What is the Public Press?
A concept for a noncommercial daily newspaper
What do you mean by “noncommercial”?
1) It’s owned and operated as a nonprofit charitable organization. 2) It accepts no (or very little!) advertising
Why no ads?
Adlessness focuses the newspaper on its primary product: the news. It also frees the paper to criticize businesses without fear of scaring off its main source of funding. And eliminating ads reduces paper use by at least 60 percent
Then how can you pay for putting out the newspaper?
Like a public broadcaster, the newspaper raises money from community “pledges,” foundation grants and individual philanthropy. Unlike a public broadcaster, it charges for subscriptions and copies. Nonprofit status means “profits” aren’t siphoned off by investors, and it pays no corporate taxes.
Isn’t ink on dead trees obsolete?
No. Fifty-two million Americans buy a hard-copy newspaper every day
Are there any precedents?
There are at least half a dozen newspapers currently owned or operated by nonprofits, including the St. Petersburg Times, the UK Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor. Two newspapers in this century survived several years without taking ads: Day Book in Chicago in the 1910s and PM in New York in the 1940s. NPR and PBS are also important analogues.
Is this “citizen journalism”?
The newsroom will employ experienced professional journalists. But the paper should reverse-publish selected Web comments, blog posts and reporting.
Will the Public Press be multimedia?
Of course. It will be integrated with a robust, breaking-news Web site and share reporting resources with the local public radio/television station.
How far along is this idea?
We’re still soliciting ideas from journalists, academics, businesspeople and civic leaders. We are still working on building an online community to solicit ideas from hither and yon.
What you could do with a noncommercial newspaper:
• No ads. Saves paper, preserves independence, makes room for more content. Ads are replaced with independent reporting on businesses, services and products.
• Front-page comprehensive index. Page A1 becomes a search “portal” into the rest of the paper. Without ads, readers would no longer be forced to “browse” through every page to find the stories they’re looking for. Page-order listing speeds navigation through printed edition.
• Sober coverage of important news. Free from market pressures, the paper prioritizes informing, not entertaining, the public about goings-on in the neighborhood and around the world.
• “Interactive” print. Incorporates various editions of important news stories — from wire services, local publications in far-away places. Also, extracts pertinent excerpts from blogs, letters and commentaries to run alongside related news stories. This approach respects the intelligence of Web-savvy news readers who already understand the newspaper doesn’t have a monopoly on interpretation.
• Consumer reports. Uses dispatches from the eponymous monthly magazine and provides local listings of prices and quality of goods and services — something ad-driven papers are reluctant to do.
• Free classifieds. Classified ads serve an important community function. But in the age of the Internet, readers are no longer willing to buy ads. A nonprofit paper can instead print for free selected ads already posted on a site such as Craigslist.
• Nonprofit collaborations. The Web site and the print newspaper become “aggregators” for local news from a variety of sources, including public broadcasters, community news Web sites, local and regional think tanks and civic and scientific organizations with limited-circulation publications.
• Add your brainstorms here!
