It’s an honor to be liveblogging the final panel, featuring Linda Greenhouse, David Carr, Marcia Chambers, Bill Mitchell, and Ari Paul, and moderated by Emily Bazelon.

Linda Greenhouse observes that the Harvard Crimson created an endowment to subsidize students who otherwise would have had to do work-study at other parts of the university. Describes the benefits and burdens of life on the web. LG could not be doing what she’s doing now re the Supreme Court without the Internet (e.g., new Guantanamo posts on SCOTUSblog, How Appealing). In the past, there was only the information that journalists chose to write about, but now, through websites and blogs, you can get a nearly real-time idea of what’s happening from court to court, in terms of orders, transcripts, and conversations among people with similar interests. But there are also burdens. (1) Quick turnaround time for reporting precludes having a few hours to think about the opinions that have just been handed down. Have moved from a contemplative posture to posture that more closely resembles coverage of a football game. (2) A second challenge is how to add value: if anyone in the world can read the opinion/briefs/arguments at same time you can, you have to do more than simply duplicate those. Hard to justify paying for something that is free. But websites can create model where you can *read* everything for free and to participate in the conversation, you have to pay something.

David Carr calls it a worthwhile thought exercise to think about what US public understandings of the Supreme Court would be like without the past 30 years of Linda’s work. He will attempt to make sure that his presentation does not “suck.” Where I am as a reporter, things are very murky, and you realize you’re in a barrel about to go over a waterfall. You examine the barrel’s efficacy and preparedness for after the fall; the barrel we’re in is not fine. There’s an air of uniqueness at NYTimes newsroom, but the mood is still one of dread, excitement, and fatigue; people are happy to have a job. File and face-plant paradigm: do a story, video, facebook/tweet about it, try to get into every platform as fast as you can. But you end up being at an event and not experiencing it at all. I love what I do but I don’t want my reporting to be thin and stupid; there’s an explosion of pixels in content, editorial, and advertising, and there’s *so much content*. I can’t make a living doing $20/story rates. A person like me is the result of a legacy business model; Craigslist shot off the back-end of the media biz (classified = 40%); regional monopolies gradually eroded by insurgent technologies. I am overpaid in the current paradigm; this is an artificial construct, as explained by Clay Shirky earlier. Advertisers pay for scarce assets and adjacency, but on the web there’s no scarcity, and adjacency is much broader. In Ken Auletta’s book about Google, search advertising is explained to old media rep, who responds, “you are fucking with the magic.” Other than lining pockets of shareholders, the legacy models produced great journalism; it’s not just expensive to execute journalism, it’s also expensive to defend (e.g., prison innocence articles). All these wonderful hybrid citizen models have to understand: after you write a good story, “you better put a nut cap on and you better hire a damn good lawyer!” I’m a believer in citizens and collaboration, but you have to be ready to defend your work as well. Kraft, Bank of America, etc all produce workarounds to what media does. Holds up laptop: this contains far more resources (if you assume the cloud) than any other newsroom I ever walked into. It makes me so much more powerful than I ever was when entering the business. 17M+ users is a huge audience that we’ve never had, and a very powerful tool in the hands of a journalist. I do 1 minute podcasts from my basement every morning. The problem, though, is that space is infinite and you need to fill it. Both my toolbox and my heart is full. We have been developing a common dialogue over production of news; the web allows you to listen so much better; I have targeted RSS feeds, when something is important, it finds me. I like what I do, and I want to develop new business models; but I don’t want to put on a sandwich board that says “will write for food.”

Marcia Chambers: like LG, I was fellow at Yale, and many of our fellow graduates are out in the field. I made leap, however, from print to web, with creation of Branford Eagle. A lot of the conversations I had were related to political transformation in local politics; I called New Haven Independent and Paul Bass, and I started writing without any clue as to how to write online. Published story called “Dark Side,” that began coverage of what was happening in Branford town politics. People began writing to me and asking me to keep up the good work; I began bringing tape recorder to meetings so as to ensure there was context; many people *didn’t* like this, as seen in story “Enemy of the Press.” One thing I’ve learned is how different the web is; esp w/r/t linking, e.g., property tax article. Annie Le case was fascinating for revealing separate forces in law as pertaining to print (libel) and web (more of a wild west regime). Two separate versions, due to different legal issues. The local press did well because they are repeat players in a case that occurred in our community; we kept breaking stories left and right *because we were here*. In 3 years since Eagle founded, a lot of local stories, and quick comments from audience. People no longer wait for the news. Stories about feral cats in Branford.

Bill Mitchell: as speaker #38, I feel obligation to return to Dean Post’s framework. “Routinized circulation of texts” required as democratic core of what journalism represents in democracy. In 1993, I was working at San Jose Mercury News–we had a paywall in partnership with AOL, for $9.95 for the first 5 hours, and $3.95 for subsequent hours. Didn’t work very well–was owned by Knight Ridder back then. In the undergraduate dorm where I live, I find that 3 of 450 students have newspaper subscriptions. Any debate whether transition has taken old becomes academic, when you look at how people are consuming news. Dean Post’s idea, in context of what’s happening in Detroit & Ann Arbor–news orgs are disrupting old routines of circulating fundamental texts and starting new ones. Penny Abernathy made point that job #1 for news orgs is to shed legacy costs, but these costs must be shed as part of strategy for migrating readers from old to new platforms. It’s harder than just asking people to move, b/c we ask them to change routines that they really care about. Detroit cut back from 7-day/wk to 3-day deliveries. Other option is to read papers & e-editions online. But in Detroit, people are losing not just newspaper habit but also the *news habit*. This interim period is messy: Detroit needs public-service journalism, and we need to wrestle with these consequences. Ann Arbor experiment is even broader: newspaper shut down entirely; quick shedding of legacy costs in move to annarbor.com. Old newsroom had 66 reporters/editors; new had 28, paid less than they were in print newsroom. However, they are thinking more about reader’s experience of the news; newsroom no longer set up as fortress, instead first floor is now set up as a coffeehouse where readers can interact with journalists face to face. So question remains: what kind of routines will replace the old routines, and how we’re going to pay for it.

Ari Paul: works for Chief (Leader) newspaper covering public sector workers in New York City. Reflecting on conference as someone just at beginning of career, I thought about how 40 years ago I would be perceived as a sort of public sector worker, but now I am perceived more like an actor, or a full-time activist, or a starving artist. One thing not often brought up at this conference, and sometimes avoided, was how news orgs are going to act as employers. W/r/t collective bargaining, compliance with labor law, etc. Yesterday president of CNN commented how many people are willing to do journalism without needing money–this has created wage deflation. In my job as a labor columnist, no one is getting paid for working in my area. The lesson we should take from this is that we should focus less on how to cheaply extract labor in creating revenue streams, and more on how to create real careers for people starting out in their 20s. We need to keep people past their 20s so that they commit to making a new media model.

QUESTIONS FOR PANEL:

Emily Bazelon: one thing we’ve been talking about is authority, how people know about authority, linking/ranking/etc. This is a function of personality: it puts pressure on journalists to be out there with Twitter and fan-feeds and be less anonymous. Is it OK if journalists are becoming more like actors, or is this a perversion of the role in some way?

Linda: The Times used to have a policy that seriously disfavored people appearing on Sunday morning talk shows, etc. Now it’s completely the opposite. During Bush v. Gore, the Times PR people kept feeding me media requests; I finally demanded a raise, which in those days you could still get. Other side: if people are supposed to be personalities, the old constraints–you’re not supposed to have a thought in your head about the event you’re covering–are diminished. When I said Bush admin had created legal black hole in Guantanamo (at private event), was reprimanded by NY Times, but this seems outdated now.

