How sorry are you that newspapers are dying? Dan Gillmor ain't.
I worry about not having a nice inky newspaper to read over Sunday (or any) breakfast, but Gillmor takes aim at the big, greedy side of the media conglomerates. He sees web-based journalism replacing (and maybe doing a better job than) the old model. I wonder, though, if there’s no editor to screen and vet the material and uphold some journalistic standards, how can we have the same trust in the stories? Would Woodward & Bernstein have the same credibility today if they broke the Watergate story on a blog? Food for thought.
Journalism monopoly was also a market failure,
Eroding newspaper business models represent markets that are working, not just failing
More than one speaker at today’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism has used the expression “market failure” to describe the eroding business model of local newspapers. Perhaps they’ve picked up on the FTC’s Federal Register Notice describing the purpose for this months-long initiative, in which economists say that “public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.”
There’s some truth in this, even though it’s far too early to assume that current trends will lead over the long term to less trustworthy information in the public affairs realm. (I believe the opposite, but the jury’s definitely out on this.) Framing the issue this way also buys into the mythology that we had a Golden Age of Journalism with ample public affairs reporting; even the biggest daily newspapers rarely covered governments outside several core jurisdictions in their markets.
For the privileged few journalists who lived in that era’s once-warm embrace, and especially for their employers, professional life was almost perfect — because that was an era of fabulously profitable monopolies and oligopolies. The public affairs journalism was real, and sometimes brilliant work that made a huge difference in local and national affairs. But relatively speaking to the available financial resources, it was a typically a modest spinoff of near-absolute market power the journalism companies boasted in the communities they claimed to (and sometimes did) serve.
But there’s another way to look at the media marketplace of those days. And from several other perspectives it’s safe to say that current trends amount to the overdue correction: that the pined-after Golden Age was in key ways itself the era of market failure.
If you were a local business that wanted broad reach into the community, you essentially had to pay the extortionate and always-rising display advertisement prices newspapers charged or the equally extortionate broadcast rates local TV affiliates could command. If you were an individual trying to sell a car or household item or rent out a spare room, you paid absurdly high prices for classified ads.ARTICLE CONTINUES…
