Soft-spoken, unassuming, humble, kind, and generous, Don Newhouse was at the same time a publisher of vast experience, universal respect, and great strength. I had the great privilege of working for him via his sons, Steven and Michael, at various tasks in the newspaper, magazine, cable, and book arms of the media empire he built with his brother, Si. I entered at a moment of volcanic change in our industry, starting in 1994, just as the commercial browser was introduced and the company decided to forego Prodigy, AOL, et al for this new world wide web.
One clear memory of mine is sitting at a table in Don’s unpretentious Newark office in the Star-Ledger with the family members who oversaw the newspapers, each of them traveling to a different paper and city each month. Thus they were called “The Travelers.” That day, one of the many new competitors to newspapers for their long-lucrative classified business, Monster.com, had reported declining earnings. Don would brook no gloating. He pounded the table to get attention and announced sternly, “People! It’s not coming back.” While others in the industry maintained false hopes, Don was clear-eyed and strategic about the future. He bravely invested in that future.
Under Donald, Steve, and Michael, Advance cut its own path. While others in the industry made online an afterthought next to their legacy newspapers, Advance set up separate companies so their digital entities could explore and exploit every advantage of the internet — experimenting with new models for content and business. We established new brands, including NJ.com and Cleveland.com (URLs the company had the foresight to grab). We were the most interactive of any newspaper-related sites; it was Steve who taught me the value of conversation and connection — more than content — online. Don once told a friend of mine, “Jeff learned everything he knew from Steve.” True that.
It is hard to imagine that there was a time when no one could be sure whether this online/internet thing would last. Just as newspapers, magazines, and books jockeyed for advantage in the early industrialization of American media at the turn of the prior century, so in its digitization at the turn of this century, it was not clear whether print or digital would emerge triumphant. But there came a time when the victor was clear. After I left Advance in 2005 to help start a new journalism school at CUNY, I was brought back to work on a daring project in Ann Arbor.
Another memorable day was spent in a large conference room at Condé Nast’s Times Square headquarters as executives presented the owners with various scenarios for the future of print: what happens if circulation falls by X percent or advertising by Y. It was there and then that Donald and his family and managers decided to take the brave step of making Ann Arbor their first digital-first market, turning the company’s outlet in town into a fully online entity with a newspaper as an ancillary product. Eventually, most every newspaper company would follow Advance’s lead. It was a wrenching decision. I recall witnessing the courage and poignance of that moment. Here was the beloved newspaper company Donald and Si and their generation had inherited from their father and founder, Sam: a precious family heirloom. They loved their newspapers, their histories, and everything they stood for. But as I said, Don was a strong and strategic executive who knew he had to preserve the company and the journalism, not necessarily the presses.
Don was not just a dedicated publisher but also, of course, a doting husband to his beloved Sue, who died in 2015, father to Steve and Michael, and grandfather as well. Other media dynasties have failed to pass down their companies and knowledge to following generations. Not the Newhouses. I watched with enduring admiration as Steve and Michael continued every day to respect and learn from their father, carrying on not just the business but the values and experience that made them and their company stand apart. I am forever grateful for every lesson I learned in turn.
California legislators have amended a bill written by newspaper lobbyists — and made it worse. New York has enacted a law pushed by newspapers to give tax dollars to newspapers — excluding some broadcasters and the true future of news: digital and not-for-profit newsrooms. And Canada further demonstrates what a disaster its newspaper lobbyists have caused with a law that drove news off Facebook and Instagram.
The newspaper industry in both countries is in great measure controlled by hedge funds. The only investment they make is in lobbyists to write protectionist legislation. The publishers blame technology for their own failures, seek payoffs for themselves, and threaten to expand copyright and diminish fair use to the detriment of internet freedoms.
The field of journalism is a disaster from top (The New York Times and day-by-day The Washington Post) to bottom (Gannett, Media News Group, Sinclair). I will leave that lament for another day. Now I want to look at the latest in the legislation and its perils.
California’s tax on reading
The California Journalism Preservation Act — which I dissect in detail in a paper I was commissioned to research for the state Chamber of Commerce — has been amended. It is no longer an explicit link tax.