David: In the course of spreading versions of yourself around, no one would have any interest if my last name wasn’t NY Times.

Emily: can’t you take your own brand past the Times, now?

David: that’s not an experiment I would run now. An editor recently called me up and said they didn’t like how I was addressing issue on Twitter, and I said, “that’s not really yours, it’s mine.” My objective has always been to fit in, not to stick out.. but my objective has become more to stick out, recently. Although some of the most important people at the Times, you’ve never heard of and never will.

Marcia: I don’t do much Twitter. If people are really interested in what you’re writing, they’ll read it. It’s all about what you’re covering. I do have Branford Eagle community TV show, where I interview public officials from town and talk about column events.

Ari: it’s more peculiar for me because I’m in niche media market where I’m one of the few people willing to listen to union leaders.

Bill: current NY Times public editor went so far as to make contribution to story funded by outside group. Values changing.

Edwin Baker (from audience): what do you think generally about the conversations at the conference? There have been a number, which fit into different boxes. One kind of conversation is how to have an economically viable business model, a second kind is how to have a media that serves society, a third kind is what’s likely to fall out of all this. In the second conversation, two divisions: Yochai Benkler’s works previous to Wealth of Networks, including works on copyright, show how certain copyright laws favor different sizes of actors & discourses: commodified vs. non-commodified. Some debates are whether we want more or less commodified; other debates are how we can make either of those discourses more ideal.

Bill: a tax break that would reimburse news organizations for # of reporters, might perpetuate journalism as it’s always been done, and not produce the kind of journalism society really needs. We need some pressure to respond to what people are asking for.

Linda: some of the new ways of delivering information are resources, and others are distractions for people trying to do journalism. E.g., PR push, overflowing inbox with requests to quote law firm partners and write about certain cases. Towards end of my time in daily journalism, it was like swimming through molasses to get through the day of a major case. This environment requires different skill-sets of attentiveness–knowing what to ignore; knowing not to go on Google Blog Search to see what someone’s saying about you.

David: as a media reporter, this is extremely exciting time. For 10 years, kept hearing sky was falling, but nothing happened; but now, a grand piano is hurtling towards our heads. Gawker, Pro Publica & NY Times, etc — these are new models and collaborations; we’re in a more-than-theoretical state, and the work is underway. Legacy media is going to have more trouble walking back to a state where they can make a living; there’s going to be more new media forms built on the business. If it’s going to be good, it can’t just be done for the love of it, because you’re going to work your ass off over and over.

Marcia: I’m the only one on the cutting edge; we’re very dependent on gifts, donations, etc. We never know if we’re going to be funded. But I believe that the people of Branford really want and need what I give them; we haven’t given up old-fashioned reporting skills, we rely very little on the Internet. It’s a great new day for journalism. We need a new financial model to get us there.

Emily: Thanks.

Howdy everyone. This is Betsy Cooper, your humble rapporteur for the government subsidies panel. Our illustrious speakers for this panel, moderated by the ISP’s Nic Marais, include:

- Edwin Baker, University of Pennsylvania Law School

- Bruce Ackerman, Yale Law School. His paper is available here

- Stephen Nevas, Yale Information Society Project & Knight Law and Media Program

- Susan DeSanti, Federal Trade Commission

Steve Nevas introduced the panel, and handed it over to Nic, who is listing some of the amazing ways you can keep in touch with our conference, including here and on Twitter. He received the New York Times this morning on his doorstep, even though he doesn’t subscribe. Is that a good sign? Hope so!

Nic notes there have been 230 million ipods sold in the past 5 years. We had no youtube, iphones, and many did not have facebook. It will be amazing to see how things change in the next five years.

Here we’re discussing federal subsidies; Nic is doubtful about the pay models discussed yesterday. He then introduces the panel, and hands it over to Edwin.

Edwin Baker

Edwin first claims that the market cannot provide the professional journalism that people want and need. The claim is not that business models will not provide us some journalism – they do – but will it be as much and as good as we want? His claim is also not related to the current digital age. It relates to the structure of media products. We’re always been dependent on subsidies.

There are a variety of ways in which markets fails. When value goes other than to the consumers, and there’s no relationship between the benefitters and the firm, there is no incentive to provide such a value. If customers are only a small portion of people who benefit, there are inadequate incentives for production. Probably the most obvious way to see this is journalism’s impact on reducing corruption. The benefit goes to all members of the community, not just those who bought the newspaper. News production and consumption result in less corruption, which is a benefit to everyone. But this can even hurt the newspapers; there will be less stories. These are externalities that don’t produce revenue for the journalistic unit.

Similarly, to the extent that journalism produces intelligent voting, it is a benefit which no one pays for. From the beginning of the country, as a result of these pressures there was huge subsidies of newspapers through the postal system. In Morgan v. Lewis, the subsidy cited there today would be worth $6 billion (!) dollars.

This is not due to a lack of interest of the public in news. Most of the decline has not been an evaporation of audience – these have been replaced by online readers. (Though we do not yet have good data on these points). In the last 10 years, the amount of the public that doesn’t pay any attention to news has gone from 14-19 percent, as we hear yesterday. This is a relatively small decline compared to newspaper circulation.

There could be a partial explanation due to a degradation of the product. We might not have an incentive to keep newspapers when the quality decreases. If you fire your reporters and sell for the same or higher price, you should be expected to lost audiences. Costs of keeping audiences may no longer be worth revenue. Those papers which add journalists and keep prices have increased circulation (though not enough to keep at speed of costs). So the key is that it’s not economical to keep up producing newspapers, not that there is no audience for this.

What are the results?
1) Bankruptcy; 2) Closures; and 3) Layoffs.

1) Bankruptcies are irrelevant. This is mostly because of bad debt which the papers can’t pay. They will go through reorganizations.
2) Closures. Rocky Mountain News, etc., are closing, but these are mainly two newspaper towns. That model hasn’t been viable in the past 100 years.
3) Reduction of journalists. We should be concerned about how this affects quality.

There is also the reduction of advertising, unsurprisingly in this recession. This is a short term problem. But there’s also a long-term problem-that there’s a fixed amount of advertising money. If it doesn’t go to media, but onto other sources like Google, then you have a crisis in the media. Google is not creating new media. Similarly, classified ads which do better independently take money away from the media.

What should be done? A tax credit for 1/2 the salary of their journalist. This would decrease the cost to papers of keeping journalists. Assuming a subsidy of $25,000, that would be 1.5 billion. This is much smaller than the 6 billion subsidy by postal service cited earlier. Note that at that time, the problem was more about distribution. Today, it’s more about content.

Bruce Ackerman

He and Ian Ayres suggest putting together an optional box where they can affirmatively click to say the article increased their understanding of public interests. This will then translate to a government endowment. The more clicks, the more payment.

This has only a few exceptions. Government should not support libel. Assets will be on the line, so will require serious factchecking.

To avoid scams, the reader must be a real person. Reader will have to spend exercise answering simple questions or type in random words. Only those which are truly enlightening articles will compel people to do this work.

This will create incentives to publish articles with serious contents. A significant share will go to the political core of articles with serious concern. The point is to modify the market system, take full advantage of the new technology to get decentralized, individual votes.

