Death spirals and other perils of journalism
Free dailies, a solution that dare not speak its name
(Editor's note: As The Portland Daily Sun marks its first year of publication this week, our Usually Reserved column is focused on newspapers in general and free daily newspapers, like this one, specifically.)
Last August, as the nation's economy tilted into its nose-dive, a Who's Who of American media jetted into Aspen, Colorado to participate in a blue-ribbon discussion of the future of journalism.
The executive editor of the Washington Post was at the event conducted at The Aspen Institute, as was National Public Radio, most of the more important industry think tanks — even Google — found a couple of days to search far and wide for ways to save the American newspaper.
Ideas included public funding, micro-payments and not-for-profit business models. In fact, in both stories and discussions, Aspen Institute President (and former president of CNN and editor of Time Magazine) Walter Isaacson has become a champion of micro-payments — the idea that online readers can pay as they go while reading on the Internet.
They should have found time to walk through Aspen's inviting West End and onto its Main Street, only about a nice half-hour stroll away.
Because they might have wondered how Aspen, a town of maybe 10,000 residents, supports not one but two daily newspapers.
Granted, using a demographically top-heavy place like Aspen as an example of anything beyond consumerism run wild is risky, but the town and its papers are actually the core of a more diverse community that runs about 45 miles "downvalley." Thousands of workers commute daily for jobs in a place where starter homes cost millions of dollars.
But the newspaper example of Aspen, and why it remains mostly ignored by experts, is a good place to consider the future of both newspapers and news.
See, those Aspen newspapers are free dailies.
Isaacson has used this comment to address the idea of free news: "Henry Luce, the founder of Time, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula 'morally abhorrent' and also 'economically self-defeating.' That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers."
As a former editor of the Aspen Daily News, I'm here to tell you that is not what happened there. Ask Aspen business folk how much the Daily News understands that its "primary duty" is to them, and they will laugh out loud.
Morally abhorrent? It makes me feel oddly important.
Let's see, people pay for cable subscriptions, so cable is paid-for news, while our broadcast news is free for anyone with a TV ... under the timeless wisdom of Mr. Luce, that means the likes of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow hold lesser moral turf than Fox News?
But the attitude underscores, to a degree, why mainstream media, desperate enough in some cases to seek taxpayer support or ask that monopoly laws be suspended, is still not desperate enough to include the free daily newspaper model as part of the "solution."
Except when it has to. Faced with the clear and present danger of free dailies, The New York Times bought about half of the free METRO paper in Boston; The Tribune Company launched free dailies; and even The Washington Post launched its own free daily, The Express. Just for fun, go to the Post's website and try to link over to the Express ... indeed, free dailies are the the part of the media solution that dare not speak its name.
Avoiding Death Spirals
Competitive free daily newspapers work, in part, because they side-step a business "death spiral" that destroys competition among paid dailies.
It's a primary reason why so many cities that once had multiple dailies now have virtual monopoly.
In that "death spiral," one of several daily papers starts to gain a subscriber or single-copy lead, by being better or offering discounts or some other means. Eventually, that readership leads to a bit more advertising, which leads to more pages of news and information, which leads to an even bigger readership lead. And so on.
Of course, one way traditional papers create death spirals is by making their products free or very nearly free until competitors are strangled. That's why the Portland Press Herald has "free" newspaper boxes in some areas served by this newspaper, but that's another story.
Eventually, in the paid model, you walk up to a news rack offering a choice of where to spend your money. You're likely to take only one of the daily papers.
Launching competition against a death spiral victor is difficult. Getting paid circulation while smaller is very difficult, and launching at the same size is prohibitively expensive.
But with free daily newspapers, readers don't really face that either-or choice. If the smaller paper is likely to have news you want, you'll pick it up either in addition to, or in place of, a larger paid paper.
Trust me, it happens thousands of times every day here in Portland.