The bill demands payments from platforms for “accessing” news content online. That is a tax on reading. That is noxious to the Constitution and to an enlightened society.
It requires platforms to negotiate — though it’s not clear with whom — or submit to arbitration, paying a fee — with no cap — to “journalism providers” (undefined) based on number of journalists (including freelancers).
The bill now exempts only one technology company from its reading tax: any platform that earns at least half its revenue from “the manufacturing and sales of company-branded devices and hardware to consumers.” Guess who. That demonstrates that Apple has even better lobbyists than the newspaper industry.
Most of my problems with the bill remain: It still supports newspapers owned by hedge funds and national broadcasting companies. It still ends up supporting many out-of-state and national companies that have someone in California. It has another constitutionally troubling clause forbidding platforms from “retaliating” against news companies with whom they do not forge agreements by no longer linking to or changing ranking or placement of their content. That is a clear violation of the Copyright Act and Supremacy Clause and of the First Amendment. Compelled speech is not free speech. (This law would be locked in the courts for years.) Further, the bill sets no standards for what qualifies as journalism (though we would not want government to define that), opening the door to supporting pink slime and propaganda. Finally, there is no accountability.
Last week, I went to Sacramento — brought there by the Chamber — and spoke with legislative aides in the offices of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold a hearing on the bill on June 25. (I might testify.) I’d never done such a thing and it was a fascinating and heartening exercise in democracy. Their doors were open and they were all ready to listen. I gave them my paper and in conversation presented them with a nightmare scenario and with alternatives.
The nightmare is being endured in Canada, where passage of Bill C-18 led to Meta pulling news off Facebook and Instagram and ending all support for journalism while Google agreed to pay $73 million (US) but ended other support. (More on this below.) My fear for California is that Meta will follow through on the same vow there, banishing news, and that Google will kill its voluntary Google News Initiative (GNI), taking down a number of valued programs it supports. At the ISOJ conference in Austin a few weeks ago, I heard the editor of a major newspaper from California talk about what a good and useful funder GNI has been.
In an L.A. Times report, I was relieved to see Sen. Tom Umberg, chair of the Judiciary Committee, take these concerns to heart. “I believe that we could screw up so that we make it so expensive that the platforms don’t carry [journalism] content,” he said. “That would be catastrophic.” Indeed.
As an alternative, I suggested that the legislators look to something like New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium — which distributes grants based on its goals and the quality of proposals, requiring accountability, instead of automatically doling out money to hedge funds’ and conglomerates’ P&Ls via newsrooms on the basis of say, number of employees. The Consortium’s fund is managed by a board appointed by top public universities and the legislature on a bipartisan basis. Such a fund could underwrite initiatives like a California version of Montclair State’s NJ News Commons, which provides support and training for local news proprietors; projects like KQED’s quality news sharing network; efforts to bring coverage to undercovered communities, addressing a long history of inequity in media; and perhaps investment in startups like Lookout Santa Cruz (winner of a Pulitzer Prize this year). Such a fund could also require accountability.
In Canada and Australia before it, legislation aimed at the platforms did not end up taking effect. Google (in both countries) and Meta (in Australia) voluntarily contributed to news and thus earned exemptions from the laws. Unfortunately, I don’t yet see such an opportunity in California. Google has made an offer involving contributions of unused R&D tax credits, a large contribution to a fund, and help raising further contributions from other tech companies, which could add up to well more than $100 million a year. I hope that legislators will look seriously at what this could accomplish. I also hope they will try to foster collaboration rather than divorce for journalists and technologists — especially now, with the advent of AI. If anyone should enable such cooperation, surely it should be California, headquarters state of the internet.
If such agreement could be reached, legislators may take credit for using their bills as forcing mechanisms to bring tech companies to the table. And what about the newspaper lobbyists? As I told folks in the capitol, the old newspapers no longer set the public agenda. Hell, the once-mightly L.A. Times has a digital market penetration under five percent in L.A. County. Media News Group’s and Gannett’s papers are so thin you could shave with them. They don’t matter anymore. Politicians no longer need fear those who buy ink by the barrel as they now buy it by the pint. In fact, if you really want to tax the people who have ruined newspapers in the state, tax the hedge funds.