This is part of a more general project about encouraging citizenship. Another example is patriot dollars; put credit card in and sign up for patriot dollars which allow you to send funds to candidates. We’re creating a context for citizenship. This is especially important in the context of Tocqueville and the notion that citizenship is declining. The citizen army is no more, public education is changing, etc. Other than voting, there are very few contexts where you understand yourself as a citizen.

One might compare this to more familiar models of public subsidy. One is the NPR-BBC model which is vastly inferior to this one. NPR/BBC is under the thumb, in principle, of a tyrannical government. We have to be designing an institutional structure, if we have government subsidy, which is tyranny-resistant. Under those models, the government can control the output of the public press.

How can you pitch to funders that this is more important than helping the poor, the environment, etc.? The answer is that we’ll be more effective advocates for your cause, as stated in the last panel? This is an affront to the history of journalism. Journalists are supposed to investigate, not advocate. The problem would be that you would not be able to report on the positive nature of the immigration system if sponsored by an immigration reform group.

The market-like mechanism he suggests is very flexible. It has no monopolistic intentions. It is significantly different and better, and should be seriously considered.

What about political feasibility? There are two forms of liberalism: laissez-faire and activist. He believes in markets but he is an activist liberal, like President Obama and Cass Sunstein. This would not be a fair description of Reagan, who is laissez-faire; serious people can disagree about this. The case for activist liberalism is strengthened if you can avoid government pressure, as in this case.

So the political feasibility problem here means we should move to a model which is more market-like but recognizes that the invisible hand is flawed at protecting professional journalism.

Stephen Nevas

Who pays for what you consume on the web? Advertisers in part, but not you or your neighbors. The picture yesterday was the implosion of local news. Thousands of journalists have been sent packing, and the institutional history is disappearing. The “emaciated flesh and bone” of the institutions that protected our democracy have been sent to “the slaughterhouse.”

This can be considered mailure in journalism. This is a market that by definition no one can be excluded. The costs are higher than those who pay for the goods. When the market fails and has an interest in protecting an industry (like finances and the auto industry), government may step in. Here, there are public interests, and the 1st amendment protects against government intervention.

This is not new for government. In the earliest days, postal rate privileges facilitated the movement of media and information. Government has not stood back. Player-piano technology led to new licenses so that those who created piano rolls would be protected. Similarly, copyright laws protects creators, and compulsory licences have been enacted for internet radio.

The problem goes back to paying the messengers. Government can and should act when the market failures. We have substantial precedent to do this.

One option is to enact a compulsotry licence and to register work at the copyright office, and to then distribute compensation like the copyright board. But this is clumsy and inefficient. He instead proposes a hybrid.

This would encourage groups to create copyright rights offices (CROs). This will require Congressional legislation to protect against anti-trust. He suggests that participating content owners should log downloads of sites, which would be cross-checked by sampling. This should involve both national and regional officers. Then distributions would be made to CROs. Content providers will not get full cost, and should supplement income with advertising and additional funding. One can also opt out if can go it alone.

This doesn’t pick favorites. And because money comes from homogeneous source, it will encourage new production. We need to be willing to think outside the box.

Susan DeSanti

Her views are her own and do not represent the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The FTC has announced it will hold workshops on these issues. Why are they interested in this topic, and what is the FTC’s approach?

Why is the FTC interested?

On the first question, Federal Communications Commission, Justice, and Anti-Trust all may have jurisdiction here. BUt the FTC has unique jurisdiction over issues of the US economy. The FTC was legislated in 1914. One of its important early functions was to gather facts and write reports, keeping an eye on the economy and publishing materials. In the 20th Century, FTC contributed to Radio Act of 1927 and the eventual establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since the mid-1990s, her policy shop has been involved in a number of activities. including patent law and brandname/generic drug debates.

The immediate impulse stems from the stories about journalist layoffs and bankruptcies. This phase of creative destruction would not normally produce FTC interest alone, because we ordinary would wait for a new equilibrium in the market. Here, there are market failures. So there might be a need for government policy to help in this area.

This past spring, there were requests for anti-trust protections for news organizations. Given market imperfections, could either respond in usual way (to say no) or to try to understand these markets. The Commissioners decided the latter, given the value of journalism to a functioning democracy.

How is the FTC approaching this?

1) This is not about saving newspapers but about the future of journalists.

2) The FTC is not a regulatory agency – they don’t impose regulations. Their job is to ensure that anti-competitive practices do not occur. Consumer should know what their options are, but they will not say what should or should not be sold to consumers. This is a free market approach with serious skepticism of government regulation. The FTC is not looking for an excuse to regulate in this area.

The first question is whether there is anything to do here. The data can be read in two ways; many newspapers in bankruptcy are still profitable. But there are long-term ad revenue questions as well. Do they need to do anything now?

If the Commissioners became convinced to act, this would follow a cost-benefit analysis for preventing market failures with as few transaction costs as possible. The proposals presented today do the same – looking at transaction costs, effectiveness of solution, difficulties of implementation, etc. The pharmaceutical drug debate was very similar. They are very aware of the complications of market failure.

Question and Answer

Bruce Ackerman suggests there are three models suggested here: tax law changes (Baker), public law model (Ackerman), and property rule model (Nevas). The question is what is the form of intervention that will best express the right values?

Edwin Baker suggests that Nevas’s proposal may not respond to the problems of market failures. There are merits to both his and Ackerman’s approach as well as disadvantages of each.

A commentator suggests that there is an icopyright program which embeds work with a tag. Nevas responds that this is before the Supreme Court.

Another commentator inquires how much of a ‘watchdog’ function is enough. We can never entirely prevent corruption. How do you decide?

• Ackerman responds that one should look at professional journalism. One benchmark is whether that practice is sufficiently sustained to sustain itself. This is not information, but about a professional journalist’s obligation and practice. If it sustains itself, that is the goal.
• Baker responds that one should look for responses to market failure. There will be disagreements about what level of corruption a greater marginal investment of journalism will prevent.
• Nevas suggests this is difficult for the government to do because we’re dealing with the market, so perhaps is best left to the the market.
• DeSanti suggests that while the FTC would normally be inclined to follow the market, the market failures make this problematic, not least because of existing monopolies. One should look at the product, revenues and costs. We’re not taking into account the positive externalities here. This is a conundrum. As a famous economist once said, there’s not enough evidence to get rid of the patent system, but there wouldn’t be enough evidence to create this system either.

A questioner from the FCC asks Ackerman, one funded out of general tax revenues, another from user fees. How would his be funded? Ackerman responds that he is moderately indifferent. If through the tax system, can be seen as a tax gimmick where actors can rip off the money. His program will be much more visible and represent the public commitment to citizenship public choice. On the revenue side, he would prefer taxing the internet connection in one way or another since that network is generating the revenue, but you could also sustain it with general revenues. The FCC questioner thinks financial feasibility is important, and that it seems like if everyone benefits based on the theory, everyone should pay. Ackerman clarifies that he is talking about the ideal professional journalist – which would be a force for reason in society. The language of citizenship is a distinctive language, and there is an interesting dialogue between these ways of talking.

The questioner says he has been raising money for public television from the government for most of his life. He is uncomfortable with the proposals. He thinks it’s fine to give tax breaks for journalists. But the other proposals have an odor of manipulation. by giving a reward for voting, as per Ackerman’s idea, you have to spend the reward in a specific way. He argues that if you want to give a present for voting, let the person spend it any way they want. Nevas’s proposal similarly makes everyone pay a hidden tax dedicated to serve a particular public interest. An appropriation would most explicitly point out how these are. Hiding taxes is problematic. Nevas and Ackerman respond by focusing on the development of the media industry and citizenship. Ackerman suggests that this is not manipulation, but creativity.

