News Is a Bu$iness — Or Is It?

Part Six What Is to Be Done

The challenge in so much of our lives is how to provide money for what we want and need: education, health, housing, security, food, and fun.

News, gathered and distributed by journalists, is not a utility, like the telephone or electrical power networks. It is information delivered by means evolved over the centuries and arriving instantly now in formats analog and digital.

As with any commodity, there is an infrastructure that supports the process of making or manufacturing the product and bringing it to consumers.

 Here, briefly, is a recap of what has happened in recent decades.

A prevailing system was upended with the arrival of the internet in the late twentieth century, which established ways of carrying data and information and came to be dominated by massive enterprises, the largest of which controlled the flow of output because of their ability to attract billions and then trillions of dollars in advertising and fees, until now largely unencumbered by regulation.

Befor then, in most respects advertising and news gathering were considered essentially two separate lanes — one paying for the other.

When advertising moved online to those tech behemoths, collecting the news had to develop different means of paying for itself — a combination of subscriptions and donations in the form of memberships, underwriting, and philanthropy. That equation is still developing and is not anywhere near where it needs to be to provide sustainable journalism.

So, what now?

Legacy news remains a very large array of for-profit news organizations, from community newspapers that rely on local advertising to hundreds of chain-owned newspapers like those owned by Gannett almost all of which have been depleted of resources. Metropolitan dailies, which were once the pride of their cities, alongside major league sports teams, universities, and museums, are now less formidable.

The remaining news and consumer magazines all have an online presence. None has yet the cachet that the printed versions did in their heyday. Network and cable news make profits, but their travails and scandals often get attention that obscures their primary purpose.

There are standouts in the for-profit world — The New York Times in newspapers, for example; The Atlantic and The New Yorker among magazines. Assessing their success reflects the extent to which they are exceptional rather than models for other news businesses.

The most encouraging model seems to be the still emerging nonprofit news enterprises — hundreds of them across the country, in a wide range of scale and impact. Increasing amounts of money are being raised. Entrepreneurial energy and ingenuity are on display. What has yet to emerge is a consensus, among those who are dedicated to this reinvention, that they can fulfill their destiny.

The internet and tech-based revolution was led by a relatively small group of individuals: Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Brin, Page, Bezos, Newmark, etc. Nonprofit journalism is unlikely to make anyone rich, which means that success and celebrity over time will be measured by what each news outlet can do with news in shaping and guiding the country.

We are being inundated with the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, and my sense is that over time the need for regulation and the pressures of capitalism and lately antitrust action will make today’s preeminent enterprises into something different. Remember when classic AT&T was telephones, IBM was technology, and Detroit’s Big Three were cars?

There is one significant element in all this transformation of news that deserves more consideration: the agency — the role — of all of us who need the news in all its forms for the navigation of our lives and times. That is the part each of us should play in the way journalism operates, how it is received and exerts influence.

Readers and viewers of twentieth-century journalism were mostly passive recipients. Newspapers and magazines were delivered, daily and weekly. We turned on the radio and the television. News was something we were given, assembled by people who were responsible for bringing it to us.

We had the choice, of course, of taking it or not.

Now, to be a dedicated consumer of news means making an effort. We are all editors-in-chief of our personal news report. You can be satisfied with the minimum available, but if you want or need more — and to really function well in all the spheres of life, from local to global — the system demands that you find it.

The internet is a vast expanse of information, data, and entertainment. The screen is a canvas to be filled with what each of us puts on it. That is a responsibility that, even if all you are doing is scrolling, is not passive. This is not the morning paper or the evening news. It is the places you land, the articles you read, and — for better or worse — what you absorb.

So, is news a business? Yes, when it is meant to provide a return for its owners and investors. No, when it is designed to be sustained with resources to operate and enough to invest in growth.

Here is where these two intersect. Every enterprise, whatever its role and ambition, must be business-like, managing revenues and costs, setting standards of quality, practice, and ethics. The trade of journalism has a singular purpose: to organize the facts around what is happening, enabling us to understand why – and to bring that information and perspective to us.

 No matter what means are necessary to pay for news as technology and delivery systems develop, the result has to be the same: making it as valued and valuable as it should be.