IN a corner of Bukvatoriya, a bookstore here in the capital of the Crimean Peninsula, are some stacks of literature that may be as provocative to the Kremlin as any battalion of NATO soldiers or wily oligarch.
The books are classics — by Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare — that have been translated into Ukrainian, in editions aimed at teenagers. A Harry Potter who casts spells in Ukrainian also inhabits the shelves.
Two decades ago, there would have been little if any demand for such works, given that most people in this region are ethnic Russians. But the Ukrainian government is increasingly requiring that the Ukrainian language be used in all facets of society, especially schools, as it seeks to ensure that the next generation is oriented toward Kiev, not Moscow.
Children can even read Pushkin, Russia’s most revered author, in translation. (This tends to bother Russians in the way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Spanish can touch off cross-cultural crankiness in the United States.)
The Ukrainian policy has become a flashpoint in relations between the two countries and reflects the diminishing status of the Russian language in not just the former Soviet Union, but the old Communist bloc as a whole.
The Kremlin has tried to halt the decline by setting up foundations to promote the study of Russian abroad and by castigating neighbors who shove the language from public life. In some nations, a backlash against Russian has stirred its own backlash in the language’s defense.
Still, the challenge is considerable. At stake is more than just words on a page.
Language imparts power and influence, binding the colonized to the colonizers and, for better or worse, altering how native populations interact with the world. Long after they gave up their territories, Britain and France and Spain have retained a certain authority in far-flung outposts because of the languages that they seeded.
Czars and Soviet leaders spread Russian in the lands that they conquered, using it as a kind of glue to unite disparate nationalities, a so-called second mother tongue, and connect them to their rulers. That legacy endures today, as exemplified by the close relationship between Russia and Germany, which stems in part from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ability to speak Russian. She learned it growing up in Communist East Germany.
But with the language in retreat, there are unlikely to be many future Angela Merkels. For the Kremlin, could there be a more bitter reminder of how history has turned than the sight of young Estonians or Georgians or Uzbeks (not to mention Czechs or Hungarians) flocking to classes in English instead of Russian?
“The drop in Russian language usage is a great blow to Moscow, in the economic and social spheres, and many other respects,” said Aleksei V. Vorontsov, chairman of the sociology department at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. “It has severed links, and made Russia more isolated.”
Russian seems to be faring more poorly than other colonial languages because the countries that had to absorb it have a more cohesive sense of national identity and are now rallying around their native languages to assert their sovereignty.
Russian is one of the few major languages to be losing speakers, and by rough estimates, that total will fall to 150 million by 2025, from 300 million in 1990, a year before the Soviet collapse. It will probably remain one of the 10 most popular languages, but barely. Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi head the list.
The situation has not been helped by the demographic crisis in Russia itself, which is expected to shed as much as 20 percent of its population by 2050.
The fall in Russian speakers has not been uniform across the former Soviet Union, and Russian officials praise former Soviet republics like Kyrgyzstan where Russian is embraced.
But countries that felt subjugated by Soviet power, like the Baltic States, have taken vengeance by mandating knowledge of the native language to obtain citizenship or other benefits. (As a correspondent in the former Soviet Union, I find that in some countries, I can often speak Russian with people older than 40 and English with those younger.)
The dispute is vitriolic in Ukraine, especially here on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, a former Russian territory where about 60 percent of the population of two million is ethnic Russian and others also speak Russian as a first language. Many residents here would prefer that Russia reclaim Crimea.
Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, indicated this month that a deepening understanding of the Ukrainian language is one key to keeping Moscow at bay. “With our native language, we preserve our culture,” Mr. Yushchenko told the German magazine Spiegel. “That greatly contributes to preserving our independence. If a nation loses its language, it loses its memory, its history and its identity.”
The policies in Ukraine, the Baltics and other countries have often drawn the ire of not only the Kremlin, but also local Russian speakers.
At the Bukvatoriya bookstore in Simferopol, the manager, Irina P. Germanenko, said locals were upset by “Ukrainization” — laws compelling the Ukrainian language in government, on television and in other areas.
Many schools in Crimea use Russian as their primary language, but they often must teach courses in subjects like geography and math in Ukrainian. And important national examinations are given only in Ukrainian.