An audience member suggests the mechanism for funding in Ackerman’s proposal, clicking on publicly useful articles, is substituting consumer choice for public interest. Ackerman responds that you won’t do it unless you care because it has no value to you. Some have suggested to him that he should get funding for an experiment.

The final questioner suggests Baker’s proposal is a production subsidy to reduce the cost of journalism, when the externality is consumer-based. Would we be better subsizing consumers? For the panel at large, the questioner asks whether it is hard to identify who should be receiving the payments.

Baker responds he is not sure of the consequences of a production subsidy; because you can sell at a cheaper rate, it is essentially subsidizing consumption. Both he and Ackerman are trying to get more money into the production process. Baker’s is more confident in the professional editorial role. Under professional journalism, one characterization is that Ackerman’s proposal promotes pandering to the public rather than editorial decisions, even as it gets people more engaged. If you take into account benefits, Ackerman’s model benefits the consumers. Baker’s gives benefit to editorial staff. One would have to work out which one will best get at the problems, as well as which would be more politically viable. Ackerman’s public project and institutional requirement may be less viable administratively, even if it does engage the citizenry. Tax manipulations, made thoughtfully, can be more beneficial.

Ackerman responds that the advantage of his proposal is that it encourages non-traditional news organizations and collaborations. Clicks goes to news organization(s) that are creators of the content. It is easy to imagine collaborative transactions. The notion of the editor has the disadvantage of reifying the ‘newspaper’ which has organizational consequences.

We’re out of time, so thanks for reading. We’re now on a 15 minute break. Thanks to Nic and the panelists for a great session!

Greetings and salutations. This panel, moderated by Douglas Rand, will discuss the role of not-for-profit models and funding in the emerging ecology of news. The panelists are:

David Westphal, USC Annenberg
Bill Buzenberg, Center for Public Integrity
Robert Lang, Mannweiler Foundation
Patrick Kabat, Yale ISP
Nabiha Syed, Yale ISP
James Cutie, Connecticut News Project

Doug Rand: A conversation about the past, present and future of philanthropic funding in journalism.

David Westphal: This is a period of rapid change in world of non-profit news. Projects such as Voice of San Diego have captured  mainstream attention (and in mainstream media). Community news sites are one center of gravity in non-profit journalism; investigative journalism is another, even at the local level. Non-news organizations, including established NGOs like Human Rights Watch as well as universities, are operating substantial newsrooms.

Why are so many going into non-profit journalism? First of all, they can; barriers to entry are very low. It’s an appealing endeavor for both out-of-work and aspiring journalists. And individual philanthropists perceive the need to sustain original news reporting.

What’s not to like about this model? First, is it sustainable — what happens when foundation money runs out? Second, will non-profits prove adaptable enough for a mercurial market? And lastly, good intentions aside, are these philanthropists impeding the emergence of market solutions?

One key to understanding philanthropic interest and activity is that we simply don’t know what the news environment is going to look like in five or ten years; it’s fair to wonder whether in the short term the market can produce the news we need. Another is that non-profit journalism offers an outlet for people and institutions which have sought a voice but didn’t have one in the old world of news production. Investigative work by unions such as SEIU offers an excellent example: we’re increasingly going to see non-news organizations moving into news productions. This is one answer to the question of who is going to pay for news, though this may be supplemental to a core of professional journalism.

Bill Buzenberg: CPI is 20 years old, and clearly the ecosystem is changing; new models of collaboration are certainly possible; but people may not understand how much work is involved in doing investigative journalism.

List of where CPI reports have shown up in last month: BBC, CBS, Daily Telegraph, Google News, Politico, Reuters, AP, TPM, Yahoo News, Sean Hannity, and on and on and on. This is the new ecosystem: There’s a void in investigative journalism, and CPI exists to fill it. You may not know CPI but you know their work — from the Lincoln bedroom story under Clinton, to Halliburton exposes during the Iraq war, to establishing which companies were responsible for the financial meltdown. Much more work forthcoming on this front to show city by city who were the worst predatory lenders. Another ongoing story: the Murtha ethics investigation, which used database journalism to reveal revolving door between congressional staffers and military contractors.

Another endeavor: ICIJ, network of investigative journalists around the world. For instance, exploring illegal tobacco trade, identified factories in Russia, China, Paraguay; stories ran in papers around the globe, also produced ebook version.

Another project: ujima.project.org, collecting UN data on arms sales and aid flows across Africa; data provided to regional journalists; similar projects in Asia, Latin America.

Tranparency is the new accountability, but it takes work.

Domestically, many projects afoot; for instance have sued federal government to uncover “medicare millionaires,” which may result in investigations at the state level. Another project, “states of disclosure”; comparing ethics laws state by state. 24 states have changed ethics laws since project began.

Now on to revenue — this isn’t cheap! Take money from foundations, from individuals; seeking paying relationships with news outlets, though this is proving difficult; 30 to 35 people at the Center, which requires a lot of funding. Center has been sued 3 times for libel, always won, but costs millions; 5 law firms offer pro bono services.

The goal is to keep creating this value — somehow we’ll figure out how to pay for it!

Robert Lang: Only $40b given out in nonprofit sector every year; by comparison private equity adds up to $60 trillion. Private money has to come back into the equation. Consider small counties which are neglected by high-profile philanthropic efforts — who’s going to pay for journalism there?

One answer is a hybrid vehicle, the L3C: low-profit limited liability company. Offers a for-profit vehicle which can draw on private equity pool, but on modified terms: the mission comes before the profit. Foundation money can also play a role in these companies: foundations can invest in for-profits if they also have a non-profit mission, and as long as they’re not engaged in lobbying, more about which later.

This inverts the normal investment scheme for venture capital: VCs will provide money at a fairly low rate of return, in a way that greatly stabilizes the entire endeavor and sustains news for small communities. What you need is patient capital to provide the necessary journalism during this period of transition. The L3C structure allows for different sorts of stakeholders to offer different kinds of support on customized terms. Crucially, this hybrid model preserves a role for advertisers, who are a critical element in local journalism and in small communities.

On the question of the ban on lobbying by non-profits: A project is afoot to redefine newspaper editorializing as falling outside of the definition of lobbying, which would permit newspapers to tap into non-profit funding more easily.

Patrick Kabat: We talk a lot about what markets do well and what they do poorly, about market failure; he and Nabiha will talk about one component of the emerging nonprofit role, the protection and pursuit of “press entitlements.”

The press traditionally stands in for the public’s right of access to information and documents, a long history of jurisprudence establishes this. However local enforcement of press entitlements is eroding along with the revenue base for local journalism; there’s a shortage of capable litigants to pursue press entitlements. Meanwhile, new questions of law are presented by emerging technology.

We’ve always gambled that newspapers would pay for the pursuit of press entitlements, that they would the the litigants of last resort. That gamble is especially dangerous today.

One way to address this is via transparency, via new norms and procedures for making public information available, but this will always fall short. There will always be a need for lawyers to pursue public information. Not-for-profits are perfectly positioned to address this need, to pay for the lawyers who will pursue public information.

Nabiha Syed: Taking the baton from Patrick: a new clinic at Yale provides legal services and support to journalists in pursuit of public information. The volume of work even after a few weeks has been tremendous.

