The idea of journalism as a public good is what has led the French Government to support that country’s newspapers. It is also why all those universities and charitable trusts in the USA are backing experiments in making good journalism sustainable.

Locally, the idea of journalism as a public good is what drives our media organisations in their founding and support for the Right to Know campaign, although I won’t be the first to point out that there is self interest involved as well.

It’s not hard to persist in the assumption that journalists are good things, even if it does involve overlookin or forgiving gross abuses of media power. In recent months I have taken pleasure in observing how The Age, despite all the troubles at Fairfax, is still dishing up some gutsy investigative yarns. All credit to those involved, and those who support them.

But sometimes you need a reality check. And there are good reasons why most people think the newspaper emperor is a tad underclothed.

Have a look at this post on the US based Xark blog . It scores a number of direct hits. Although it concerns the American scene, these are questions we will have to confront in Australia if we want to convince people that journalism actually matters.

Here are some edited highlights:

Watchdogging government is hardly the primary purpose of modern newspapers (it doesn’t even make the Top Three in most outfits), and if Watchdogging ever interferes with Job No. 1 (generating double-digit profit margins for shareholders), Watchdogging is right out;

And an uncomfortable one for both News Limited and Fairfax:

Newspaper companies and media corporations are run not by civic-minded saints, but by business people. And while they love looking into other people’s business, they don’t like anybody looking into theirs. If you run for public office, you’re expected to reveal your financial interests, but buy a newspaper and you can shape public opinion for years without ever having to reveal much of anything.

But what about the “newsroom firewall,” that oft-touted invisible fortress that protects the news judgment of top editors from the economic interests of the company? Might as well call it a Maginot Line. Does anybody seriously believe that editors who refuse to adopt the personality and concerns of top management are likely to reach and remain in top newsroom jobs? Even the best top editors exist in a hellish realm of compromise between their public-minded mission and the “bottom-line realities” of for-profit newspapering. Color me snobbish, but I like my watchdogs to live by the same rules they apply to others. Call it a quirk.

And one for every editor I have ever known, and every news conference I have ever sat in on:

Your local city council is required to let the public witness all its decisions. What about your local newspaper? Are interest groups allowed to sit in on afternoon budget meetings? Are news decision-makers required to release their notes and e-mails that relate to why they promoted one angle but spiked another?

Editors understand that they take heat sometimes for the stories they publish. The last thing they want is heat for the stories they didn’t publish, or a pubic accounting of the decisions that lead up to framing stories in a particular way.

The conclusion:

Today’s mediascape is a remnant of a collapsing 20th century system in which most of the journalistic infrastructure belonged to newspapers. Their current argument for their social value oozes irony because it reverses the way newspapers have valued themselves for a generation — not for their civic-mindedness, but for their bottom line. And if that bottom line is less than 20 percent profit, you can bet they’re laying off reporters, not offering stockholders smaller dividend payments.

Somebody should investigate that.

All of which adds up, surely, to a realisation that if we want to continue to believe that journalism is important, and particularly if we want other people to care about its future, then the way we do it is going to have to change quite radically.

So how should it change? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen outlines the problem well, then suggests some new ways of thinking, in this post on his Pressthink blog.

Rosen outlines several possible new ways (and some of them are in fact old ways, dating from before modern media) in which the collection and dissemination of news might be supported, including:

• The private collection of news, in which individuals directly commission correspondents;

• new economies of news, including:

1. wealthy individuals supporting investigative work (and not celebrity gossip, entertainment etc) because it is a public good;
2. Niche publications serving highly specialised audiences with content of intense interest to them

Rosen also has stuff to say about advertising, and how it, too, is going to have to change, which is why it can’t be relied upon to fund journalism as it has in the past.

Says Rosen:: “We need to try all routes: for-profit and non-profit; amateur, pro and pro-am; market-driven, subsidized.”

Those who heard Rosen address the Future of Journalism conference organised by the MEAA in Sydney last year will remember his beautiful migration metaphor.