Most of Bukvatoriya’s stock is in Russian, but Ms. Germanenko said sales of books for teenagers in Ukrainian showed the policy’s impact. “It’s an unfortunate process that is occurring,” she said. “People should be able to have freedom of choice in their language.”
The resentment can bubble up in unexpected locales. When Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, said this summer that it would demote the status of Russian, requiring government documents to be only in the Tajik language, an outcry arose from those who saw Russian as a bridge to Russia and the outside world. And in former Soviet satellites in Europe, where Russian was essentially purged after Communism, there has been a small but noticeable revival.
The language is obviously helpful in doing business in Russia’s sizable market, so interest in Russian-language classes is rising. The lingua franca of Communism, it seems, is now an asset in the pursuit of capitalism.
TOKYO — As the newly elected Democratic Party works to assemble what will be only the second government in Japan’s postwar history not to be led by the Liberal Democratic Party, it is treading carefully to avoid infighting that could split the ideologically diverse party or drive a wedge between it and its coalition allies.
Since smashing the Liberal Democrats’ nearly uninterrupted half-century monopoly on power two weeks ago, the center-left Democrats and their leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, have hurried to fill top posts in the party and his incoming cabinet and to cobble together a coalition with other parties before their government’s formal accession to power on Sept. 16.
The party is working under unrelenting scrutiny from the news media and from Japanese citizens still affected by the bitter aftertaste of their only previous experience with non-Liberal Democratic rule since 1955. That government, which took power in 1993, lasted less than a year before collapsing amid bickering and defections.
Nightly news broadcasts, which are dominated by detailed coverage of the political maneuverings within the newly formed coalition, frequently feature veterans of the earlier failed government who offer lessons from their brief, rocky time in power.
While there have been no major bumps so far, warning signs are already appearing.
On Wednesday, when Mr. Hatoyama and the heads of two smaller anti-laissez-faire parties, the Social Democratic Party and the People’s New Party, agreed to form a coalition government, they left unresolved disagreements over the status of 50,000 American service members in Japan. Mr. Hatoyama has spoken in vague terms of re-examining the American military bases, while still trying to remain close to Washington, but the leftist Social Democrats want the bases removed.
There have also been signs of division in the Democratic Party since Mr. Hatoyama gave a top party position to one of the party’s most powerful men, Ichiro Ozawa, in what analysts say was an attempt to keep his loyalty. But in doing so, Mr. Hatoyama raised concerns by other Democrats that the party was embracing a shadowy kingmaker whose money-oriented political style closely resembled that of the Liberal Democrats they defeated.
Those critics fear that Mr. Ozawa, 67, will compete with Mr. Hatoyama for control of the party; Mr. Ozawa was a member of the 1993-1994 government, and political analysts have blamed his clashes with other coalition members for contributing to its demise. On Thursday, many Democrats lobbied to have Seiji Maehara, a young proponent of clean politics, included in the new cabinet to help offset Mr. Ozawa’s influence.
Mr. Hatoyama has tried to dispel concerns that he is creating competing centers of power.
“This will not create a dual power structure,” Mr. Hatoyama, the presumptive next prime minister, told reporters. He added that policy would be set by his cabinet and not the party.
Still, the barest hints of fissures within the party have made news in a nation keen to see if the Democrats can pull off the daunting task of essentially dragging the country into a true multiparty system.
The 1993-94 government, which included eight small parties and groups and was first led by Morihiro Hosokawa as prime minister, lasted only 11 months. Its quick collapse drove disappointed Japanese voters back into the arms of the Liberal Democrats, where they stayed until the election.
While there are many differences between now and 1993 — the biggest being the fact that a single, large party, the Democratic Party, has beaten the Liberal Democrats — the mistakes of that earlier government still cast a shadow, according to veterans of that coalition.
“It took 16 years to get this second chance,” Mr. Hosokawa, who retired from politics in 1998, said in an interview. “Lack of cohesiveness has always plagued efforts to build a second big political party.”
Mr. Hosokawa said the Democrats’ main weak point might be their broad manifesto of campaign promises, which would be hard to achieve quickly enough to satisfy Japan’s recession-weary voters. The party is trying to reinvigorate Japan’s sclerotic system of government by empowering elected politicians and consumers over the bureaucracy and industry, and to blunt the pain from globalization with a stronger social safety net.