New York’s retrograde law
Meanwhile in New York, the legislature at the last minute passed a bill to provide tax money for job credits for journalists in the state. It is a disaster. The law specifies paying only print — yes print — newspapers and some broadcasters. Welcome to 1986. The legislation thus explicitly excludes digital outlets and not-for-profits. According to one account, it was the governor’s office that dictated this exclusion in the last-minute rush to get the bill passed without public comment.
The bill did, to its credit, specifically exclude publicly traded companies from receiving money — which should have left out the hedge funds operating in the state. But then it drilled a loophole by granting an exception to companies that have lost a quarter of circulation or workforce in the last five years, which likely lets the hedge funds back in. For Gannett or Media News Group to get money out of this but not TheCity is shameful.
Digital outlets raised alarms but it was too late; the bill had already been rushed through the legislature and signed into law. Though there is a frantic effort to find loopholes to the loopholes, it is simply true that the law is designed to support only legacy news. It is bad law. I am told by the proprietor of one local and digital site that newspaper publishers in the state’s trade association — which still does not allow dues-paying digital members to even vote — told online folks that they should keep quiet and not rock the boat. I am disturbed to see legacy newspaper publishers holding an event at my former school promoting what they call the “NY Local Journalism Sustainability Act.” They’re trying to rename the law after its birth. The bill was named the NY Newspapers and Broadcast Media Act. The name says it all.
This is what happens when politicians fear publishers and when publishers engage in conflict of interest by seeking favors from those we cover — and when they both shut down comment from the people who are doing the real work of rebuilding local journalism, and from the communities they serve. There is just no excuse for implementing something so shortsighted and retrograde — and in the media capital of the world, of all places.
Canada’s aftermath
Legislative aides in Sacramento told me that newspaper lobbyists and publishers have tried to convince them that Canada was a win for news. That’s simply wrong. As I report in my paper (which, by the way, also has a lot of fun history about copyright, media consolidation, and anticompetitive behavior past), news sites in Canada believe they are worse off, losing Meta’s traffic and the opportunity to find new audience, losing Meta’s financial support for journalism, losing Google’s voluntary grants for journalism, and gaining a bit of Google cash. As Jeff Elgie, head of the very successful local news enterprise Village Media told me: “We will probably get a bit more money than we did before with Facebook and Google combined, but we lost the Facebook traffic. So if you ask me, any day I would say, keep your damn money and give us the Facebook traffic back.”
The deal in Canada called or Google to choose an independent body to decide how to divvy up the money it is now forced to grant. Google just announced the organization that will decide among the roughly 1,400 news outlets that have applied for their silver. Given the large number of recipients, the amount any one outlet will receive is unlikely to be life-changing. I note among applicants a fashion magazine, a B-to-B site, many radio stations (I doubt all of them are cornerstones of journalism), and many, many outlets from one company declared bankrupt by the investors that own the Toronto Star and from the hedge fund that controls the largest chain in the nation, Post Media.
What now?
As I sat down with a policy aide in Sacramento —yes, in the lobby — I said, “I’m a Biden Democrat, but for the next 30 seconds I will sound like a libertarian. I am troubled by any government intervention in speech and especially journalism. But since the discussion has already gone over that wall to subsidize news, I just want to consider how to do it well.”
Supporting news should mean not supporting the hedge funds that are killing newspapers and news. It should mean making judgments about quality, equity, serving underserved communities, and accountability to communities. It should support diversity, innovation, new business models, better listening, and independence. It should support collaboration over retribution against technology companies that did not ruin news — and in any fair exchange, recognize the value of platforms’ links to publishers. If you’re going to pass laws to support journalism, then don’t support news as it was, support news as it could be.
I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news: It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry.
I say this with no joy, no satisfaction at having tried to get newspapers and magazines to change, and much empathy for the journalists and others caught working in a dying sector and those who count on them. But the old news industry is gasping for air. I’m not suggesting performing euthenasia on what is left. Nor do I dance on the grave. In my time running a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, now ending, I have tried to balance support for startups and legacy companies. But I wonder whether it is time stop throwing good money and effort after bad.
