New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger defending publication of the Pentagon Papers, June 16, 1971, New York. Barton Silverman/New York Times/Redux
January 25, 2015
For anyone interested in
discovering how the business model for American journalism has changed over
time, here is a thought exercise. Consider the following institutions:
—CBS News Radio, the House of Murrow, the leading
source of breaking news for Americans by the end of World War II.
—New York Herald Tribune, the finest paper in the United
States for much of the twentieth century (yes, a smarter and better written
paper than the New York
Times), and the home base for the indispensable Walter Lippmann, the most
influential columnist of the century.
—Saturday Evening Post, which featured the work of the
country’s greatest illustrator, Norman Rockwell, and presented its millions of
readers with news, views, and diversions.
—LIFE magazine, a pillar of the vaunted Time Inc. media
empire and the most important showcase for the skills of photojournalism.
Next, let’s pick a historical moment. Somewhat
arbitrarily, let’s go back fifty years and look at 1964. If you asked any
educated, engaged American adult who paid attention to world and national
affairs in 1964, that person would have agreed that all four of those
journalistic institutions were indispensable. It would have been hard to
imagine American society without them.
Within a few years, though, all would be gone (or so
diminished that they were mere shadows of themselves). The rise of television
news hollowed out CBS Radio and ultimately killed off LIFE as we knew it. A printer’s strike
finished off the Herald
Tribune, leaving the quality newspaper field to the Times alone. Corporate ownership pulled
the plug on the Saturday
Evening Post when tastes changed and the magazine started racking
up annual losses in the millions.
Now, let’s jump ahead to 1989, halfway to the present
from 1964. The lineup of indispensable media would look different.
—The Times had not only outlived the Trib by then, but had surpassed it in
almost every respect.
—National Public Radio, and its television sibling,
Public Broadcasting Service, brought intelligent, original reporting to the
airwaves and won the loyalty of millions.
—CNN, the brainchild of billboard businessman Ted Turner,
established the 24-hour news cycle by putting journalism on television round
the clock and across the globe.
—Bloomberg, the business news service, was not even
founded until 1982 but burst on the scene and soon became an essential tool for
traders and later, as a general business news service for readers worldwide.
Thus, at quarter-century
intervals, we can see the phenomenon known to economists as “creative
destruction” at work, with a vengeance. The older media, despite their eminence
in the journalism establishment and their deep ties into the lives of their
audiences, were swept aside and replaced, often by upstarts less than a decade
old.
And all that happened even before the Internet came
along to “change everything.” In light of such a turbulent history, it behooves
us to look deeply into the history of news organizations. Where did they come
from? How did they pay the bills in earlier periods? Is there anything to learn
from the days before the Huffington Post, YouTube, and social media?
Nowadays, it is commonplace to refer to the news media
that predates the Internet as “legacy media.” Just what is that legacy?
Printers
and Pamphleteers
In America, the history of
selling the news can be said to have begun in 1704, when John Campbell, the postmaster
in Boston, got tired of writing his longhand weekly summary of interesting
developments for his friends. So, copying the model of news journals in London,
he went to a nearby “job printer” and launched something never seen before in
North America: a printed weekly newspaper. The world took little notice, but
Campbell’s new venture, titled The Boston News-Letter, began the long rise of “big media” to the pinnacle of power and profit
that it reached in the late twentieth century, just before going through a
near-death experience in the last fifteen years. Over the course of those three
centuries, news has been carried in many different kinds of vehicles. In broad
terms, the news business has also operated under a succession of prevailing
business models. And each time the business model changed, a new philosophy of
journalism was needed. Repeatedly, journalism has evolved slowly over decades,
only to face a crisis or some external shock in which innovators could
flourish.
Campbell and other colonial-era
newspaper editors and printers, including the estimable Benjamin Franklin, all
operated in a business world that had several key characteristics. Most
producers of newspapers were printers, and they worked in a shop, which was the
era’s distinctive form of productive activity other than farming and fishing.