However in some cases journalists haven’t come knocking yet — is it the lawyers’ (or the law students’) role to anticipate issues of importance, to go after public information, and to begin to expose controversies, even before reporters are writing about them? This question demands scrutiny.

James Cutie: The Connecticut News Project will launch publicly in January of 2010. As a veteran of the private equity world he can confirm that the amount of money available is vast. Even on the business side, he has a journalistic sensibility: The always-difficult relationship between the business and editorial sides of news is even more perilous in this new environment and will need to be tested and rethought, though journalism may emerge stronger as a result.

He has been in the media business for 35 years; here are three general observations. 1) At the heart of this discussion over journalism is the well being of democracy itself. 2) The conversation about the future of journalism is itself a democratic one, one which will hear from many voices and see many experiments, and won’t be over anytime soon. 3) Good journalism is a smart business strategy and worthy of long-term investment. Successful journalistic start-ups tend to be driven by passion rather than by an exit strategy.

The CNP will try to reflect all three of these lessons. The CNP is a non-profit, independent journalistic outlet aiming to provide the news and information and opinion critical to the exercise of democracy in Connecticut. A combination of original reporting, links to outside work, and links to original documents; the goal is to increase transparency and accountability for all branches of Connecticut government.

While the website is the flagship, the CNP is not burdened with the advertiser model and can push content to outside partners and platforms, including community organizations and other news outlets.

Key partnerships are with universities and with journalism schools; the CNP will also run an outreach program to mentor (aspiring journalists?) across the state. Funding from private foundations and individual contributions, but eventually also from syndication.

The mission is to remind CT residents that what their representatives do in Hartford and Washington has direct a impact on their lives, and to give them the information needed to hold those representatives accountable.

Questions and answers:

Q1: Do we think that going forward the new models will be sufficient to cover state and local government? Will they do a better or worse job than what we’ve had?

Lang: Accountability will be stronger in a nonprofit world, because there’s less concern for building an audience.

Buzenberg: We don’t and can’t know. It’ll take a lot of foundations and a lot of money to fill the gap.

Kabat: In addition to accountability reporting, we’ll see a lot more advocacy and issue-oriented reporting, unconventional forms of reporting. For instance prosecutors’ offices are essentially newsrooms, and can contribute to the information ecology.

Syed: There’s no shortage of students, and not just journalism students, who will be interested in doing the work of holding government accountable.

Westphal: Some expect a flourishing of corruption. However, we’ll see many different approaches — accountability reporting will be done at much smaller scales than it has in the past, so the potential is there for a richer ecology of accountability.

Cutie: There’s a finite number of actors in a state such as CT, and partnerships will be crucial to doing what’s needed.

Q2: What will hiring practices be like at new endeavors such as CNP? Aren’t different skills necessary than in traditional newsrooms?

Cutie: A diversity of backgrounds and experience is essential. Internships and fellowships play an important role. And CNP’s content will be distributed and developed beyond the newsroom, not locked down. Give me your business cards! We’re focused on the quality of the journalism.

Q3, for Bill Buzenberg: Are you aware of NYT’s DocumentCloud effort, in partnership with ProPublica?

Buzenberg: We’re part of it. CPI’s new initiatives may tie into that as well.

Q4: What about competition with other foundation priorities? Why should a foundation support an ephemeral activity like news, at the expense of its anti-poverty programs for instance?

Buzenberg: It’s not either-or. In fact supporting journalism about an under-covered issue may lead to public action, remedies, solutions.

Lang: It’s true, there’s not unlimited money in the foundation world. That’s why news projects need to use as little of that money as possible, and not to become dependent upon it, because foundations get funding fatigue. You don’t want the smartest person in your organization to be dedicated to raising money.

Westphal: You can make a big difference in non-profit journalism with a fairly small investment, which may appeal to funders who want to make a name for themselves.

Cutie: Good journalism covering the capital, covering schools, etc., really drives and affects public action. Well-articulated, there’s a direct correlation between journalism and traditional foundation missions.

Kabat: Education is the most secure sector in the foundation world, and it’s not too difficult to couch news non-profits in the language of an educational mission.

Q5: The role of universities in journalism will be an increasingly important question — witness the ongoing controversy over the Innocence Project. A mini-conference about this is in the works for the AEJMC annual conference slated for early August, 2010, in Denver. Leonard Witt of the Center for Sustainable Journalism invites queries at lwitt@kennesaw.edu.

Q6: Chitown Daily News failed because it didn’t become sustainable — what are the lessons to draw from its experience?

Westphal: It was a simple matter of not coming up with the transition plan to sustainability. The founder’s own conclusion was that he needed to scale up more quickly and effectively than he was able to.

Lang: There’s a new group in Chicago that’s going to reproduce Chitown’s mission, but as an L3C, precisely in order to better manage that path to sustainability.

Applause! Thanks to all for participating and listening; we’re off to lunch.

The Changing Ecology of News Media
Saturday, 9 am – 11 am.

Good morning! This panel, moderated by Yale ISP’s Chris Anderson, will explore the changing ecology of news media.

How do peer production models work and how well do they perform
traditional journalistic functions? How does a networked public sphere
operate and how does it provide salient information, quality information, and
set agendas for deliberation and discussion? How do digital media change the
relationship between journalists and end users, and the way that news is
gathered, produced, reported, and discussed? How are the profession of
journalism and the professional values traditionally associated with it
changing as a result of digital media?

Jack Balkin, Faculty Director, Knight Law and Media Program, Yale Law
School.

We need to understand democratic theory as it pertains to journalism. What is the consequence of journalism? Three points/questions: One, what is democracy and how does it related to journalism; two, what is the function of newspapers and what will happen to its functions; and three, that the way that newspapers produce public goods is gone with the wind.

The kind of newspapers you want to have is related to what kind of democracy you want to have. In some versions of democracy, such as the elite version of democracy, it is not necessary that people be well informed, only that it is enough to have interested groups and we do not need a public sphere. Elite democracy can also be called the division of labor and theory–or D.o.L.T. In this version, the changing new media ecology is not very important—it is only important that the elite now know how to use new media to correct and check their opponents. Internet-related media are actually pretty good at this, so elite democrats tend to like the new media ecology.

On the other hand, if you vision of democracy is participatory, the changing new media landscape is more of a problem. It allows political junkies to focus on things they care about, and exacerbates the polarization of the attention economy. Civic republicans often worry about distraction and being dumbed down, and tend to be culturally elitist. They face the horse-to-water problem in terms of getting the public to engage politics. The new media ecology is, by in large, bad news for civic republicans. It gives the chance to people to tune out further. In their view, objective visions of journalism will increasingly be displaced by the party press. Alexander Middle John (check name?) thought radio would be the great democracy–no. Civic republicans have so many bad experiences with new media, they now tend to reflexively oppose them. Civic republicans will level the same criticque no matter what the new media ecology looks like.

Liberal pluralists are happy with the gains of pluralism but scared of the loss in power in the new media ecology.

For the cultural democrat, the point of public discourse is to allow people to participate in cultural forms that shape those individuals. Cultural democrats love the new media ecology. What some see as people tuning out, cultural democrats see as people moving to participate in the interests that pertain to them.

Clay Shirky, Graduate Interactive Telecommunications program, NYU.

A story that illustrates the landscape of new media: in 2002, David Weiner, an early proponent of blogging, and Nissenholtz, of the New York Times had a bet: in five years, would there be the top five news stories, according to the AP list, be from the New York Times or from blogs? In 2007, it looked like a tie. The third candidate they had not considered was Wikipedia. It took over during those five years, and won a bet.

