The question of how societies should pay for their journalism – at least to compensate professional journalists in attempts to eradicate the credibility concerns – was addressed very recently by Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. He was speaking in London and said that the greatest threat that independent writers and bloggers pose was found more in the "failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers."
This is coming from The New York Times – where credibility issues have presented themselves, as they do in any news source from time to time. This notion of the Newspaper-as-Establishment-and-Stature is false, and the issues around fragmentation in journalism and reporting are not the newspaper industry’s issues to resolve. Time and again the newspaper establishment lumbers and misses the point – and this is reflected most acutely in the sell-sell-sell recommendations now put upon The New York Times Company.
The public in any free society deserves the highest quality reporting across all given media buckets – print, television, web, radio. No single news source in any of these media buckets is consistently more credible or more able than another. This is important to understand against the wide varieties of reporting vehicles we see in the media landscape today.
Quality reporting can mean many things to the spectrum of audience tastes out there – it could be entertaining, pithy, intellectual, punchy, dry, long-form, humorous, etc. Quality reporting is defined by the desires and the lifestyles of the audience base. In some cases, sources that consistently break stories are seen in a more important light. In other cases, sources that take a more analytical view are deemed more valuable. On and on this goes. However, now the lines are obliterated. Google alone has brought anonymity to broad swaths of sources, and in the process the search engine has cannibalized the source brand and made it a commodity. The leading journalism brands today still believe incorrectly that an on-the-move American society will remain with them.
So how should a free society pay for its journalism? There is an undercurrent in comments like Mr. Keller’s above: the free public is unable to discern the impartial journalism for themselves, and it is up to "the people who make newspapers" to sort it all out. One gets the sense that he was wearing a cape and matching boots when he made that comment – and that he has not read the financial reports coming out of his own publicly-traded company. The free public pays for journalism by choosing freely to consume a given story.
Much like the music industry’s initial rejection of the song-by-song model brandished by web demand, "the people who make newspapers" do not want to acknowledge that we are in an era of story-by-story consumption. This consumption is measurable – and that measurement directly determines the payment a free society makes. Should consumers be forced to buy an entire music CD when all they want is one or two songs? That same question is being forced upon big and small journalism brands alike – but the answer has been in motion for years now. Outside of their control.
Newspaper brands in particular can protect their financial interests by getting together and prohibiting the search engines and crawling bots from quite effectively stealing their core intellectual assets. Nobody believes that Google’s stock price would be north of $500 – or even north of $100 – if the journalism content arteries were severed. And would that denial not help the stock price of The New York Times Company? But this is another topic entirely.
Free society and free market forces have been demonstrating this deployment of journalism currency for some time. Advertising revenue follows these deployments very efficiently – and in that sense the reporting is paid for. Shelling out coins at a newsstand is simply a relic of a dead era.