. This summer, Condé Nast brought in the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company to “help in looking at every one of these businesses clinically, not emotionally,” Mr. Townsend said.

Gourmet was smaller than Bon Appétit, with a circulation of about 980,000 versus Bon Appétit’s 1.35 million. Bon Appétit had higher newsstand sales in the first six months of this year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Though its sales dropped, Gourmet’s dropped much more sharply in that period, compared with the first six months of 2008. Their editorial approaches differed, too: a recent Bon Appétit cover line promised “America’s Best Hot Dogs,” while Gourmet ran an article on how restaurant critics would spend $1,000 in their hometowns.

“You have to look at the advertisers that support food magazines — they tend to be mass manufacturers, and those are the companies that have the money,” said Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of the food magazine Saveur.

Barry Lowenthal, president at the Media Kitchen in New York, part of the advertising holding company MDC Partners, said that Gourmet’s reliance on travel and luxury advertisers had hurt it. “If you have to make a bet who will support you,” he said, “it’s going to be the Bon Appétit advertiser.”

Gourmet did not lack for impassioned readers. Alice Waters, the California restaurateur, said she nearly started crying when she heard of the closing. Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor in chief of Gourmet, said she was saddened. “I think it was the first magazine that taught people how to navigate the intricacies of foreign travel, where to stay, what to eat,” she said. “It was such a special magazine. It had such history.”

And Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food and Wine, praised Ms. Reichl’s “sociopolitical and cultural commentary,” as well as the magazine’s literary sensibility.

The death of Gourmet doesn’t mean people are cooking less or do not want food magazines, said Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association.

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

It has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She “is one of those icons in chief,” said George Janson, managing partner at GroupM Print, part of the advertising company WPP. But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

Of Condé Nast’s decision, Abe Peck, professor emeritus at Northwestern’s journalism school, said “they didn’t make the glamour bet here.”

With the news about Gourmet and the other publications, which employees received on Monday morning, another era ended within Condé Nast itself.

The company has developed a reputation for luxury. Part of that means keeping cars and drivers idling outside restaurants for its top executives, but it has also spent years holding on to money-losing publications, including, at points, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

But Mr. Townsend said that the current advertising picture was too dismal. “The tide’s not coming back in,” he said. “It could take us five years to get back to 2007 levels if we’re lucky enough to.”

So, he said, the company could no longer afford magazines that lost money. “We won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution,” he said. “This economy has pinched us and sobered us up.”

The consultants from McKinsey issued specific budget recommendations for publications, and executives at some magazines, who asked not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss the cuts, said they were told last month that their budgets needed to shrink by 25 percent.

Mr. Townsend said each magazine was given a profit-margin goal, and it was up to the editor and publisher of each to figure out how to reach those goals. After that, he said, there will be no further cuts for a while. “Done. Done,” he said.

Mr. Townsend said that much of his effort going forward would be focused online, where he wants to move away from dependence on display advertising. He will also expand the wedding magazine Brides, increasing its frequency to 12 times a year, and invest in its Web site.

Mr. Townsend said the closed magazines could have some future on the Web or in other media.

Cookie, for instance, “may very well be an electronic brand of substance,” while Gourmet could have strong books, broadcast and Web businesses.

It is unclear what plans for those businesses are; the company has contracts to fulfill in some of the side businesses. Ms. Reichl, after packing up her office, was expected to return to her book tour for “Gourmet Today,” a new cookbook.

“Sorry not to be posting now, but I’m packing. We’re all stunned, sad,” she posted on Twitter on Monday afternoon.

Stuart Elliott and Kim Severson contributed reporting.
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Sep 20, 2009

Strong ethnic media market gets new weekly - SFGate

The word "Nihongo" written in :w:Kan...Image via Wikipedia

A group of community leaders and journalists did something seemingly unusual last week - they started a newspaper, the Nichi Bei Weekly.

But while its introduction comes as economic pressures are forcing publications to scale down or close, it also comes at a time when the audience for ethnic media is bigger than ever.

According to a study earlier this year by New America Media, a San Francisco group that represents 2,000 ethnic news organizations around the country, readership in this sector increased by 16 percent over the last four years.

Still, it won't be easy. Despite an increasing readership, the ethnic press hasn't escaped the same downturn in advertising that has hurt mainstream publications.

The fledgling Weekly, in fact, was born out of the demise of the Nichi Bei Times, Northern California's oldest Japanese American paper.