We are all going to have to leave the old country, and seek our future in the new. Not all of the boats we push out will make it across the ocean, so we must make sure that we launch a lot of them. When we get to the new country we will find that others are there before us. We will no longer have exclusive claim to the territory. Like all migrants, we will have to work out how many of our old traditions and habits are still relevant and useful, and how many we will need to abandon.

Or would you pay for something else – some other kind of news content?

Waddya reckon?

This question is spurred by a so-called “grassroots” attempt to tout for newspapers in the USA.

Can there possibly be such a thing as a “grassroots coalition of newspaper editors and executives”? Sounds like a contradiction in terms to me, but that is the kind of group that is behind the USA Newspaper Project, which is running ads in American newspapers aimed at overcoming the pessimism about the medium.

It’s a companion to the Australian Newspaper Works, which runs ads on the wonderfulness of newspaperse in our Australian publications, although there is nothing “grassroots” about the local iteration. Newspaper Works is funded by our main newspaper publishers and aimed at convincing advertisers that they should spend their bucks on print. So while Newspaper Works touts about all the fine journalism newspapers produce, their credibility, and so on and so forth, the Australian defenders of the medium actually spend very little time thinking about what journalism is, why it matters or how it might have to change.

Both the USA and Australian organisation make the point – which I certainly wouldn’t dispute – that newspapers can be a very good thing, and that we have yet to develop alternative methods of doing what they can do at their best. They also say that newspapers are still very widely read. All of which is true, but misses the point.

It’s the business model, stupid. That is, the linking of advertising and journalism in the physical product of a newspaper. That link has been broken.

I agree that there is absolutely no evidence of a declining appetite for news. The question is how is the journalism to be paid for?

At the same time, technology is making new models possible – but they have yet to develop. The kind of news reporting they support when they reach maturity will in any case look different to what we get from traditional newspapers. There will be good and bad in this, as has been discussed before on this blog.

Columbia Journalism Review has this Q&A with Randy Siegel, who is one of the “grassroots” group of editors. He makes the case for newspapers very well, but scratch the surface and you find he is not only talking about the dead tree product. He is talking about the institutional infrastructure and the set of social norms and practices that we call journalism. :

“It’s the infrastructure, it’s the professional training, it’s the ability to condense massive amounts of information into accessible prose for the reader and the online visitor. It’s the editing. I mean, this notion that you don’t need editors anymore is laughable. Editors make things accessible for readers and online users, and they help educate all of us about stories and issues that we otherwise might not see. I highly doubt that your favorite blogger, for example, is in a position to fly to Iraq and cover what’s going on there, or to fly to the far East and decipher our relationship with China as an economic superpower, or to go into City Hall and expose instances of municipal graft and corruption, or to get behind the scenes of a major sporting event and help people understand why a game turned out the way it did. I believe that, in journalism, you get what you pay for. And quality journalists will always have a role in our society. And as newspaper companies evolve, great journalism will now be more important than ever. Across multiple platforms.

I hope so, but (I say again) the problem is not declining appetite for news, but the fracturing of the business model. Siegel admits as much:

“I don’t have it all figured out. But what we’re trying to do with our effort, newspaperproject.org, is to create as much productive debate and discussion over what the right models need to be to make sure that the marvelous news and information newspapers provide is both widely distributed and also valued by the people who receive it. And one of the things that I think the newspaper industry will need to ask itself is, “Are the online aggregators paying enough for what they receive?” We’ve created a classic free-rider problem. You can build billion-dollar companies around the quality content that other people invest in and pay to create. The value proposition is completely out of balance.

There is an obvious point here. At what stage do we stop calling the new model a newspaper? Particularly since it is likely to be delivered online.

And of course Siegel opens up the whole “will people pay for content online” debate, which I have blogged on before here and here.

This is a key question but everyone is guessing about the answer. I am glad to say that people are beginning to turn their mind to the need for solid research on this issue of whether people will pay for journalism, and what they might be prepared to pay. I hope to have more to report on this later.

