Information wants to be free, reporters want to be paid, Part 7

While reporters and editors at newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations whisper by the water cooler about their escape plans when the ax falls, a few of us are contemplating what comes after we dinosaurs succumb.

It may not merely be the death of newspapers, but the very death of objective news as we know it. (That model is only a century or so old anyway, right?)

Salon.com Executive Editor Gary Kamiya weighs in with some interesting philosophical takes on whither news in a lengthy article titled “The death of the news.”

In an observation that sounds remarkably familiar, Kamiya describes “online journalism” as parasitic, noting that 80 percent or more of online news originates in print.

While the Internet is the usual suspect when people gather around the chalk outline where another newspaper used to be, Kamiya addresses in his best reverse Rolling Stones analogy what the future might hold when the Internet is king.

“The Internet gives readers what they want; newspapers give them what they need,” Kamiya writes. “And in a culture where the almighty market is always right, you can always get what you want — but you can't always get what you need. In their bottom-line desperation, newspapers are imitating the Internet. As Michael Hirschorn pointed out in a recent Atlantic article, papers are giving readers and advertisers what they think they want, blowing all their money on lifestyle and ‘consumer-friendly’ pieces rather than on in-depth reporting.

“If capitalism wins the battle, the result will be an unregulated marketplace of ideas in which consumers choose their own news — in effect, choose their own reality. Ironically, conservative devotees of the free market would find themselves living in a postmodern world right out of a seminar taught by Jacques Derrida. Nietzsche's credo that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ will become our epistemological motto. In this deconstructed universe, not just readers, but the very idea of objective reality, would be the ultimate victim.”

Isn’t a society nothing more than its collective common ideals, beliefs and morality?

Hirschorn is no Pollyanna on this doomsday topic. While some see the Internet as the savior of news, he put the pencil to it and got red ink.

He notes the The New York Times had in October $1 billion in debt and only $46 million in cash reserves and conceivably could default on $400 million debt.

While writing specifically about The Times, he observes:

“The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the (New York Times) paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

“If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere.”

Some people are casting about for answers, for a business model, but none has the answer yet.

One-man digital media guru Jack Myers has launched what he calls “The Campaign for a Sustainable Free Press.”

“The proliferation of new media technologies — and the media industry's failure to develop new business models to support them — are endangering our nation's ability to sustain a free press unfettered by government control,” Myers accurately states. “With media options splintering, advertising investments eroding, and subscription models deteriorating, media companies can no longer depend on their traditional revenue sources for economic support. Media companies simply cannot sustain their profitability when they have the perfect storm trifecta: a long-term global economic downturn; debilitating debt load; and the systemic issues wrought by the forward march of media technology. Consumers are better off and in many ways society and culture are better off. But there has been little consideration of the economic viability or impact of media technologies on the media economy, and the traditional business models of the past 60 years are collapsing, if they haven't already collapsed. Many media and advertising-dependent companies will be forced into bankruptcy and liquidation in the next 36 months. Almost all are scaling back their costs and investments. Even the mention of government bailouts for media companies leads to very real concerns about censorship and interference, and both federal and state governments are already pursuing onerous taxation on advertising.”

Is the answer micropayments, online subscriptions, targeted advertising, endowments by foundations, newsletters or something as yet unimagined? It is hard to envision any of these really working when we are rearing a generation of nonreaders of news, objective or otherwise.

Woe is me … and you.