Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 185 pp.
The traditional business model for daily newspapers is “virtually obsolete,” observe Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn from their Anglophile perches, which begs the question of how much longer print journalism can survive.
The 2007-2009 recession brought the first-ever three-year drop in U.S. advertising revenues, leading to the closure of venerable dailies including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A paid model for online content has proved the elusive Holy Grail of journalism in the digital age, leading to proposals of a number of alternatives to the for-profit model. Funding Journalism in the Digital Age provides both a guide to how the news media got into this mess and a handy compendium of the recent proposals to resuscitate journalism.
Kaye, who teaches at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and Quinn, of Deakin University in Australia, cast their net wide, examining innovative projects not just in the United States and Britain, but also in Norway, South Korea, and Singapore.
Sponsorship and philanthropy are the subject of one chapter, which focuses on the example of ProPublica, the investigative reporting center founded in mid-2008 and richly endowed by several foundations. The authors examine other nonprofit news organizations, such as Mother Jones magazine, as well as online-only startups like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. They also analyze microfunding and micropayment models in detail, following from Walter Isaacson’s 2009 exhortation in Time that online media outlets must start demanding per-story payment for articles.
Other options include crowd-funding experiments like Spot.us and “microsponsors,” such as those who support MinnPost’s journalism. Another chapter looks at collaboration between mainstream media and citizen journalists—“pro-am” partnerships like OhMyNews in Korea, where amateur journalists work with professional editors. It also looks at experiments with social networks, such as the Bakersfield Californian’s Bakotopia.net, which launched in 2005.
A chapter on family ownership and trusts looks at two-tiered stock ownerhip that has allowed families like the Sulzbergers to maintain control of the New York Times, and the Grahams to hang onto the Washington Post. It also looks at trusts such as the C.P. Scott Trust, which publishes the Guardian, and the Tinius Trust that operates the Schibsted media group in Scandinavia. Another possible option for finding audiences that will pay for “passion” content is niche marketing. Yet another avenue is partnerships involving media outlets, collaborations such as PBS Frontline’s ongoing arrangement with the journalism school at Berkeley, GlobalPost’s 2009 deal with CBS, Politico’s partnership with Reuters, and the Ohio News Organization setup to cover Ohio politics by its eight largest dailies.
The authors also include a short history of how the news business reacted to the coming of the digital age, chronicling 1980s experiments with videotext and early versions of e-readers from the 1990s, as well as the first online newspapers. They also outline ongoing digital experiments with aggregation, search optimization, dayparting, and hyperlocal citizen journalism.
Like many, the authors are skeptical of the recent move by some newspapers to put their content behind a paywall, as the New York Times announced it will do in early 2011. Instead they make a case for an alternative model they think might work better, although they caution it will “sound like heresy to some traditionalists.” E-commerce could not only provide more revenues for news Web sites, but might also allow for greater engagement by readers, they suggest. Online shopping through promotions like the Sunday Times wine club could see readers also become customers.
And such options are overdue, the authors argue. “The days when journalists could afford to remain willfully ignorant about the commercial opportunities at their own companies are over,” they warn in urging demolition of the “Chinese wall” between editorial and advertising. “Everyone in journalism must become more commercially minded and entrepreneurial.”
The book repeats itself from time to time, possibly the result of collaboration between authors from distant countries, such as when it details in successive chapters the two-year TimesSelect paywall experiment. Sadly, the authors also fail to provide citations or a bibliography, instead making passing reference to published material as they go along. These in-text mentions always specify author and publication, but only sometimes include date and title. Another idiosyncrasy is a complete lack of block quotes, as passages of up to a half page in length are instead incorporated into the narrative. The chapters are short, averaging ten to twelve pages, as is the book itself—184 total pages between a cover that is oddly rubberized.
Funding Journalism in the Digital Age is a valuable snapshot of the troubled times faced by traditional mainstream news organizations, especially major daily newspapers. It would be particularly suitable as a supplemental text for a senior-level or graduate course in media management or media and society.
MARC EDGE
Sam Houston State University