John Cusack Wants to Talk About Paywalls
The movie star says that by selling their public-records-based reporting, news outlets are compromising one of journalism’s essential civic roles.
In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Cusack, the actor, screenwriter, and director, plays a journalist investigating a murder in Savannah, Georgia. In the 2012 film The Paperboy, he plays a death row inmate who becomes the subject of a journalist’s story. While Cusack has never practiced journalism in the real world, he cowrote the screenplays for High Fidelity and War, Inc., and is a longtime advocate for press freedom. He has served on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—whose members include Wired editor Katie Drummond and filmmaker Laura Poitras—since its founding, in 2012, and has written about human rights, government transparency, and accountability. In 2014, he and the writer Arundhati Roy traveled to Moscow with Daniel Ellsberg to conduct a series of conversations with Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.
Related Knowledge Center: Inside the newsroom
As newsrooms struggle with rickety business models and precarious finances — as well as new technologies — they are deploying an array of editorial responses.
The Times and its critics | Washington Post mortem
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.