Overview: the Environment for the News Media

Chapter 20:Ethics in the Changing Media Environment

Overview: The Environment for the News Media

Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The State of the News Media 2013,” the annual in-depth study of American journalism. From the overview: “[The]news industry … is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion surveyreleased in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to. At the same time, newsmakers and others with information they want to put into the public arena have become more adept at using digital technology and social media to do so on their own, without any filter by the traditional media. They are also seeing more success in getting their message into the traditional media narrative … as advertiser-produced stories which often run alongside a site’s own editorial content.”

Pew Research Center, “In changing news landscape: even television is vulnerable,” Sept. 27, 2012. This is the latest in a series of surveys revealing trends in news consumption since 1991. “The transformation of the nation’s news landscape has already taken a heavy toll on print news sources, particularly print newspapers. But there are now signs that television news – which so far has held onto its audience through the rise of the internet – also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on the next generation of news consumers. Online and digital news consumption, meanwhile, continues to increase, with many more people now getting news on cell phones, tablets or other mobile platforms.”

James Rainey, “Voters still tuned in to traditional news media, poll finds,” Los Angeles Times,Aug. 24, 2012. “Facebook and Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo increasingly provide Americans their gateway for news, but the bulk of voters who catch up on current events daily turn to traditional sources, particularly local television stations.” The nationwide survey was conducted by the USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times Poll on Politics and the Press.

C. W. Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky, “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” TowCenter for Digital Journalism at ColumbiaUniversity. A 122-page analysis containing recommendations for journalists and journalism institutions.

Columbia Journalism Review, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” a report on Oct. 19, 2009, by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson. This is a detailed, definitive study by two distinguished authors – Downie is a retired editor of The Washington Post and Schudson is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at ColumbiaUniversity. The study examines the current state of the news media, including alternative sources of news such as pro-am partnerships. A key conclusion: “Many newspapers can and will find ways to survive in print and online, with new combinations of reduced resources. But they will no longer produce the kinds of revenues or profits that had subsidized large reporting staffs, regardless of what new business models they evolve.” The authors make recommendations for financing journalism.

Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” May 10, 2011. You can download this detailed study from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. An excerpt: “[M]any sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology. They also have been flummoxed by competitors who invest minimally in producing original content but have siphoned off some of the most profitable parts of the business.At the same time, digital journalism has created significant opportunities for news organizations to rethink the way they cover their communities. And in several organizations, old and new, we see promising signs that a transformed industry can emerge from the digital transition—one that is leaner, quicker, and, yes, profitable. We do not believe that legacy platforms should be disregarded or disbanded. It simply is not reasonable to assume that any company would cast aside the part of its business that generates 80 to 90 percent of its revenue. But we do think that companies ought to regard digital platforms and their audiences as being in a state of constant transformation, one that demands a faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”

Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009).

Jones, who directs Harvard’s JoanShorensteinCenter on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was interviewed on NPR’s “Fresh Air” on Aug. 19, 2009. A recording of the interview and an excerpt of the book are at:

Ethical Issues in the New Environment

Edward Wasserman, “Threats to journalism in the New Media age,” News Media Ethics, Spring 2010. Wasserman, now the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California/Berkeley, discussed these themes: (1) an aggressive desire to be relevant online, to be “a player”; (2) an uncritical acceptance of online norms as constituting an ethically appropriate revision of journalistic standards; and (3) a cavalier unwillingness to consider harms (who’s hurt, is the harm necessary, can it be avoided, can it be minimized?).

Mike Webb, “ProPublica editor Paul Steiger discusses emerging ethical questions for journalists,” ProPublica,Oct. 21, 2010. Steiger identified four distinct issues: the blurred line between presentation of fact and opinion; the quest for building a larger audience versus the need for journalism of substance and civic importance; the new business challenges facing the industry; and the need for greater transparency from news organizations.” This file contains the full text of Steiger’s remarks.

Jodi Enda, “Retreating from the world,” American Journalism Review, Winter 2010. A detailed accounting of how many American news organizations have diminished their reporting of international news.

John Sullivan, “PR industry fills vacuum left by shrinking newsrooms,” ProPublica (co-published with Columbia Journalism Review), May 2, 2011. Sullivan writes that, as the number of journalists has declined, the number of public-relations professionals has grown. “The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the debate, and do so without the public knowing it.”