In the typical eighteenth century shop, whether it was a cooperage or a
chandlery, a brewery or a printshop, a “master” presided. A master in any field
had two distinguishing features: he had all the skills needed to take the raw
materials of his trade and turn them into finished products, and he had enough
capital to be able to afford a workplace and the tools and materials needed to
get started. As in most other kinds of shops, the master printer was assisted
by a journeyman (who had the skills of the trade but lacked the capital—so
far—to open his own shop) and an apprentice (who lacked both skills and capital
but whose contract with the master entailed a legal right to be taught the
mysteries of the trade). Each shop had a small crew, working in a strict
hierarchy.
For printers in America, the greatest challenge was to
import a press and a set of metal letters from England, which was a major
capital outlay. An economist might observe that printing had a higher “barrier
to entry” than many other shop-based businesses. The technology imposed further
conditions. Presses were operated by hand, and inks were slow to dry, so there
was a physical limit on the number of papers a printer could turn out in a week—on
the scale of the low hundreds of copies. Most of these newspapers were offered
only on a subscription basis, a year at a time, and they were quite expensive.
My research indicates that they were priced along the lines of a contemporary
investors’ newsletter, costing the equivalent of several thousand dollars a
year. It is worth noting that the subscribers were paying nearly the full cost
of the paper (plus a profit), since there were very few ads in the early
papers.
In 1704, as newswriting conventions were just being
established, most items in a newspaper read more like letters. They were
discursive, they took a lot for granted, and they assumed that the reader would
continue reading to the end. Often the contents of a newspaper would include
many actual letters, sent to the postmaster-editor or to his friends, and they
would be printed because they were so informative. The early papers also
contained a regular flow of proclamations from the Crown or the provincial
authorities, always conveying a one-way message from those at the top of the
social hierarchy to those below. Newspapers in America also aggregated news
from Europe. The printer would simply subscribe to one or more papers from
England, and when they arrived through the postal service, the American printer
would lift items verbatim from the source paper—never minding if the material
was weeks or months old. If news of Europe had not reached the colonies, then
it was still new to the colonists. Most early newspapers were only a page or
two long, and some left blank space for comments.
The “public prints” also carried
plenty of information interesting to merchants, ship captains, and others
involved in the vast Atlantic trading system, including offers of slaves for
sale. In addition, papers routinely carried news about oddities such as
lightning strikes, baby goats born with two heads, meteor showers, and the
like. Such strange occurrences were often presented for more than their ability
to astonish; they were framed as occasions for readers to reflect on how these
signs and portents revealed God’s providence, and many were explicitly
presented as episodes of the wrath of God. Another common type of item involved
reports of public executions; these often included descriptions of rather
leisurely procedures designed to torture the miscreant before sending him (or
her) to meet the Creator. In describing such burnings, hangings, and
stranglings, the newspapers were advancing the social purpose of public
executions, which was to caution and intimidate the general population against
a life of depravity. In addition, newspapers offered a grab bag of poetry,
quips, jokes, and whatever else came to the printer’s mind. In that sense,
dipping into a newspaper 300 years ago was not all that different from doing so
today: you never knew what you might find there.
With rising levels of population and economic activity
in the colonies, newspapers slowly began to spread and grow. By the 1760s,
there were a few dozen titles, mostly in port cities from New Hampshire to
South Carolina. They catered to an elite audience of literate white men who
needed information and could afford to pay for it. By necessity, they were
small-scale, local operations. No printer owned more than a single newspaper. A
few copies could be sent to distant places through the postal service (where
they enjoyed a special low rate), but they remained overwhelmingly modest,
local affairs. The only way that most people of middling ranks could read a
newspaper was by finding one in a tavern, where many a barkeep would share his
own paper with his customers by hanging it on a post (hence the popularity of
the name Post in
newspaper titles).
The newspaper trade suffered a blow in 1765, when
Parliament imposed a tax on paper. The Stamp Act required that all paper
products bear a stamp proving that the tax had been paid. The tax fell heaviest
on printers, who considered paper their stock in trade, and they felt
particularly aggrieved. Several printers went so far as to declare the death of
newspapers and printed images of tombstones on their front pages. As it
happened, Parliament lifted the tax, and newspapers survived. But the Stamp Tax
left a bitter taste among printers, and more of them opened their pages to
politics and began sympathizing with the radicals in the patriot movement. A
decade later, they would be helping to lead the American Revolution.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, another
form of journalism arose—the pamphlet. These were much cheaper than newspapers
and sometimes widely distributed, but the writing, printing, and distribution
of pamphlets was not a real business. These were done by amateurs for
non-economic motives. Indeed, it has been observed that newspapers were like
stores, and pamphleteers were like peddlers. They were hit-and-run
efforts—usually political, almost always anonymous (or pseudonymous). The
pamphleteers managed to inject a big infusion of politics into American
journalism, advancing political arguments that could not be risked by printers
of regular newspapers. In some respects, the pamphleteers resemble the bloggers
of our times, ranting about political topics not to make a living, but to have
an impact.