Instead, Mr. Hosokawa said, focusing on a few high-profile policies would make it easier to keep the party on the same track and offer voters results.
“They need a single flag to stand under,” he said.
Adding to the difficulty will be the fact that Mr. Hatoyama heads a party that is broad and often hazy in its identity.
The party was formed in 1998 as a motley grouping of former Socialists and defectors from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Since then, it has tried to forge a unique culture and identity, with mixed success.
By finally winning power, the party has been robbed of its main source of unity, say political analysts and former politicians. The glue that held the Democrats together has been a shared desire to end the Liberal Democrats’ rule.
“The Democrats are like wet, unformed concrete, which still lacks a mold,” said Atsuo Ito, an independent political analyst who wrote a book on the party. “Just holding power may be enough to keep the party together at first, but eventually the party will need shared beliefs to keep from flying apart.”
RAMADI, Iraq — It has been just more than seven months since a mainly tribal coalition came to power here in Anbar Province, but already its leaders are being accused by many of doing little for most citizens while seeking to enrich themselves through sweetheart business deals.
“The majority of them are after personal gains,” said Sheik Ghazi Sami al-Abed, a prominent local businessman recently. “Few are looking to rebuild the country.”
The provincial elections at the end of January were supposed to enfranchise people in this staunchly Sunni Arab province, once a stronghold for insurgents and militants linked to Al Qaeda. After almost all the Anbar Sunni tribes boycotted the previous elections in 2005, this year’s voting was seen as a crucial way to bring them into government and perhaps ease tensions with the Shiite-dominated national government in Baghdad.
But extensive interviews with Anbar residents show that they see very little difference between their new government and the previous provincial council. That council, widely deemed illegitimate by many boycotting Sunnis, was accused so vehemently of corrupt and dysfunctional rule that it created fears of renewed intertribal warfare.
“They are thugs; they became politicians and now they have a lot of money,” said another Anbar businessman about the province’s current political leaders. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The discontent in Anbar is coming at a critical time, as the United States has reduced its military presence here significantly and completely stopped spending money on new projects despite the province’s “enormous” infrastructure needs, said one senior American official. It was American cash and contracts that spurred most tribal leaders to renounce the insurgency and switch alliances to the American side almost three years ago, in what is now known as the Sunni Awakening — a model the United States is seeking to replicate with tribes in Afghanistan.
In the absence of American patronage, the worrisome question in Anbar, which makes up roughly one-third of Iraq’s territory, is whether public dissatisfaction coupled with political and economic rivalries between the tribal leaders in power and those on the outside could lead to large-scale violence.
“The structure of modern local governance including transparency and accountability are at variance with the traditional expectations of tribal leaders,” said James Soriano, who leads the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Team based on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Ramadi. “There is a potential for a recipe for trouble if the pie is shrinking.”
Mr. Soriano spoke before his expected departure from Ramadi this month.
Anbar’s test also comes at a time when insurgents appear to be regrouping. Almost no day goes by without an attack or a bombing in Falluja, the province’s other main city. Several pro-American tribal leaders have been killed, and there have been a number of deadly bombings in Ramadi and other cities like Haditha and Qaim since July.
The picture is further complicated by a still uneasy relationship between this province, once among the most loyal to Saddam Hussein, and the Shiite-led national government. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki appears to be pitting Sunni leaders against one another and finding tribal allies here who can bolster his standing as a national leader and help him in his bid for re-election in January.
In addition to money spent by the Americans in Anbar, the previous provincial government received hundreds of millions of dollars from the central government. Much of it is believed to have been lost to corruption and mismanagement.
Among the new political leaders coming under increased criticism is the province’s governor, Qasim Abed al-Fahadawi.
In the absence of new American development aid, dwindling as the United States has urged the government in Baghdad to fill the breach, Mr. Fahadawi has followed the Western model and turned to the private sector for investment and help. The governor was even recognized for his efforts as “global personality of the year” by the London-based magazine Foreign Direct Investment.
But increasingly, the governor’s business affiliations are sounding alarm bells inside the province and elsewhere.
In a recent interview, Mr. Fahadawi made no secret of favoring a small clique of his tribal and business friends over others when it comes to future investments and contracts in the province. His relationship with Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, who two years ago took the lead role in the American-backed tribal Awakening movement, has caused hard feelings here.