Justin Peters, “On Facebook and freedom: Why journalists should not surrender to the Walmarts of the Web,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011. Peters contends that in offering news organizations the opportunity to publish Facebook-specific editions of their content, Facebook “furthered its ambitions to control every segment of online activity, from commerce to conversation.” He concludes his essay, “[T]he news as a public good will not survive if its future rests in the hands of people who don’t actually care about the news.”

Financing Journalism in the Digital Age

Project for Excellence in Journalism, a survey of newspaper and broadcast news executives’ attitudes about the economics of their industry, April 12, 2010. This survey was conducted in association with the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association. “America’s news executives are hesitant about many of the alternative funding ideas being discussed for journalism today and are overwhelmingly skeptical about the prospect of government financing.”

Barb Palser, “Will the iPad save print?”, American Journalism Review, Feb. 28, 2011. Technology is offering a glimpse of what the digital future could look like, but it’s going to take a lot of trailblazing to get there.

Caitlin Johnston, “Second chance,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2012. “The advent of the tablet presents a bright opportunity for traditional news outlets that stumbled at the onset of the digital era” in the mid-1990s. People who own tablets and e-readers represent nearly a third of the population, and it is a demographic that is well-educated and affluent. The question is whether news organizations will take full advantage of the tablet’s potential. An in-depth study.

Dylan Stableford, “The Daily, Murdoch’s ‘bold experiment’ in iPad publishing, to shut down,” Yahoo! News, Dec. 3, 2012.

Should online users pay for news content? Would they?

Lee Thornton, “Can the press fix itself? Steven Brill answers the question he asked a decade ago,” American Journalism Review, February/March 2009. The entrepreneur says newspapers are “committing suicide by giving journalism away for free.”

Walter Isaacson, “How to save your newspaper,” Time,Feb. 5, 2009. The author and journalist proposes micropayments – “something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet, a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.”

Rick Edmonds, “Is paid online content a solution or an impossible dream?” Feb. 20, 2009.

David Carr, “Let’s invent an iTunes for news,”The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2009. A proposal to have consumers pay for news with an electronic device.

Michael Kinsley, “You can’t sell news by the slice,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2009. A rebuttal to Walter Isaacson’s proposal.

Lauren Rich Fine, “Micropayments? Won’t work. Here’s a better plan for newspapers,” Feb. 23, 2009. The former newspaper stock analyst assesses the situation.

John Morton, “The Morton Plan: Here’s how America’s newspapers can save themselves,” American Journalism Review, April/May 2009. Morton, a newspaper consultant, proposes that newspapers simultaneously offer readers the choice of getting their paper online or in print for the same price.

Peter Osnos, “What’s a fair share in the Age of Google?”, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2009, 25-28. Osnos is the founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and a senor fellow for media for The Century Foundation. A particularly useful passage in this article is his analysis (on page 26) of the current state of journalism economics, in which he urges that a way be found to “redress the growing imbalance of power and resources between traditional content creators and those who provide links to or aggregate that material.” The Osnos piece is one of four articles in the magazine grouped under the heading “No Free Lunch”: i.e., gathering the news is expensive and a way has to be found to pay for it.

Brett Schulte, “Against the grain,” American Journalism Review, March 2010. Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, took the contrarian approach by charging for online content from the beginning, and it has paid off for him.

Clay Shirky, “Why we need the new news environment to be chaotic,” Shirky.com, July 9, 2011. Shirky argues that news has to be subsidized, cheap and free.

Megan O’Neil, “Paywalls might be starting to pay off,” Online Journalism Review, April 11, 2013. The writer quotes statistics that seem to support “sentiment in the industry that after a decade of false starts, American newsrooms are finally proving to be incubators for successful 21st century journalism models.”

Jeff John Roberts, “New York Times CEO calls digital pay model ‘most successful’ business decision in years,” paidContent.org, May 20, 2013. In a commencement address to business students at Columbia University, Mark Thompson “hailed the company’s digital subscription strategy and dismissed skeptics who say media outlets can’t reinvent themselves.”

What business models might work for newspapers?

