Anybody got $5 billion to spare?

Last week I wrote in OJR about how some newspaper editors were open to the idea of philanthropic support for their news-gathering operations. A couple of business types at Yale University have gone a couple of steps beyond that. In the New York Times op-ed today, "News You Can Endow," they called on philanthropists to consider buying newspapers and running them as non-profits. I'm betting that this will happen in some locations.

Signs of economic trouble in ethnic press

I missed this when it was published in The New York Times last week, but apparently there are now signs of stress in the ethnic press as well.

Michael Schudson on American democracy and the press

I'm very much looking forward to hearing from our guest Wednesday night. He's Michael Schudson, professor of communication at UC-San Diego, who will help us thinking through the relationship between the press and American democracy, and how that is likely to change with the emergence of the Internet and digital media.

One thing that's worth noting as we read Schudson's chapter on the history of American news media in "The Press:" While we're going through dramatic changes now, we need to remember that the press, and the press' business model, have hardly been a constant thing. I was struck by this sentence in Schudson's chapter, which he co-wrote with Susan Tifft: Printers in colonial America, they said, "pretty much invented the newspaper as they went along, amid their efforts to make money selling stationery, printing wedding announcements, running the post office, or even selling from their print shops such sundries as chocolate, tea, snuff, rum, beaver hats, patent medicines, and music instruments." (Don't forget beaver hats, entrepreneurial journalists!)

Same thought applies to the objective story form. While it achieved Holy Grail status in the last half of the 20th century, it was hardly the form that nourished American democracy for most of its first two centuries of existence. Might that make us feel differently about the prospect of an anything-goes environment on the Internet where advocacy might become the most popular form?

I'm interested in hearing Prof. Schudson talk about the salient characteristics defining the relationship between the press and American democracy. And also his take on how that's likely to change in a world where legacy media declines and a more decentralized digital newsplace rises. What would you like to know from our speaker?

By the way, Prof. Schudson's colleague at UCSD is Daniel C. Hallin, who participated in an interesting discussion with new-media leader Jay Rosen recently on Rosen's blog, "Press Think." Rosen had been using a model developed by Hallin, describing how the press decides what to cover, to question whether it's such a good thing to have the press being the arbiter of what's fair game for debate and what's not. The implication of Rosen's treatise: Digital media will shove aside the arbiters, and isn't that a good thing?

Hallin's response: Not so fast. Here's a key line: "I think journalists often play an important role as an independent source of information, and in many ways I'd like to see them playing a stronger role, not a weaker one, in shaping the public sphere. I'd like to see them play that role in a more independent and thoughtful way than they often do, but I would not like to see them vanish from the political scene--which to some extent is actually happening as media companies cut newsroom budgets."

I wonder if our speaker agrees with this.

Editors are open to philanthropy to support news-gathering

The president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors says there may be a way for newspapers to seek philanthropy in support of news-gathering, without giving way to conflicts of interest or loss of credibility. So said Charlotte Hall, editor of the Orlando Sentinel, in a blog I posted today at Online Journalism Review.

And she isn't alone. Robert Rivard of San Antonio and Nancy Barnes of Minneapolis also indicated they could accept foundation support under certain circumstances. Although newspapers have accepted foundation grants before (particularly Pew civic journalism awards), this strikes me as a potential watershed moment. None of these people thinks philanthropy will be the main driver of news revenue, but rather a way to sustain critical reporting. This is going to be worth watching, especially if newspapers and broadcasters go beyond journalism foundations to tap into civic foundations, private giving and membership models.

What if for-profit media relied on philanthropy?

I'm working on a blog for OJR that explores whether newspapers, local broadcasters and other for-profit media might someday begin relying on philanthropy to subsidize their declining reporting resources. This idea might sound a little far-fetched -- why would a contributor give money to an organization that's already turning a profit? But there's an answer to this: It's to pay for coverage that otherwise wouldn't happen.

I started wondering about this last week when the Knight Foundation announced it was giving $5 million to 21 community foundations, who in turn would add their own money (up to $12 million) to support news coverage by nonprofits in their hometowns. This was the first round of a five-year program by Knight, which is journalism's biggest funder, so this idea could really catch on. I wrote about the grant announcement last week in OJR.

