We’ve known for decades that for-profit capitalism and public-serving journalism are incompatible.
In New York City, in January 2019, it is brutally cold. Winter has arrived with savage consequences for digital publishers, including BuzzFeed. In the space of two weeks, about 2,100 jobs have been lost across the media, with many disappearing from purely digital publishers. BuzzFeed’s layoffs amounted to 15% of its total staff, a loss of around 220 jobs across all departments, including in its widely admired New York newsroom. On Friday, Vice, another media company once associated with fast growth, said it would lay off 10% of its workforce, while last month, the phone company Verizon, which owns Huffington Post and Yahoo, cut 800 workers in its media division. In the UK, the Pool, a website aimed at women launched in 2015 by radio presenter Lauren Laverne and magazine editor Sam Baker, went into liquidation, with 24 journalists facing redundancy.
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The long slow decline of newspapers has been well documented, as advertisers and readers have increasingly shifted their attention to digital platforms. But for the companies that were lauded for having understood the social web faster than legacy media to falter sends a signal too dire for many media companies to contemplate. Many of us are concluding that the commercial internet makes profitable journalism exponentially harder, and in many cases impossible.
We need a world in which journalism is not looked upon as a driver of profit. It was this way for a short time, in the US at least, postwar (and maybe before?), when media corporations considered it prestigious and a matter of pride to be running serious-news arms, unprofitable though they were.
But it’s tough to imagine any corporation or millionaire/billionaire willingly forgoing profit. We need whole new paradigms for not only our media but for the entire economy. Cuz none of it is working.
The problem is not, I think, that Boring Old Newspapers haven’t gone digital fast enough. The problem is that with Facebook and Twitter to do the curation for them (or even just news.bbc), people don’t feel the need to pay for a news source to supplement the free ones. (And they aren’t necessarily wrong. So much of what was in newspapers was junk, paid promotion, regurgitated press releases, the owner’s opinions. Why pay to get all that?)
The newspapers’ answer to that was advertising, but advertising is a poison pill anyway, triply so on the web where it’s the primary malware vector.
This thread was retweeted by AOC, and seems to be a way forward:
https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/status/1091466402152607744
https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/status/1091468719274975233
Yes, I think that a return to the basic principle of selling the news to the prople, rather than selling the people to the advertisers, is the key to newspapers’ survival. Advertisers don’t want journalism; they just want eyes.
That is very well put.
I think the switch to serving stockholders or major funders instead of serving customers a good product is what makes so much of work no fun anymore. If media companies are able to shift back to quality products, there will be a whole lot of necessary retraining for the generation of journalists raised to focus on clicks not depth.
Sorry, that was meant as a response to RogerBW’s response to Bluejay.
Dean Baker’s proposal for a tax credit to support journalism…http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/can-journalism-be-saved-a-tax-credit-system-for-creative-work
That sounds really complicated, but this part?
Hell no. Copyright is not a government subsidy!