The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionnaires — has failed them. Hedge funds have bought up chains and papers, selling everything not bolted down, cutting every possible cost, and taking every penny of cash flow home with them. The one thing the old companies are still investing in is lobbying.
In my testimony in the Senate last week, I engaged in the wishful if futile act of urging the legislators not to enact protectionist legislation written with the industry lobbyists who sat beside me, but instead to support the emergent reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere. Not likely.
The bad news for news is constant. Just in the last month, the Los Angeles Times islaying off 115 people, throwing its newsroom into “chaos” and “mayhem.”Time magazine lays off 15 percent of its unionized editorial staff. Meanwhile, The New York Timeschronicles the pains of billionnaires losing fortunes trying to save old news. I didn’t think it was possible for hedge funds to torture journalism more, but Alden just did something even worse than buying a paper: sellingThe Baltimore Sun to the mini-Murdoch, David Smith, chair of right-wing Sinclair, hater of news and newspapers. In the UK, the Mirror’s circulation has fallen from 5 million to a quarter million, its local papers are sputtering, and the company predicts print will be unsustainble — something I’ve been warning about for two decades. Once-grand Sports Illustrated is being murdered in plain sight. The FCC just announced it is trying to support local TV news, nevermind that audience for local broadcast news is small, old, and dying … and more and more made up of people watching the faux Fox, Sinclair.
Meanwhile, trust in journalism falls to ever-lower records. The Reuters Institute at Oxford tells us that a third of people actively avoid news, and who can blame them? I myself am fed up with old news’ wishful doomsaying, its credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait. Semafor and Gallup report that trust in journalists is falling now among Democrats, too.
And now here comes artificial intelligence to manufacture and devalue that thing we call content, robbing the old news industry of its sense of value and purpose in making the commodity. I’ve been trying to convince news organizations that they are not, or should not be, in content business, but that journalism is instead a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration. I have failed.
Of course, there are exceptions. The Boston Globe and StarTribune seem to be surviving or better. My old colleagues at Advance are innovating in Alabama, living on past print. (In his lengthy lamentation on death in news, Ezra Klein lists Alabama going out of print as a loss when I say it is a victory: life after the death of the press.) The Times is growing on the backs of games and food. The National Trust for Local News is saving papers here and there.
But then there’s Scranton, its paper now in the clutches of Alden. The Washington Post has chroncled their pain. On Feb. 9, I’ll be speaking at the University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum about what to do now. What should I tell them?
I will warn them to expect cutbacks and no investment or innovation at their dear old Times-Tribune. I’ve seen how Alden operates. As a member of a Digital First advisory board a decade ago, I saw the company innovate under John Paton and Jim Brady, but when that didn’t yield a sale in 2015, both of them left and the hedgies proceeded to cut to the marrow.
I come with no solution, no salvation; nothing’s that simple. There are many examples of people trying to find new futures for news. In my Senate testimony, I spoke of the 450 members of the New Jersey News Commons, which I’m proud to have helped start a decade ago at Montclair State University; and the 475 members of LION, the Local Independent Online News Publishers; and the 425 members of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. See also today’s news that The 19th is starting a new network for sharing news (something I tried in New Jersey years ago). This is where innovation in news is occurring: bottom-up, grass-roots efforts emergent in communities.
But as my old friend and colleague Peter Bhatia said when he made the controversial decision of dismissing the editor of the new Houston Landing, “We’re basically putting out a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for success for us for the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.” I don’t know Houston Landing well enough to comment but I do worry that some of the efforts at new news still emulate and aspire to the form and function of old news.
I think we need to be more radical than that, much more radical than I have been.
I note with optimism Mike Masnick’s just released report, The Sky is Rising, about the impact of the internet on media writ large — reading, watching, listening, and playing. It concludes, “More creative content is being produced that ever before. More people are able to create content than ever before, and more people are able to make money doing so…. And almost all of this is thanks to the power of the internet.” The report is talking mostly about entertainment but also notes that according to Census Bureau data, “it appears that internet publishing jobs more than replaced the jobs lost in newspapers and periodicals.”