Tom Rosenstiel, Mark Jurkowitz and Hong Ji of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The search for a new business model: How newspapers are trying to build digital revenue,” March 5, 2012. This thorough study “combines proprietary data with in-depth interviews at more than a dozen major media companies.” It shows that “the search for a new business model is making only halting progress but that some newspapers are faring much better than the industry overall and may provide signs of a path forward.”

Could nonprofits and philanthropy pay for journalism? And if they do, what are the ethical implications?

David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, “News you can endow,” The New York Times, Jan. 28, 2009.

Richard Pérez-Peña, “A.P. in deal to deliver nonprofits’ journalism,” The New York Times, June 13, 2009.

Howard Kurtz, “ProPublica’s nonprofit’s news gathering pays off for partners,” The Washington Post, April 19, 2010. “There was a time when most journalistic investigations were carried by newspapers, when revenue was abundant and ‘I-teams’ were all the rage. But with nearly all papers hurt by cutbacks and some in bankruptcy, ambitions have been downsized. And that has left a vacuum for ventures that don’t have to worry about Wall Street expectations.”

Jodi Enda, “Staying alive,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2012. An in-depth examination of nonprofit news organizations. “As newspapers continue to fold or shrink and journalists lose their jobs by the thousands, the more entrepreneurial in the field have turned to nonprofits as a way to fill the void in news and to keep reporters and editors employed. … The burgeoning world of nonprofits offers journalists the chance to do quality work and to get in on something that is growing, changing and charting a new course. … But nonprofits are also unpredictable, a result of their heavy reliance on foundations for money, and at times uncomfortable as they require journalists to enter relationships with funders that in the past would have been taboo.”

Krystal Nancoo-Russell, “How the L.A. Times is using its Ford Foundation grant,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2012. The Times received $1 million from the Ford Foundation and is using it to pay for five more reporters and to strengthen its coverage of immigration, ethnic communities in Southern California, the state prison system, and Brazil.

Hazel Sheffield, “Santa Barbara is getting a nonprofit investigative newsroom,” Columbia Journalism Review, Oct. 16, 2012. A small team of journalists will launch an investigative news organization, aided by a $500,000, two-year matching grant from the Ford Foundation. Similar organizations include MinnPost in Minneapolis, the Voice of San Diego and Texas Tribune.

What if newspapers fail?

Video clip: This is a trailer for a documentary about the decline of American newspapers.

Gary Kamiya, “The death of the news,” salon.com, Feb. 17, 2009. If newspapers die, so does reporting. If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier.

Paul Starr, “Goodbye to the age of newspapers (hello to a new era of corruption),” The New Republic, March 4, 2009. An analysis of the changing media environment.

Rachel Smolkin, “Cities without newspapers,” American Journalism Review, June/July 2009: “As the economic noose tightens, the notion of big cities without local dailies seems a real possibility. What would the impact be on civic life? And what might emerge to fill the gap?”

The Problem of Infotainment

The Anna Nicole Smith case:

Mark Jurkowitz, “Anna and the astronaut trigger a week of tabloid news,” Project for Excellence in Journalism, Feb. 12, 2007.

PEJ, “Anna Nicole Smith – anatomy of a feeding frenzy,” April 4, 2007.

Carl Hiaasen, “We have seen the future, and it’s not pretty,” Miami Herald, March 4, 2007. (Lexis/Nexis Academic)

A general discussion of infotainment and its implications for journalism:

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople ShouldKnow and the Public Should Expect (New York: Crown, 2001), 150-155.

David Shaw, “News as entertainment is sadly becoming the norm,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2004. (Lexis/Nexis Academic)

Michael Schudson and Susan E.Tifft, “American journalism in historical perspective,” Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eds., The Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40-41.

Thomas E. Patterson, “Doing well and doing good: How soft news and critical journalism are shrinking the news audience and weakening democracy – and what news outlets can do about it,” Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2000, 4.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public blames media for too much celebrity coverage,” Aug. 2, 2007. The survey was based on a nationally representative sample of 1,027 adults conducted July 27-30, 2007.

Eric Alterman, “It ain’t necessarily so,” The Nation, Sept. 10, 2007: “Despite what many in the media believe, the American public is interested in more than just right-wing punditry and celebrity gossip.”

Deborah Potter, “Past their prime: Their audience shrinking, TV newsmagazines go tabloid,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2005.