In 1768, the Encyclopedia of Brittanica emerges with the breakthrough idea that you do not need to trust an individual author, you can trust an institutional editorial collective. Britannica says that the allegiance of authority can be transferred to a brand, to an institution, to properly vet the encyclopedic product. This idea was revolutionary in its time–that the market was trustworthy enough to vet content; that an evolving corporate institution could manage knowledge work over time.  And the Britannica vision took over in history in both longevity and its continuity. Philosophers call this “the lost socks problem”: if you continually repatch a pair of socks until it no longer contains of its original material, is it the same pair of socks? Britannica has become a different encyclopedia than it was in 1760s, yet it remains the same thing today, a continuity.

The unentered third candidate that Weiner and Niseenholtz failed to recognize in their bet was Wikipedia. It was a rematch of 1760s, the idea that emerged was in trusting the process, not the institution. People trust Wikipedia, why? More is up for grabs, including the nature of authority. Consider the valuable CNN coverage in the late 1980s and 1990s, and then compare it to the craven and almost useless CNN coverage of the June events in Iran: recently people are turning not to CNN but to Wikipedia, and to Twitter for the last six months.

The Associated Press admitted just this year that it considers Wikipedia as a news competitor. This comes five years after, in 2004, Wikipedia became a news outlet after the Tsunami. If you need to find someone in New York City but with no location where would you go? The information booth in Grand Central because it is the central hub for traffic. Wikipedia is that booth now.

I’m not arguing that Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter–all of which use algorithmic authority–actually replace traditional institutional authority. Rather these are using their content, and displacing the monopoly of the idea of authority. In professional news conferences, the slide “people need trusted news institutional brands”–or the sentiment that the public is waiting for us–is shown when the presenter of that slide has run out of ideas.

Authority has a second component besides trustworthiness. Authority is a function that allows you to be wrong and not be blamed when you are wrong.

If I were start a news business today, I would work on a news business that did not work on generating new contents. Instead it would have research and implementation components. The research would ask to ask “what do people trust when they trust algorithmic authority”? And the institutional component…..

Michael Schudson, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

I’ll present today a quasi-utopain vision of journalism’s future. To Jack, I’m not a civic republican, but a liberal pluralist of some sort. To Clay, algorithmic authority may be a new form of authority but it does not displace the others. Two days ago, I had terrible foot pains, and the Internet provided me with a diagnosis, and my doctor confirmed it by telephone. Expertise and authority remain, and coexist with new ones. We even have old-fashioned moral authority. The pope has a job. Although the leaders in our universities no longer appoint faculty, but subdivide it among subcommittees of faculty experts. For more, see our recent report, “Reconstructing American Journalism,” for download here http://tiny.cc/38M9p. Call it “the Downie Report” if you don’t like it, “the Downie-Schudson report” if you do.

My brightest vision of the society is liberal and pluralist, and not wildly democratic. I believe in competence and expertise. I believe there will be a role for it journalism for a long time to come. So what then are the grounds for my optimism?

1. We can do better in journalism because the bar has not been set too high. Of course, there are exceptions. There are a few remarkable achievements in journalism today, dogged and systematic research. Even so, the 40,000 journalists that write news for journalism is most often trivial and redundant. Journalism before the 1960s was narrowly focused, almost empty and uncritical, blind to minorities. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, it began in about 1965. One anecdote: Barbara Rowan (check name!), business editor of The Washington Post said that when he entered the field in 1966, that major advertisements were directed from the newsroom. The business editor was there, for or less, to make the advertisers happy. Payola was acceptable at Christmas time.

2. The competitive news environment, other things equal, is better than a monopoly news environment, which has been the case mostly for the last half century. Now competition is possible, but is not incompatible with cooperation. For example, “The Voice of San Diego,” a philanthropy-funded five years old local news organization, is well known in the area, not because of the web sites, but through cooperative arrangements with local radio and television. The digital era lowers the entry barrier to covering local news. Reporting for the public and not just for the newsroom can be done in the course now.

3. There is a growing availability of relevant data that makes first-class journalism possible throughout the country . This reduces the cost of journalism. Databases of government earmarking information are publicly available. Lev Manovich, the database is to new media what the narrative was to the Victorian age. This comparison is wrong, but interestingly so. Databases have not displaced narratives. Both are in use now. It’s not only the DNA testing but the database behind it that gives DNA testing statistical predictivity. Database journalism began not with Google but with data gathering institutions in the 1970s. These developed in part thanks to the rights oriented ethos of the 1960s. in now returns as aftermath and aftershock in the present database era. Television whatever its weaknesses, presumes a public-ness, and this helps. The Kennedy/Nixon debates are often criticized but it was the first time that two candidates faced each other on the stage, and a stage accessible to the entire country.

Today’s stage include bloggers, citizen journalism, and often Washington-based non-profits that mushroomed in the 1970s. Human rights watch, 1978, has more foreign correspondents than all but a handful of news organizations. Inside the government, reform legislation in the 1970s and 1980s, including campaign finance disclosure reports, and the Inspector General reports, on the corporation of public broadcasting exposes, that have revealed the prejudicial decisions making–all these are available to the journalists or any other member of the motivated public. None of these were available before the 1978 Inspector General Act.

Where do you get your weather news? You get it from the national government weather organization, built in the 1870s. Journalism is different. In the future, newspapers will be leaner and smaller. Many online journalist services will have only a few employees. It may enhance public television and may benefit from NGO and public interest organizations. Moreover it will use databases.

4. Funding can come from every sources. The value of government funding is important. Government funding means government control. Is this or is it not a public broadcasting recording. The government funding does not mean you cannot speak what you want.

5. Journalism is an obsession; information is an obsession. It partly works because
there are thousands of obsessives out there.

Pablo Boczkowski, Northwestern University, Dept. of Communications

An introductory example from Buenos Aires where I do news ethnography. A picture of the snake that swallowed the elephant from the Little Prince. But it is also a graphical representation of the use frequency of his site, which peaks between 8 am to 5 pm. News consumption happens at work. This means a new time and place for the consumption of news. This fact challenges us to rethink the when/where/how/and why of news consumption. I study three stages of research: phase I, production; phase II: product; and phase III: consumption.

Three dimensions of news consumption: news consumption is relatively routine; it occurs mostly in the domestic space and outside of the time of work; and sociability, news is embedded in social relations. But what happens to this convention when it turns out, in fact, that news consumption takes place at work?

The first visit takes place before the start of the work day, with a coffee mug before work begins. Everyone has their own routine, usually scanning one or two or three sites, and click on a handful of stories.

The subsequent news visits happen during the day. They, on the other hand, are not systematic but are driven by particular interests. They are special interest information driven. Most people look at the homepage online. Most people browse or skim, they don’t read. Mostly consume, few contribute. Only two of 63 interviewed admitted to having commented on news sources. News consumption is dominated by the readable web, not the writable web.

Now people can work at an office space or at home. If you work in an office space, they feel a small amount of guilt, and news consumption usage is down. Yet, when they go home, they tend to avoid the computer at home because they associated the computer with work.

How do social relations affect conventional pre-broadcast news consumptions. Nothing has changed. People consume news to have something to have something to conversation with their peers. The water cooler or the lunch conversation is the site of conversation exchange. People tend to avoid politically and culturally sensitive topics. Interestingly, if your conversations tend to be with your coworkers, and your conversations tend to be non-political, then your news inclination tends toward non-political news.

