An inflection point for local journalism
The Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey is a glimmer of hope for publicly funded journalism
This post was adapted from a forthcoming article titled, “Innovation in Public Funding for Local Journalism: A Case Study of New Jersey’s 2018 Civic Information Bill” by Sarah Stonbely, Matthew Weber, and Christopher Satullo.
Local journalism is in the midst of an evolution — many would say crisis — of the sort that occurs only once or twice a century (see Abernathy, 2018; Hallin, 1994). The current evolution has many causes, but perhaps the most significant has been the economic one: specifically, the uncoupling of advertising from journalism, as digital ad revenue now overwhelmingly goes to online search and social platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook) rather than to news organizations.
Despite the fact that many Americans value local news and think highly of their local news providers, the commercial model that supported those outlets for so many decades before collapsing in the early 2000s has not yet been replaced with a sustainable alternative. While big donors and audience funding are helping some types of journalism, both have fundamental flaws that virtually guarantee systemic gaps in the landscape, especially at the local level.
First, big donors are unlikely to support local outlets or outlets that cover the critically important but admittedly mundane, day-to-day functioning of small, local governments. Second, audience funding simply doesn’t exist in communities where people either don’t have disposable income or they lack the desire to put whatever disposable income they have toward journalism.
This reality suggests that journalism is the victim of market failure. In “Journalism as a public good: A Scandinavian perspective,” Allern and Pollack define market failure in the context of journalism as “insufficient investments in and production of journalism with positive externalities [(from a democratic perspective)].” In other words, the market will continue to support news about sports, entertainment, celebrities, and the like, but will not necessarily support news that makes people better informed about their government or that holds the powerful accountable (i.e. “civic news”).
Acknowledging the market failure for civic news, and supporting public funding, are premised to a large extent on seeing journalism as a public good. Defining journalism as a public good means understanding that journalism benefits society in ways that are difficult to put a price tag on (i.e. the impact is too far removed from the actual product and/or is too diffuse). As a result, market-driven actors will likely be unwilling to pay the whole cost of producing public-service journalism because they will be unable to profit from doing so (see Ali, 2017, Chapter 2 and Hamilton, 2016, for example).
When the market no longer supports a product that is vital to our democracy, argues Victor Pickard, new ways of supporting it must be established.
Making journalism a true public good would mean thinking of it as something that is necessary to the health and well-being of a community, in the same way that having solid infrastructure and a well-supported military are considered foundational to the health and well-being of a country. It would mean placing journalism alongside universities and libraries as one of the pillars of the knowledge economy. In other words, not only do funding models for journalism need to evolve, but the very way we conceive of journalism and understand its role in society must also change.
New Jersey’s newly funded Civic Information Consortium is one such effort. Spearheaded by Mike Rispoli, director of the News Voices: New Jersey project at Free Press Action Fund, the Consortium highlights the challenges for public funding of media in the United States — but it also provides a glimmer of hope for those who believe that public funding is one of the best ways to ensure a strong journalism sector.
What is the “Civic Info Bill” and how did it come to be?
The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (also known simply as “the Consortium” or “the CIC”), is a prime example of the new funding models that are beginning to emerge.
The bill establishing the Consortium was conceived in response to the national spectrum auction that took place in 2017, in which wireless companies bought un- or under-utilized public spectrum from terrestrial broadcasters. The bill appropriates $2 million of the more than $330 million the state gained through the spectrum auction and gives it to the Consortium to distribute in the form of “grants that support news and information that benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s underserved communities.” (Details including where the Consortium will be housed, who will be on the board, and the mechanisms by which the money will be distributed are still being worked out.)
For more on the spectrum auction, check out this 2017 FCC report about the auction or read this 2009 report by Victor Pickard & Sascha Meinrath.
The FCC estimated the potential top value of the New Jersey licenses at $2.3 billion. But as the multi-stage auction played out, that estimate proved optimistic. When the auction closed in April 2017, New Jersey had sold two of its four licenses, in Montclair and Trenton, for $332 million — still the largest sum for any single state.
When the public campaign for the Civic Info Bill launched in 2016, Dodge Foundation CEO Chris Daggett wrote an op-ed in The New York Times making the case that the auction was a chance to reimagine public interest media in a way as powerful and long-lasting as the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Daggett argued that New Jersey was the perfect laboratory to test ideas for a digital public-interest media of the 21st century — “Perhaps nowhere is there a better opportunity to take advantage of the auction than in New Jersey,” Daggett argued — and indeed the state was uniquely positioned to benefit.