There can be life after legacy. There will be roles for journalists. But journalism schools must expand their horizon to teach more than making content. How do we serve many publics in a networked world?
For the last two decades at least, I have told newspaper editors and publishers that they must imagine a day when print is no longer sustainable, and if they are not profitable digitally by then, they will die. Now I will tell the good people of Scranton to imagine a day when their paper dies, or is as good as dead.
What then? Citizens will have to come together to understand their needs as a community: for information, yes, and also for understanding, collaboration, accountability, repair, and service. They will need to decide what is best for Scranton and its many communities.
They might find some help, though never enough. Press Forward is bringing $500 million to the effort, but that can stretch only so far. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is doing interesting work granting state funds to bolster innovation. Perhaps Pennsylvania could do likewise. (Though I worry about what equivalent efforts in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma would support.) California, like the US Congress with its JCPA, are talking about helping news — but what they’re actually doing is looking to blackmail tech companies on behalf of legacy news companies and their hedge-fund owners. JCPA specifically excludes news enterprises making less than $100,000 — which is to say most of those hundreds of innovators I listed above. No thank you.
The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in so-called media literacy, but in media leadership, in taking responsibility for the health of their communities and their public discourse. That is a big, complex, nuanced, unsure order that will require marshalling the wisdom of disciplines far beyond journalism: history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, community studies, ethics, design, and the arts.
I am afraid to say that the newspaper and TV and commercial radio station of today are inadequate to the task. Their news was invented in the long century of mass media, which began (as I recount in Magazine) when Frank Munsey realized he could sell his eponymous periodical at a dime and a loss, but profit by selling his audience’s attention to advertisers. Thus was born the attention economy that now corrupts not only old media but new. The internet isn’t killing news. It is killing the mass and the myth that kept media alive all these years: that our attention is a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold.
I say this with reluctance and sadness but also with hope, for I am priviliged to watch some of my alumni try to create a new journalism at human scale, built on listening and serving communities, not nostalgia. How might Scranton do that? That will be up to Scranton, not to the heartless hedge fund — the Dunder-Mifflin of newspapering — that has come to town.
I was called about possibly testifying to a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust regarding technology companies. That’s not happening but I decided to submit a statement to the committee. Here, minus my bio, is what I have to say:
Statement to the Subcommittee:
I write to the committee to express my concern about often well-intentioned but ill-conceived internet regulation, which could have deleterious effects on freedom of expression; which tends to protect incumbent media and technology companies at the expense of innovation and competition; and whose unintended consequence is frequently to grant internet platforms yet greater power. It is worthwhile to examine the effects of internet regulation elsewhere as it is debated here.
Consider, for example, Australia’s media code. The net result, according to the news site Crikey, is that the country’s existing media duopoly of News Corp. and the Nine Network will receive 90 percent of the money being paid by Google and Facebook, both of which are now in the position to decide which news organizations should receive support. Small news startups that might compete with the powerful incumbents receive no protection or support in the law. The Australian code amounts to a link tax — for those companies that link to news are required to pay for news — and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, testified to Australian legislators that such a precedent would “make the web unworkable around the world.” It would break the internet. I regret that in the end, Google and Facebook succumbed to what I see as corporate and political blackmail.
In Europe, various changes to copyright law — Germany’s Leistungsschutzrecht, Spain’s link tax, the EU’s Articles 15 and 17 of the its Directive on Copyright — amount to regulatory capture, for the large internet companies can afford compliance but I have spoken with smaller competitors for whom the expense and effort are crippling. Germany’s NetzDG hate-speech law requires Facebook to decide — in a private company rather than an open courtroom — what speech is manifestly illegal. Europe’s Right to be Forgotten court decision puts Google in the position of deciding what speech should be remembered or forgotten. The UK is considering regulation that would require platforms to take down “legal but harmful speech.”