The pamphleteers engaged in a polemical debate that
grew increasingly polarized in the early 1770s over the issue of separating the
colonies from Britain. Cautiously at first, the regular newspapers joined in
the great debate, and—driven by their readers—they became identified with the
Whig or Tory cause.
During the early years of the Republic, papers not
only became more political, but they also became more partisan. Indeed,
newspapers predated American political parties and provided the first nodes
around which the parties grew. Some papers were founded by partisans such as
Alexander Hamilton (or, as in the case of his rival Thomas Jefferson, by
surrogates), and newspaper editors helped readers figure out which candidates
for office supported Hamilton’s Federalists and which ones supported
Jefferson’s Republicans. In return, victorious parties rewarded loyal editors
with lucrative government printing contracts and showered benefits like reduced
postal rates on the whole industry.
Such then was the kind of journalism that American’s
founders were familiar with. It was local, small-scale, independent, and highly
argumentative. One thing it did not have was much original reporting. Indeed,
throughout the first century of journalism in America, there was no one whose
job was to gather facts, verify them, and write them up in story form. Opinions
were abundant, facts were haphazard.
Hail to
the Penny Press
During most of the nineteenth century, the news
business was a high-technology, innovative field, often at the forefront of
deep changes sweeping through the U.S. economy. It may be hard for us today to
think of newspapers as innovators, but they once were, and it may well be that
the failure to continue to innovate is a major source of newspapers’ current
problems.
Beginning in the 1830s, newspapers pioneered in
creating the first truly mass medium. Led by Benjamin Day, who founded the New York Sun, and his great rival James Gordon
Bennett, who founded the New York Herald, newspaper editors discovered the simple but powerful
truth that there is money to be made in selling down-market. The founders of
these “Penny Press” papers brought a profoundly new model to American
journalism, based on deep and simultaneous changes in economics, technology,
marketing, and philosophy.
First, Day decided to go after an under-served market:
the literate from the middling ranks of society. He wrote for tradesmen,
clerks, laborers, anyone who could read. His motto for the Sun was “It shines for all”—and he
meant all. To make his paper affordable, he slashed the price from six cents a
copy to a penny. That allowed him to take advantage of simple arithmetic: if
you multiply a small number by a very big number, you end up with a pretty darn
big number. In his case, the Sun began selling many more copies than anyone had before—rather than hundreds
a week, he was selling thousands a day. So, his small purchase price was more
than offset by his large circulation figures.
To make his paper even more affordable, Day changed
the business model in another way: readers no longer had to subscribe for
months at a time. They could lay down a penny for the Sun today and skip it tomorrow. This
put tremendous pressure on Day to meet an entirely new problem: his paper would
have to be interesting every day. He met that challenge by re-defining news.
Instead of old, recycled news from Europe, letters from ship captains, and
official proclamations from New York’s government, Day discovered the appeal of
telling New Yorkers short, breezy stories about the calamities and strange
doings of regular people. The Sun’s pages were filled with stories about suicides, riots, brawls, and the
fires that plagued wooden cities like New York. People loved it, and they voted
with their pennies for Benjamin Day’s new kind of journalism day after day.
Soon, the circulation was soaring and money was rolling in. News was now
defined as whatever lots of people found interesting.
Day was also fortunate in his timing, because the
decade of the 1830s was a time when inventors were applying a new technology to
a host of age-old human problems. That new technology was steam power, which
was being applied to such problems as powering ships that could travel upstream
and the new-fangled railroads. One of the earliest adaptors of steam power was
the printing trade, which had relied since Gutenberg’s time on the power of
human muscles to raise and lower the heavy platen that pressed paper and ink
together. With the introduction of steam-powered presses (and fast-drying
inks), it was now physically possible to produce enough copies of a newspaper
in a few hours to meet the demands of thousands of ordinary people in a growing
city like New York.