In the past, ethnic publications were more recession-proof because of the advertising from small community businesses, particularly restaurants, auto dealers, travel agencies and real estate offices, according to Sandy Close, New America Media's executive director.

Even in down times, those bread-and-butter advertising sources were enough to sustain ethnic media outlets, which were already used to operating on shoestring budgets. But given the current economy, "All of those small businesses are hurting and they can't afford to advertise," Close said.

But there are signs of hope.

Decline stabilizing

Recent reports suggest the recession has ended and the rate of decline in advertising spending is stabilizing. The challenge is for these publications to hold on long enough.

"We need to be here for the community," said former Nichi Bei Times editor Kenji Taguma, who heads the English-language Nichi Bei Weekly. "This effort is true to our mission of keeping the community connected, informed and empowered."

According to the New America Media poll released in June, the ethnic press is reaching 57 million of an estimated 69.2 million African American, Asian American and Hispanic adults in the United States.

Close said the organization was surprised that the poll showed that much of an increase from the 49 million in 2005.

Newspapers aimed at Chinese Americans and Korean Americans have made progress, now reaching 70 percent and 64 percent of their audience, respectively, the New America study said.

Papers such as Sing Tao, the World Journal, Korea Daily and Korea Times have substantially increased circulation, and a Filipino community biweekly, the FilAm Star, began publishing in the Bay Area, the report said.

Meanwhile, English language publications reached 2.8 million Hispanic and 500,000 Asian adults.

Close also said that ethnic media will probably get a big boost when government ads for the 2010 U.S. Census are directed toward people not reached by mainstream news organizations.

Not alone

Still, the Nichi Bei Times is hardly alone in its demise. This year, Bay Area community papers AsianWeek, Ming Pao Daily and Pinoy Today all closed.

Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus of Asian American studies at UC Berkeley, noted that although the recession claimed the 5-year-old Ming Pao Daily, Chinese Americans in the Bay Area are still served by four vibrant papers.

"The ethnic media is suffering, though to a lesser degree than the mainstream press, perhaps because immigrant communities do not have as much access to the Internet, especially the working class," Wang said.

Also, he said Chinese language readers have a "different relationship" with their papers, which have a higher literary standard than American papers, including "poetry, short stories, essays about simple things, about life."

Kevin Weston, director of new media for New America Media, said long-standing African American newspapers such as the Oakland Post and San Francisco Sun-Reporter have survived numerous "waves of recessions" in part because of the passion of the staff.

"The folks that are in the field see it as a business, but to them this is also community work, this is their life's work," Weston said.

Hispanic growth

Hispanic newspapers have increased in number nationally from 735 in 2005 to 834 in 2008, although the number of daily publications fell from 42 to 29 as the recession hit, according to the Latino Print Network, an advertising group that represents 625 Hispanic newspapers and magazines.

Circulation rose from 17.6 million to 17.8 million during that time. And those papers generated $909 million in ad revenue in 2008, although that was down from $996 million in 2005.

The 8,000-circulation Nichi Bei Times, started in 1946 as a successor to a paper founded in 1899, saw a "modest increase in subscribers" after the paper went from a daily bilingual schedule to publishing three times a week, with one weekly English edition, in 2006.

But the change didn't increase revenue enough for the paper to survive, prompting its board of directors to close the doors and leave the Northern California market to the rival Hokubei Mainichi, also based in San Francisco.

The Japanese American market is different because it's not growing substantially through immigration. That also means the demand for a Japanese-language publication has waned as its readers grow older.

Nonprofit status

So the Nichi Bei Foundation, the group that publishes the new weekly, decided to concentrate on an English edition. The group has applied for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service, a process that could take months.

That delay makes it impossible to get grants from companies and community groups now, said Taguma, who is the foundation's president as well as the paper's editor. So the foundation is relying on individuals, who have donated as much as $5,000 each.

The group, which has a Web site at nichibeifoundation.org, has raised about $40,000, enough to cover about three months, and plans to publish a scaled down 12-page edition.

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

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Aug 10, 2009

Howard Kurtz on Politics Daily, AOL's Fledgling Web Site

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 10, 2009

After a quarter-century as a military correspondent, David Wood knew the drill as he reported from Afghanistan last week, in helmet and flak jacket, on the intricacies of the U.S. war effort.

