

The American Press on Suicide Watch - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10rich.htm

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cma
Newspapers are a product sold for personal consumption and priced accordingly,
but they have enormous positive externalities. The traditional solution to
dealing with something with positive externalities is via government subsidy;
doing so for news in a direct manner is obviously a bad idea, since the
primary positive externality provided by reporting is the check it provides on
the government and other centers of power. Doing so through a government
funded voucher system could be one possible solution.

Everyone would receive $X of money with a mandate to give it to any news
organization they wish. A condition of the money is that the organization
receives it blindly, e.g. they don't reward you with anything in exchange
(this isn't a subsidy for you to buy a daily newspaper).

The primary difficulty with this solution is that under such a system, how do
you ensure the money is spent on news? As one example, how do you prevent Bob
from spending his voucher on his neighbor's sham "news organization", and his
neighbor doing likewise on Bob's sham "news organization"? You can easily
craft legal language to remove a one-level tit-for-tat situation like that,
but how do you do so robustly for the many other manifestations?

If you allow the government to choose who constitutes a real news organization
and who doesn't, the voucher system loses many of its advantages (the primary
one being proportional representation through the "individual choice" a
voucher system provides, rather than monolithic "majority choice"; of course
in both cases there is still a monolithic decision made on how much funding
will go towards news).

~~~
pie
Although it seems like a political and economic improbability in the US, I'm
somewhat fond of the BBC's (potentially as an extension of PBS's) system of
large-scale, government-supported news. Clearly we would prefer a more
distributed, personalized, and capitalist solution for funding quality news,
but it seems as though we're losing a lot of steam while groping around for
some unknown salvation of our current paradigm.

If our society really does _need_ exhaustive, deep journalism from large-ish
organizations (which seems to be an underlying consensus among articles on the
topic), then it's probably the government's duty to keep these institutions
and practices alive.

Perhaps all this hubbub arises from a lack of vision though, and investigative
reporting and in-depth analysis of current events are not in jeopardy at all -
they'll simply come from different sources that most of us would expect.

~~~
Retric
Sadly I find publicly funded news organizations (BBC,PBS) far more informative
than private organizations (NBC,FOX). However, I suspect directly paying for
news that is not primarily funded though advertising might be the best
solution. Removing the costs of TV / printing paper and filling a 24 hour news
cycle means far smaller organizations can still fill the need for real
reporting.

The other option is something like "the daily show" where in depth news is
just one type of content and you don't need to yammer on about every new case
of H1N1 to fill an hour of news every single day.

PS: The reality is paying 10,000 or so journalists is just not that expensive
a proposition and assuming the current system is the only way to fund them is
probably missing the point.

~~~
Xichekolas
I think you make a good point about the hour long format.

News seems like a case where the time constraint was beneficial, and the
product has become less valuable (more noise) ever since that constraint was
dropped by the 24 hour news networks.

When I was a kid, we watched the 10 o'clock news every night before bed. The
first half hour was world news, the second half hour was local news, and it
always wrapped up with some local human interest piece. Yeah, it was a staid
format, but it also meant the signal to noise ratio was high, because you
really only had time to say what was actually important/informative.

With 24 hour news, we basically have the same information, but it's diluted by
23 hours of commentary on "what might happen" and "what's your view on what is
happening". Why do we want to listen to people speculate all day? If the
speculation was at least honest and intelligent, you might be able to learn
from it, but I'm fairly sure you could find a higher level of discourse in
your local high school debate class.

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lacker
It seems awfully ironic to see an article lamenting that newspapers don't
"get" the internet right after the New York Times buys iht.com and immediately
breaks all its incoming links.

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davidbnewquist
The author laments: "Web advertising will never be profitable enough to
support ambitious news gathering."

Really?

~~~
tokenadult
Is there a counterexample on the horizon?

~~~
netsp
The assertion is not necessarily wrong, it's that it misses the point. It
implies that the natural order is that 'we do the content, you do the ads.'
You aren't doing your job, that's why we are failing.

That kind of attitude lets news-people stay high browed & complaining about
how suits are ruining their content, so long as they are bringing in the ad-
dollars. The new paradigm (as the author goes on to explain) has the dumb
suits replaced with the dumb public ("The real question is for the public, not
journalists: Does it want to pony up for news,...?") The constant is 'real
news.' The world better hurry up and find them a business model or you'll be
sorry.

If I step back and look at the whole thing from the outside I'm not worried
about democracy and the flow of information being destroyed by a mostly free
web.

Taking a step even further back, I would note that there is systemic risk in a
business model where you're main advantages are disconnected from your revenue
sources. They were never selling news. People have never bout news. They were
a way for companies to interact with their customers. They are no longer such
a good way of doing this.

~~~
akkartik
I wrote up a suggestion 2 weeks ago.
<http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-04-23-21-23-27-soc>

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adatta02
and the irony is now I can't even read the article without logging into NYT.

~~~
jonknee
What's ironic about that? Just log in (it's even free). It would be ironic if
you couldn't read the article because the NYT went out of business.

~~~
adatta02
I'd vote for the irony because I can't opt out of signing in, I can't sign in
with fbconnect, I can't use OAuth, I can only enter the walled garden that is
NYT for no apparent benefit.

I guess it could be worse - all the NYT content could be paid subscription.

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msluyter
There are certain ritualistic and tactile aspects of newsprint that I'll
dearly miss. Just something about waking up, drinking coffee, opening up a
fresh paper to read the front page... There's something primal about that that
can't be replicated virtually.

~~~
ars
There is a certain ritual of me starting my computer and clicking the news
sites from my bookmarks. There is just something about picking which stories I
want to read, and seeing my customized categories that can't be replicated in
a piece of paper.

If it wasn't obvious: everyone has different morning rituals. I've never had
yours, and I'm not a teen.

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DannoHung
Well, here's the deal: We don't really want journalism, we want investigations
into everything being done all the time by a party uninvolved with the
investigated subject. We also want the findings of all those investigations to
be recorded somewhere.

After that it's just a matter of really bored people trawling through the
investigations looking for juicy information.

So, fundamentally, we want a distributed Big Brother. Always watching, always
judging... everything.

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Ardit20
_it’s only journalism that’s essential to a functioning democracy_

Yet

 _Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’
Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being
stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with
murder (or at least the war in Iraq)._

How is such journalism protecting democracy when it can not hold accountable
its government when it matters the most. These papers are hardly journalism
they are the establishment and this is clearly shown by: _Colbert’s routine
did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it “fell flat.” The Times
initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s
riff went viral overnight,_ Clearly therefore it seems that newspapers are not
doing their job of informing the public and the public seems to find the
information without their help. Hence if newspapers die then so be it. Their
upholding of the spirit of democracy is only empty rhetorics when the actions
show that they do nothing of the sort. Their drums of death to democracy if
they die is utter hypocrisy when looking at the facts. When there is a void to
be filled I doubt there will not be brave journalists to fill it without the
help of the newspapers.

P.S Funny huh, yesterday we read about Murdoch wanted to charge for papers,
today we read a propaganda piece exactly to convince people to pay. I would
not pay for New York Times and the sooner they die the better not least
because their boss seems to have the power to meet with any leader he wishes
promptly. This is not journalism, this is propaganda.

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TweedHeads
It is unbelievable how paper still wants to compete with electrons, and how
cardboard-CEOs refuse to accept the same fate of music, videos, books and now
news.

There is nothing they can do. If it can be electronically consumed, it will
be.