The success of Day and Bennett and the imitators who
soon followed in other cities had some powerful unintended consequences. One
was a radical new division of labor, which brought about the de-skilling of
printer/editors and a radical flattening of the organizational chart. Once,
newspapers had been produced by a master printer, assisted by a journeyman (who
could expect to become a master one day), and an apprentice (who could in turn
expect to become a journeyman one day). But, with the growth in scale of
newspapers, the owners forced through a deep restructuring. The new big-city
dailies would be run by one person, with the title of publisher. The publisher
was the sole proprietor and was responsible for organizing the entire
enterprise.
As papers grew, publishers began appointing
assistants, along these lines:
—A chief of production to oversee printing (a trade
that, thanks to steam power, now involved tending machines rather than the traditional
hand skills);
—A head of circulation to make sure all those
thousands of copies got distributed every day;
—An advertising director, to run the growing volume of
ads, which would soon make up a giant new revenue stream;
—An editor, to preside over the newsroom, where the
new job of reporter was spreading and would eventually develop into specialties
such as covering crime or sports.
Called by various titles, these four individuals would
all see their domains grow in the coming decades, until newspapers were
employing hundreds of workers in specialized roles. By the 1840s, it was
already dawning on journeymen that they were not going to learn all the skills
of this new trade, that they would never accumulate enough capital to go out on
their own, and they would never be their own master. They were now doomed to a
life of wages.
The rise of popular and profitable newspapers had
another profound consequence: publishers like Day and Bennett declared their
separation from the parties and became politically independent. Observing that
they won an “election” every day—in which the ballots were the readers’
pennies—publishers said they would stand apart from the parties and pass
judgment on the performance of all office-holders. They would do so in the name
of “the people,” whom the publishers now claimed to represent. They would act
as the people’s tribune (hence the popularity of that name in the newspaper
trade) and “lash the rascals naked throughout the land.”
Near the end of the nineteenth
century, all these ideas were taken to their ultimate fulfillment by a later
generation of mass-market newspapers, known as the “yellow press.” Led by
Joseph Pulitzer and his rival, William Randolph Hearst, the yellow papers
brought tabloid journalism to new heights. Readers loved it, and by the year
1900, the yellow papers passed the circulation milestone of a million copies a
day. (Let’s do the math on that: 1 million purchasers x 1 cent = $10,000 a day
in income from circulation alone. That’s $3.6 million a year. Add a comparable
amount of income from advertising, and you have a huge enterprise.) The money
surged into these papers, flowing in two broad streams of revenue—one from
circulation, both regular subscribers and newsstand sales, and another from
advertising, both “display” ads and classified. Readers grew accustomed to
paying less than the real cost of the newspaper, because advertising brought in
so much money. In another case of good timing, the era of Pulitzer and Hearst
coincided with the rise of big-city department stores like Macy’s and Gimbels,
which regularly bought full-page ads to carry on their rising competition.
Rise and
Fall of Corporate Empires
In the early twentieth century, some leading figures
in American journalism pushed back against the rise of the tabloid style. They
aspired to make journalism into a true profession—along the lines of law and
medicine—with a defined canon of knowledge, a set of standard procedures, and a
mechanism for certifying new journalists and policing the ranks of practitioners.
None other than Joseph Pulitzer himself gave this movement a big lift when he
decided to leave a major portion of his huge fortune to Columbia University in
order to endow a school of journalism and a set of prizes intended to elevate
the practice of journalism by rewarding each year’s best work.
Another major supporter of the
drive to raise the standards of journalism was Adolph Ochs, the publisher who
bought the failing New York Times in 1896 and set about trying to
turn it into “must reading” for the American establishment. Ochs asserted that
his paper would provide all the news that respectable people needed “without
fear or favor,” regardless of parties, religions, or other interests. Through
his involvement on the board of The Associated Press and other industry groups,
Ochs strove to get his fellow publishers to produce papers that were serious,
responsible, and decent.
