Below are the links to a great interview Bill Moyers conducted with former journalist and current writer and film producer David Simon. Simon, known for his realistic portrayal of the streets, government, schools and cops of Baltimore in The Wire, also made the HBO mini-series, “Generation Kill” with fellow collaborator and former Baltimore cop Ed Burns. Never shy to express his true feelings, I have immense respect for Simon because he has reported more on what life is like in Baltimore than any series the Baltimore Sun, his former employer, has probably ever done. Enjoy.

Bill Moyers\’ Interview with David Simon, Part 1
Bill Moyers\’ Interview with David Simon, Part 2

A print journalist I know recently brought up the following argument, in response to the ongoing debate about the future of news. He said he is still unclear as to why newspapers are the only businesses in the world that are expected to provide their content for free… I thought to myself, you know? This is actually a very good point. Why are our expectations of newspapers different from any other content-providing industry? He continued with his argument:

“Perhaps they need to adopt the television business model on their Web sites. You click on a link to a news article, but before the article appears, a well-produced, high-resolution, high-quality commercial appears that DOESN’T have a little “X” in the corner to click on to get rid of it. These commercials can be sold for big bucks (or at least bigger bucks than newspapers currently can get from advertisers). If it’s a long story, another commercial appears before you can continue reading.

This model works for TV — otherwise, how else could CBS pay trillions for the so-called “March Madness” rights, etc., etc., etc. Why would this model not work for newspaper Web sites? Because other Web sites would just pirate (i.e. steal) the content and post it without the commercials?

Why is it that Web sites can steal newspaper articles but have to pay for songs? Does the latest unintellible hip-hop diatribe by L’il Whoever have more intrinsic social value than an investigative series that uncovers public corruption, grisly conditions for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the like? I guess so, because that’s what society has decided should be paid for and what should be free.”

What do you think? Would readers accept ads on their screens before they are able to read the contents of an article? Would this be a profitable business model for newspapers? How would this type of setup work with news aggregators such as Newser or Google News? Would it put them on the street or force them to rewrite the news?

A lot has been written in the blogosphere about David Simon’s recent comments about the future of newspapers. Simon, the creator of the outstanding television shows The Wire and Generation Kill, is not shy about his beliefs and I can’t blame him. If I spent 13 years on the streets of Baltimore as a cops reporter I might be just as cynical and jaded… However, some of what he says holds merit, even if I don’t agree with his vision of how newspapers should charge for content. (Actually, I’m not necessarily against newspapers charging for content, I just don’t believe it will happen in a million years and that it will destroy the industry in the process if the model is attempted.)

Most of what has been written lately (and hence the predominant blog discussion) surrounds of the future of news and newspapers, but I absolutely love what he said in a recent interview with The Guardian about what newspapers have become; more of a look into the recent past and present. Here is my favorite quote from the full interview (which can be found here).

“The way Simon sees it, The Wire and Generation Kill are, above all else, an exercise in reporting: the pulling back of the curtain on the real America that should have been undertaken by newspapers, transposed instead into the multimillion-dollar world of TV drama. “It’s fiction, I’m clear about that. But at its heart it’s journalistic.” Newspapers, he says, launching into a new tirade, “have been obsessed with what they called ‘impact journalism’ – take a bite-sized morsel of a problem, make a big noise, win a Pulitzer. It was bullshit! But it was the only thing they knew. But what America needed in the last two decades was not ‘impact journalism’. What they needed was somebody explaining what the fuck was happening to the country.” The phrase he uses to describe the role newspapers should have been playing is also, you can’t help feeling, one Simon would like to see as his own epitaph: “A counterweight to bullshit.”"

Walter Isaacson is an icon in present-day media circles. Starting as a beat reporter for local newspapers, Isaacson moved up the ranks of national and international publications before becoming the managing editor of TIME and later the CEO and President of CNN. Isaacson now leads the Aspen Institute, co-host to, among other things, the Aspen Ideas Festival (along with The Atlantic).

Isaacson has written a piece entitled, “A Bold, Old Idea for Saving Journalism” or “How to Save Your Newspaper” depending on whether you read the Huffington Post and TIME. The basic premise of the article, as you might have guessed, is that journalism needs to be saved and that he has a great, new/old idea on how to save it: Micro-payments.