Sheik Ahmed has turned the Awakening movement into the dominant political party here, leading the coalition that runs the Anbar provincial council. Many of the two men’s opponents say that Mr. Fahadawi has basically served as Sheik Ahmed’s money manager, with the two combining forces to use their political power to control how business contracts in Anbar are distributed to outside companies.
Both men insist that their business dealings are completely aboveboard, and Mr. Fahadawi says he has helped bring in investment and jobs that have helped revitalize local industries.
One of the biggest deals the men have been involved in is an effort to bring in two companies from the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum, to develop Anbar’s giant Akkaz gas field. Sheik Ahmed has taken the lead in the negotiations, and the two companies have committed to helping create as many as 100,000 jobs in the province, Mr. Fahadawi said.
But the men are circumventing the Oil Ministry’s plan to put the contract up for general bidding, instead appealing directly to Mr. Maliki for support. It was one of the main topics Sheik Ahmed and Mr. Maliki discussed when the prime minister visited Anbar this summer. Almost 175 sheep were slaughtered and the meat was distributed in Mr. Maliki’s honor, according to local residents.
Opposing tribal leaders in Anbar see the deal as an attempt by Sheik Ahmed to use national backing to cement his position as the province’s de facto chieftain and to freeze them out of lucrative business interests. They say he already has a dangerous amount of control over the local government and security forces.
“There will be a bloody struggle if he takes it all,” warned Sheik Ghazi, the prominent local businessman.
Another Anbar business magnate, Sheik Tariq Khalaf al-Abdullah, who was instrumental in introducing American forces to the local power structure at the beginning of the Awakening movement, also is fighting the deal. Sheik Tariq is now based in Amman, Jordan, but he has been trying to galvanize the opposition within Anbar.
In an interview in his plush office in Amman, he wondered why the Americans were not taking a bigger role in monitoring Anbar’s affairs. “I am surprised how they could withdraw before tying the loose ends,” he said.
Sheik Tariq established a tribal council and businesses for Anbar’s sheiks that benefited from American money and largesse when it was more abundant in return for allegiance.
Mr. Soriano, the leader of the State Department reconstruction team, said that the United States would continue to assist and advise Anbar’s government but that it would be up to Iraqis to resolve their differences and determine their priorities.
“A nice way to exit Iraq would be for a tribal society to support the structure of local government and local security forces to prevent a setback,” he said.
Migration has caused many problems in Papua, but it is not part of a genocidal master plan
Stuart Upton
In the second of two pieces on demographic change in Indonesian Papua, Inside Indonesia here presents an analysis by Stuart Upton that suggests – in contrast to the first piece written by Jim Elmslie –there is little hard evidence to support claims of genocide in Papua.
Urban areas are where the population is most mixed, and where the best opportunities are
The indigenous population of Papua has resisted Indonesian control from the start. Since the Dutch passed sovereignty over Papua to Indonesian hands in 1963 there has been recurrent violence in the territory, resulting from the heavy military presence there. The armed forces have committed many human rights abuses. These are well-documented and indisputable. What is problematic is how these and similar experiences are interpreted. Many people have claimed that this violence, along with attacks on Papuan culture and social structures, constitutes a program of genocide against the indigenous population. This emotive term has been widely used by both indigenous and Western activists in the last few years. However, the case in favour of using the term genocide to describe the Papuan situation is weak. It is also potentially damaging to the cause of positive change in Papua.
Demographic change
One of the common charges is that the Papuans are subject to genocide by stealth, in the form of migration by non-Papuan settlers. Through looking at the figures on lifetime migration and religious affiliation, the broad patterns of demographic change can be discerned. While there were issues with the coverage of the 2000 census, there have not been any substantiated claims that the statistical data have been manipulated for political reasons, and these figures remain our best guide for understanding population trends in Papua (by which I mean the two contemporary provinces of Papua and West Papua).
If there was genocide in Papua, we would expect the number of Papuans to be declining. The 2000 census recorded ethnic composition of the population, showing there were 1,460,000 Papuans in the province, up from 890,000 in 1971. The yearly growth rate of 1.7 per cent is only marginally less than that of Indonesia as a whole of 1.8 per cent. While Papuans made up only two-thirds of the province’s population in 2000, their numbers are only decreasing in relative terms.