I think the American grassroots movement- and any local versions – would be better advised to focus not on the platform (newspapers) but on what they deliver – journalism, as well as being prepared to consider that the way journalism may have to change.

I am optimistic about an evolving journalism, but not about newspapers as we are used to thinking about them. Some sobering stats and facts on that business model in the USA:

In some cities, midsized metropolitan papers may not survive to year’s end. The owners of the Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have warned that those papers could shut down if they can’t find buyers soon. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis recently filed for bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News will soon stop home delivery four days of the week to cut operating costs. Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers in this country, recently said it would require most of its 31,000 employees to take a week of unpaid leave

Meanwhile, fresh intelligence reaches us all the time about redundancies at both News Limited and Fairfax. Watch Crikey, and this space.

And think about it. How much would you pay?

“The recent deals have prompted speculation that newspaper groups may be moving back towards private hands as private equity groups and institutional investors look for a way out. “The likely prognosis is that we will see more private deals and a withdrawal of the institutional and private-equity investors who have tried hard to milk the newspaper industry, but have done little to enhance the value or importance of newspapers,” Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant at iMedia Advisory Services, told the Sunday Times last week.”

Kitty litter liners, fish and chip wrappings, paper mache materials, whingeing newsagents, the ability to buy soft porn under the not-very-convincing pretence of being interested in the daily news…it goes on. Worth a chuckle.

Now I hear that on Friday of next week there will be a top level meeting of the Australian lieutenants, including Peter Macourt and John Hartigan, to talk about the coming year. Axings and remodellings are believed to be on the agenda.

The meeeting is being seen by insiders as a council of war in preparation for the visit of Rupert Murdoch the following week. He will be in the country for his mother’s 100th birthday.

News Limited has had a softly-softly approach to redundancies. People have been quietly tapped on the shoulder. The quiet approach means that no one section of the organisation can see the scale of the cuts, but the knife is being wielded everywhere.

One went recently from Holt St corporate affairs. Late last year the Holt St editorial training manager went and has not been replaced. But in truth there are no areas of the organisation that haven’t been touched.

Fairfax manages to make the big headlines with its, ahem, unique public relations style, but there have nevertheless been stories from throughout the Australian outpost of empire to suggest strain and austerity.

Regional and suburban newspapers, already lean, are now skeletal and even missing a few bones. A number of aged subs have disappeared from the metro dailies. There might not have been a big fuss and a scaring of the horses, as at Fairfax, but it has happened nevertheless.

It sounds like the troops should be bracing for more, and worse. John Hartigan said when he got his Walkley Award last year that he would never slash the journalism. Can he keep his word?  Can any newspaper boss?

In Australia, plenty of journos are wondering how far behind the USA we are. Newspaper circulations have held up comparatively well in this country so far, but the business model is nevertheless broken. For diversified media  companies like Fairfax or News Limited, the newspapers are responsible for a big percentage of the costs, and a much smaller percentage of revenue. That’s okay if you have an engaged and committed proprietor who cares about newspapers and journalism. It is not sustainable if , like Fairfax, you are owned by banks and institutional investors.

How long before the crunch comes here?

There are people in Melbourne who would be interested in buying The Age, largely because they care about the journalism, and Melbourne is that kind of town. Does the Sydney Morning Herald have the same kind of loyalty? What do people think?

Some quotes:

I no longer believe that the industry is very relevant to the future and things digital. Since I prefer to write about those topics, and am also becoming more interested lately in how the Internet will reshape the television and video industries, I plan to focus my attention there.

And:

those who believe that newspapers came late to the Internet are wrong. In fact, they were very, very early. Rather, newspapers’ abysmal failure to build great businesses online was a direct result of their incredibly narrow-minded focus to make online  work within the same “locked-down” look, feel and content control paradigm of their existing print distribution model.