Pulitzer, Ochs, and other reformers thought their
biggest problem was achieving real independence. That was the foremost quality
they associated with professionalism (and interestingly, not “objectivity”),
and they understood journalistic independence not just in political terms. Yes,
they believed that newspapers should, of course, stand apart from the political
parties. They should not carry water for either side in their news coverage,
and they should editorialize freely in a non-partisan manner in favor of the
best candidates and policies. But they also had a deeper concern: they wanted
to liberate the nation’s newsrooms from the pernicious effects of hucksterism,
ballyhoo, and puffery. They wanted to stamp out the influence of the emerging
field of press agentry, to get their own staff reporters to stop taking bribes
for favorable stories, and to assert the inviolability of the newsroom. The
goal was to create a wall of separation between “church and state,” between the
newsroom and the advertising side of the paper. As newspapers became big
businesses, the professionalizers hoped to insulate reporters and editors from
the imperatives of making money.
As businessmen themselves, most
publishers did not see the greater threat to professionalism that they actually
faced—the growing transformation of the news industry from stand-alone,
family-run small businesses to the corporate form of ownership that would sweep
almost the entire field in the coming decades. It was the new business model,
dominated by the for-profit, publicly traded corporation that transformed
journalism in the mid- to late-twentieth century and left it vulnerable to
collapse.
It was often great fun while it lasted. One of the
pioneers in building the big media companies was William Randolph Hearst. Heir
to an enormous fortune, Hearst had the means to build the first major media
empire. Keeping his family-owned newspaper in San Francisco, Hearst bought a
failing paper in New York City in 1895. And he did an unusual thing: he kept
the Examiner, so he
now owned two newspapers. Later, he founded new newspapers—in Los Angeles,
Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere—and kept ownership of all of them in his hands,
thus dictating their editorials and giving the Hearst press an increasingly
conservative, isolationist outlook that mirrored his own views. But he did not
stop there. He also bought magazines, including the muckraking Cosmopolitan, then ventured into new fields as
they came along—newsreels, radio, television. By the time of his death in 1951,
the Hearst Corporation was a mighty media monolith.
In the 1920s, radio manufacturers like the Radio
Corporation of America (RCA) and Westinghouse—which were already large,
profitable, publicly traded corporations—became darlings of Wall Street when
they figured out how to make money in radio not just by building the receivers
that people craved, but by broadcasting programming as well. In short order,
companies like RCA’s new subsidiary NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation)
began adding to the corporation’s bottom line by creating “content” for a
growing audience and then renting that audience out to advertisers and commercial
sponsors. In the new era, RCA could make money on both the hardware of radio
and the programming. All that remained was to build the network of affiliated
radio stations across the country, which allowed NBC to profit many times over
from the same content. In that setting, the cost of putting a little news on
the air—to satisfy the broadcast regulators’ requirement that radio operate in
“the public interest”—was a tiny cost for running a very lucrative enterprise.
The emerging broadcasting
powerhouses of NBC and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) were highly
profitable entertainment companies that ran their news divisions for decades as
“loss leaders.” The vaunted CBS Radio News operation, run by the Tiffany
Network, the home of Edward R. Murrow and the other pioneers of radio news, was
paid for by the jokes of Jack Benny, and his sponsors—Chevrolet, Jell-O, Grape
Nuts, and Lucky Strike. When television came out of the laboratory after World
War II and entered consumers’ homes in the 1950s and 1960s, the same corporate
and regulatory scheme that dominated radio took over the new medium, and
television news grew up almost entirely in the corporate domain overseen by
NBC’s David Sarnoff and CBS’s William Paley, whose first commitment was to make
money for their stockholders.
And make it they did. In the process, they became
almost entirely dependent on advertisers. Their industry depended on sending
signals through the airwaves to consumers who pulled those signals in through
an antenna. At the time, no one could figure out a practical scheme for
charging them to receive the signals, so broadcasting was originally founded on
a free model. NBC and CBS—and their rivals and affiliates—gave their content
away for free in order to assemble the largest possible audience, so they could
sell that audience to advertisers. Like the big automakers, a small number of
sellers—including, eventually, ABC (American Broadcasting Company)—dominated
the market. Although each one was big, they all wanted to be bigger. The logic
of the situation was simple: if some viewers or listeners are good, more are
better. Best of all would be to rope in every single radio listener and
television watcher. To do that, of course, broadcasters would have to cater to
mass taste and shun partisan politics. As a result, the news divisions in
corporate broadcasting needed to acquire a “cloak of invisibility”—an ethos of
factuality and detachment that would avoid offending Democrats and Republicans,
or anyone else for that matter.