The case in favour of using the term genocide to describe the Papuan situation is weak, and it is potentially damaging to the cause of positive change in Papua
Much of the eastern part of the archipelago, of which Papua is one part, has experienced significant economic development over the last three decades, prompting large numbers of migrants to move to these areas of growth using the improving transport system. Between 1971 and 2000, the population of Papua increased from just over 920,000 to nearly 2,440,000. This is a seemingly large increase but it is a population growth of only 3.1 per cent per year over these three decades, this rate being lower than other provinces in eastern Indonesia such as East Kalimantan (4.2 per cent) or Southeast Sulawesi (3.2 per cent). Papua is also not the only province to experience high levels of immigration, with the percentage of lifetime migrants in East Kalimantan in 2000 (35 per cent of the population) being far higher than in Papua (20 per cent). Put in their broader Indonesian context, population changes in Papua don’t look like genocide, they just look like part of the normal pattern of inter-island migration.
Papua is also not the only province to experience high levels of immigration, with the percentage of lifetime migrants in East Kalimantan being far higher than in Papua
Migration was an important factor from the first few years after the Dutch left and the Indonesians took over. Initially there was an influx of Indonesians taking the higher level public service positions. By 1971 there were over one thousand tertiary educated Indonesians in the province (mostly from Java) compared to less than 100 Papuans educated to this level. This was a blow for the Papuan elites because the government was the dominant employer. There were also some transmigrants settled in Papua prior to the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969 (surely an indication that Indonesia had every expectation that the vote would go the way they intended).
Transmigration and military violence
There were relatively low levels of migration through the 1970s, unsurprising for such a remote part of the nation, with the 1980s bringing settlers from Java due to increasing transmigration projects. The figure of 90,000 migrants in 1980 rose to 260,000 by 1990. The settlement of transmigrants along the PNG border was a government attempt to cement the incorporation of Papua into the nation. Since then, transmigration has ceased to be a major factor in demographic change. The importance of this program diminished in the 1990s with the rising number of self-financed migrants from Sulawesi and Maluku taking advantage of the improving shipping system. It is hard to accurately estimate the proportion of migrants who have arrived through the transmigration program but they probably represent less than a third of migrants overall. The transmigration program was finally halted in 2000.
Instead, the great majority of newcomers were not part of the transmigration program and came to settle in the towns and cities along the coast with little or no government assistance. The chief force bringing them to Papua has not been government policy but instead pull migration for economic reasons, with the migrants mainly coming from eastern Indonesia, particularly Sulawesi and Maluku. In urban areas, migrants from these areas made up 23 per cent of the population compared to 12 per cent from Java in 2000. The impression on the ground is that the proportion of migrants from Eastern Indonesia is rising.
Another common accusation is that the Indonesian military has been responsible for so many attacks on the population that they amount to attempted genocide. But genocidal actions would be expected to lead to gaps in the population statistics such as missing men in particular age groups. My analysis of the figures from all the censuses carried out in the province shows no evidence of such gaps. There are low male-female ratios for the 20-29 year age group but these low ratios do not carry over to older age groups in later censuses. It seems that young men are simply not being counted in the census, possibly due to their avoidance of government agencies or through difficulties in the administration of the census. Similar issues with counting young men were encountered by the statisticians in charge of the latest census in Britain.
Genocidal military actions would be expected to lead to gaps in the population statistics, but my analysis of the figures from all the censuses carried out in the province shows no evidence of such gaps
For particular ethnic groups who have been the victims of violence from the military, such as the highland Dani, the 2000 census did not show evidence of men missing on a large scale. Additionally, there are no large decreases in population figures in particular districts which would point to massacres of whole villages in these areas. All this is not to deny that there have been serious human rights abuses, but it seems they have not been on such a scale as to leave their mark on the population records.
Explaining the charges of genocide
A glimpse of houses in the transmigrant settlement in Babo Bintuni, founded 23 years ago
Iskandar Nugraha
The figures show that many of the provinces across Eastern Indonesia have experienced massive demographic change, change that has impacted greatly on the indigenous populations. So why are there suggestions of genocide in Papua but not in East Kalimantan or other eastern provinces? The reasons behind this are complex but involve the lower level of commitment to the Indonesian nation felt by Papuans, partly as a result of the separation of Papua from the new nation of Indonesia following the Pacific War. With the Dutch holding on to this half of New Guinea until 1962, an indigenous elite with an expectation of separate independence was born. The dashing of this hope by the Cold War politics of the time created resentment and little commitment to Indonesian nationalism.