But this time he was writing for a fledgling Web site, one that -- unlike the thousands that specialize in commentary, snark or recycling other people's reporting -- is willing to pony up to send an old-school journalist on a six-week foreign assignment. Wood was picked up by AOL's Politics Daily in May, shortly after the Baltimore Sun laid him off.

"As the newspaper business declined, I felt hemmed in by smaller news pages, demands for tighter copy, growing stinginess with travel money," Wood says. "It just seemed harder and harder to do quality, in-depth journalism on my beat. None of those restrictions exist at Politics Daily."

The three-month-old venture has become a reemployment program for middle-aged journalists who lack the flash and dash of young bloggers -- and that is by design. Melinda Henneberger, the former Newsweek and New York Times reporter who runs the site, says her goal is "to preserve the values of the mainstream media." And in doing so, she is flouting several conventions about what works on the Web.

First, she is slowing things down, rather than posting every traffic-generating tidbit.

Second, she believes Web surfers have the patience to read pieces that run as long as 5,000 words.

Third, she is challenging "the assumption that to get a lot of hits you have to be hyperpartisan."

The result is a text-heavy site, with pieces that range from provocative to pedestrian. On many days Politics Daily seems on top of the news; on others, columns that linger on the home page give it a dated feel. And it may be a tad high-minded: On Friday afternoon, when Politico and other sites rushed to post stories on Jenny Sanford moving out of the South Carolina governor's mansion occupied by her philandering husband, Politics Daily had nothing.

The veteran staffers -- "they have asked me to stop calling them old pros!" Henneberger says -- are being lured by the startup's six-figure salaries. They include former USA Today political writer Jill Lawrence, former Washington Post columnist Donna Britt. Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, a part-timer, writes a column on Michelle Obama.

It is hard to discern an office culture; Henneberger got approval to rent a Washington office but decided to save the money for future hiring. One "advantage to working with grown-ups is that there's no need for me to keep a literal eye on anybody," she says. So everyone works virtually from home, including two Denver editors hired from the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News.

"I don't know what the future of print is -- I hope it survives -- but we're all having to hedge our bets a little bit," says Deputy Editor Carl Cannon, a veteran of six newspapers who was hired after Reader's Digest eliminated the Washington bureau he headed. Cannon, too, talks about maintaining "cherished" values: "Not everything the old media did was right, but some things were right: getting both sides of the story, making sure the quotes are right, and using official documents instead of rumor."

Wood, a veteran of Time and the Los Angeles Times, says he relishes the chance to mix straight reporting with personal observation, such as in this dispatch from Afghanistan: "Civilian-world is casual, easy, a place filled with friends and family and many choices. Maybe I'll amble down to Starbucks. Nah, Caribou this time. War zone is a hard, unforgiving, chaotic place of fewer choices, where friendships have to be earned. Seen from civilian-world, it's daunting. But intriguing."

The site is also making room for opinion. The latest addition is liberal blogger David Corn of Mother Jones magazine; Henneberger says she plans to hire a conservative columnist to balance him.

Says Walter Shapiro, a left-leaning former columnist for USA Today and Salon: "We don't deal in epithets, we don't deal in invective. We really adhere to things that have been proven true, as opposed to jumping on Sarah Palin rumors because some Web site in Alaska is running something."

For AOL, which is being spun off from Time Warner after their disastrous merger nine years ago, launching Politics Daily is part of a larger strategy to regain its lost cachet. The battered company announced plans in March to lay off 10 percent of its staff.

Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Media, says his company wants to be "the Toyota of content . . . the largest mainstream content publisher on the globe." He says Politics Daily is designed for a mass audience, not as "an inside-baseball site."

In raw numbers, it is off to a fast start, drawing 3.6 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore. Its busy neighborhood helps; Politics Daily draws nearly half its traffic from users already on AOL.

In the battle against other big portals, AOL drew 106 million unique visitors in June, trailing Yahoo (154 million) and Microsoft Network (127 million). AOL has hired journalists and bloggers for a slew of sites, including TMZ, Moviefone, Fanhouse and Engadget.

Yahoo offers little original content in news -- a "Good Morning Yahoo!" video, for instance, provides a recap of the past 24 hours -- but is boosted by its signature search engine. Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo's head of media, says that the site has hired nearly 80 staffers to chronicle sports, and that close to 10 percent of its material overall is homegrown.

"It's super-important for us to maintain that balance between content we're creating and content we're licensing," Pitaro says. "It helps establish our voice. . . . We don't just throw stuff up against a wall and hope it sticks. We're much more selective."

