Reviewing some of the latest publications critical of the current state of American journalism, former New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Baker's latest piece for The New York Review of Books does more than simply explain away these newspaper-men blues as a by-product of technological progress.
As Baker sees it, the Internet's contribution to journalism remains confined to that of "an electronic version of the ten-year-old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device". The loss of advertising and circulation revenue to companies such as Google and Yahoo, which remain uninterested in funding reporting staff; the rise of a Wall Street theory that says profits can be maximized by minimizing the product; and an uncritical deference to power particularly among the Washington press elite have each helped to undermine not just the business models underpinning independent journalism, but also its ability to supply information the citizenry needs for democracy to work.
Baker's review article offers an insider's view of American journalism's current malaise. Blogging is still heavily reliant on newspaper reporting and does not replace the contribution made by full time staffers whose job is to monitor the inner workings of powerful institutions, both public and private.
Robert McCrum observed in The Guardian this week that the violence the internet (specifically, blogging) does to the English language is of as much concern as its challenge to journalistic infrastructure. Well, that may be. But one doesn't need to read these insightful pieces to know there's going to need to be a new means of funding the wages of good journalists, even if the internet is there to distribute their work.
Is it so difficult for wizened newspaper men, and their cherished readers both young and old, to test out some new funding models? It seems clear that we should not expect the current crop of media companies to subsidise the cost quality reporting through advertising, especially if their master is private equity. Perhaps the solution then is to pay up front for your news, at a cost of, say, $100 per year? Or perhaps not. But it's time discussions about journalism's sorry state of affairs included some imaginative thinking about new business models. The age of the newspaper baron is over, and the media tycoon does not tend to be a man terribly interested in democracy.
Words: Sarah Barns
Image: Rupert Murdoch by David Levine. This drawing originally appeared with Goodbye to Newspapers? (NYRB, August 16, 2007)