Saving newspaper industry or saving journalism?

Is it about sav­ing jour­nal­ism, or sav­ing the news­pa­per indus­try? And are the two inseparable?

This morning’s somewhat-​ballyhooed Con­gres­sional hear­ing on the future of news­pa­pers — fea­tur­ing an indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tive, an indus­try ana­lyst and an aca­d­e­mic — did lit­tle to clear the air on that ques­tion, but raised some inter­est­ing points.

U.S. Rep. Car­olyn Mal­oney (D-​NY), who chairs the Joint Eco­nomic Com­mit­tee hold­ing Thursday’s hear­ing, last week sub­mit­ted a bill that would allow news­pa­pers to reor­ga­nizes as 501 ©(3) non-​profit groups, ded­i­cated to the pub­lic good. A sim­i­lar Sen­ate bill is pend­ing. In her open­ing remarks Thurs­day, Mal­oney empha­sized the impor­tance of jour­nal­ism to our democ­racy.

When the JEC asked for reac­tion to the non-​profit idea, it got a quick brushoff from News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica CEO John Sturm. We’re not here to talk about that, Sturm said. 

He did talk about it a bit in his open­ing state­ment, char­ac­ter­iz­ing it as poten­tially use­ful in lim­ited sit­u­a­tions, but dis­miss­ing it as a solu­tion for the indus­try as a whole. And of course, it’s Sturm’s job to lobby for the industry.

High­lights of Sturm’s sug­ges­tions to help the news­pa­per indus­try:

• Con­gress should busi­nesses carry back net oper­at­ing losses for 5 years instead of 2 years under exist­ing law. This was part of this year’s stim­u­lus pack­ages, but Con­gresses lim­ited it to only a minor­ity of businesses.
• Con­gress should let busi­nesses spread out future con­tri­bu­tions to defined ben­e­fit plans
• Nice try on the whole non-​profit idea, but we’re not con­sid­er­ing that (my paraphrase)

Sturm also brought up the idea that the sal­va­tion of the news indus­try is stop­ping what the indus­try alleges is wide­spread theft of con­tent. While he didn’t men­tion leg­is­la­tion, those haul­ing water for the indus­try have been push­ing for changes to copy­right law that would not just crack down on out­right theft (which is already cov­ered in the law), but would allow news orga­ni­za­tions to exclu­sive own­er­ship of facts. Some pro­po­nents go so far as to ban links and com­men­tary on news sto­ries, which pre­dictably has raised a firestorm in the blo­gos­phere. Sturm noted that the indus­try is rolling out its own tech­ni­cal and legal solu­tions to those engaged in out­right story-​snatching.

(Read in-​depth cov­er­age of the news­pa­per indus­try copy­right con­tro­versy)

In tes­ti­mony, Sturm also raised the idea, with no specifics, of mod­i­fy­ing antitrust laws, say­ing that Con­gress should con­sider whether a joint indus­try plan to address the cri­sis really vio­lates the spirit of antitrust laws. Industry-​wide (although with a few excep­tions), the com­pe­ti­tion for adver­tis­ing rev­enue is not other news­pa­pers, but other forms of media and revenue-​sapping conditions.

The sec­ond of the two wit­nesses was Tom Rosen­stiel, direc­tor of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excel­lence in Jour­nal­ism. In his pre­pared remarks, he laid blame on the indus­try itself for not respond­ing effec­tively to web ser­vices that have sucked away clas­si­fied ads, such as eBay, CraigsList and Mon­ster. But he also noted that the drain on news­pa­per rev­enue pre­dated the inter­net, point­ing to the loss of the one-​time anchor ads of com­pet­i­tive gro­cery stores and depart­ment stores. Big-​box stores such as Wal-​Mart haven’t replaced this revenue.

Rosen­stiel said news­pa­pers still have options, though the door is clos­ing on them. He did make a pointed state­ment sep­a­rat­ing jour­nal­ism from the news­pa­per industry:

So should we care whether news­pa­pers sur­vive? Per­haps not. Type­writ­ers have come and gone. But I believe we do have a stake as cit­i­zens in hav­ing reporters who are inde­pen­dent, who work full time, and who go out and gather news, not just talk about it, and who try to get the facts and the con­text right. And its not just the high-​lying inves­tiga­tive reporters I have in mind, but per­haps even more so the reporters who sim­ply show up week after week, sit in the front row, and bears wit­ness, and who, sim­ply by their pres­ence, say to those in power on behalf of all the rest of us, you are being watched.

