It’s no secret newspapers are battling a major slump. Declining ad revenue means smaller newspapers, fewer stories, even fewer reporters. This change will affect both for-profit and nonprofit newspapers. Dr. Jay Hamilton, Charles S. Sydnor professor of public policy at Duke University and director of DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, discussed the changing media picture in a 2009 presentation to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. He also discussed that topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: The future for for-profit newspapers has been looking pretty dicey for a while now. What are some of the trends that you have been following very closely?
Hamilton: If you look across the country, you see newsroom cuts, much like you see at the [Raleigh] News & Observer. Over the last 4 1/2 years at the N&O, they’ve gone from about 260 to 130 people in the newsroom. That’s because you’ve got Craigslist, so people don’t advertise in classifieds. You’ve got the great recession, and there went the car and the housing ads. So you have a declining revenue stream, but the stories are still very expensive to create.
Kokai: Given those circumstances, what are we seeing happening in terms of coverage and the availability of newspapers?
Hamilton: Especially at the state and local level, this is a problem. The New York Times and The Washington Post and national newspapers can aggregate up across the country people who are interested in international or foreign policy or national stories. But the question that we’re seeing in many different cities across the country is: who is willing to pay attention to the accountability stories about the local school board, about zoning, and things like that? So when the newspapers have to cut, what they’re often doing is cutting public-affairs reporting, which is expensive to create and which may not generate as many eyeballs as other types of stories.
Kokai: The meat of your presentation was dealing with the question of how does this get covered? How do these important issues for citizens get resolved in terms of news coverage? And you mentioned that there are several possibilities.
Hamilton: Online we are seeing nonprofit city reporting units being approved by the IRS and being founded in areas like Minneapolis or San Diego. You have 15 or 16 people working with a budget of $1 million to $2 million, and they’re covering — in part through grants from foundations or donations — they’re covering civic life in their area. The question that we posed at a nonprofit media conference that we held at Duke was: could the IRS provide better clarity on whether they would accept large metropolitan daily newspapers as nonprofits?
Kokai: What are some of the ideas that flow out of that conference?
Hamilton: Well, it could be a spectrum. One is, you could have a newspaper that’s run as a nonprofit. You could have a company called an L3C that would have foundation investors, or socially conscious investors, or people looking for a market return. Those three different types of people could get together and form a company that they expect to make low profits. Or you could actually have foundations or nonprofits subsidizing a beat reporter at a newspaper, or a series of stories, or an investigative unit. So it might run the gamut — a nonprofit owns the outlet, to a nonprofit subsidizes the creation of stories, and those stories are then picked up by the for-profit newspapers.
Kokai: This is an issue for the folks who run Carolina Journal Radio and the Carolina Journal print publication [and] CarolinaJournal.com as well. What do you see in terms of the future of organizations such as our parent organization, the John Locke Foundation, or folks from a different political ideology, becoming players in this market?
Hamilton: I think we are going from a world where people from your foundation would be quoted in a story, and we’ve evolved to a world where you all do studies and reports that have often generated stories. But now you’re actually generating the full story. If you look at, for instance, the Kaiser Family Foundation, they’ve put reporters in Washington and created their own news service. So I think, in the future, you’re going to find more information about government provided by a nonprofit. And essentially, that does make some people uncomfortable. But the idea to me is that saying information wants to be free isn’t really true because somebody has to create that information. Somebody has to pay their bills by creating the information. It could be an advertiser who wants to get your attention. It could be a political party who wants to get your vote, or it could be a nonprofit who wants to change the set of ideas that you’re thinking about.
Kokai: Do you see in the future the likelihood that groups of various perspectives will all be contributing to this debate and dialogue to a greater extent than they are today?
Hamilton: I do. I think that you could see the American Enterprise Institute, Cato, Heritage, but you also see the Center for American Progress and Brookings and Human Rights Watch. So I think all of those folks are realizing the people that we used to call in the media aren’t there anymore. Nobody is answering the phone because they’re gone. They’ve been fired. So they’re going to take the next step of taking the information and creating it, and then what it will be is the market for reputation, because that is what will keep the information accurate.
Kokai: In other words, the players who are putting out the information will not be particularly important if the information itself is seen to be inaccurate.
Hamilton: Yes. What it means is that you might be less likely to see something that you disagree with because you will be able to segment your media choices. So you’re more likely to get the world-view reflected back to you that you began with. But it also means that the set of facts that are generated, especially ones that are incorporated in the for-profit media, those facts will be policed by the market for reputation.
Kokai: How will the consumers of news have to react to this changing situation? In the current situation, you pick up your local paper. You might have a sense one way or the other about its bias, but you can factor that in to the way you read the stories. When you’re getting information now from a bunch of different groups, how will you as a consumer decide, “OK, I believe this, or I’m going to cast a little bit more doubt on this?”
Hamilton: I think it’s going to depend on the type of story. If there are … accountability stories where there is evidence generated that this program was inefficient or these legislators had a conflict of interest — those I’m more confident that you’ll be able to determine the accuracy. Broader questions about world-view, I think that you’re headed for a world where people are going to see the media as more biased. Because, essentially, as you get more outlets, you get more viewpoints, and there is a bigger gap between what other people are believing and what you’re believing. So in terms of some types of stories, I believe that this market will work pretty well. In terms of more opinion or value-laden, I think we’re going to be in a world where people will always believe there’s strong bias.
Kokai: Some people will say this is a bad thing. The way things are moving is in the wrong direction. What do you think?
Hamilton: I think that there is hope in the sense that more data are out there. And with that data, we can hold government potentially more accountable if we use the tools that the Web is giving us. It’s not a guarantee. The government may try to keep the information hidden. But I’m pretty optimistic that evolutions in technology and data availability will help us hold government more accountable.