In the world of print journalism
too, publishers and investors kept moving in the direction of the corporate
model. One pace-setter was tycoon Henry Luce (to use an epithet that he brought
into news vocabulary). Along with sidekick Briton Hadden, Luce invented the
weekly news magazine in 1923, and TIME quickly
caught on with American readers, making it the profitable cornerstone of the
Time & Life empire. Time Inc. launched Fortune, Sports
Illustrated, People, and dozens of other titles before merging with the movie and music giant
Warner Communications Inc. Most recently, the company orphaned its original
magazine businesses and sent them out to fend for themselves, while morphing
the remaining film and television properties into a global entertainment
conglomerate made up now mainly of “video content providers.”
Through the middle and later decades of the twentieth
century, the corporate model eventually came calling even on the now
long-established and no-longer-innovative newspaper industry. As newspapers
folded and merged, a smaller number of papers remained standing as monopolies
(or near-monopolies) in most of the big and medium-large cities of the United
States. That meant that they could practically print money on their presses,
since anyone who wanted to advertise (either display or classified) in their
domain had to pay the newspaper for the privilege. Many of the monopoly papers
were lucrative enough to become takeover targets for the emerging chains like
Gannett and Knight-Ridder. As they sold out to the chains, those papers left
the control of their long-standing family owners (the Chandlers, the Binghams,
the Coxes, and the like) and became small parts in the portfolio of big, remote
corporations with no civic or sentimental ties to the areas those papers
served.
For a while, it all sort of worked. In the decades
after World War II, the big media that arose in the new corporate order seemed
to have it made. They were (mostly) earning buckets of money, which allowed
them to pursue the professional goals so admired in the newsroom. Editors could
tell the business side to buzz off. Editors could open new bureaus in
Washington and overseas. A correspondent like Morley Safer could spend CBS’s
money to shoot film of American soldiers burning Vietnamese villages. Publishers
like Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (grandson of Adolph Ochs) at the Times and Katherine Graham at the Post could bet the house on bold
reporting—such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate—that directly challenged
the power of government. It was an era of rising salaries, rising standards,
and rising expectations. The journalism that was originally enshrined in the
Constitution—small, local, independent, opinionated—had been changed beyond
recognition.
Then it all went bust. It is tempting to say that the
Internet was to blame for everything, and many people in journalism (especially
those of a certain age) really do believe this. It’s easy to see what happened
in journalism as an episode of “technological determinism”—that is, the new
technology of the personal computer and the Internet combined to form a
superhuman force that destroyed everything. But the real story is more
complicated and gives a bigger role to the agency of the people (in and out of
journalism) who made the decisions that brought about the big crack-up.
One issue that is often overlooked is the threat to
journalism posed by corporate ownership itself. Take NBC News, for example. The
news division was a small part of NBC, which was first and foremost an
entertainment company. NBC was, in turn, a small part of its parent company,
General Electric (GE), which was a globe-straddling conglomerate of industrial
and financial interests. NBC News was a small tail on a mighty big dog.
Managers at GE gave profit targets to all divisions with simple instructions:
meet your numbers or face being spun off. But the pressure to make a profit was
not the only problem in this regime. There were also inherent conflicts of
interest that journalists could not escape. How could NBC News report on GE’s
role as, say, a supplier of jet engines to the Pentagon? Or as a builder of
nuclear power plants? Or, at ABC News, after the The Walt Disney Company bought
ABC, how could a film reviewer for ABC’s Good Morning America show critically evaluate a new film from Walt
Disney Studios?
As more and more of these
journalism operations got folded into bigger and bigger corporations, they lost
something else—their ability to rock the boat. Large corporations, especially
ones that sell products to the U.S. government or face regulation by the U.S.
government or need favors from the U.S. government, are not in the habit of
blowing the whistle on government waste. Large corporations do not have it in
their DNA to pick fights with powerful institutions like the Catholic Church or
the Democratic Party or the professional sports establishment. Yet, the
dictates of journalism sometimes lead reporters to fight those fights. My point
is that the news business had serious, systemic problems before anyone tried to
read a newspaper on a computer. The golden era that is so often lamented turned
out to be more of a gilded age. In any case, it can now be seen in the rear
view mirror as a distinct historical period—one that is over.
