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A journalist’s prayer: bailout

Posted by Andrew Nachison on Dec 11, 2008 in Business Models, Game Changers 09, Journalism | 2 comments

Mark I. Pinsky, a former religion reporter for Tribune Co.’s Orlando Sentinel, makes a modest proposal in TNR.com for a government-funded program to hire out-of-work journalists.

The historical precedent is the Federal Writers Project, which hired 6,000 writers from 1935 to 1939 – among whom were some rising American literary superstars, including John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Now, with 15,000+ jobs lost in U.S. newspaper companies in 2008 alone, along with thousands of others at magazines, web sites, book publishers and ad agencies, Pinsky says the U.S. needs a new program to put at least some unemployed writers to work.

Like Detroit’s troubled Big Three automakers, federal intervention to save the newspaper and magazine industries are highly problematic, at best. Ink-on-paper periodicals are never coming back, and it may be some time before the web can provide well-paying jobs with health benefits – if it ever will. Until then, providing some way to provide young journalists a way to get started, or displaced media workers a way to transition to new occupations, or to retirement, might help – and serve the nation in the process.

Is this desperation or inspiration? I’m a writer and know many others. But my kids go to schools facing drastic budget cuts, including teacher layoffs, elimination of arts programs and more. Would I rather see 6,000 writers hired, or 6,000 teachers? Honestly: Teachers.

There’s an unspoken implication to Pinsky’s bailout pipedream: that the business case for journalism has vanished, so non-commercial subsidies – government, charity, whatever – will need to fill the void. But there’s a big difference between today’s market and 1935. For starters, a number of U.S. philanthropies built from 20th Century business empires – Knight, McCormick and MacArthur, for instance – subsidize journalism, writers and the arts on a scale that was unheard of during the Great Depression. And new non-commercial sources of journalism are on the rise: like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Witness, both of them finalists for 2009 We Media Game Changers Awards. And there’s much more to come. Every company is a media company in the connected culture.

I hear in Pinsky’s words a prayer for those who can’t see the worldwide proliferation of story-telling and social entrepreneurship as anything other than the end of good times.

Pinsky’s bailout pitch implies but misses some good questions. What’s the right number of paid, trained professional journalists necessary for a vibrant, functioning democracy? Or unpaid, part-time muckrakers, video bloggers and opinion makers who work along side them? Or writers, researchers and policy activists who are often at the base of the journalistic food web – and who no longer need to channel their work through institutional journalists to get attention? Or poets, painters, photographers, designers, sculptors, actors and dancers, for that matter?

The deeper truth of Pinsky’s proposal is its pathos – disorientation and dissociation from a profession and an industry that once made such simple sense. Newspapers employed, journalists worked. Never mind the nasty business that made all that possible – or the fortunes amassed along the way. Pinsky and many others were once part of a simple, comfortable story that could be passed from one generation to the next. That story is over.

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Andrew Nachison

Andrew is co-founder of We Media and of iFOCOS, a media think tank and futures lab. Find him on LinkedIn.

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http://www.markpinsky.com Mark I. Pinsky

Andrew,
You raise some interesting and fair questions and issues. I go into more detail this weekend on NPR’s “On the Media,” and another writer addresses similar issues in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’m told, an essay I assume was commissioned before mine appeared.
By the way, I’d pick teachers over journalists as well.
In the unlikely event the program comes into being, I envision a cross between Pell and and National Endowment for the Humanities grants, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 (for groups). Because the arts are by nature subjective, grants in those areas might be more difficult to judge.
Also, the original title for my TNR essay was, “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” The editor probably thought it was too cutesy.
What I was getting at in the title was journalism is shape shifting. I’m not sure where it’s going either. The new-style FWP would be strictly transitional, for displaced workers, and in no way intended to bail out ink-on-paper journalism, a lost cause, dying of partially self-inflicted wounds.
However, for me — an unreconstructed geezer — much of what appears in the independent blogosphere is karaoke journalism, produced by hobbyists (albeit some well-informed), who do not sign their real names.
Under market capitalism, a thing’s worth is determined by what people are willing to pay for it. Free lancer or staff writer, for 40 years I’ve always been paid for my journalism. How much would you pay for an anonymous blog post?
That said, I still do occasional opinion pieces, but have shifted full time to writing nonfiction books. So far, there is no expectation that they should be provided free to consumers, like most other content on the web. As with my first three books, I write without significant advances. If my work is any good, people buy it and I earn money through royalties (200,000 copies in print so far). In its most fundamental form, that is how the market works,and that is how I now earn my living. From time to time I also teach and lecture, where my compensation is likewise performance-based.
Mark I. Pinsky
http://www.wemedia.com Andrew Nachison

Mark, thanks for the further thinking. You might want to think about funding models. Rather than a bailout scenario for a down economy, you might be looking at a funding proposition for digital media – based on license/fees/tax attached to ISP or any networking data service. A U.S. media fund based on such a tax could invest in journalism, community media, journalism education and a range of services – not unlike the TV tax model for the BBC, or the Universal Service Fund in the US – http://www.usac.org/ – which distributes telecom fees used to fund rural telecom services.