Will people pay for news? No. (Laughter.)

If most news consumption is online and in homepages, people will not pay for that. They may pay for specialized content. Also, political impact: avoidance of sensitive topics drives people away from conversation about current affairs. Three, consumer-drive reform: citizen journalism, pro-am reporting, etc., are feasible only for a relatively small segment of the public. Two standard deviations of the population on both sides are very interested in the debate, and will contribute to it, but they will never represent an appropriate cross-section of the public. The average consumer does not make the prospects for consumer-driven news high.

Jeff Jarvis, Graduate School of Journalism, Knight New Media Program, CUNY.

Algorithmic authority has 107 hits. I will review my own news business models for journalism at CUNY.

We need to question the assumptions of the industrial era of the means of production and distribution of news consumption and production. If we break out of those, news becomes a process, not a product. When we understood news as a process, we get beta-think: this thing is unfinished, help us finish it. It is a statement of humanity and humility, even from Google. The conventional news industry does not have that thinking style. The half-baked blog post requires admitting not only what you know, but what you don’t know, and asking for more. Thus stating what you don’t know is the novelty. The other is inviting collaboration.

The article is no longer the atomic unit of news. You can have topic pages. You can have other things. Hyper-local news is a start, but a hyper-individual news streams, and how do we embed ourselves in streams and extract ourselves to figure out the larger picture.

Structure:
1. The Link Economy vs. the Content Economy. The content economy, post Gutenberg, uses the content as value. The content with no links is of no value in the link economy. The link economy has two values: not content and aggregation, it’s creation of the content and creation of the public. It demands that you make everything open. If you’re not open, you won’t be found. If forces specialization: do what you do best and link to the rest. Be local, in Cincinnati, and link to the rest. It is upto you to figure out what you are going to do. Google is the model, not the enemy.

2. Distributed vs. Centralized. “if the news is that important, it will find me.” It is the new way of the news word. The audience is our distributor; Clay’s audience is his distributor and is his publisher.

3. Ecosystem vs. Institution: at CUNY, we found bloggers who were bringing 100,000 to 200,000$ of revenue in cities of about 50,000, which may be the new model. If a paper dies, what replaces it? Not a single product, but an ecosystem of many, some for-profit, nonprofit, some for volunteerism, that is not institutional. The future of news is entrepreneurial, not institutional.

4. This necessarily leads Network vs. Corporation. Networks versus companies, they may co-exist and constitute themselves.

5. Collaborative vs. Owned. Owned is over. It is dead. Journalism is an act, not an event. The value of transparency is great. Sue Gardner, of Wikipedia, calculated the value of the edits to be conservatively per hour and came to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. It is non-monetary news. That is what is happening to economy. This leads to a new economic viability of journalism. The Gren Bay team whose team is owned by its fans.

The journalist may be an organizer. The X-Prize: what are our problems? 1. Engagement. Being of the community is enabling the community as a platform and as a network to give what it needs. 2. Effectiveness to marketers and to advertisers. Google does not sell scarcity, it does not charge on a limited number of searches. 3. Efficiency. The marginal cost of journalism and new news is zero. The community will work beautifully. Perfectly? No. The base beginning is not what journalists create, but what the community shares with itself, and then journalists curate, find authority, and educate.

Q&A:

Chris Anderson (moderator): some believe “the Internet makes most things about journalism better and easier, except form making money. But we need to figure out the business model, and then we will be OK.” I think the panel would disagree with that.

Clay: it is harder to understand what journalism is. But it does not make it more expensive to let journalism work. The edges of journalism are incredibly blurry.

Jeff: to preserve pre-existing institutions, and to preserve revenue lines.

Pablo: the internet has made it more difficult for journalism to ignore the public. Now, they can no longer ignore the public; the public is more visible.

Michael: newsrooms are obsessively busy. I cannot understand how you can constantly update your stories. I see certain values in constantly posting., you’re getting feedbacks. But there may be a frenetic minus.

Q. Peter Shame, Ohio State: Clay said transparency is accountability is not algorithmic authority but participatory authority? It seems to me the old boss is now the new boss.

Jack: the old boss will not be the new boss, but there will be a new boss. So google is now incredibly powerful, but powerful in a different way than CBS or ABC or twentieth-century newspapers. It is a mistake to claim that paritipation is decentralized and barrier to entry is lower, and then to include that they are subject to less external ontrol. Piracy for example is one obvious example.

Michael: in the journalism school, we assume that the nature of journalism is central to the distribution of power. But in the law school, I think it is not so. Will health care to pass has less to do with the news media than the politicians and law makers, these are powerful sites that remain.

Q. George Brock, City University in London: To summarize: the rival claims ofo different forms of collective intelligence. To speak in defense of the activity formerly known as editing. Journalism as an activity can be done by many in many ways. But editing remains.

Clay: ProPublica started off by opening it up to the news media, but a pretty high percentage of the people that can be David Broder already are David Broder.

Q. Jennifer ?: I think that Yale is a fantastic place to have this conference in that New Haven is becoming a capital of hyper-local journalism. Government 2.0 plays, journalism citizen resources, and other informational sources and tools are available. What other tools are enabling journalists, or what would you like to see?

Clay: The set of tools that I would like to see would put information into the narrative model, into the public story. We need tools that help people tell stories that benefit the public. Otherwise, the well-coordinated special interests will benefit as they did in the 1970s with the rise of the sunshine laws, which in large part benefited the special interest lbbists.

Q. After you take all the MSN reporting out of Wikipedia, there is no bricks in the mortar. It is frequently information that has been paid for by a business model that is now dead.

Jack: Information for a public good will be under-produced in open markets, and are thus in need of support. The New York Times, which now has fewer profits, will turn into something different, called the new New York Times that, like peer organizations, wil need to be subsidized to produce this information necessary to sustain the public ecosystem in question. What mechanisms will make up for the loss in the conventional business model? It is, as Clay and Jeff are saying, not only a distribution mechanisms, but a production mechanism itself. ProPublica are placing articles now in the New york Times.

Pablo: a 24 hour to a 24 minute shift of speed. It’s not only bet practices but worst practices.

Clay: Wikipedia is definitely learning from worst practices, and is constraining new policies on living biographies entries.

Q. Is now a time for a licensed profession?

Clay: let them have licenses, like a certificate, a minimum standard of quality, or to prevent people to participate. It would be impossible to protect against uses.

Michael: I think it is a symbolically bad idea.

Jack: it would probably be illegal in the first amendment law. But whether there is any benefit in the creation of a trade organization. But it is important for the state not to recognize or to indirectly subsidize them.

Q. Linda: Pablo, is this exacerbating the digital divide, in that so many do not have a computer? And to the journalism professors, what is the ethics standards of journalism—can the new media ecology help us move away from the journalism of assertation? Can it help us mature ethically?

Pablo: Digital divide is an important question. There may in fact be a deepening of the digital divide in how news is consumed. However, in developing countries, there is some for whom it helps. Being able to read a newspaper and to be seen with a newspaper builds unseen cultural capital in developing country communities.

Chris: Ethnic media in the US print news has seen some benefit. Ethnic news audiences stand to benefit in the reading of print media, in part because they don’t have a computer.

Q. Fred Dewey, CEO of Cachingal.com. Voluntarily to contribute to content they support, and we divide up the support dprovided among use traffic patterns. We hope that people will individually fund those communities that help. Is this a viable revenue model?

