Financing the News Called Fundamental Issue

The fundamental issue for news organizations today is not declining readership – it’s how to finance the news and to prevent quality from shrinking as revenue and resources shrink, Project for Excellence in Journalism Director Tom Rosenstiel said during last week’s journalism educators’ convention in Washington, DC.

Media executives have not gotten away from the idea that theirs is an advertising-driven business. But the Internet is a worse advertising vehicle than print. Getting information about goods and services is an online activity in itself, not a byproduct of getting news, he said.

News organizations must find ways to get people to pay for content – including going to war with Internet access companies and news aggregators to insist that the current system, in which the people producing content get nothing for doing so, be re-engineered.

Rosenstiel also warned that the notion that news is platform-agnostic is ‘suicidal.’ You’re dead if you do the same thing you’ve always done but simply put it on the Web, he said. News competitors believe in the power of the Internet, and news organizations must structure what they do to that platform. For instance, they must think of news as something much broader than the narrative itself; news also encompasses documents, databases and more.

Among Rosenstiel’s other points during his panel discussion at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention:

* Journalism includes not only narrative but also original documents, links, elements that people can use to assemble their own news, and more. In this environment, the journalist’s role is one of sense-maker, helping people make sense of information gathered in many places.

* The news industry is simultaneously a mature industry and an emerging industry. It’s hard for editors and publishers to know which set of behaviours is appropriate: To what extent should we worry about next year as opposed to five or six years from now?

* The values of media owners are more important than the structure of ownership. Corporate ownership is not necessarily better or worse than private ownership, for example. But there are so many pressures on corporate owners that it can be hard to be a long-term entrepreneur.

* The energy in news companies now is in the newsroom. People are excited about doing news on the Web. The greatest level of fear, however, is in mid-level management on the business side, as awareness grows that the problem is a revenue one.

* User-generated content drives traffic, but at the moment, it is not directly helping revenue. The New York Times spends $215 million a year gathering news. User-generated content cannot replace the cuts in staff and produce journalistic value in the same way. The journalistic component will be enriched by user views, but the problem of financing quality news gathering remains. ‘That dialogue is vital, but it doesn’t solve the business problem,’ Rosenstiel said.

The section about online media from the PEJ’s latest State of the News Media report, produced by a team that Rosenstiel leads, is an excellent resource for trends in digital journalism.