Thinking Through the Hardest Business Problem in American Journalism Today
Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
We spend a lot of time these days talking about various business problems in journalism: challenges from AI, the audience signals being sent by the rise of creators, the retreat of some billionaire donors, the aimlessness of much of institutional philanthropy. But I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the hardest problem that has been identified over recent years, and this week I want to redress that balance, even if only for a moment.
The hardest problem is how we are going to provide quality journalism on a sustainable basis to communities that don’t have much money.
In my judgment, this is a challenge to which no one—very much including me—has offered a satisfactory answer.
Why it’s such a problem
Let’s begin with how the problem arises. In communities—whether geographic (whole states or cities, or particular neighborhoods) or communities of interest—where people don’t have money, paywalls aren’t an answer because subscriptions are widely unaffordable. It’s true that a lot of advertising is still aimed at those who aren’t affluent, but, from a publishing perspective, almost all of these ad revenues have been captured by television and the digital platform oligopoly. Put these two conclusions together, and for-profit local journalism in poorer communities is highly problematic.
On the nonprofit side, major donors, pretty much by definition, can’t be found in such communities, and while it may be possible to convince some major donors to make commitments to communities to which they lack personal connections, that support is very unlikely to prove sustained. Finally, while institutional foundations often talk a good game about funding where others will not, and especially regarding their support for the marginalized, they are also notoriously strategically fickle, and deeply allergic to making permanent commitments.
Overall, this is a fairly pervasive problem. It affects much of rural America, many inner cities and some entire states which lack financial centers or natural resouces. It is, at root, the business challenge of most newsrooms whose focus is minority communities. It is, therefore, not only a hard problem but also an urgent one.
Where does that leave us?
The trend toward “multi-local” publishing initiatives, serving a related group of communities, does hold out some promise. In particular, it might be possible to operate in both wealthier and poorer communities, and effectively provide some subsidy from the former to the latter, with hyper-local efforts in affluent neighborhoods supporting those in poorer ones nearby, or even with operations in wealthier cities in a region subsidizing those in less fortunate cities in the same region.
But this approach remains largely untried, and I have sensed resistance to it from some editors and publishers with whom I have raised the prospect. Their concerns have ranged from the practical (how can I sell the subsidy in the wealthier areas?) to the ideological (newsroom resistance to work that may amount to comforting the comfortable).
In theory, this could also be a space in which public funding should play a big role. But public funding of journalism is worse than the problem it seeks to solve unless it is content neutral— that is, dispensed without regard to any test related to editorial content. (Otherwise, you inevitably end up with political interference with purely editorial matters.)
Paradoxically, however, content neutral funding can only be provided though a limited number of channels (e.g. employment tax credits or postal rate subsidies), and tends to be quite inefficient—which is to say that much of the resulting public spending misses the intended target. Finally, of course, in our polarized political environment, substantial public spending on journalism, especially if limited to poorer communities, seems a quite distant prospect.
I am not opposed to carefully structured public policy initiatives in this arena, but I don’t hold out much hope for them to arise at scale. I do wish that some of the philanthropies that seem to favor permanent government support of this sort would see the irony and overcome their own reluctance to offer sustained help.
Another important contribution to providing news about communities that lack financial resources of their own must be provided by well-resourced national news organizations. They need to recognize a special obligation to bring news of these places to the country as a whole—and, to the extent possible, to the locales themselves. Unfortunately, telling these stories is easier than achieving meaningful distribution in the communities whose stories are being told. And the work of national newsrooms in places remote from their own base will necessarily be occasional, and far from comprehensive.
Sticking with it
So I still don’t have a real answer to our hardest problem. But that’s hardly a good reason not to discuss it. I have cautioned before about why “happy talk” regarding the state of local journalism is unhealthy. Going beyond this, I think we need more thought about the toughest issues we face, not less. I intend to continue not only to worry about them, but also to boost any solutions, however partial, that arise. I hope you will join me.
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