Isaacson starts by describing how newspapers have lost their way, due to misaligned allegiances and now falling revenue with ad cutbacks are adding to the crisis (emphasis below is mine):

“Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions, and advertising. The new business model (online vs newsstand) relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens, the stool is likely to fall.

In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent upon them for your revenue. Newspapers will end up producing a lot of sections about gardening and home improvement, which advertisers want, and getting rid of their book review sections, as the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have done.”

Isaacson suggests that instead of relying on a complex layer of advertising revenues from various sources, readers should again pay for their news, therefore holding the newspapers responsible to their readership, rather than their advertisers. I don’t disagree that newspapers’ (and much of the mainstream media’s) allegiances are misaligned, they have been as such for more than just a couple of years. This confusion with one’s own righteousness dates back decades and we shouldn’t expect it to change even with a new pay-as-you-go micro-payment revenue model. But this isn’t even the main issue at the heart of his suggestion.

The first issue I have is that Isaacson suggests that newspapers use software that allow us, the reader, to pay 10 cents per article or one dollar per day and that this will somehow change the direction of dwindling dailies and sunken stock prices. But let’s stop and think for a moment if this will actually accomplish what Isaacson hopes it will accomplish. Think about how the music industry transformed itself with iTunes, which Isaacson cites as an example, by charging a fee per song downloaded. First, I’m betting Hollywood is looking to do the same. But more importantly, there are fewer similarities between these examples than Isaacson will have you believe, so first lets not confuse them as having anything to do with micro-payments.

The similarities between music, movies and newspapers are paper thin, at best, and concentrated more on each industry’s inability to adapt to new trends and technology. This similarity is not about how, if I pay .99 cents for a song, I will also pay .99 cents for today’s New York Times. It is that these industries, after years and years of consolidation, conglomeration and cutting out and pushing down the little guy, have found themselves too large to adapt while at the same time the little guy found a tool to fight back. The Internet is finally becoming known to this industry and its true power heralded by the Hearsts of this world, but the problem is they are late to the game, just like the music and movie industries were late to adapt to users’ demand for cheaper and easier access to their products. Bloggers and technologists are already recreating the newspaper industry for the newspapers, much like Napster and then Apple recreated the music industry. But what is so revered about the Internet is its ability to level the playing field. The rules have changed and it isn’t that traditional newspapers have become obsolete; just their method of revenue generation has become obsolete. It is awfully hard to recreate the rules of the game when you’re only just learning how to play the game. Bloggers and technologists may not have it all right, as McClatchy’s John Walcott made clear in a speech last fall (more on this later), but they at least have the ability not just to react, but also to create. This is something that mainstream newspapers have so hopelessly lost over the past decade or more.

The second major problem Isaacson will run into with his proposal is the difference in the information or service provided between music/movies and news. Downloaded music and movies allows the user to listen or watch the file over and over. Most newspaper articles provide information, news and background once and they have then served their purpose. Even if the charge is one cent per article, I can’t see the mainstream market going backwards. What Isaacson is asking us to do is go back in time, forget that at one time we were able to get our news for free, and instead ask for money for the service. That is a very, very hard nut to crack, even for this old and successful nut of the mainstream media.

The third issue I have is with Isaacson’s assumption that, even if a large group of people paid for their news, this would be enough to sustain this bloated industry. While the diminishing number for foreign correspondents and destruction of local news coverage continues, these holes will be filled in time by someone. Already the local news coverage has picked up where the newspapers left off, and in many cases the quality and depth of the coverage has improved. Isaacson cites Pew’s study in December showing online newspaper readership numbers overtaking physical newspaper readership for the first time and draws a correlation that this must mean that people are interested in reading the news online. While there will always be a certain percentage of the population who is interested, no matter what, in what The New York Times has to say (no matter where they publish it), there still has yet to be a mea culpa for all of the wrongs wrought over the last decade. I have yet to hear little more than a half-hearted apology for “getting things wrong” with the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq from any of the mainstream newspapers. It is so much more than just “getting things wrong” and they know it. I especially liked the way John Walcott, mentioned earlier, described the situation in his speech last year accepting the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. It isn’t as if bloggers are ready to take the lead, Walcott says, but certainly newspapers are making bloggers’ jobs easier by not fixing their mistakes.

