Rodney Benson on the Value of Publicly Backed Journalism

In the early 2010s, the Christian Science Monitor, a Boston-based newspaper owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist, became one of the first major American papers to go digital. Facing a perilous financial crunch, the owners hoped to reduce costs—and bring in fresh revenue—by creating a free, ad-supported website, alongside a subscription-based weekly print edition. As NYU professor Rodney Benson notes in his new book, How Media Ownership Matters, the website proved moderately successful—it was soon among the top fifty news sites in America—but it also tended to produce lower-brow content. The print edition was more substantive, but neither product made enough money to eliminate the need for church subsidies. Still, the experiment left a legacy: “While the new strategy has failed to pay its own way commercially…it did help herald across the US journalistic field (with a few exceptions) a new era of reserving quality news only for those willing to pay.”

Benson and his coauthors—Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel—spent ten years examining the operating choices of publications like the Christian Science Monitor, to better understand which ownership models are most likely to lead to sustainable business outcomes—and the highest-quality journalism. Their key innovation was not being distracted by the big names at the top of the publications (Bezos, Murdoch, Gannett), but considering, in true academic fashion, ownership across four broad categories: market (profit-maximizing stock market–traded or hedge funds), private, nonprofit or civil society, and public. Then, using interviews, content review, and an analysis of vast amounts of data from more than fifty news outlets across Sweden, France, and the US, the authors compared how these categories stack up against one another in a range of areas, including audience composition, amount of investigative reporting, provision of public interest news, political independence, favorable mentions of their owners, and “partisan intensity”—which the authors define as the degree of one-sidedness in their coverage.