There is also a subtext of racism implicit in much of the discussion of the genocide issue from both sides. Papuans suggest that they could never be part of Indonesia due to differences in skin colour (they are dark, Indonesians are light) or hair type (they have curly hair, Indonesians have straight hair). Such reliance on physical appearance in marking national identity – a racialist assumption of a sort that is repudiated these days in many parts of the world – is itself a response to the negative attitudes, including racist stereotyping, that many Indonesians show towards Papuans.
The charges of genocide also stem from Papuan social disadvantage. Migration patterns have indeed contributed to this disadvantage. The influx of economic migrants has impacted greatly on the indigenous populace, blocking them from gaining better education and employment in the coastal towns. Only one in five migrants in these towns are from another area of Papua, with the rest being migrants from outside the province. With most industries located along the coast, the better-educated migrants settling in these areas have tended to get the jobs in higher status sectors. For example, in the cities non-indigenous people are four times more likely to have jobs as traders than indigenous people. Overall, migrants hold more than 90 per cent of the lucrative jobs in trading.
The figures for rural areas are even more striking, with non-indigenous people being 16 times more likely to work in the trade sector than Papuans. Ethnic connections are important for getting jobs in Indonesia, and in helping migrants to establish themselves in towns. With few indigenous businesspeople, Papuans can’t use ethnic affiliation to obtain employment. The indigenous population continues to work in agriculture in rural areas, with the majority still in subsistence farming and only peripherally engaged with the modern economy.
Along with the majority of employment possibilities, the coastal urban areas have the best education opportunities. Illiteracy is only four per cent in the migrant-dominated capital Jayapura but it is nearly 60 per cent in the rural highlands of Jayawijaya. Migrants are more than twice as likely as indigenous people to have finished secondary school, and five times more likely to have tertiary qualifications. The poor standards of education in the areas where Papuans live, the distances between villages and schools (especially secondary schools), and financial obstacles to regular school attendance mean that many indigenous children do not obtain the education necessary to compete for employment.
The results of all these factors are that indigenous people have little chance of migrating to the towns, are unable to compete in the job market and do not see their children getting an education that will enable them to compete in the future. Rather than simply being the result of human rights abuses in the province, the current sense of a shared Papuan identity is more the result of the marginalisation of the indigenous people, and the understandable resentment and jealousy felt by this group towards the economic success of the newcomers.
With little realistic prospect of independence, working with the Indonesian side to implement policies to reduce corruption and the power of the military in Papua would be a vital first step to create trust in the government among the indigenous population
With little realistic prospect of independence, working with the Indonesian side to implement policies to reduce corruption and the power of the military in Papua would be a vital first step to create trust in the government among the indigenous population. In the longer term, policies to address the poor education standards of Papuans, assist indigenous small-businesses and enable more equality in employment are needed.
The claims of genocide in the province are mistaken and misleading. Such dramatising of the situation in Papua is only likely to result in the alienation of those Indonesian groups who are in a position to implement meaningful change. The ‘Papua Road Map ’ drawn up by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences suggests that some in the Indonesian academic community are willing to embrace such change. Let us hope that there are those in the bureaucracy and the military who can do the same in the future. ii
Stuart Upton (suptons@optusnet.com.au) completed his PhD about migration in Papua at the University of New South Wales in 2009.
SAN FRANCISCO — Make a phone call that crosses a national border and, without even knowing it, you're probably using a technology that is transforming the global telecommunications industry.
The technology, known as Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP), began in Israel in the mid-1990s and was popularized by startups like Skype. It chops conversation into thousands of digital data packets, sends these packets over the internet and reassembles the conversation at the other end — bypassing the traditional phone system and its per-minute charges.
“VoIP began as a much cheaper way to make international and long distance calls,” said analyst Ken Landoline of Synergy Research Group in Reno, Nevada.
Now it is now being quietly adopted by telecommunications carriers in Europe, Asia and North America.