Q. Tom Hermann, Yale business economics in the press: I’ve noticed what seems to be an alarming hoaxes on financial news organizations. Unlike Wikipedia, a tremendous amount of harm can be done in 30 seconds, and how to correct it. How do we deal with this? And how is doing work on this now?

Clay: Absolutely. But I have not yet seen good numerical data because hoaxes are tricky. It is hard to get the denominator for the changing numerator. Yet other things being equal hoaxes get through more easily. Yet sociopaths can saturate the media environment. There are no sociopaths need do not march on the sidewalk with a sign. No one does that now. Third, fact checking is down. But after-the-fact checking is way, way up. We definitely need more research.

Michael: a student mistake, a hoax? The fox news slogan as “fear and balance.” I’m struck by how rapidly everything is changing. The most important thing for journalism research is humility. Where it is going, I really do not know.

Q&A

Silver responding to Larry Grossman’s skepticism – other countries have made Internet access accessible. We just need to copy other successful political movements to make this happen.

I cannot help but agree with with Larry Grossman. Ellen Goodman believes that the case just has to be made. But the reality is that the massive federal deficits will handcuff policymaking for years to come. Goodman wants people to focus on how public broadcasting impacts their lives? How can we do that?

Silver admits that it could take 30 years before we see a real renaissance in public funding for public broadcasting. But that is dependent on constant advocacy and vigilance – and it should not deter us from making the effort.

Lawrence Grossman – Digital Promise Project

Creative Destruction – following up on Paul Bass’s presentation from the last panel

We have heard about the trouble that the news industry is in, the fact of the matter is that we are living through the creative destruction of a $50 billion industry.

The Web is killing off the news media of the 20th industry. Every single monopoly newspapers is in serious financial trouble – not to mention the major news magazine and network television news.

Even the normally wealthy Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week are suffering.

This is evidence of capitalism’s propensity for creative destruction.

Presidential Election, Michael Jackson’s Death, and Shooting spree in Fort Hood. Once the videos are seen, the viewers do not go back to the old media forms.

Six grandchildren from ages 18-28 and never seen any of them read a newspaper in print, let alone purchase a newspaper in print.

Perhaps the most intriguing statistic of the day – for the first time, the annual survey from the Society for the Protection of Journalists – demonstrated that the largest single group of imprisoned journalists was Internet journalists.

We should stop trying to save “old” media. It is dead and it isn’t coming back. So how do we ensure that the new journalism will flourish?

And regardless, we are not looking for a return to the days of party-controlled journalism or Father Coughlin-style radio reporting (think Lou Dobbs but rabid anti-semitism that made Dobb’s xenophobia look like niceties)

Reconstruction of American Journalism Report – focus on local news coverage will require a big increase in funding from Congress. But this is neither a practical or realistic solution. The lack of funding is pathetic and not even close and the high budget deficits make it next to impossible to imagine additional funding for public broadcasting.

Although weak, there are interesting entittes, like the New Haven Independent and the Chicago News Cooperative. But perhaps the pooling of resources that so many papers are engaging in will provide a model for the future.

But the biggest impetus for expansion will come from the new digital technologies themselves.

Laura Walker – General Manager – WNYC, New York

Wins the prize with the first reference to the Kindle.

Describing her subway ride in NYC where only five people were reading a paper newspaper, and three of those were the free am newspapers.

Public Media must aim to preserve local democracy.

3 Specific Areas of focus in the journalistic world
1. Local Coverage
2. Deep Coverage

Investigative Journalism (doesn’t pay and we need to make sure someone is asking those questions)

3. Represent the diverse voices in this country

Forget nostalgia. The New York Times newsroom in 1961 wasn’t all that great. You wouldn’t even know there was an African American person in this country – and the only women were on the Society Pages.

We are no longer just telling a story but we are also initiating and facilitating a conversation.
- This is a major theme that is emerging. Journalism is more of a conversation. But it is not a free flowing conversation with no restraints but rather one led and moderated by the professional journalists – especially those funded by public institutions.

But there are limits. We need to make sure that as we evolve, we maintain very high standards for journalism.

Fort Hood Example – there was a lot of WRONG information coming out from a 30-year-old Twitterer female soldier. She said that the shooter was dead and that there was a second shooter. How do the “journalists” do the fact checking necessary to ensure accuracy?

As the role of the journalist changes, so do the pay models. The pay walls are coming. And in the not-for-profit world, it is key that we come up with sustainable business models. It will help protect against funders with an agenda.

Although there is somewhat of a contradiction here in that arguing for public funding and yet recognizing that can influence the content. The key is mixed partnerships that is not all one or the other.

We have an opportunity and the responsibility to fill the void of local journalism.

We need more public funding – not just for infrastructure – but most importantly, for the CONTENT.

This movement is not going to resonate like suffrage but that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk to Congress and increase our funding.

The recipe for change – thinking big – add 500 reporters in communities across this country. We need to challenge others to come up with plans to really cover their local areas.

Josh Silver – Executive Director of Free Press (organization has been around for 7 years)

Involve the public in very important public policy debates – commercial media is abysmal
The reliance on coveted advertisers can skew the content and get them to shy away from some very important topics.

Reference to Vanity Fair article that Reality programming has cheapened the networks. There is a constant quest for ever-cheaper content.

When we look at this public media question, there is a really simple question
If you look at the divorce of news content and advertising, which has many factors on top of the digital revolution, the question is whether there is sufficient revenue sources (including advertising) to support meaningful national and international newsgathering? Absolutely not!

No matter what, you will lose the majority of professional journalists in this country? Thus we have to look at the public sector as a necessary evil. He uses this term because people generally don’t like the idea of government money funding media. It is sort of like trying to get your kid to eat asparagus. It may not be the desired source but it is the necessary one.

Over the past couple of months, there have been two really good reports that have come out, especially the Knight Commission Report headed by Peter Shane.

In general, across the board, we have to broaden the debate. We need a real movement across this country that really understands how vital journalism is – likens it to the women’s suffrage and Civil Rights movements.

Friendly: “If Public Broadcasting is reliant on an annual appropriation from Congress, it will be a disaster.” And in fact, it has been a disaster.

We have one of the lowest per capita funding of public broadcasting in the developing world.

It is 1/30th or even less of what AIG got in its bailout. A real populist.

If we are going to do this, it has to be non-ideological – conservatives and liberals who can work together in support of an emboldened public media.

Yet there is no explanation of how to make that happen – especially how to get conservatives on board!

The Carnegie Commission had a “we can” and “must do” attitude. History is repeating itself and we must work together to replicate that success.

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967
“that constitute a source of alternative sources for all . . .”

ACCESS to information and networks
OUTREACH to underserved communities
SERVICE public with information

What should public media become given:
technological convergence; information abundance; new publics; participatory capabilities

The media no longer can just reach out but others also have to (and can) reach in

The case for public media:
Market Failures
Non-Market Objectives
$10 billion plus investment

Create where the market fails to create
- not just creation from scratch but also curation (aggregate at large) and then connect

Can public media SAVE journalism?
Digital networks make it more likely but the original 1967 public broadcasting act makes it difficult. Most of the federal support goes to public broadcasting

Many of the most exciting public media projects involve connections with community groups. This echoes the comments by Paul Bass on the previous panel in which he discussed that the citizen journalist is not king – still need the professional journalist – but the citizen (journalist) has a bigger role to play