“Even if we are talking about tens of millions of dollars, not billions,” wrote Rutgers Law professor Ellen Goodman in 2015, “these figures could be transformative for New Jersey public media.”
Molly de Aguiar explained the moral impetus behind the effort to put the money made by the state on the sale of the spectrum back into public journalism in a Galley session for the Columbia Journalism Review: “The state of New Jersey sold spectrum that belonged to the public,” de Aguiar wrote, “and the public deserves to benefit from that sale.”
However by the fall of 2017, it was clear that the state would use much of the proceeds to cover a budget deficit rather than put all or most of it back into the public media system. As a result, the dollar figures had shrunk significantly, from the initial $100 million that was originally requested to fund the Consortium, down to $5 million.
Notably, other states were successful in putting most or all of their spectrum auction proceeds back into their public media. In Virginia, for example, the entire $182 million from the sale of two station licenses went directly back into the state’s public media via Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp., based in Richmond.
The legislation for the Civic Info Bill passed the New Jersey State Assembly on June 21, 2018, but the money to fund the Consortium was placed in a separate $5 million line item in the state’s higher education appropriations bill, making its implementation uncertain. The Legislature ultimately passed a 2019–20 budget that included $2 million to establish the CIC, and released half of the money on January 16, 2020. The Consortium will likely be based at one of the five public universities partners involved with the Consortium.
Addressing criticisms of government funding
Not everyone supported the Civic Info Bill, nor does everyone think using public money to fund local news is a good idea more broadly. As Jessica Clark noted in a post for Mediashift in 2011, “Conservatives’ (and even some progressives’) ideological objections to public broadcasting — that it’s too elitist, too liberal, too centralized, too vulnerable to government pressures — could prompt legislators to decide that future taxpayer funding will focus on maintaining the pipes, rather than supporting what flows through them.”
It is worth remembering, however, that public funding of journalism in the United States dates back to postal subsidies enacted in 1792. Government intervention in the distribution of media resources followed at regular intervals, including with the 1927 Radio Act, the 1934 Communications Act, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In fact, the impetus for this story — the reallocation of broadcast spectrum — highlights the government’s ongoing involvement in what media and journalism look like at a structural level. As much as critics would like to insist that governments take a hands-off approach, it is effectively impossible for governments to be completely uninvolved in media policy. The question is only which type of media government policies favor.
In recent years a substantial body of rigorous scholarship has demonstrated that publicly funded media is in many ways superior to commercial media. A meta-review of public media policies in different countries, found that “large-scale content analyses consistently show that in Northwest Europe and North America, public media tend to offer more in-depth, diverse, and critical public affairs reporting than their commercial counterparts.”
Meanwhile, a cross-national analysis published in 2014, which looked at levels of political knowledge in 27 countries in relation to the type of news consumed, found that news gained from public broadcasting and broadsheet newspapers — as compared to commercial broadcasting and tabloid newspapers — resulted in the greatest improvements in factual political knowledge. As these and many other studies show, the content and form of public-media journalism consistently produces the same positive externalities that are associated with better-informed citizens.
Why it matters
The establishment of the Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey — and the broader effort to increase public funding for local journalism — have become more urgent as the effects from the crisis in local journalism have proliferated.
When local journalism fails, anyone who relies on the daily flow of news that journalists provide is affected. Helen Branswell, for example, cites the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic as an example of a case in which local reporting helped to bring an emerging disease threat to global attention. “Without local reporting,” Branswell wrote, “it’s also harder to follow an outbreak and assess its progress.”
Conversely, the positive effects of local journalism — especially investigative local journalism — are significant. Research has shown that strong local newspapers “increase voter turnout, reduce government corruption, make cities financially healthier, make citizens more knowledgeable about politics and more likely to engage with local government, … encourage split-ticket (and thus less uniformly partisan) voting, make elected officials more responsive and efficient,” and maintain a healthy number of candidates for local office.
New funding models for local journalism are critical to the long-term sustainability of a healthy civic democracy and overall community wellbeing. The model put forth in the Civic Info Bill provides a clear example of a potentially viable — if imperfect — alternative funding model for local journalism. While the effects of this funding remain uncertain, it’s clear that the Civic Information Consortium represents a unique opportunity to test the impact of state funding on local news ecosystems.
Sarah Stonbely is the research director at the Center for Cooperative Media. She can be reached at stonbelys@montclair.edu.
Matthew S. Weber is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. He can be reached at msw@umn.edu.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
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