Analyst Jeff Pulver said VoIP as a technology has been more successful than Skype, the Scandinavian company that was acquired in 2005 by eBay, the online marketplace. EBay recently spun Skype back off again to compete more freely in the VoIP marketplace.
“Skype as a company hasn't done all that well, but VoIP has gotten a lot of traction in the telecom world,” said Pulver, who tracks the industry through his website, Pulver.com. “The incumbent telecommunication carriers, especially in Europe and Asia, have embraced VoIP to make themselves more competitive.”
Pulver said the Israeli company VocalTec unveiled the first commercial VoIP system in 1995. Skype debuted in 2003 with VoIP software that enabled computer users to have conversations through their PCs, via the internet, essentially for free.
“Skype became very popular very quickly,” Pulver said. “In 2004 and 2005 it was threatening every major phone company.”
In 2005, eBay bought Skype for more than $2.6 billion, hoping to weave online conversation into its digital marketplace and thus spur more transactions. Pulver said the acquisition never delivered the benefits eBay expected and blunted Skype's momentum as an alternative to traditional phone carriers.
In September, eBay sold a controlling stake in Skype for nearly $2 billion to a group of outside investors that includes browser software pioneer Marc Andreessen. Whether the new ownership will revive Skype as a challenger to the telecom status quo remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, analysts say the major telecommunications firms have embraced VoIP as a way to lower their own costs of delivering long-distance voice traffic.
Analyst Stephane Teral with the market research firm Infonetics said telecommunications firms in Europe and Asia have been pushing VoIP all the way into their systems, using it not just for long-haul transport but also selling digital lines directly to consumers, in contrast to U.S. phone carriers that still typically offer old-fashioned analog lines, which essentially connect the caller and receiver over wires that are dedicated to their conversation, like a string stretched between two cups.
NTT in Japan has more than 7.3 million VoIP subscribers, and France Telecom has about 6.5 million, Teral said.
In the United States, cable companies are using VoIP to deliver the phone component of the bundled services they are selling to consumers, enabling them to compete with the telephone carriers.
“Phone calls in my home office come through my cable provider's infrastructure along with my internet and television service,” Landoline said. “The telephone company does not enter my house.”
Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo said the Skype spin off comes at a time when VoIP technology is approaching an inflection point.
“So far VoIP has just been cheaper,” Saffo said. “Now the voice quality is getting better. But what will really make VoIP take off is that it can add features that weren't possible with plain old telephone service.”
For instance, he said VoiIP makes it possible for players in online games to speak with one another, adding another dimension to their interactions.
“We're just starting to understand what VoIP can do that the old telephone system couldn't,'” Saffo said. “This is a technology that is moving into the mainstream.”
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.
In Singapore, there is water everywhere and, belying the old adage, almost every drop can be drunk. Much of Singapore's water falls from the sky. Stand outside in the afternoon, when dark thunderclouds usually roll by, and you will probably get drenched. An average of 7.9 ft. of rain falls on Singapore annually, nearly 2½ times the global average. Moreover, this small, chestnut-shaped, 268-sq.-mi. island is surrounded by water, albeit the salty kind.
Hot, equatorial, but with limited groundwater, Singapore has made itself a global paragon of water conservation by harvesting--and reusing--the aqueous bounty of its skies and, to a lesser extent, its surrounding seas. "It is an exemplary model of integrated water management," said Lars Gunnarsson of the Stockholm International Water Institute in the citation given to Singapore's national water agency when it won the 2007 Stockholm Water Industry Award. "The story would fit well as a study example in the education of water managers."
Water is chronically in short supply in the world's megacities. In the arid Western U.S., cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix are in constant legal scrapes over access to the stuff, and there are strict rules for homeowners about usage. By 2025, 1 in 2 Africans could face water scarcity, leading to potential water wars between countries. Chronic shortages are also expected in Asia. And groundwater supplies in three of India's most productive agrarian states are rapidly shrinking.
Singapore's success story, like many happy ones, began in struggle. "When you have your back against the wall, you come out fighting," says Sam Ong, deputy CEO of Hyflux, a Singapore-based water-treatment company. "That's how Singapore is with water." The fight dates back to several old water agreements with Malaysia, the country Singapore acrimoniously broke away from in 1965--which ensured that as of Singapore's independence, 80% of its freshwater supply came from Malaysia through fat steel pipes across a causeway. Yet soon after Singapore signed the agreements over the course of 1961 and 1962, it began formulating Plan B. Fearing that its erstwhile master would use water as a "lever of pressure," as Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, put it in his memoirs, the country has searched for more than 40 years for ways to wean itself off foreign water.
