Our Civic Duty To #FundJournalism
The first amendment to the constitution allows the protects the people’s right to a free and independent press. This body keeps the people informed about the events that impact their lives, magnifies the voice of the people, and tells us the things that the government may not want to tell us. It is for this reason that the press is as important to our government as the three party system. This is why the press is referred to as the 4th estate, a body independent of the government that serves as the 4th leg of the table of democracy.
The 45th president of the United States has consistently preached and purported media distrust. “The Fake News Media” has become a broad stroke used to cast doubt on a wide variety of information being reported. On the internet where anyone can post anything, digital literacy has not yet caught up with the information flux. This is why, funding good journalism may be more important now than it has been at any other point in my lifetime. Journalism keeps the people informed and if we want to keep our press free and independent of outside influence, then we have a civic duty to put our money behind it.
We’ve Got Little to No Say in TV News
In a time where information literacy is becoming increasingly important, we should carefully consider our news sources and what they are good at. Television news is great for covering big and breaking news. It allows the viewer real time audio-visual feedback and commentary during events like natural disasters and the State of The Union Address. In their presentation of breaking news, they offer a unique and necessary product and are good at it.
However, because breaking news is infrequent, cable news has to air something the rest of the day to pay for the staff that reports breaking news. Something needs to be on in order to sell ads.The advertiser model has been the primary Television income model for about as long as TV has been around.The big three 24 hour news networks(Fox News, CNN and MSNBC) pulled a combined $4.98 Billion in revenue in 2017 from advertisement and affiliate fees. Which means that for the station to operate and profit, they have to appeal to cable providers and advertisers. Not everything in on cable news networks is quality information and some of it is outright harmful to people’s perception.
The only voice the consumer has in this equation is ratings. The more people watch a station the more a station can charge advertisers. In order to keep their audience watching when the breaking news is not happening. To keep the money coming in and to keep people on the payroll, they have to fill the rest of the time with other programming.
Headline News keeps the lights on
Newspapers, magazines, all digital news outlets and public broadcasting offer consumers a direct ways to have a say in content. Most public broadcasting stations are registered non-profits and the money they generate goes to the news. Newspapers have always relied in-part on a subscriber model. The subscriber contribution for papers and listener/viewer donations in public broadcasting give these outlets a direct stake in consumer satisfaction.
However, while consumers have some say they do not have all the say and ads and underwriting(which is similar to ads) are a major source of income. In the world of digital advertising, the more clicks a website gets, the more money they make. I used to refer to click baity headlines as “modern journalism” as a way of expressing distaste of misleading article titles that painted the story different than the articles itself. After getting hip to the web ad model, I began to understand that it helps keep the lights on.
“As long as platforms and user organizations are so reliant on an advertising model your metrics are going to be to keep people on your platforms and websites for as long as possible to consume more advertising and therefore the type of content you’re going to serve up is with that in mind” — Aine Kerr S2E10 of Zig Zag pod
One of the biggest examples of how a website’s income relies on users clicking their is the notorious internet time suck: Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed once prided itself on selling branded content and being funded entirely by through innovation advertising. Despite people’s love-hate relationship with the media company, the large amount of seemingly useless content funds Buzzfeed News Desk which broke news on Breitbart smuggling white-nationalist news into the media and Michael Cohen lying to congress.
Major news outlets do not depend on the digital advertising model to the extent that Buzzfeed does. However, it is still a prominent force in news revenue. The bottom line is that to pay journalist news needs headlines. Quite literally ‘clicks = revenue’ and if edgy headlines get clicks, then its the edgy headlines that are going to fund the quality journalism we all desire. I still think click-bait is an accurate description, I still think this is a part of modern journalism but when put in context, it is apparent that the media ecosystems rely on those clicks.
Adapting to the Digital Age — Diminishing Returns
This century has been a trying time for the 4th estate. Several newsrooms including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed have had layoffs. Hundreds of newspapers have had to close, merge, or be saved by a wealthy entrepreneur.