So far, Politics Daily rarely breaks through the media static with pieces that are widely linked and debated elsewhere. One exception was Cannon's recent denunciation of the media for their coverage of the former governor of Alaska.

"In the 2008 election," he wrote, "we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. . . . We simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession."

This drew a sharp rebuttal from another contributor, Jeffrey Weiss, who called Cannon's argument "horsepucky. . . . To claim that Sarah Palin is the victim of leftist journalism gone unusually amok is to cherry-pick the record and ignore the circumstances of her candidacy."

That is the kind of attention-grabbing argument that Politics Daily needs if it is to compete with the likes of the Huffington Post, Politico, the Daily Beast, Slate, Salon and other sites that offer speed, original writing and higher production values. With Henneberger calling the operation a "preservation society" dedicated to "respectful" arguments, Politics Daily remains defiantly out of step with the online ethos.

"If there isn't a market for this kind of Web site, that takes politics seriously, that is politically eclectic and journalistically conservative," Shapiro says, "we're all in a lot of trouble."

Presidential Endorsement?

The full-page newspaper ad is filled with images of President Obama.

"Who does the man everyone listens to, listen to?" the Financial Times asks. The answer: "If anyone needs a global perspective it's Barack Obama. No wonder he reads the FT."

Isn't it a tad tacky to use the president as an endorsement prop? Financial Times did not respond to several requests for comment. Administration spokesman Bill Burton was diplomatic: "The White House discourages the use of the president's name or likeness for commercial purposes."

Aug 6, 2009

The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers

Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.

After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry. Journals ranging from Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New Republic to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times concur on the diagnosis: newspapers, as we have known them, are disintegrating and are possibly on the verge of extinction. Time's Walter Isaacson describes the situation as having "reached meltdown proportions" and concludes, "It is now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters." A newspaper industry that still employs roughly 50,000 journalists--the vast majority of the remaining practitioners of the craft--is teetering on the brink.

Blame has been laid first and foremost on the Internet, for luring away advertisers and readers, and on the economic meltdown, which has demolished revenues and hammered debt-laden media firms. But for all the ink spilled addressing the dire circumstance of the ink-stained wretch, the understanding of what we can do about the crisis has been woefully inadequate. Unless we rethink alternatives and reforms, the media will continue to flail until journalism is all but extinguished.

Let's begin with the crisis. In a nutshell, media corporations, after running journalism into the ground, have determined that news gathering and reporting are not profit-making propositions. So they're jumping ship. The country's great regional dailies--the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer--are in bankruptcy. Denver's Rocky Mountain News recently closed down, ending daily newspaper competition in that city. The owners of the San Francisco Chronicle, reportedly losing $1 million a week, are threatening to shutter the paper, leaving a major city without a major daily newspaper. Big dailies in Seattle (the Times), Chicago (the Sun-Times) and Newark (the Star-Ledger) are reportedly near the point of folding, and smaller dailies like the Baltimore Examiner have already closed. The 101-year-old Christian Science Monitor, in recent years an essential source of international news and analysis, is folding its daily print edition. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is scuttling its print edition and downsizing from a news staff of 165 to about twenty for its online-only incarnation. Whole newspaper chains--such as Lee Enterprises, the owner of large and medium-size publications that for decades have defined debates in Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin--are struggling as the value of stock shares falls below the price of a single daily paper. And the New York Times needed an emergency injection of hundreds of millions of dollars by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in order to stay afloat.

Those are the headlines. Arguably uglier is the death-by-small-cuts of newspapers that are still functioning. Layoffs of reporters and closings of bureaus mean that even if newspapers survive, they have precious few resources for actually doing journalism. Job cuts during the first months of this year--300 at the Los Angeles Times, 205 at the Miami Herald, 156 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 150 at the Kansas City Star, 128 at the Sacramento Bee, 100 at the Providence Journal, 100 at the Hartford Courant, ninety at the San Diego Union-Tribune, thirty at the Wall Street Journal and on and on--suggest that this year will see far more positions eliminated than in 2008, when almost 16,000 were lost. Even Doonesbury's Rick Redfern has been laid off from his job at the Washington Post.

