Losing the News

"That’s right. Everyone sees there has been this enormous proliferation of information and of publishing. What people sometimes miss is that while the number of opinions is exploding, the number of original sources of fact is contracting. In the US, for instance, the number of reporters working for US organisations based outside the country has collapsed. Many, many news organisations that used to base some people outside this country no longer do. The New York Times has, I think, the largest staff covering general news outside the US for an American audience, and they have 40 people. The US broadcast television networks base almost no one outside the US. They tend to just have a very small flying squad that runs to any particular point of crisis. Yes. Here is the problem. Editors are not people of bad will, they are not people who are trying to deliver less to readers. They’re trying their very best. But if you force people to cut news budgets, they will pare away. There are certain basic things they feel they have to do, and there are other things they feel they can live without. So international news is one that gets cut, investigative reporting is another one that gets cut (which gives rise to ProPublica where I work). A third one that gets cut, and this is a particular issue in the US, is statehouse coverage. I’ve concluded that a principal reason for that is an accident of 19th century American history. The state capitals of most of the largest states are not population centres. So you have Albany instead of New York City, Sacramento instead of LA or San Francisco, and Springfield instead of Chicago. That’s actually true for eight out of 10 of the largest states in the US — the consequence of which is that when you have to cut back, the state capital is not local and you adjust accordingly. In Britain, it’s as if important government ministries were located in Manchester and if they were, they would be covered less. To a considerable extent they are, yes. Alex Jones is a distinguished reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner. He covered the press for The New York Times and, with his late wife, wrote a history of The New York Times. Earlier, he wrote a book about a family that owned a once great newspaper in Kentucky, the Binghams, which is the story for which he won the Pulitzer. My one reservation about the book is that it strikes me as excessively nostalgic for the newspapers of yesteryear, and excessively convinced that the salvation of newspapers is the principal issue. I don’t want to caricature his argument, but I think his view is that the news is going to rise and fall with our leading newspapers. I’m not completely convinced that is the case. If you look at this as an economic matter, all the phenomena we’ve been discussing are a series of market failures in certain areas of high quality news. Everyone is beginning to realise that these market failures are very, very likely to persist. When you have a market failure, the good, assuming its creation is desirable, becomes a public good. And in the case of news, it’s more than desirable, it’s essential to democratic governance. So then certain kinds of news need to be funded in the way that public goods are. Investigative reporting is one of those areas that, particularly in this country, has increasingly been revealed to be a public good — and in the US, the funding of that comes largely through philanthropy. Britain has a different tradition in this respect, and a different culture [BBC news is funded by a licence fee payable by television owners]. But while there is some public support for public radio and public television in the US, it is increasingly under attack. If public television and public radio had not yet been invented in this country, today they could not be. No. We’ve begun to accept advertising and you can garner a certain amount of money that way. You may be able to charge partners for a certain amount of content. But ProPublica exists because of a market failure, not because there is a business opportunity. Take, for example, the economics of charging partners. In the US, pretty much the most that anyone will pay for a long and incredibly well done story is about $50,000. That would be an unusually high price, but there are a few times and places when people will pay that much money. The cost of the kinds of stories that we’re talking about producing – and it’s not just us, there are a number of other entrants in this field – is often a very, very significant multiple of that. Which again just points out the problem."