Journalism is in trouble. This book is an attempt to do something about it.
The idea was born on Flattop Mountain in North Carolina in the summer of 2001. I was reading The Sum of Our Discontent: Why Numbers Make us Irrational by David Boyle and following an Internet discussion about newspaper layoffs when I saw the possibility of making a connection between quality in journalism and investors' decisions. By chance, the owner's library in our rented vacation house contained the Louis Lyons volume with the anecdote that opens Chapter 1. That might have been the spark.
My original model was simple. Give investors numbers that would lead to better and longer-term predictions than the quarter-to-quarter earnings changes that they like so much, and they would encourage managers to focus more on the long-term health of their news organizations. If the market is efficient, better news products and community service would become another means of putting a value on newspaper companies.
There is no shortage of historical studies showing a correlation between quality journalism and business success, as Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri demonstrated when she reviewed the literature.1 But there are two problems. One is that it is very difficult to show that quality journalism is the cause of business success rather its byproduct. In my lifetime, I have read many bad newspapers that made money and seen how the character of the owner could be the critical factor in determining quality. But even if we could gather enough data to produce the quality-success equation in a way that would convince investors, we would still face the other problem. We are not in a steady-state universe. The media business has been so disrupted by new technology, that the formula for success could be changing in unexpected ways. The past is not always prologue.
Good journalism has managed to survive, if not always to prevail, through many changes in technology in the past century. The Internet is just the latest in a long series of advances that contribute to the demassification of the media. Richard Maisel, a sociologist, wrote about the trend a generation ago when there was no Internet and personal computers were expensive and rare. He saw it happening across a broad array of media. Off-Broadway plays, which are held in smaller theaters, were gaining audiences faster than Broadway plays. Monthly magazines were doing better than weekly magazines and quarterlies were doing better still. Community newspapers were holding on to readers better than metropolitan papers.2
The Internet is accelerating this trend by giving seekers of specialized information an increasingly efficient source. Why would you look up yesterday's closing prices of your equities in the newspaper when you can find the last half-hour's price on the Internet? The umbrella newspaper has owed much of its success to paying attention to a mosaic of many such specialized interests, but it is no longer the most efficient way to appeal to those interests.
The disruption of existing enterprises by substitute technology is an old story in American business, and a substantial literature has developed around the problem. The old businesses hang on too long to their accustomed ways of doing things and become ripe targets for upstart competitors who are not burdened by tradition. The issue of quality journalism and business success has to be considered in this context.
At the outset, I hoped to produce evidence that a given dollar investment in news quality would yield a predictable dollar return that would more than justify the outlay. That might be possible, and the evidence in this book provides some support for the idea, but at nowhere near the level of precision that would excite an investor.
The main value of the work that follows is that it offers a way of looking at the news business that supports our intuitive need for quality and, most importantly, can be transferred to whatever strange forms of media will convey the news in the future. The most interesting of these new forms are being invented by nonjournalists, and often they are ignorant of the culture of truth-telling and fairness that enabled the best news givers to prevail. That's not a bad thing as long as there is enough varied experimentation going on to allow new forms and standards to compete in the process of natural selection.
The first two chapters present the business model for journalism that can be both advertiser-supported and socially responsible. Chapter three shows how advertisers are responding to new technology. Chapters four through nine report the results of a search for evidence that quality in journalism is good business. Chapter ten recounts the recent history of increasing investor influence on newspaper companies. Chapter eleven considers the problem of harnessing the new and disruptive technologies to the old values. And the final chapter is an appeal for solidarity among the men and women who do the day-to-day work of journalism and on whom the maintenance of its standards ultimately depends.
1. Posted at http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/Quality_Project/quality_resources.html
2. Maisel, “The Decline of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Summer 1973).