The toll is daunting. As former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Post associate editor Robert Kaiser have observed, "A great news organization is difficult to build and tragically easy to disassemble." That disassembling is now in full swing. As journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life go dark. Newspapers that long ago closed their foreign bureaus and eliminated their crack investigative operations are shuttering at warp speed what remains of city hall, statehouse and Washington bureaus. The Cox chain, publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and fifteen other papers, will padlock its DC bureau on April 1--a move that follows the closures of the respected Washington bureaus of Advance Publications (the Newark Star-Ledger, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and others); Copley Newspapers and its flagship San Diego Union-Tribune; as well as those of the once great regional dailies of Des Moines, Hartford, Houston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Toledo.

Mired in debt and facing massive losses, the managers of corporate newspaper firms seek to right the sinking ship by cutting costs, leading remaining newspaper readers to ask why they are bothering to pay for publications that are pale shadows of themselves. It is the daily newspaper death dance-cum- funeral march.

But it is not just newspapers that are in crisis; it is the institution of journalism itself. By any measure, journalism is missing from most commercial radio. TV news operations have become celebrity- and weather-obsessed "profit centers" rather than the journalistic icons of the Murrow and Cronkite eras. Cable channels "fill the gap" with numberless pundits and "business reporters," who got everything about the last decade wrong but now complain that the government doesn't know how to set things right. Cable news is defensible only because of the occasional newspaper reporter moonlighting as a talking head. But what happens when the last reporter stops collecting a newspaper paycheck and goes into PR or lobbying? She'll leave cable an empty vessel and take the public's right to know anything more than a rhetorical flourish with her.

The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on "old media" to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios, no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens' forum without such journalism.

So this is where we stand: much of local and state government, whole federal departments and agencies, American activities around the world, the world itself--vast areas of great public concern--are either neglected or on the verge of neglect. Politicians and administrators will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability. We are entering historically uncharted territory in America, a country that from its founding has valued the press not merely as a watchdog but as the essential nurturer of an informed citizenry. The collapse of journalism and the democratic infrastructure it sustains is not a development that anyone, except perhaps corrupt politicians and the interests they serve, looks forward to. Such a crisis demands solutions equal to the task. So what are they?

Regrettably the loud discussion of the collapse of journalism has been far stronger in describing the symptoms than in providing remedies. With the frank acknowledgment that the old commercial system has failed and will not return, there has been a flurry of modest proposals to address the immodest crisis. These range from schemes to further consolidate news gathering at the local level to pleas for donations from news consumers and hopes that hard-pressed philanthropists and foundations will decide to go into the news business. And they range from ineffectual to improbable to undesirable. Walter Isaacson has proposed that newspapers come up with a plan to charge readers "micropayments" for online content. Even if such a system were practically possible, the last thing we should do is erect electronic walls that block the openness and democratic genius of the Internet.

Don't get us wrong. We are enthusiastic about many of the efforts to promote original journalism online, such as ProPublica, Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. We cheer on exciting local endeavors, such as MinnPost in the Twin Cities--a nonprofit, five-day-a-week online journal that covers Minnesota politics with support from major foundations, wealthy families and roughly 900 member-donors contributing $10 to $10,000. But even our friends at MinnPost acknowledge that their project is not filling the void in a metro area that still has two large, if struggling, daily newspapers. Just about every serious journalist involved in an online project will readily concede that even if these ventures pan out, we will still have a dreadfully undernourished journalism system with considerably less news gathering and reporting, especially at the local level.

For all their merits and flaws, these fixes are mere triage strategies. They are not cures; in fact, if there is a risk in them, it is that they might briefly discourage the needed reshaping of ownership models that are destined to fail.

The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders"--civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front page.

As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to '90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.

Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they would undermine their raison d'être and fail to cultivate younger readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were already heading due south.

We do not mean to suggest that '60s journalism was perfect or that we should aim to return there. Even then journalism suffered from a generally agreed-upon professional code that relied far too heavily on official sources to set the news agenda and decide the range of debate in our political culture. That weakness of journalism has been magnified in the era of corporate control, leaving us with a situation most commentators are loath to acknowledge: the quality of journalism in the United States today is dreadful.

Of course, there are still tremendous journalists doing outstanding work, but they battle a system increasingly pushing in the opposite direction. (That is why some of the most powerful statements about our current circumstances come in the form of books, like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine; or documentaries, like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine; or beat reporting in magazines, like that of Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker.) The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion, spoon-feeding us lies masquerading as fact-checked verities. They missed the past decade of corporate scandals. They cheered on the housing bubble and genuflected before the financial sector (and Gilded Age levels of wealth and inequality) as it blasted debt and speculation far beyond what the real economy could sustain. Today they do almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spare not a moment to update us on the "Octomom." They trade in trivia and reduce everything to spin, even matters of life and death.