There’s a graph that I saw years ago that stood out to me so much that I now have it pinned to the wall in my office. It has a red line and a blue line. The red represents newspaper advertising revenue. The blue shows the number of newspaper reporters in the country. From 1980 to the early 2000s, ad revenue, the red line, rose and rose and rose. It peaked in the early 2000s. Then there was a cliff. As people canceled subscriptions and advertising revenue plummeted, so did the number of reporters — the blue line. Between 2006 and 2014, some 20,000 newspaper journalists lost their jobs. — Shankar Vedantam Hidden Brain
In the US Newspaper industry, revenue from circulation has steadily been between $9.9 and $11.2 billion per year combined since 1996. The ad revenue model has not proved sustainable. Buzzfeed has dismantled their national news desk and diversified their revenue stream because their branded content model has not played out.
Furthermore, while digital advertising revenue is growing exponentially, Facebook and Google have begun to cannibalize the digital advertising market eating collecting more than half of all digital advertising revenue. This has left newspapers in a position where ad revenue has been on a decline since 2006. The steady subscriber base, combined with declining ad revenue amounts to an overall decline in news revenue. While many of these forces are out of our control, newsrooms that accept money from individual contributors offer us a voice with our dollar.
Moral of the Story: Fund Journalism
If ad revenue drops and circulation revenue remains steady, we as consumers grow in contribution percentage. As of 2017 roughly 40% of newspaper revenue comes from the same $11.2 billion in form circulation. This is a similar percentage to what Public Broadcasting broadcasting sees from individual donors. A heavy reliance on subscribers and donors means that we keep the journalism we love alive through our direct contributions. If there are publications and media outlets that produce journalism that inform the people, those who benefit should offer what they can.
Paying for news may seem like another bill you can’t afford right now, but the decision to support a media outlet that puts out journalism that you like usually cost less than your Netflix subscription. Finding money to support something this important can be as simple as deciding not to eat out one less time a month, cancelling subscriptions that you forgot to cancel when the free trial was up, or putting the money you were going to put behind a political candidate for the journalist who will cover them.
For example Valentine’s day officially marks the day that I cut the cord and end my cable service(and also my home phone which was basically free with the bundle). I had been thinking about cutting cable for almost 2 years and I never pulled the trigger to save money because I could afford it. However, I take journalism seriously and the decision was easy when it became a restructuring of my budget. I am trading the ~$140/mo Spectrum Triple Play for a $65/mo Spectrum Internet only package. This leaves me ~$55/mo. to spend on journalism.
With that $55 I was able to give:
$8/mo. to PRX and Radiotopia
$12.50/mo. to New York Times (Introductory Rate)
$4.16/mo. to the Tri-City Herald (based on Annual Digital only)
$2/mo. to The Atlantic (based on Annual Digital only)
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$36.66/mo. to media outlets I frequent
At the end of the day, I still save ~$18/mo.
A free and independent press is the right of the people, but it is the will of the people to exercise that makes it worth while. Journalism is at its best when it is taken care of by everyday citizens like you and me. If we make a few small tweaks in our lives we can preserve the fourth leg that our democracy stands on.
P.S #ReadLocal
If this part counts then I’ve already failed at my 1400 word limit lol. If I have convinced you to fund journalism, I would also like to encourage you to fund locally.
The things that a media outlet with good revenue can fund are the things that don’t always start out big at big. When it was reported that USA gymnastics had been systematically covering up a culture of sexual abuse, it was not a national news network, but local journalists at the Indy Star who broke the story. Less than a month after the story dropped, two survivors of abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar shared their stories with the same investigative team. Television news cites local media outlets when reporting stories all the time, and television news cited the Indy Star when this local story got national attention.One of the biggest national stories of the year, and the systems in place that allowed a serial sexual predator to operate for decades started with a local story. This is the power of local news outlets and these stories can only happen if journalism remains well funded.
There are things that I would never know that are directly relevant to me or my community. I would not have been known my rent was about to spike when it was time to renew without the Tri-City Herald. Without Northwest Public Broadcasting, I would not know about the sketchy ways that ICE detains people in the next town over or the epidemic of violence against indigenous women. While these stories are reported locally, they are microcosms of larger national issues. A dollar for local journalism is a dollar for the community and a dollar for the next big story.