Online speech is imperiled in many quarters. In Italy, Facebook was forced to reinstate a site for a neo-fascist group. Poland has announced a new law that would require platforms to carry all legal speech, a nightmare that would protect the worst of the net. I would remind us that compelled speech is not free speech. In addition, Singapore instituted a fake-news law, which puts internet companies in the unwanted position of being arbiters of truth. Similarly, India is enacting regulation that would require platforms to take down speech that is false or threatens national unity.
In the United States, Google’s recent announcement that it will forego ad targeting on the web based on third-party data was applauded by privacy advocates who have demonized web cookies as so-called “surveillance capitalism.” But this again amounts to regulatory capture as Google itself has plentiful first-party data about consumer behavior as well as the resources and technical means to innovate in advertising. Incumbent publishers, on the other hand, are stuck without their own first-party data or innovation. I know this because in my university center, I spent years trying to convince publishers to change their product and business strategies to prepare for this day. They generally insisted on relying on their dying print businesses and on third-party ad networks online, and now they are retreating behind paywalls. As a result, just when we need it most, reliable news is becoming a product for the privileged few who can afford it. According to Oxford’s Reuters Institute, only 20 percent of Americans pay for online news and it is a winner-take-all market with most people paying for only one subscription for news — almost two thirds of subscriptions go to just three publishers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Note well that most local newspaper companies in the United States are now controlled by hedge funds, which are not inclined to invest in innovation and which, by their nature, tend to sell assets and draw cash out of these enterprises. If there ever were an attempt to enact an Australia-like law here — if it could overcome clear First Amendment objections — any money resulting from it would end up in the balance sheets of hedge-fund owners and would benefit neither journalism nor innovation at legacy, local news companies.
Thus to grant newspaper owners an exemption from antitrust, as has been discussed, would be profoundly anti-competitive, for it would — as in Australia — entrench the interests of the largest companies on both sides of the table, media and technology.
Similarly, I argue that breaking up major technology companies is an emotional response to the discussion of technology and power. It would not meet the test of rectifying consumer harm, for users benefit tremendously from free, open, and inexpensive services. Also, there is considerable competition; note Microsoft’s role in this debate.
Instead, in both industries — technology and media — the best cure for concerns about size is to encourage and support entrepreneurship and new competition. In my university, I started a first-of-its-kind program in entrepreneurial journalism to teach journalists to do just that. I hope next to turn my attention to internet studies, to foster the design and creation of a next generation of the net: one built not just to speak but to listen, one designed to build bridges rather than battlements, one that protects the benefits of today’s historically unprecedented opportunity to hear voices too long not heard in mass media. There is much work to be done and much opportunity to create competitors to the present proprietors of the net and media. This is where we should focus our attention in policy.
The net is yet young. We don’t fully know what it is and may not for generations, even centuries. Note that the first newspaper was not published until a century and a half after Gutenberg introduced movable type. In my research for a book on the end of the Gutenberg age, I have learned much about the reaction to the introduction of printing. After initial and brief utopian glee at its prospects, authorities worried greatly about print’s power to spread the fake news of the day, to cause unrest (the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War), and to disrupt institutions. I have also learned that governments’ attempts to control printing and thus speech largely failed. In a prescient 1998 paper for the RAND Corporation, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” James Dewar argued persuasively for “a) keeping the Internet unregulated, and b) taking a much more experimental approach to information policy. Societies who regulated the printing press suffered and continue to suffer today in comparison with those who didn’t.”
In what I have said here, it might sound as if I oppose all internet regulation. I do not. I worked for more than a year with a Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression, convened by former FCC Commissioner Susan Ness under the auspices of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Amsterdam. The group included many experts and luminaries, such as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Ambassador Eileen Donahoe, former Estonian President Toomas Ilves, and former members of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and Erika Mann. Our report recommended a flexible framework for internet regulation based on transparency as the basis of accountability as well as the establishment of e-courts to rule on matters of legality where that should occur, in public and in court.
To put this in my terms, I have long argued that both technology and media companies should make covenants of mutual obligation with their users and the public — not just rules for users but promises from the companies for what we may expect of them in building useful, respectful, and productive services and environments. In the model of the Federal Trade Commission, I would favor requiring them to provide data about their implementation and impact so as to hold them accountable to their promises. I also hope for a multistakeholder forum — of technologists, lawmakers, regulators, civil society, academics, and users — to grapple with new and unforeseeable problems, such as pandemics, and to exploit new opportunities.
