Can Ownership Make a Difference
What do reformers really mean by the term ‘corporate media?’ Do forms of ownership make a difference? A dessert-and-discussion town meeting session with corporate governance, family ownership and non-profit experts unpacking assumptions about this issue. Convener: Vin Crosbie, Corante Media Hub (not shown above). The panel included, shown left-to-right above: Paul Bass, New Haven Independent; Rick Edmonds, The Poynter Institute; Christopher Mackin of Ownership Associates; Dave Carlson, Univ. of Florida/SPJ; Richard Anderson, VillageSoup.com; Chris Satullo, editorial-page editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer; and Joseph McQuaid, president, The Loeb School and the New Hampshire Union Leader.
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(due to a technical error, the first 25 minutes are missing)
Annotation of video by Bill Densmore, editor, the Media Giraffe Project
The initial presentations of Anderson, Carlson, McQuaid, Satullo and Mackin are not recorded because of an inadvertent technical error.
The tape begins midway through Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute describing the state of the newspaper industry. He suggests that the dismemberment of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in spring, 2006 showed there is interest among private, local owners in acquiring dailies. Edmonds says daily news managements have now really made online their No. 1 priority.
The microphone then goes to Paul Bass, owner/editor of the New Haven Independent, a local online news site funded by foundation grants and its users. Bass, a former daily and alternative-weekly writer-editor, talks about his sense of optimism about the future of journalism. He asks, do newspapers and the profit motive work anymore?
He said he decided to fund The Independent as National Public Radio’s All Things Considered operates — journalism supported by people who have self interest at stake. He went to health-care foundations to support health-care coverage. He has a budget of $120,000 a year and has another fulltime reporter, a couple of free-lancers and a webmaster. He said he has broken a lot of stories. “I think that for profit newspapers is largely a bad idea at this point,” he said.
TEXT EXCERPTS OF PAUL BASS’ REMARKS
Convener Vin Crosbie then transitions to Q&A from the audience.
Mark Karlin of BuzzFlash.COM in Chicago, asks about an ownership model like The Guardian, in Great Britain, which he said is owned by a public trust. With the Chandler Family seeking to divest its stake in Tribune Company (putting pressure on a public-stock ownership model), is the Guardian model worth looking at?
Edmonds speaks. Then Dave Carlson, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, talks about “his dream” of social investing for the news industry, similar to so-called “green funds.” He says this would make journalism Job No. 1 and profits Job No. 2.
Terry Mollner, of Shutesbury, Mass., and the Trusteeship Institute, a funder of the Calvert Social Investment Fund, speaks next from the audience. “There is another possibility,” he says. “Rather than be for profit or not for profit . . . you could end up with a company that is totally for profit in its structure, but not in its priorities.” He said the company’s first priority might be to “nature”, and the second to investors and profits. He said 80% of Wall Street investors want to have nice, safe, steady return; only 20% want a outsized big return. He says that’s a lot of investors who might purchase such a fund. “You wouldn’t have to change anything about the system; you would just have a different set of priorities,” he said. “I think it would also be a good idea in this structure, which is to have the board of directors be what it was originally called . . . (originally the New England corporation was one vote per person, not per share) . . . the board of trustees again.” He suggests a board of trustees oversee the board of directors, who run the company. “I think this is going to be the rage in corporate America over the next 15 or 20 years.”
Next Jessica Duda of the Center for Social Media at American University, asks about the costs of investigative journalism. What does it cost?
Chris Satullo, panelist and editorial-page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, responds: You have to be able to tolerate dry holes. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, he said, “we lost our margin to tolerate the failure . . . we just can’t afford that anymore . . . we don’t have enough people anymore.” It can take a few days or a year to do an investigative piece.
Eric Deggans, media columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, reporting on the summit, asks if there is some way to reduce the tension between mainstream media journalists who are optimistic they can made a transition to new forms of journalism, and the new-media practitioners who “just want to blow it all up.”
Edmonds replies that the old media may have been complacent but are not anymore. There are some things it can do with its institutional heft and skills that the new web-only practitioners probably can’t do anytime soon, he adds. As an example, he cites the pedophile-priest stories pursued by The Boston Globe.
Paul Bass thinks there is room for both: He cites as innovative examples Greensboro, Bakersfield and the Washington Post. He thinks the innovation will come from the web, that the print companies are dinosaurs.
Dave Carlson says it makes it sound as if all journalists are out there trying to take the money and run. He says the problem which plagues the industry is that mainstream media has not had to be innovative and therefore isn’t innovative. “Realistically newspapers should have been eBay, Monster.com, Priceline, and I think frankly they should have been DSL . . . why do they only toss a newspaper out of those trucks?”
Yolanda Hippensteel of FreePress.Net asks: Is it right that the problem is the owners, not the journalists? She makes arguments about media consolidation. She asks if anyone on the panel can talk about ownership restrictions pro or con.
