It’s the same old song, second verse: The old ways of paying for quality journalism are slowly dying and will continue to decline until a new model that works has been created. Though what the best news model looks like is always up for discussion.
American Journalism Review’s senior editor, Carl Sessions Stepp, wrote a bulleted list of ways to succeed with the new newspaper. "Maybe it Is Time to Panic," Stepp says.
A few highlights:
- Make it better not worse
- Make it astonishingly, irresistibly better
- Make it easier, not harder, to use and enjoy
- Involve everyone from school kids to staff members to senior subscribers in the ultimate group science project of creating the greatest news outlets imaginable
Hey, he’s singing our song!
Nonprofit and noncommercial journalism dovetail nicely with the outline Stepp provides. Like the other leading journalism publications, Columbia Journalism Review and Quill, AJR has long been hunting for solutions to the business-model mess. In 2004 Stepp spent some time at the St. Petersburg Times (owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute) and NPR, and wrote in a forward-thinking piece titled, "Journalism Without Profit Margins," that the staff working in nonprofit newsrooms seem to have an enhanced "shared ethic and enthusiasm" to make the product the best it can be. In that piece, Stepp wrote:
My own observation, based on years of working in, visiting and studying news operations, is that noncommercial journalists have no monopoly on commitment or quality. Large media corporations have the resources and clout for in-depth coverage, investigations and enterprise. No matter who pays their salaries, journalists tend by tribal habit to be aggressive, competitive and mindful of public service.
Yet in visiting less-commercial newsrooms and interviewing their journalists, I was struck by the palpable sense of relief and liberation, the exhilaration of professional autonomy.
When journalists feel in control, audiences gain something extra and special: news, analysis and opinion tailored to community and civic needs by professionals who care deeply.
Following up on these observations by writing a laundry list of ways to improve newspapers is a start. But the time to implement new ideas is now. Let’s hope that "panic" is only the first emotional response to dealing with this crisis, not the last.