In what could serve as an
epitaph for that period, here is what journalist Steve Coll (now the dean of
the journalism school at Columbia that Pulitzer endowed) said in 2009:
Uniquely in the history of journalism, the United
States witnessed the rise of large, independently owned, constitutionally
protected, civil service-imitating newsrooms, particularly after the 1960s.
These newsrooms and the culture of independent-minded but professional
reporting within them were in many respects an accident of history.
Bottom
Lines
Starting in the mid-1990s, people with online access began
discovering a part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web. It brought an
apparently endless array of visual displays to your computer screen. As with
the telegraph and the radio before it, this seemed like a cool invention that
delighted hobbyists but did not come with operating instructions on how to make
money with it. Most publishers disdained the Web at first, which was a costly
human mistake they made, and not the product of technological determinism.
Because they tried to stand still, publishers got run over. The mighty dual
revenue stream that had paid for all the great journalism in print media
suddenly dried up. Display advertising shrank, as more and more ads migrated to
the Web. Classified advertising dried up almost overnight, thanks to
Craigslist. On the circulation side, subscriptions and newsstand sales both
evaporated as readers moved online and expected content to be free.
To make matters worse for the legacy media, the Web
posed an existential threat. From the beginning, most newspapers were a
grab-bag of various content. They covered politics and government, along with
business and crime and sports and fashion and a growing array of features and
departments. Early newspapers often included poetry and fiction, too. In every
case, the newspaper presented itself to readers on a take-it-or-leave-it basis
as a pre-determined bundle of material, ranging from important news to the
comics. The Web un-bundled all that content and rearranged it. Online, people
who really liked sports could find faster, deeper coverage of sports on a website than they could in their local print newspaper. People who really liked
chess could find a higher level of engagement with chess online than in a
newspaper’s chess column. And so it went for all the elements in the newspaper:
there was a superior version online, usually for free, without having to wait
for an inky stack of paper to arrive at your doorstep to tell you about things
that happened yesterday. It was time to ask: if the newspaper didn’t exist, would
it make any sense to invent it?
Now, all media are digital.
People who liked the Web and understood it moved
rapidly into the digital space, and they are thriving. The founders of Huffington Post, Drudge Report, BuzzFeed, Vice, TMZ, Talking Points Memo, Politico, and many more are doing just
fine, thank you. News ventures that were “born digital” are not carrying the
big fixed costs of legacy media, so they are able to profit in the changed
environment.
This is not the future; it’s the present. We are in a
transitional period, and it is naturally messy. We are in a period of great
contingency, with many unsolved problems—notably how to pay for ambitious,
expensive, accountability journalism. On the other hand, journalists have
better (and cheaper) tools than ever. The “barriers to entry” have fallen, and
the field is open to new talent in a way not seen since the early nineteenth
century. Journalists have a global reach that earlier generations only dreamed
of. I don’t believe in historical golden eras, but there’s a definite shine on
some of these new ventures.
There is a brisk trade in making
confident assertions about the future of journalism. I will venture this
tentative judgment: if you want to look into the near future, look at the
powerful trends now at work. One snapshot of those trends appeared in the New York Times last October, in a story about the newspaper’s own recent financial
performance. The Times is the most important
institution in American journalism, so its future is a matter of no small
concern. It turns out that the paper’s latest quarterly numbers were mixed.
Overall, the paper lost $9 million, on revenues of $365 million. The main
reason for the loss was the cost of buying out about 100 newsroom employees,
who were being let go (out of more than 1,300), combined with the continued
downward trend in print advertising, which dropped by another 5.3 percent. That
is the kind of gloomy news we are used to hearing about the legacy media. But
the report also pointed the way forward. During the same three-month period,
the Times added 44,000 new digital subscribers, and the revenue from digital
advertising rose by 16.5 percent. That sounds like a glass that’s half full (at
least). The news business will survive. That’s the headline.
Christopher B. Daly, an associate professor in Boston University’s Department of Journalism, is
the author of Covering America: A Narrative History of a
Nation’s Journalism. He previously reported on New England for the Washington
Post (1989 to 1997) and served as statehouse bureau chief for the Associated
Press in Boston (1982–1989). On Twitter: @profdaly.