“We’ve reached a point, I fear, where the journalism of I.F. Stone is now very much at risk from a combination of economic, technological, political and philosophical developments. I’ve talked a little about the pressures on news companies to cut costs to compensate for falling revenues, and I know there are those out there who think that’s fine, that the traditional “Mainstream Media” have so discredited themselves on Iraq and other issues that we should all say “good riddance” to them and turn to the blogosphere for all our news and analysis.

There are two reasons why I think that’s foolish, at least for now.

The first is that the blogosphere, like cable television and talk radio, reflects the political polarization in our country today. People go to Fox News or MSNBC, to O’Reilly or Air America, to Daily Kos or to Redstate.org, to have their biases reaffirmed, not to have their assumptions challenged or unpleasant truths exposed. It’s been a good business model, but I don’t think that it’s good journalism, and I suspect that I.F. Stone, as hard to pin down ideologically as he was, might agree.

…The second reason that I don’t think that even the best blogsites are a substitute for the mainstream media is that bloggers cannot do all of the things that mainstream media companies can do, at least for now. In June, for example, we completed an investigation of the Bush administration’s detainee program, which you may have read about in a piece by Tony Lewis in The New York Review of Books. I think I.F. Stone might have liked it, but it took the lead reporter, Tom Lasseter, other reporters and Travis Heying, a photographer for the Wichita Eagle, to 11 countries on three continents over the course of eight months. It’s hard for bloggers, no matter how good they are, to do that kind of work.”

I want to emphasis his words, “at least for now” because they are of utmost important here. First, Walcott’s assumption that blogs have an agenda and newspapers don’t is incorrect, as we discussed earlier. Newspapers not only have to keep their advertisers happy, but with so many of them being owned by public corporations, this profit pressure is increased tenfold. Second, while most bloggers don’t have the resources to send reporters around the world, newspapers didn’t have these resources when they first published either. I think that, given time, the growth of citizen-fueled AND funded journalism will certainly become more mainstream, but I don’t know that mainstream media will play as big a role as they’d like to in this new phase of journalism. The Real News, which we’ve covered here before, has been able to give us the international reporting needed (and was more thorough than Isaacson’s alma mater CNN in covering the attacks on Gaza). If Walter Isaacson and others want to see their beloved legacy shine in history, perhaps they should make this industry non-profit again. Either way, here’s to hoping they can defy the odds and show a modicum of success like the record labels have finally been able to do. After all the end goal is to report the news, not make it.

Remember the old joke? What’s black, white and read all over? More on that later… First though, we’ve known the newspaper industry has been in trouble for quite some time, but no one has really been able to identify the final nail in the coffin. We’ve heard of massive losses from declining ad revenue, declining readership and the associated staff cuts, but it all still seems like a dream for many of the old-school paper and pen crowd. They have been waiting for (and perhaps denying) the writing on the wall. Add to this the already muddied waters of media ownership we have previously discussed here, here and here, and things are starting to get really ugly.

Alexander Lebedev, courtesy of Forbes.com

If there was ever a wake-up call to be had, it happened in the last week: One of the primary daily newspapers, read by millions of commuters each day in London, was sold for 1 Pound (and a whole lot of debt) to a former KGB Lieutenant, Alexander Lebedev. The already beleaguered French newspaper industry accepted a 600 million Euro aid package from Nicolas Sarkozy and the French government, (with promises of increased readership, distribution channels and lower printing costs). But perhaps the announcement that the New York Times is getting a $250 million loan from a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, at 14% interest no less, was what really put things in perspective. Add to this the other recent news that The Tribune Company had to file for bankruptcy and the message is clear: If you are still in print journalism and you don’t have alternative sources of income such as blogging, writing and editing books, television appearances or consulting and teaching offers, you’re in for a world of hurt.

Nicolas Sarkozy, courtesy of foreignpolicy.com

We should add journalistic credibility to the growing list of losses as the super rich, national governments and Russian Oligarchs all take greater stakes in the world of print. The New York Times, Le Monde (et al) and The Evening Standard, respectively, all lost a bit more independence and I’m sure this is only the beginning of the end. Perhaps the joke should read: What’s blue, white, green and red all over? We now have the answer, sort of…

Carlos Slim, courtesy of britannica.com