Karin Dryhurst

Did Newspapers “Buy Into” the Culture of Free?

The New York Times took a step forward this week, opening a space for debate about the future of newspapers.

Mainstream media heads joined new media pioneers in an attempt to flesh out various ideas about survival strategies and reasons for extinction. The common thread throughout was the acceptance of journalism as a community good.

Contributor Steven Brill, however, dismissed the changing media landscape as something newspapers "bought into," rather than a real and tangible shift in the way readers perceive and consume information.

He demands that local newspapers charge for content while editors of local non-profit news sites like MinnPost.com address the realities of the Web: that readers want free information and that the supply of ad space on the Web limits advertising revenue.

Non-profit journalism appears to be a defendable way for investigative journalism to survive. The difficulty for newspapers lies in the M.B.A.-clad publishers and editors who want to run newspapers as public corporations even as this model disintegrates across the country.

Over at Newspay, Bill Mitchell discusses VAWatchdog.org, a site that stepped in to fill the vacuum of veteran coverage left by cutbacks at Washington papers. The founder of the site looks to stay in the black rather than turn a profit, a luxury The Washington Post does not have as stocks fall.

While sites like VAWatchdog.org represent models for an online fourth estate, I worry that the democracy of the Web can be suffocated if the publishers who survive are those individuals who can afford to report for free.

Foundations and endowments may not be recession-proof, but they stand to provide a more robust and egalitarian approach to information than the mainstream media or an unpaid blogosphere can.

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Posted at 2:13 PM, Feb 12, 2009 in Media
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