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.
About Me
- DAVID WESTPHAL
- Executive in residence at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. I'm also a senior fellow at the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, and affiliated with the Knight Digital Media Center, both at USC.
7 comments:
The New York Times op-ed by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt
offers an intriguing solution to the industry's snowballing problems.
I had a thought regarding the following excerpt from the piece, regarding the constraint on an endowed institutions against trying to “influence legislation” or “participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”:
"While endowed newspapers would need to refrain from endorsing candidates for public office, they would still be free to participate forcefully in the debate over issues of public importance. The loss of endorsements seems minor in the context of the opinion-heavy Web." (NY Times)
I have always thought that it was strange that newspapers endorsed candidates. I understand that these endorsements come from a newspaper's Editorial Board, which is essentially the institutional voice of the newspaper, but I think this antiquated practice muddies the public's understanding of the role of integrity and balance in journalism.
This article from TIME Magazine offers some interesting insights into this subject.
Could the new era of journalism reserve endorsements of candidates for individual members of their editorial staff - if those journalists choose to extol their beliefs in their op-eds?
If that link to the TIME Magazine article doesn't work, here is the address:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1715046,00.html#
Profit-driven newsmedia is what got us into this mess, so it would be logical that not-for-profit ventures would get us out. Whether it is by funding competing enterprises (as in the San Antonio example) or endowing news operations and taking them away from money-hungry Wall Street, the non-profit route is looking more appealing by the minute.
I would love to see a nonprofit model work (especially at the L.A. Times!) but I think the downward slide of mainstream media is happening so fast that only a very few ventures will be saved this way. I used to be practically manic about journalism -- I'm not a half-glass-empty person by nature -- but I'm just about at Kubler-Ross' final stage of grief: acceptance. My only real concern now is whether the dying patient will drag democracy down with it.
Why EVERYONE needs a copy editor: Ahem, I'm not a glass-half-empty person (though I like the other imagery as well).
It's striking to me how vociferously many new-media thinkers are attacking this philanthropy idea. Their premise, I believe, is that it's an innovation killer. My problem with that is that nobody knows journalism's place in the coming world. I think if Eli Broad wanted to endow some kind of journalistic outfit, it's a good thing.
Someone in our last class wondered if this downturn could be seen as the calming down of the ridiculous profit inflation that occurred at newspapers in their hey-day. I tend to follow this train of thought, though i haven't seen statistical support for this claim.
Still, it occurs to me...maybe newspapers just got really lucky for a while. The fact that they succeeded in competitive markets could just be a fluke--dependent completely on the times in which they live. Advertising wasn't a part of the newspapers mission, only its business plan--maybe newspapers were never built to run on the profit model.
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