Reading, Writing, Thinking

A newspaper is a vehicle for advertising.

That doesn't mean that the publisher of a newspaper or magazine can't have high moral standards or elevated goals; here at the Freep we are never told to write what an advertiser will like, and when I was with other magazines and newspapers that was also true. But only a select few journals survive on the receipts from newsstand sales and subscriptions (academic journals can cost hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription). Consider that we are not the only newspaper in Nashville that doesn't charge at all for copies. Where does the money come from?

Obviously, it comes from advertisers, or it is supposed to. (A very small amount of it comes from grants, and only for a vanishingly small number of journals.) This is the same model that works for radio and broadcast television--the content provider puts your eyes and ears within reach of the ads.

And we can see how well it's worked for commercial radio and television. They are providing cultural leadership in all areas (American Idol and Desperate Housewives are only two examples), and providing the public with the kind of in-depth journalism that we need. I, for one, am woefully ignorant about Lindsay Lohan's love life, because I get most of my news from The New York Times. (Online. For free.)

Investigative journalism is expensive. A reporter, or a team of reporters, can work on a story for months, drawing salary and running up expenses, and produce one or two lead stories. It's important, and it's prestigious, but it doesn't draw ads. As ad revenues fall and newspapers cut back expenses (did you notice the recent negotiations at the Boston Globe?), are they going to cut operations that produce revenue, or those that cost more than they produce? Fox News is the future of newspapers. Consider how Fox News would have covered Watergate.

But if people can get their news for free, why should they pay for it? And shouldn't news organizations be subject to the marketplace, just like other businesses? Not necessarily. Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Maryland) has introduced a bill under which newspapers could be considered educational institutions, similar to universities, organized similarly, as nonprofits. Their advertising revenue would be tax-free, and they could accept donations to support specific kinds of reporting, as PBS does now.

This might keep them alive for a while, but readership is still falling, and in-depth coverage of serious issues doesn't seem to be able to stem the tide. Even more news about Lindsay Lohan isn't enough.

It may be that newspapers have seen their day, and they will be curiosities in the history books of the next generation. Right now, though, I don't see blogs and web sites taking their place. Blogs often break interesting and important stories, but there is no way of knowing the truth of what you see on a blog; newspapers, or the best of them, have a tradition of fact-checking. Any bozo can start a blog. And news web sites don't generate enough income to support a real news-gathering operation.

Perhaps we will go through a period of chaos, and blog journalism will find an economic model that allows it to do real, trustworthy, investigative reporting. Perhaps this is the end of the news as we know it.