News in the Internet Society

-- By AlexRouhandeh - 25 Oct 2024

A Broken Model

While reading the news off a screen may deliver the same result as reading off print, the shift has come with consequences. In the 1990s, weekly news subscriptions peeked around 60 million, but today that number sits under 21 million, according to the Pew Research Center. This trend has coincided with the rise of “fake news,” echo chambers, and threats to democracy. Used to the seemingly cost-free structure of the net, readers have become accustomed to trading their data for website access rather than providing website hosts dollars for paid subscriptions and an owned product. That declining demand has thus seen outlets focus more heavily on advertising dollars, which have also been drying up. Before the advent of the iPhone, U.S. newspapers totaled nearly $49.3 billion in advertising revenue compared to the nearly $9.8 billion they’re estimated to have garnered in 2022, according to Pew. Desperate to gain eyes to view these web advertisements, the independent press has become increasingly dependent on social media and tech platforms, which control algorithms and siphon ad revenue. Politics, law, and technology have parts to play in correcting the news industry’s flawed model.

The Continuous Cycle

Today’s issues around advertising’s role in the flawed news model are not new — the reliance on advertising has long troubled the industry. A 2019 study by Columbia Business School examining the historic role of advertising in news writes that the advent of television advertising in France resulted in declining ad dollars for newspapers, coinciding with a drop in the number of journalists and a decline in reporting quality. What’s different about that situation and the issues facing news today, the study writes, was that local news was less harmed than national. Pew writes that local news has been hit the hardest by the proliferation of online media. Struggling to make ends meet and find their niche in the vast web, local news outlets, with their valuable brands and local credibility, have become targets for private equity acquisition. A 2022 study by NYU’s Stern School of Business found, when acquired by private equity, local news outlets cut their newsrooms and refocus efforts on national reporting. The study states this expands their online reach, yet it leaves a potential news dessert in the process. The Columbia study thus does not see advertising as a foundational revenue stream and sees the subscription model as the way of the future.

For the Public Good

The press is the only profession explicitly named in the U.S. Constitution, and there exists a consensus that, at its best, the Fourth Estate plays an essential role in providing for the common good. Because of this, along with the sense of community that can come from being a reader/viewer of a specific outlet, one can see the rational for subscribing to a news outlet. However, recent history also shows that news can thrive when it’s not a paid commodity. The nonprofit investigative outlet ProPublica? has become one of the most awarded and impactful outlets in the business. The Salt Lake Tribune’s transition from a for-profit to nonprofit paper saw it become profitable and increase its newsroom by 10 percent, according to NiemanLab. The Guardian and The Texas Tribune serve as additional examples of nonprofit success. Per the 2024 World Giving Index, America ranks as the sixth most generous nation, so the dollars should be there to support a nonprofit news ecosystem. However, as journalist Darryl Holliday writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, for these nonprofits to succeed, journalism must be civically engaged and prove itself to be a public good.

Reaching the People

Unlike most industries, where successful competition rests in producing quality product, a significant portion of the media compete over stoking outrage. Not only does this flame political polarization, but it makes it difficult for outlets producing instructive work to frame the fruits of their labor as a public good. Before its revocation in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine played a role in thwarting that phenomenon by requiring outlets to discuss issues in the public interest and to offer multiple perspectives. Yet, if it were reinstalled today, its scope would be ill-suited to address the web. A 2020 report published in the UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal writes that a “Fairness Doctrine 2.0 could likely not reach the Internet based on the Scarcity Principle alone,” the principle being that airwaves were scarce enough to be regulated unlike the web. In turn, the report states that solutions lie with consumers. How people discuss and contextualize news is a fixture of the public square. To replicate that on the net, posts to article links could be subject to a system of interactive commentary, whereby users are free to contextualize and platform given works. If such a system were permitted on search engines, for example, the public could help elevate journalism worth promoting and downgrade journalism worth ignoring.

Journalism for All

Physical journalism continues to survive as a luxury good, yet as the masses become more reliant on web-based media, the good that is news must also be viewed as a product of the net. In this way, Columbua Law Professor Eben Moglen writes in “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” online news “consists of bitstreams, which although essentially indistinguishable are treated by a confusing multiplicity of legal categories.” In this view, and under the principles of the free software movement, when news is purchased it — as a piece of software — becomes the object of its purchaser and thus can be used, studied, shares and modified. In this model, news could be disseminated through anarchism production, which Moglen said results in increased creativity and interconnection. Passionate, creative responses to published journalism combined with an engaged, interconnected community around it, could provide subscription and nonprofit news outlets with the support needed to thrive. By stimulating passion and orienting community around news, the industry could better cement itself as an institution people can rally around, thus ensuring the public and democracy are guarded by a watchdog endowed with sharp teeth.

The first route to improvement is tightening. The writing here is loose and repetitive. An exacting edit is called for: every sentence must advance the overall flow of ideas in the paragraph, and every word in each sentence must pull its weight. That which is well said only needs to be said once. At least 20% of the draft should go.

You need the space for the idea that isn't here yet. You don't need many words to show that advertising as a source of financial solidity for news-gathering never worked very well, and has now failed. It turns out that the revenues gathered from department-store and luxury goods advertising, along with job adds and real estate sales—which supported the newspaper press, the real source of what little reporting we did in the 20th century—resulted more from a dearth of other advertising options than because it was a good fit for news organizations. There are much better ways to advertise in the 21st century, and better ways to pay reporters and editors to collect news and inform the public.

But you don't write about the destruction of local news, the private equity assault on newspapers, the billionaires' anticipatory obedience to Trump, or any of the other reasons to doubt that profit-seeking and news-distribution are compatible, if ever they were. You don't discuss the realities of non-profit news organizations (or in fact even use the word "non-profit"), so what National Public Radio, The Guardian, ProPublica and other models might teach us we cannot learn.

So the substantive route to improvement, it seems to me, is to reflect the realities rather than the restrictive vision of "the news business" that is so evidently played out. Informing the public requires that we succeed in harnessing the value of conscientious curiosity and providing freely to everyone the news they want and need. From each according to ability, to each according to need. Anarchist production and distribution can achieve that end, as we have shown in other spheres. You should at least make an effort to encounter the ideas to which that consideration leads.

**Thank you for the feedback. I have replaced the copy with a revised version —AJR