No wonder young people find mainstream journalism uninviting; it would almost be more frightening if they embraced what passes for news today. Older Americans have been giving up on old media too, if not as rapidly and thoroughly as the young. If we are going to address the crisis in journalism, we have to come up with solutions that provide us with hard-hitting reporting that monitors people in power, that engages all our people, not just the classes attractive to advertisers, and that seeks to draw all Americans into public life. Going backward is not an option; nor is it desirable. The old corporate media system choked on its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to that of the recent past.

We can do exactly that--but only if we recognize and embrace the necessity of government intervention. Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently engineered a $765 million bailout of French newspapers, free marketeers rushed to the barricades to declare, "No, no, not in the land of the free press." Conventional wisdom says that the founders intended the press to be entirely independent of the state, to preserve the integrity of the press. Bree Nordenson notes that when she informed famed journalist Tom Rosenstiel that her visionary 2007 Columbia Journalism Review article concerned the ways government could support the press, Rosenstiel "responded brusquely, 'Well, I'm not a big fan of government support.' I explained that I just wanted to put the possibility on the table. 'Well, I'd take it off the table,' he said."

We are sympathetic to that position. As writers, we have been routinely critical of government--Democratic and Republican--over the past three decades and antagonistic to those in power. Policies that would allow politicians to exercise even the slightest control over the news are, in our view, not only frightening but unacceptable. Fortunately, the rude calculus that says government intervention equals government control is inaccurate and does not reflect our past or present, or what enlightened policies and subsidies could entail.

Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news. Let's find a king and call it a day.

The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with "free markets." It was the result of public policy.

Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic. First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the "Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." Black argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that "assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order."

But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media system is anything but an independent "free market" institution. The government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses, monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased news media revenues.

The truth is that government policies and subsidies already define our press system. The only question is whether they will be enlightened and democratic, as in the early Republic, or corrupt and corrosive to democracy, as has been the case in recent decades. The answer will be determined in coming years as part of what is certain to be a bruising battle: media companies and their lobbying groups will argue against the "heavy hand of government" while defending existing subsidies. They will propose more deregulation, hoping to capitalize on the crisis to remove the last barriers to print, broadcast and digital consolidation in local markets--creating media "company towns," where competition is eliminated, along with journalism jobs, in pursuit of better returns for investors. Enlightened elected officials, media unions and public interest and community groups that recognize the role of robust journalism are going to have to step up to argue for a real fix.

Fortunately, an increasing number of veteran journalists, scholars and activists are beginning to grasp the historical significance of the present moment and the central role of public policy. It was the late James Carey, decorated University of Illinois and Columbia journalism professor and no fan of government power, who saw this before almost anyone else, writing in 2002: "Alas, the press may have to rely upon a democratic state to create the conditions necessary for a democratic press to flourish and for journalists to be restored to their proper role as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture."

We have to ask where we want to end up, after the reforms have been implemented. In our view we need to have competing independent newsrooms of well-paid journalists in every state and in every major community. This is not about newspapers or even broadcast media; it entails all media and accepts that we may be headed into an era when nearly all of our communication will be digital. Ideally this will be a pluralistic system, where there will be different institutional structures. Varieties of nonprofit media will have to play a much larger role, though not a monopolistic one.

We recognize and embrace the need for a system in which there will be a range of perspectives from left to right, alongside some media more intent on maintaining a less explicitly ideological stance. We must have a system that prohibits state censorship and that minimizes commercial control over journalistic values and pursuits. The right of any person to start his or her own medium, commercial or nonprofit, at any time is inviolable. From this foundation we can envision a thriving, digital citizen's journalism complementing and probably merging with professional journalism. What will the mix be? It would vary, with more not-for-profit and subsidized media in rural and low-income areas, more for-profit media in wealthier ones. The first order of any government intervention would be to assure that no state or region would be without quality local, state, national or international journalism.

We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let's eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let's give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial "news hole," say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper--this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms--and for us citizens--to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.

None of these proposed subsidies favor or censor any particular viewpoint. The primary condition on media recipients of this stimulus subsidy would be a mild one: that they make at least 90 percent of their content immediately available free online. In this way, the subsidies would benefit citizens and taxpayers, expanding the public domain and providing the Internet with a rich vein of material available to all.

