I had a good chuckle at that, having given up on journalism after college, despite two stints as an editor-in-chief. I had written more than my share of (in retrospect) unobjective pieces for the (decidedly unobjective) college magazine I edited, and was done with the myth of impartiality. The only thing rising faster than my political awareness was perhaps my indignant anger at the media. Who can be objective when language itself is so laden with prejudices, and reporters of different backgrounds, races and educations can perceive reality so differently? Does anyone really believe any reporter who rejects a point of view can see outside his or her
own life experiences? I said good riddance to bad rubbish, looked longingly at alternative newsweekly internships, then ultimately set my career sights elsewhere and washed my hands of the whole affair. Just last week, when I opted for the Star Tribune as lunchtime reading, some of the dreck I found there only served to reassure that choice.
Yet I am not entirely untroubled by the current state of American newspapers, past prejudices and recent disappointments aside. I recently sat in on a class at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, taught by Eric Black and featuring Joel Kramer, former Editor and Publisher of the Star Tribune, and more recently, founder of Growth & Justice and the nonprofit online newspaper MinnPost.
Kramer, who had come up through newspapers, talked about the business model that had sustained papers for the past 200 years in America. At their peak, about a third of all income was generated from classified advertising, nearly a third more through display advertising (especially from the department stores), with only 20 - 30 % of income being generated through readers. So printing and distributing the paper all came out of that reader income, while advertising paid for the reporters. This balance seemed to work alright, and gave journalists the time needed for reportage and analysis, unlike television and radio, whose constant need for content was less friendly to the process of interviewing, researching, fact-finding, fact-checking and editing. Competition emerged from new technologies came to compete, but never took that much market share - radio, television, cable television, and direct mail. These mediums relied upon the fertile ground of the newspaper to harvest stories and facts from, without interrupting the newspaper's consistently solid revenues and profits.
Fast forward to today, when papers are jettisoning staff, cutting column inches, and closing foreign bureaus. So what happened? It wasn't that readers have stopped reading the newspaper - readership had been in decline for years and years, yet revenues and profits had remained relatively stable. It was the internet, of course.
First, classified advertising went to the Craigslists. The old display advertising stalwarts began to lose market share to Wal-Mart and other discount retailers, who do very little advertising, cutting further into revenues. And then the advent of search-based advertising, such as Google AdWords, where advertisers can see effectiveness down to the click, did away with John Wanamaker's old conundrum: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." And as Kramer put it, "How many reporters does Google employ? Zero."
So what to be done? Kramer thinks the nonprofit model, where journalism can be supported through a savvy mix of quality, thoughtful content, paid for by online banner ads, ta
rgeted search advertising, and the loyalty of members, individual donors and foundations. As a nonprofit, too, journalism may be better positioned to be seen as a community asset, more about the community and less about the shareholder; more about democracy than the bottom line.
As for the fate of the full-time journalist? "Well," Kramer said, "People are still artists."
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