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.
The result is a timely and engaging book, with some important lessons for American journalists worrying about how the media can survive in the current atmosphere. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
AS: Of the four ownership and funding models you analyzed, which do you think is the best for producing quality journalism?
RB: Overall, we found that civil-society ownership was the most supportive of public service news, with public media close behind. By civil society I mean the organizational space between the market and the state—nonprofit endowments and 501(c)(3) associations, as well as educational or religious organizations. In Europe it can also include outlets linked to labor unions, political parties, or party-affiliated foundations.
Civil-society outlets devoted the highest percentages of their top news stories to investigative reporting and public affairs coverage overall. They also tended to be more pluralist and gave voice to a wider range of sources than other media.
Still, there is a downside, and the main downside with civil-society-owned outlets is their limited scale—they tend to serve relatively small and elite audiences.
For some reason, I thought you’d say public media.
What sets public media apart, especially in France and Sweden, is that they provide high-quality public affairs news for very large audiences. Sweden’s SVT and SR have especially robust “arm’s length” protections from political pressure. And these legal and administrative buffers, along with reliable, ample public funding, are key reasons why these public media are the most trusted and respected news media in Sweden.
One important difference is that most news outlets in France and Sweden receive some public subsidies. It’s a recognition that journalism is a public good and that it has to be supported even when the market fails. In Sweden, these subsidies recently shifted from preserving second newspapers in each local market to making sure there is at least one. It’s a way of stemming the spread of news deserts that has been so devastating in the US.
What about privately owned papers?
A handful of established, privately held or dominant-shareholder-controlled national legacy newspapers, notably the New York Times, have successfully carved out a profitable market niche for subscriber-funded, high-quality journalism. But across the three countries, commercial media are struggling to survive and maintain their commitment to public service news.
One of the more popular emerging models for sustaining that kind of journalism in the US is through philanthropy. Is it working?
When you have philanthropy funding, there are a couple key elements that shape the journalism. Philanthropy funders are focused on impact. And they define that in terms of policy change, or reaching certain key decision-makers, so it’s a very kind of elite-driven, elite-audience project. To get outcomes, you may not need a broad audience.
With a few exceptions, philanthropic foundations have mostly taken the approach that they’re not in it for the long haul. They are complementary to a transition to a market model. Over time, we’ve seen that the market model that works best for nonprofits, but also works for most commercial media, involves targeting elite audiences able to donate or subscribe. And so the philanthropists push the nonprofits in that direction. That’s happened at PBS and NPR too. When they say “viewers like you,” they’re really talking about “donors like you.” The viewer and the donor, or the potential donor, are the primary audience, and that’s skewed their priorities and their focus.
How would you suggest the US learn from the European experience?
We could—and should—expand public funding instead of cutting it. There is plenty of room to grow to catch up to virtually every democratic nation-state in the world. Public funding of US public media—around three dollars per capita when state and local sources are added—is dwarfed by the around eighty dollars per capita in both Sweden and France. At the state and local level there’s momentum growing to provide public funding for newspapers and online news, and I give a lot of credit to the Rebuild Local News Coalition led by Steve Waldman. They’ve built an impressive coalition from across the country with business and labor and journalists and professional associations and all kinds of groups to advocate for public funding and public policy support alongside more philanthropic and reader funding of local news. They have had some successes with legislation at the state level, and I think there’s going to be growth there in public funding. The key is to make public funding content-neutral and build in strong arm’s-length protections of editorial independence.
The Coalition has also pushed for replanting [a process where communities assume control of local publications owned by conglomerates or large corporations] and we’ve seen in France a similar movement to transfer private ownership to nonprofit endowments. At Le Monde, the economist Julia Cagé has been the president of the newspaper’s readers association and has played a key role in establishing endowment ownership. Mediapart is another example. It was founded by several former Le Monde and Libération journalists. They put their own capital into it. They also got some outside investors, who they’ve paid off, and they are now a nonprofit owned by a nonprofit endowment, totally journalist-controlled, and by the way, very profitable—but all the profits are reinvested in the news operations. I think that’s where we need to go, because you need larger news organizations with more capital to become nonprofits. It’s not enough to have these small association nonprofits starting from scratch, great as they may be. You also need nonprofit ownership at larger legacy outlets that have some capital that you can build on. In the US, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Spokesman Review are now all independent nonprofits or public benefit corporations, or moving in that direction.
What worries you most about the American media landscape today?
It’s a difficult moment, to say the least. What’s most concerning is the mismatch between the trends in media ownership and funding and the kinds of long-term challenges we’re facing.
First is increasing partisan fragmentation and polarization. And the increasing shift to subscription funding only increases the incentives for commercial news outlets to pander to their audiences’ political views. There is an antidote to polarization: well-funded, universal public media that provides trusted news across partisan divides. Yet instead of strengthening public media at a moment when we need it more than ever, the Trump administration is trying to get rid of it entirely. It would be a huge mistake to give up public funding without a fight.
Second, we are too reliant on types of commercial owners compromised either by their conflicts of interest or their exclusive focus on maximizing profits. I mean, journalists are certainly aware of the problem, but it’s usually discussed in a very personalistic way—you know, how this or that owner has lost his way. But it’s a structural problem that requires a structural solution. In France, journalists at some outlets have created binding ethical charters that in some cases provide them with a veto over the owner’s appointment of editor in chief. That’s one approach. A more lasting solution would be to change the ownership form entirely.
Finally, there is a growing problem of the degradation of accurate and reliable information in the digital sphere. And yet journalism seems to be increasingly focusing on chasing the same small circle of subscribers and donors. Even CNN’s website, long open to all, is now moving behind a paywall. It’s understandable as a financial strategy, but it’s a civic disaster in the making. Meanwhile, a generation is growing up that has almost no interest in journalism. I see this in the classroom. If commercial media is going to abandon the mass audience, and public media is not going to immediately expand, then nonprofit funders need to step up. Fortunately, a top official at the Institute for Nonprofit News recently called for a fundamental change in focus. He said, “If journalism is to live up to its highest ideals, it needs to reach audiences at scale. It needs to serve audiences at scale. It needs to be for all the people.” I couldn’t agree more.