The third wit­ness was Prince­ton Pro­fes­sor of Soci­ol­ogy and Pub­lic Affairs Paul Starr, an unabashed pro­po­nent of some sort of sub­si­dies for jour­nal­is­tic enter­prises. His argu­ments are well-​rooted in his­tory, going back to the British Stamp Act that helped stir the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, and includ­ing the fail­ure of the News­pa­per Preser­va­tion Act of 1970 that allowed joint oper­at­ing agree­ments. In fact, the JOA’s tended to favor con­glom­er­ates, effec­tively reduc­ing com­pe­ti­tion among news­pa­pers. It cer­tainly failed to ensure the sur­vival of mul­ti­ple news­pa­pers in mar­kets, its stated goal.

Starr offered no sug­ges­tions for sub­si­dies — just a list of suc­cess­ful mod­els — and he said no dis­tinc­tion should be made between non-​profits and com­mer­cial enter­prises — and noth­ing treat news­pa­pers as a spe­cial case. He offered a laun­dry list of con­di­tions such sub­si­dies should meet:

First, any sub­si­dies must be viewpoint-​neutral; they can­not favor one view­point over another.

Sec­ond, they should be platform-neutral—they should not favor print media over online media, for example.

And, third, they should be neu­tral or at least rea­son­ably bal­anced as to orga­ni­za­tional form. Taken as a whole, they should not favor for-​profit over non­profit orga­ni­za­tions, or vice versa. To be sure, some poli­cies by their nature may ben­e­fit one type of orga­ni­za­tion, but the sum total of pol­icy should be indif­fer­ent as to whether news is pro­vided via a for-​profit or non­profit enterprise.

Starr noted that just amend­ing tax laws to allow news­pa­pers to become non-​profits under 501 ©(3) is not an option.

From the found­ing of the repub­lic, news­pa­pers have played a cen­tral role in politics–endorsing polit­i­cal can­di­dates, for exam­ple. It would be a real loss to free­dom of the press if, in becom­ing non­profit, news­pa­pers had to restrict their polit­i­cal expres­sion. I believe, there­fore, Con­gress should con­sider cre­at­ing a new cat­e­gory of non­profit jour­nal­is­tic orga­ni­za­tions that are freed from tra­di­tional lim­i­ta­tions on 501 © (3) orga­ni­za­tions. When Con­gress orig­i­nally sub­si­dized news­pa­pers through the postal sys­tem, it did not require that they be non­par­ti­san; indeed, most of them were par­ti­san. Nei­ther should we require news­pa­pers to limit their polit­i­cal expres­sion in order to gain the advan­tages of non­profit status.

Starr’s pre­pared state­ments make inter­est­ing read­ing.

Mal­oney came up with one squirm moment in the hear­ing. She recalled that as a high-​school stu­dent, she was required to read a national weekly news mag­a­zine as a reg­u­lar part of her class­work. This instilled in her a life­long habit of read­ing weekly news mag­a­zines. Had news­pa­pers con­sid­ered a sim­i­lar program?

The wit­nesses were too polite to note that the com­mit­tee chair is of a demo­graphic with a much higher newspaper-​reading habit. One wit­ness (off cam­era) finally made a terse note that the indus­try had tried news­pa­pers in the class­room, but that the indus­try couldn’t wait decades for that to bear fruit. (In fact, as any­one in the indus­try knows, news­pa­pers have put sig­nif­i­cant resources into News­pa­pers in Education/​newspapers-​in-​the-​classroom pro­grams over at least two decades, try­ing to stem a hem­or­rhage in cir­cu­la­tion that began in the 1950s. What­ever the ben­e­fits of such pro­grams to edu­ca­tion, they obvi­ously have not reversed the drain on circulation.)

Tagged as: Community journalism, Editorial, News industry, Newspapers