Newspaper executives chose to sacrifice the interests of their readers and their advertisers by their stubborn refusal to embrace the Web for what it could be — a better and lower-cost platform for interactive delivery of local news, information and commercial communication (think Craigslist or Google) — as compared to what they wanted it to be (a way to sell and deliver “locked-down” content products in “walled gardens”) which neatly fit in their “trees to trucks” vertical monopoly mentalities. That was their death knell.

And:

The notion that the purity of newspaper journalism is the cornerstone upon which today’s great metropolitan newspapers were built is revisionist history. Most of today’s great newspapers were built through achieving dominant distribution in their markets, not through delivering better journalism.

The comment thread is worth reading, too.

Jay Rosen said this on Twitter this morning (our time). Rosen, of course, is the New York University academic who founded the civic journalism movement and who has written much of what’s worth reading about media futures. You can read his Pressthink blog here. It’s a primer in what’s going on, and could go on, in new media.

On Twitter Rosen was talking about this article by James Burnett in the Boston Globe. It is mostly an interview with another journalist, Mike Barnicle. For Australian readers the interview isn’t of that much interest, other than as an artefact full of romanticism and nostalgia about the craft.

Take if from me, you’ll hear this kind of thing wherever journos over the age of forty get together. I am over the age of forty. I can talk like this too.

And I would argue its not all bullshit. In fact , what better time than New Year’s Day to launch a project? I want to use this blog to compile three lists:

1. The things about old-style journalism that were good, but that we are likely to lose and should mourn.

My seed entries:

Foreign correspondents dedicated to providing a view of remote locations tailored to Australian audiences.

Sub-editors with a passion for the language and more general knowledge than Wikipedia.

2. The things about old-style journalism that were bad, and whose passing we should celebrate.

My suggestions:

The arrogance that comes with privileged access to the means of publication.

Lack of accountablity

The bullshit “faux objective” voice, that often hides something that is not objective at all. (more on this here.)

3. The things about old style journalism that remain valuable and useful, and that we should strive to evolve and carry forward.

My suggestions: Disinterested journalism, meaning reportage driven by the evidence, rather than personal, commercial or partisan agendas

The art of finding things out – often underestimated, but the central trade skill and “dirty work” of the experienced and good reporter. Meaning that eventually someone is going to have to pay people to do it.

Submissions and arguments welcome.

Stanford University is re-deploying its famous mid-career Knight journalism fellowships to drive a shift towards innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Fellowship website states:

“The program is transforming itself in order to serve the needs of journalism and journalists as much in the years ahead as it has in the past. The dizzying landscape of layoffs and consolidation, Internet media sites, citizen journalism and bloggers make journalism a chaotic and exciting proposition today. We are making bold changes to meet these new realities.”

The Stanford fellowships have a small but significant place in Australian journalism history. During the late 1980s and early 1990s leading editors at Fairfax, including Michael Smith, Malcolm Schmidtke (now at the Herald Sun) and Bill Birnbauer (now at Monash University) had periods at Stanford. Some of the world’s best journalists have done likewise.

Jay Rosen, the new media guru from New York University, has posted an interview with Fellowship Director Jim Bettinger, on the reasons for the change. Partly, according to Rosen, it is the uncomfortable fact that applications are dropping because US journalists are too scared to take a sabbatical, in case the jobs aren’t there when they return.

But Bettinger also says its about trying to solve the problems, and seize the opportunities:

“We will be expecting fellows to come with a particular journalism problem, challenge or opportunity that they want to work on during the year, and to have something to show for it, which we will then publish on our website so that others can use it. Our idea is that these results would be replicable, scalable and open-source: It could be putting on a symposium, which we would record and post. Or it could be guidelines to using new digital or other tools for better storytelling in a specific realm, like foreign correspondence. Or maybe the beginnings of a business plan template for independent publishing. We’ll see.”

Bettinger’s blog, which includes a video interview about the changes, is here.

Now Young has responded, and I have responded to her. Read the comments.

I think it is an interesting conversation, and I’m hoping others join in.