What struck me is that many of the funded projects sounded like things that would be right at the heart of a newspaper's mission statement. So what might happen if a newspaper decided it might want to get in on this action? Might foundation money and other kinds of philanthropy be a way to support critical reporting that otherwise might disappear from the newspaper?

My initial reporting suggests that there would be a lot of hurdles to overcome. Foundations face costly and time-consuming red tape when giving to for-profits; and newspapers would have potential ethical issues in accepting money from people and groups that have agendas. But, and this surprised me, I found quite striking receptivity to the idea from both funders and journalists.

Any reaction about this idea? Do you know of any for-profits that are already accepting philanthropy?

And we're off!

The gang of 15 is off and running, trying to keep pace with (and occasionally make sense of) the news media changes that are revolutionizing journalism. The best part for me about last night's class: the self-introductions, which showed what an interesting and wide-ranging group we are. We have people focusing on religion. We have people interested in paparazzi. (Wait a minute! That's the same person.) I'm excited about what we're going to learn this semester.

Already we have three new blogs created -- by Nikki Usher, Amber Mobley and my partner-in-teaching, Geoffrey Cowan. I've added the three to my links over on the right-hand side of my blog. Let us know when you're up and running with your blog and we'll add it to the list. Update: On Monday I added six more new blogs to the list.

Last night we talked about how change in the news media is happening so urgently these days. Today's Romenesko rundown on a (not-quite) day's worth of developments is a great example. Hearst is asking news staffers at its Seattle paper to help think about how it might be an online-only newspaper; Boston University is setting up the first university-based investigative reporting operation; Tribune Co. is in talks to outsource its national and international reporting to the Washington Post (oops, a new post says not quite so fast); Texas Christian University is building a convergence lab; a free-lancer talks about why she blogs for free at Huffington Post; Boston Globe to reduce newsroom size, and.... PHEW!

It sounds to me like there's a pretty lively discussion going on (largely beneath the radar) about which newspapers and newspaper companies will maintain separate national and foreign staffs. The Washington Post appears to be quite active in trying to persuade newspapers that they should buy the Post's reporting and shut down their own operations. This will be interesting fodder when we talk more in depth about Washington and international reporting.

Let us know if you need guidance on setting up your blog. Which reminds me. Here's the link for Richard Prince's blog, which someone mentioned last night.

A real-time look at the digital revolution

Maybe it's the start of a new year. Maybe it's that plus the really lousy economy. Maybe it's both of those plus the digital revolution. Whatever the causes, change seems to be coming at a tremendous rate these days to the news media. Just this week The New York Times started putting ads on its front page -- something I never thought we'd see. Just before the end of the new year Detroit's two daily newspapers announced they would soon begin publishing just three days a week.

Most experts I've read recently think 2009 will be full of announcements like that. The Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn got a lot of attention by imagining a time, not far away, when the New York Times might be printed just one day a week -- if that. Steve Yelvington and Martin Langeveld weigh in with their own views of how rapid the change will be this year.

I'll be writing about those changes, and linking to others' thoughts, in this blog as part of a graduate course Geoff Cowan and I are teaching at USC Annenberg this spring. Students will also be doing their own blogs, which we hope will be a combination of original thinking and reporting as well as aggregation of interesting stuff they see.

We're going to be examining both sides of this transition -- the difficulty and decline that afflict mainstream news media like newspapers and television, but also the growth and innovation that are occurring in the digital news world. Here's a good example: Two days before the class begins, a brand new foreign reporting operation, Global Post, will launch. Foreign reporters working for American news organizations have been declining for years. But because of the Internet, Charlie Sennott and other entrepreneurs think they can make money by offering the overseas reporting of more than 60 journalists.

We're also going to be thinking about the impact these changes will have on American democracy. It's not hard these days to find doomsday predictions about what newspapers' economic woes will do to democracy. But I don't think it's all that simple, and I look forward to exploring this in more depth.

This is going to be an unusual course because we'll be studying something that's happening in real time. It's a little scary. It's also hopeful. And it sure is interesting.

ADDENDUM: The Poynter Institute's Rick Edmunds tosses a fast bucket of cold water on Michael Hirschorn's Atlantic piece referenced above. Edmunds says a printless New York Times could come some day, but not anytime soon.