We do not have to speculate. It's clear that having paid subscribers does not guarantee a newspaper will not overly embrace its advertisers, and there's ample evidence that a free paper can avoid moral bankruptcy.
Experience shows that Mr. Luce was just wrong about free papers being and more or less beholden to their advertisers. In a competitive environment, if any paper doesn't make readers the priority, then it is doomed.
Come On, Why Bother?
A Southern friend, hearing a colleague note that "we have to save American journalism!" quipped, "We'll have to find it first."
It's a good point.
Amid the breathless discussion about journalism's role in protecting the Republic, it's apparently assumed that American media is an upstanding, fair and objective watchdog of Truth & Justice.
Some would beg to differ.
My journalism colleagues sometimes, usually after a pint, wonder aloud why I'm so interested in little free papers instead of manning up and working for a traditional newspaper. It's easier to explain now that there are no such jobs, but it was an interesting rhetorical exercise until the Iraq War.
Until then, I'd maybe point out that sustainable journalism — small papers supported by small business serving a specific geographically defined community — were just more fun.
But then you see something like the Bill Moyers Journal 2007 report "Buying the War," a heartbreaking look at the American media in the days leading up to the war, and tell me why anyone would defend ... THAT.
Among other points, Moyers notes that Phil Donahue's nightly MSNBC talk show was virtually the only program of its type that gave antiwar voices a chance to be heard, and was canceled 22 days before the invasion of Iraq. The stated reason was low ratings, but the New York Times intercepted an in-house memo in which a network executive complained: "Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time, our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
The Aspen Institute's Isaacson is in the Moyers report, saying: "One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is, it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb-suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters."
The report overall is an indictment of the American press, with the notable exception of a couple of Knight Ridder reporters in the chain's national bureau. Far from salvaging the media, their efforts just illustrate that everybody knew better.
But they stood down.
And I think I know why.
While they address another issue (pointing out that it's a misconception that the crisis in journalism was created by the rise of the Internet and the current recession), the writers John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney explain why in the Jan. 25 issue of The Nation.
"In fact," they note, "the (media) crisis began in earnest in the 1970s and was well under way by the 1990s. It owes far more to the phenomenon of media corporations maximizing profits by turning newsrooms into 'profit centers,' lowering quality and generally trivializing journalism. The hollowing out of the news and alienation of younger news consumers was largely disguised by the massive profits these firms recorded while they were stripping newsrooms for parts. But that's no longer possible. The Internet, by making news free online and steering advertisements elsewhere, merely accelerated a long-term process and made it irreversible."
That's a business observation, but a similar bankruptcy was happening in the soul of our collective newsroom. Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, we reporters are a socially aware bunch, and all the self-censorship and answering to large corporations took a toll.
I'd argue that the Iraq story was the national example of what we see in many of our regional newsrooms.
Proving that powers of observation and analysis don't always co-exist, McChesney and Nichols advocate a way out of our crisis through government funding of journalism on a large scale, arguing that it's a "public good" like education.
Political decisions, they note interestingly, "about economic issues will respect Main Street concerns only if citizens are kept abreast of the issues by independent news media."
An "independent" news media paid for by the government? Even those of us who love NPR stop short of advocating a similar model for most of the rest of journalism. Worse, by creating public sector bailouts along with the subsidies you reward the very corporations they blame.
Hmmmmm. It sounds like the authors feel Big Journalism is too big to fail. Let's make sure, this time, that none of the subsidy money goes for bonuses.
For those of us who toiled in corporate newsrooms and saw the subtle pull of those priorities, the idea that the government would replace that is truly chilling. For those of us expecting to compete with the Big Journalism, now backed by taxpayers, it seems amazingly unfair.
(Curtis Robinson is an owner and founding editor of The Portland Daily Sun. He has launched more than a dozen newspapers, including three free daily newspapers. Tomorrow: How the national narrative misleads on the journalism crisis, and the three big trends that will shape news in the next five years.)