Joe McQuaid, president and publisher of the Union Leader Corp. and the Loeb School in Manchester, N.H., says there is another issue: Getting Americans interested in the workings of government. He says civics aren’t taught in school; citizens don’t get involved in government; they’re too busy; they don’t vote; they often seem uninterested in the news. “We’ve really go to find more ways to be creative about how we go about it,” he said. In Manchester, N.H. there is now no local media actively reporting other than the Union Leader. “We have a lot of problems to get around . . . (but)I don’t think it is a good idea to let the TV and the radio and the newspaper and Internet all be owned by the same people,” says McQuaid.
TEXT EXCERPT OF MCQUAID’S REMARKS
Paul Bass replies: “I beg to differ.” He says over the years he has found people love local news when it is not done in a boring way. He says they don’t vote because they don’t see a choice. “While I’m a child of the Ben Bagdikian era and I’ve learned to hate consolidation, I do think it is time to stop wining about it. The Internet is our possibility . . . yea, it stinks, they destroyed our local media, but we don’t have to keep making all our charts talking about how fewer companies own it and talk in long boring speeches about it. We can start our own websites, we can do what we believe about it. Because tools are cheap now. You don’t have to own a printing press anymore.”
Andrea Frantz, journalism professor, Wilkes [Pa.] University asks: What should we be teaching journalists; what do they need to be looking for and at in a future employer?
Paul Bass replies: Focus on the skillset. The next generation has to be able to do audio, video and be able to write well.
Chris Satullo replies: His advice to his just-graduated daughter pursuing journalism is to focus on the work she wants to do, not the size of the paper or the location. “I’m going to get Paul’s card and send her up to him and see how that goes, because that’s the kind of work she wants to do,” says Satullo. “And I know I’m going be supporting her for the next 10 years anyhow, so she might as well love what she’s doing.”
Josh Wilson of Newsdek.org wonders if there is a great opportunity for the philanthropic community to invest in journalism, to think of the field as a utility necessary to democracy, rather than as a for-profit industry. Could philanthropy invest into a large endowment pool which would be dedicated to supporting local journalism? Wilson thinks the Carnegie News21 initiative seems to be a bit of a subsidy for large journalism organizations. Sites NewsDesk.org needs the support, he says. He would like to have funders come to them instead of the sites having to seek out funders.
DENSMORE EDITING NOTE: The Knight Foundation is planning to offer funding to local news initiatives
An audience member asks if the panelists are worried that newspapers, who have been so critical of the Internet, and now may “get it” have blown it by waiting too long.
Edmonds replies that it’s a reasonable point. It’s a late start. But he says it is unreasonable to expect dramatic innovation from such a mature industry. Edmonds exact remarks:
” . . . [T]he problem that plagues the industry is that mainstream media are not very innovative, they have not had to be innovative and it is very difficult to change the way of thinking. There were plenty of people in the newspaper industry 25 years ago who pointed the course, frankly, who saw that newspapers were in the information business not in the newspaper business. But it is very difficult to change the corporate wheels, to change those directions. Realistically newspapers should have been eBay, they should have been Monster.com, they should have been PriceLine and frankly I actually think they should have been DSL. Every newspaper in American runs trucks up and down every street in America every day. Why do they only toss a newspaper out of those trucks. It doesn’t make sense to me. But it seems to make sense to them.”
Dave Carlson observes: “Time grows short would be my answer to the question. I think that the competition grows every day and I think if newspapers want to survive for the long term they are going to have to consider at the most basic level the way they do their jobs. The way they produce their product. The lion’s majority, probably 90% of newspaper websites, are still updated once per day, just like it’s a newspaper going out on paper in print being delivered to people’s doorsteps. I mean, how plain can it be that that’s not the way it is anymore? Newspapers, all media companies, now have to operate like wire services — there is a deadline every minute, not every day. And if they don’t get with that program sometime soon they are in some real danger. And I do want to say I love newspapers, I come from newspapers, I want to see newspapers survive. But I am frightened for their future as they continue to have their heads in the sand, frankly.”
From the audience, Rob Williams, president of the Action Coalition for Media Education asks how many panelists are following the network neutrality debate? “Lest we get too excited about the Internet setting us free. Five years ago my ACME colleague, Bob McCannon was in a closed-door meeting with Quest executives. And this guy said, Here is what we want: 70,000 high speed, broadband, digital channels, a digital high-speed cocoon, out of which no one will want to go. Digital Dobly Stereo. And guess what, you’ve gotta pay to play. There will be no such thing as a free World Wide Web anymore, because we will be in charge of determining who will gain access and at what speed they will gain access. And when my colleague asked him, well, what’s going to happen to the Internet, the Quest executive said the Internet will go the way of the buggy whip. So I think we have to think really carefully about the Internet and I think that as my colleague Yolande just pointed out, media reform is central to 21st-century journalism if, as Paul pointed out, we are serious about using the Internet to innovate and as an entrepreneurial tool. I think all of us have to be involved in that fight.”
Crosbie: “That’s an interesting point. We don’t want the ownership to be the cable company or telcos — the ownership of local media.”