What should be done about the disconnect between young people and journalism? Have the government allocate funds so every middle school, high school and college has a well-funded student newspaper and a low-power FM radio station, all of them with substantial websites. We need to get young people accustomed to producing journalism and to appreciating what differentiates good journalism from the other stuff.

The essential component for the immediate stimulus should be an exponential expansion of funding for public and community broadcasting, with the requirement that most of the funds be used for journalism, especially at the local level, and that all programming be available for free online. Other democracies outspend the United States by whopping margins per capita on public media: Canada sixteen times more; Germany twenty times more; Japan forty-three times more; Britain sixty times more; Finland and Denmark seventy-five times more. These investments have produced dramatically more detailed and incisive international reporting, as well as programming to serve young people, women, linguistic and ethnic minorities and regions that might otherwise be neglected by for-profit media.

Perhaps in the past the paucity of public media in the United States could be justified by the enormous corporate media presence. But as the corporate sector shrivels we need something to replace it, and fast. Public and community broadcasters are in a position to be just that, and to keep alive the practice of news gathering in countless communities across the nation. Indeed, if a regional daily like the San Francisco Chronicle fails this year, why not try a federally funded experiment: maintain the newsroom as a digital extension of the local public broadcasting system?

Currently the government spends less than $450 million annually on public media. (To put matters in perspective, it spends several times that much on Pentagon public relations designed, among other things, to encourage favorable press coverage of the wars that the vast majority of Americans oppose.) Based on what other highly democratic and free countries do, the allocation from the government should be closer to $10 billion. All totaled, the suggestions we make here for subscription subsidies, postal reforms, youth media and investment in public broadcasting have a price tag in the range of $60 billion over the next three years.

This is a substantial amount of money. In normal times it might be too much to ask. But in a time of national crisis, when an informed and engaged citizenry is America's best hope, $20 billion a year is chicken feed for building what would essentially be a bridge across which journalism might pass from dying old media to the promise of something new. Think of it as a free press "infrastructure project" that is necessary to maintain an informed citizenry, and democracy itself. It would keep the press system alive. And it has the added benefit of providing an economic stimulus. If these journalists (and the tens of thousands of production and distribution workers associated with newspapers) are not put to work through the programs we propose, their knowledge and expertise will be lost. They will be unemployed, and their unemployment will contribute to further stagnation and economic decline--especially in big cities where newspapers are major employers.

These proposals are a good start, but then the really hard work begins. We have to come up with a plan to convert failing newspapers into journalistic entities with the express purpose of assuring that fully staffed, functioning and, ideally, competing newsrooms continue to operate in communities across the country. The only way to do this is by using tax policies, credit policies and explicit subsidies to convert the remains of old media into independent, stable institutions that are ready to compete and communicate in the decades to come. To get from here to there, and especially to make possible multiple competing newsrooms in larger communities, policy-makers should be open to commercial ownership, municipal ownership, staff ownership or independent nonprofit ownership. Ideally the next media system will have a combination of the above; and the government should be prepared to rewrite rules and regulations and to use its largesse to aid a variety of sound initiatives.

We confess that we do not have all the answers. Neither, we have discovered, does anyone else. The fatal flaw in so many sincere but doomed responses to the current crisis is that they try to do the impossible, to create a system using varying doses of foundation grants, do-gooder capitalism, citizen donations, volunteer labor, the anticipation of a miraculous increase in advertising manna and/or a sudden--and in our view unimaginable--reversal on the part of Americans who have thus far shown no inclination to pay for online content. At best, these are piecemeal proposals when we are in dire need of building an entire edifice. The money from these sources is insufficient to address the crisis in journalism.

We have to open the door to enlightened public policies and subsidies. We need our members of Congress and our leading scholars to approach this matter with the same urgency with which they would approach the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change. We need an organized citizenry demanding the institutions that make self-government possible. Only then can we, like our founders, build a free press. The technologies and the economic challenges are, of course, more complex than in the 1790s, but the answer is the same: the democratic state, the government, must create the conditions for sustaining the journalism that can provide the people with the information they need to be their own governors.

About John Nichols

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

About Robert W. McChesney

Robert McChesney is Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. He hosts the program Media Matters on WILL-AM every Sunday afternoon from 1-2PM central time. He and John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, are the founders of Free Press, the media reform network, and the authors of Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press). He has written 16 books and his work has been translated into 15 languages.