Internet regulation should not be about punishing power or success but instead about creating the means to work together for a better internet, a better society, a better future.
At the end of an exceptional first week for our new program in News Innovation and Leadership at the Newmark J-school, the students — five managing editors, a VP, a CEO, and many directors among them — said they learned much from teachers and speakers, yes, but the greatest value likely came from each other, from the candid lessons they all shared.
When I first proposed this program about four years ago, I suggested it should offer a smorgasbord of courses to be taken at will. Then I was fortunate enough to recruit Anita Zielina, the ideal news executive, to create and run it. She said (nicely) that I was wrong and that the program had to revolve around a tight cohort of students sharing their education together. She was so right. This week, I watched this group build trust, respect, and empathy — and a common store of knowledge and insight … as well as exasperation.
Next Saturday in Philadelphia, the Tow-Knight Center at Newmark, will take part in the first meeting of an international gathering of product leaders in the news business. Our involvement grows out of one of a handful of communities of practice my colleague Hal Straus has been running for a few years, bringing top product, audience, commerce, and talent-and-inclusion executives in New York together to share — and sympathize — with each other. Aron Pilhofer at Temple and Damon Kiesow at Mizzou generously offered to include us in a collaboration to build a national product organization whose aim is to answer the question, “How do we make news organizations more audience-oriented, data-driven, and product-focused?” In short, how do we save the news business?
These people — like the Social Journalism students I wrote about so proudly last month— are our innovators. They will be our leaders. But they are frustrated by the state of the business and, of course, now and then by their bosses. They see the imperative for change; they have ideas; they are eager to run. But where? What frustrates them — and, in fairness, their bosses — is that the solutions are not evident and thus finding them requires risk, experimentation, failure, and investment of capital we do not have, capital we can acquire these days only from others who bring their own goals and agendas. Does this mean it may require letting some institutions burn to the ground so a radically new journalism can be built from the ashes?
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Gutenberg and the birth and long progress of printing toward its eclipse in our age of digital data and connectivity. And so this morning I came across an article by Otto Fuhrmann, a book and Gutenberg historian and former director of graphic arts at NYU, in the 1926 edition of the Gutenberg Gesellschaft Jahrbuch (Gutenberg Society Yearbook). He wrote about the New York Club of Printing House Craftsmen in a lovely evocation on the value of sharing in our field, which we used to call printing.
“The times are not so far distant when every foreman or executive jealously guarded his technical ‘secrets’, in the mistaken idea that by doing so he would make himself indispensable to his employer,” Fuhrmann writes.
So it was quite natural that the younger element should find out that a business can be run without secrecy, as long as the essential facts are recognized and dealt with. A friend working in a competitor’s shop did not cease to be a friend just because his employer did not like the other employer. And the men [sic*] who had the same or similar problems to meet in the actual running of their employers’ businesses found that an exchange of views and ideas benefitted them without hurting their employers.
It is true that employers first frowned upon the very idea to have their foremen meet other foremen…. However this prejudice is gradually disappearing, in the same measure as the spirit of cooperation and fair dealing, instead of the old method of slamming a competitor, is growing. Naturally, a large city like New York was the best place in which to inaugurate the craftsman idea, and it succeeded as it deserved.
Indeed.
Fuhrmann attributes its success in part to “a gradual change in business ethics that has taken place in the last 15 years.”
This change is signified by the word “service”. It meant, fundamentally, a complete change from the old standpoint of the producer or seller that the customer had to take the goods as they were offered, or do without them. The technique of advertising became more refined, and instead of forcing goods on an unwilling customer it became a fine art, all over the business world, to find out what a customer wanted and to satisfy his desires…. Developed to the n-th degree, “service” today often means anticipating the client’s wishes…
There is nothing new. I have been arguing for years that we should see journalism not as the manufacture of a commodity — content — but instead as a service. Here is Fuhrmann in 1926 arguing the same for printing. And that is the argument made by product people (though I’ll contend that their self-anointed label is a misnomer, for their craft is all about understanding customers’ needs and desires so as to serve them; they don’t make products so much as they serve people).
