It’s time for a new fundamental source of funding for community news, Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Rebuild Local News, says. Throughout our history, subscribers and advertisers have been our foundation.
But that foundation has been seriously eroded by the internet and social media, which have stolen community newspapers’ advertising resources. Meanwhile, too many residents have checked out of reading the news, instead focusing on their Facebook posts and other social media.
As they’ve checked out of subscribing to and reading the news, they’ve become increasingly ignorant of what is happening at their schools, cities, and county governments. They are increasingly ignorant of the challenges their communities face and what is being done, or not done, by their local leaders to address those challenges.
Meanwhile, the community newspaper’s ability to provide the real news coverage they need to be informed citizens has been deeply wounded.
In his Editor & Publisher interview, news media innovation critic and observer Jeff Jarvis expresses skepticism of philanthropic funding as a long-term solution for news in America.
“There is no white knight,” Jarvis told E&P. The so-thought white knights, such as Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns The L.A. Times, both put revenue ahead of editorial independence, and undermined the integrity of both publications.
At the small-community level, there are no benevolent billionaires or multimillionaires waiting to energize a newsroom with their funds. The large national philanthropies tend to focus their funds on metropolitan areas or on digital “innovators” whose start-up news sites couldn’t exist in rural areas.
Our small state, regional and local philanthropies have far more demand for the funds than they have available to give. It is not their mission to sustain local news, though we wish they would consider helping. Some have been lending us help in pleading our case to the state Legislature.
Philanthropies can be a bridge, but a temporary one. They change the focus of their giving as new priorities arise, making them an unreliable partner for long-term sustainability.
To ensure local news survives and continues to play its essential role in our representative democracy, Waldman says it’s time for a fourth leg of support, one driven by public policy.
“Yes, I think we’re there,” Waldman said in his own Editor & Publisher (E&P) interview, adding that “no one is suggesting that public policy become the only or even main support to this, but it is, in fact, an important leg of the stool now.”
Waldman told E&P that the market can “still sustain local news in lots of places or portions of it, but he added that some journalism now needs broader civic support.
“Some aspects of local news are basically a public good and they’re really important to communities, and they might not be entirely supported sufficiently by earned revenue,” he said. “And in cases like that, you need philanthropy and public policy.”
Public support for journalism is nothing new. American representative democracy’s founders and later presidents, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, knew their “experiment” would fail without an informed electorate. To ensure citizens were informed, they gave newspapers almost free postal rates and ensured the placement of government advertising.
If we are to highlight whose support is required to sustain community news, we must change what we call it. We must define it by asking, ‘Who has the most to lose if local news disappears?” The simple answer: Citizens. It’s not government support that is required; it is citizen support. Citizens in a representative democracy must have the information they need to make informed decisions and to hold those they elect to public office accountable.
While funding must be broad to help those who provide news in both metropolitan areas and rural communities, there must be parameters for who receives the funds. No hedge fund or massive out-of-state corporation should receive them. Only a business that has local ties, has an office staff in the community, and has staff in that office should be eligible.
Funds must be used to improve the local news gathering and production of the community newspaper, not to enrich investors who are simply mining a community for money to be wired to investors outside the state.
News outlets whose primary purpose is to advance a political, religious, or social agenda should not receive funding.
Waldman told E&P that he “acknowledges the obvious concern: public money can create public pressure. ‘There are very good reasons for our industry to be cautious about going into public policy,’ he said. ‘That is why Rebuild Local News reviews proposals carefully. ‘We are always running every policy we work on through a First Amendment filter, making sure that it holds up,” he said.
Jarvis acknowledged that “government support for journalism is becoming a larger part of the conversation, but he warned that such support carries significant risks. “I think there’s danger in expecting tax support for journalism,” Jarvis said. “Government can give, and government can take away.”
We’ve seen this as politics, empowered by the extreme wealth of a few individuals who seek tens of billions in government contracts, kill renowned and needed programs like CBS’s “60 Minutes.” What is done by one side today can be done by the other side tomorrow. The sanctity of news independence must be vigorously defended even if we don’t always agree with what we read and hear.
Whatever forms of citizen help for community news we adopt, they must be independent of the whims of one party or the other. Citizen support will be essential to the survival of our community news. Citizen support is fundamental to the survival of civic knowledge in our communities and the news that binds us together with a common identity, which is the backbone of working together to get things done to make our communities healthier, safer, and economically sustainable places to live and work.
There is no democracy without independent, vigorous journalism.