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Billionaires Won’t Save Local News. Here’s What Will. [1]
['Dean Baker', 'Jeet Heer', 'Delaney Nolan', 'Maya Vinokour', 'Josef Burton', 'Bryce Covert', 'Jonathan Van Harmelen', 'Adam Johnson', 'Othman Ali', 'Gregg Gonsalves']
Date: 2024-03-04 10:00:00+00:00
Society / Billionaires Won’t Save Local News. Here’s What Will. Praying for beneficent tycoons is not the answer. We need the government to step up.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos laughs as he speaks about his flight into space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard, during a press conference on July 20, 2021, in Van Horn, Tex. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Local journalism is fading fast. According to Northwestern’s Journalism School’s annual report on the state of journalism, which came out last fall, the United States was losing an average of 2.5 newspapers per week in 2023. That was up from two per week in 2022. Since 2005, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists, or 43,000 people.
The bad news keeps coming. In late January, the widely respected Baltimore Sun was taken over by a billionaire executive from the right-wing Sinclair news network. He quickly told the staff that their job was to get clicks. That same week, the Los Angeles Times announced a new round of layoffs.
This should be very troubling for people who care about democracy. The news media plays an enormously important role in informing the public and exposing corruption. The loss of local news outlets essentially gives free rein to corrupt local politicians and businesses.
The old business model that supported newspapers throughout the last century is no longer viable. Before the Internet age, newspapers relied primarily on advertising revenue to support their operations, with subscription revenue roughly covering the cost of printing and distributing the paper.
The Internet destroyed this model from both ends. First, the vast majority of readers want their news online rather than in print. This mattered because online advertising generally generates less revenue than print does. Department stores were more willing to pay to have people staring at their ads as they looked through different articles on a printed page than to have them quickly glancing at the ads as they clicked around a website.
On the other side, the Internet opened up a vast array of alternative advertising possibilities. That is true not just for major retailers but also for people who want to sell a car or a piece of furniture or advertise a job opening. Classified ads used to provide a healthy stream of revenue for newspapers, but they are now pretty much dead. It also doesn’t help that Google and Facebook manage to scoop up a disproportionate share of the relatively meager online ad revenue that is available.
With the old model no longer working, the newspaper industry is collapsing. This has provoked considerable hand-wringing, but not many proposed solutions. For the past decade or so, the go-to answer has appeared to be “find a beneficent billionaire.”
Beneficent billionaires are great (until they turn the money taps off, as has happened at the Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post), but that is not a serious way to support an essential public service like local newspapers. We need a new model.
Fortunately, there is an alternative: investing public dollars into journalism. The idea of public subsidies for news outlets is hardly new.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/billionaires-wont-save-local-news-heres-what-will/
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