Fuhrmann notes that he is writing about his craft in a time of deep disruption. The Linotype had been patented only 40 years before. Rotary presses and dry stereotyping came about the same time. Paper made from pulp came not long before. Thus the business of publishing changed greatly, becoming a mass medium. In the shop, all these technologies spread and robbed the craftsman — whose heritage was in centuries of hand composition and hand presses — of their sense of control of their art.
The increasing mechanization tended to lower the skill and to narrow the range of the individuals in the printing business. It came to the point where specialization made it hard to find good all-around craftsmen. So it can be seen that the time was ripe and the background prepared for an attempt to bring the essential factors in our industry together for frank discussion and study of their problems.
What was needed, says Fuhrmann, was for executives to have a full understanding of every technology of the industry — “he must know enough about paper, engraving, electros, binding and finishing processes” — and perspectives from other fields. “That calls for real men of no mean calibre; and, of course, the man with the greatest fund of knowledge and resourcefulness will be the most successful one.”
And so, the club. According to Fuhrmann, monthly meetings began with dinner and entertainment to provide “a good antidote against the tension and the strain of business work and furnish a background for good-fellowship.” The building of a cohort, in our modern tongue. “We particularly lay stress upon the educational feature,” with guests and lectures. And they had an annual dinner dance. (There’ll be no dancing in Philadelphia.) The club, together with other trade associations — the New York Employing Printers’ Association and the Typographical Union — operated well-equipped schools for compositors’ apprentices and “a training course for foremen in the science of modern business management,” with employers “glad to pay the entire amount of tuition, knowing that the benefit to the foremen would ultimately redound to the firm many times over.”
And so, we attempt the same today in our rapidly changing field with meetings and communities of practice and training of journalists and managers. The difference is that from 1926, printing qua printing grew, tremendously so. Its methods and means changed significantly, which had considerable impact on the product and the profession. But it was still printing.
Today, we are leaving the business of printing and text, of content and publication, even of authoring and storytelling. But, let’s be honest, we still refuse to admit it. So the solutions talked about in classes and conferences are all incremental, aimed at getting bosses and boards to allow us to change what we have done enough to keep doing it, to save what we knew rather than start on what we don’t yet know.
Stop. Stop the presses.
The death of the newspaper has been often foretold. Yes, they are still around us. But I must ask to my Twitter peril, are they better off dead than in the hands of hedgies who milk every last drop of ink, sweat, and blood from the end of the diminishing tribe of (pardon me) craftsmen of our field? Are we better off if they die so newspapers and magazines and broadcast channels are not reinvented but journalism can be?
I take full blame myself for not being radical enough in seeking new definitions of journalism. But even that confession is hubristic. For perhaps these definitions are not new but only new to us. Perhaps they should come from other fields — anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, design, philosophy — to help us envision an entirely new service to the public and its conversation. We who have the luxury and privilege of time and salary in universities should reach out to other fields to seek new expressions of society’s goals and problems and new ways to meet them using the new tools at hand.
So when all the young leaders we are gathering above who are eager to run and ask “where?” we should be ready not with answers, for we do not have them, but with audacious suggestions: Try here, try there. Try using the tools of the net and data and listen to the public we serve in new ways. Try understanding how people make decisions individually and together (even against their self-interest) and how to improve what they decide. Try listening to, valuing, and serving the people and communities who were long ignored and left unserved by our old industry, mass media. Try using the tools of connectivity to enhance the public conversation. Try new measures of value based not on our products but on how we help people improve their communities and lives.
And when they try and fail — as they must — we should offer support, convincing their bosses and boards or new funders that there is promise in this direction or that, but only if we explore. Along this journey — which I believe will be long, generations or even centuries long — we need to provide the means to bring together these brave new leaders not just to teach them what we know (so they may challenge it) but also to enable them to teach each other, to share.
* I will apologize for the sexist language of the period and then leave it unchanged and unremarked upon as it presents a picture of a past.