It has succeeded. Even though roughly 40% of the country's freshwater still comes from Malaysia, by building a sophisticated network of rivulets, storm drains and canals, Singapore has made itself into a vast catchment area for the thundershowers that regularly soak it. "We are a large-scale urban storm harvester" is how Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of Singapore's PUB (formerly known as Public Utilities Board), puts it. "We do not have any groundwater, but we do get a lot of rain," Khoo says. "That was the starting point of our efforts."
And Singapore purifies and recycles what it captures, including sewage. Here's how it works: More than half the island is crisscrossed by a grid of drains that not only prevent flooding, to which low-lying Singapore is prone, but more important, capture rainwater. That rainwater eventually flows into canals. From the canals, the water runs to one of several reservoirs and then to a treatment plant, where it is purified for home use. The wastewater, meanwhile, runs into a gigantic underground pipe, nearly as wide as a subway tunnel, that traverses the length of Singapore. To speed the water flow, this giant pipe tilts progressively downward, reaching a depth of 230 ft. By that point, hundreds of millions of gallons of water have arrived below a lip of reclaimed land on the easternmost edge of Singapore. There, a newly opened $2.5 billion water plant pumps the water back to the surface and treats it, discharging some of it out to sea and treating some of it further for use in factories. Not only are rainwater and wastewater efficiently "harvested" in this way, officials point out, but the system also makes every Singaporean water-conscious. "We want to promote the idea that the water that falls on your roof, patio or car park is eventually used," says the PUB's Khoo. "This ensures the environment is kept clean."
The government's enlightened policies have developed an expertise in water management that has spawned a host of profitable companies. Chief among them is Hyflux, a water-treatment company that purifies waste-, salt- and rainwater. Hyflux was started in 1989 by a chemistry graduate named Olivia Lum, who grew up so poor in a Malaysian village that rains regularly flooded her grandmother's small wooden house.
The company struggled for nearly half a decade. Then came the penguins. "To convince Singapore [that it could treat water], we tried our first project in a bird park with the penguin tank," explains Hyflux's Ong. Because penguins are used to pristine arctic water, the water in their tank needed to be continuously cleaned. The penguins were pleased enough by Hyflux that the company was allowed to recycle part of Singapore's wastewater into drinking water, which has in turn propelled Hyflux from a start-up into a global player in water treatment. Its systems are now used in cities such as Tianjin, China, and Magtaa, Algeria.
Hyflux's membrane technology shows that even the dirtiest water can be cleaned. Seawater in Singapore, for instance, is first dosed with acids to adjust alkaline levels and then cleaned of contaminants like oil and grease. The water passes through a sieve of sand that removes silt. Then it is shot through a stringy honeycomb of plastic membranes at high pressure, which "polishes" the water, Ong says. In the case of desalination in Singapore, Ong adds, the water becomes so clean that minerals have to be restored for it to be consumed. In 2008, Hyflux reported net profits of $40 million, a 79% increase over the previous year, on revenues of roughly $382 million. Hyflux's stock has jumped almost twentyfold since its public listing in 2001.
Not all of Singapore's water babies harbor such commercial promise. To highlight its prowess at converting wastewater into drinking water, the government created a drink called NEWater and packaged it in colorful plastic bottles. Although it's copiously drunk by Singaporean government ministers, often at media-saturated events like the country's National Day celebrations, brands like Evian and Perrier have little to fear. Singapore's officials are more interested in making a point than a dollar, the point being that water is a valuable, renewable resource.
The country's painstaking efforts to become self-sufficient in water have worked. The first of the water agreements with Malaysia, which expires in 2011, is not likely to be renewed, according to a book sponsored by the Singapore government. Equally important, by using so much of its land to capture rainwater, Singapore has made its citizens environmental stewards who take responsibility for conserving resources. "It's a passion," says Albert Phee, a 49-year-old IT expert who has persuaded his family to turn off the shower while shampooing and reuse the water he washes his car with for flushing the toilet. "Once I've started, I can't stop."
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