Noted: “Let’s subsidize open broadband, not journalists”
Dan Gillmor delivers a fascinating essay in Salon.com about the value of open broadband infrastructure and net neutrality, which he compares to postal subsidies of early America and their defining role in advancing democratic participation.
Corollary to that is the notion that the government should otherwise not be involved with journalism subsidies, specifically because the newspaper/media industry has been “so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition.”
Large media corporations should also be paying for the free content that new journalism nonprofits such as ProPublica offer them. When commercial media take free content from news nonprofits, they are getting a free public subsidy, and are only deepening their disinvestment in actual content generation.
On the flip side, hollowed-out commercial newsrooms are great potential clients of third-party/nonprofit journalism providers. That’s no substitute for the hundreds-strong newsrooms of yesteryear, but it’s an intriguing “B2B” model that remains largely untapped by the emerging wave of new journalism nonprofits. There’s no reason those nonprofits need to be asking for gov’t handouts.
That’s the whole point of the Newsdesk.org project: Build a new network of nonprofit, third-party news providers, aggregate their work, and sell it.
While a public subsidy for journalism must necessarily not be used for propping up the lumbering dinosaurs of newsprint — public subsidy is indeed necessary to create ground-level infrastructure for civic dialogue and information exchange. And this is something that goes deeper than fiber-optic buildouts and net neutrality.
The issue is of singular importance to the small/non-corporate news producer, and in particular the nonprofit producer who may be doing important work that is off the radar of the commercial sector. You know — the type covering parolee health issues or pollution in low-income neighborhoods that causes asthma in local kids. Stuff that’s not very sexy, doesn’t sell ads, but is damnably significant in terms of our democratic pretensions as a society.
Even something as aggressively entrepreneurial as the Newsdesk.org model, which should be able to accommodate this kind of reporting, needs the public subsidy simply to get the model up and running.
Gillmor previously noted in a 2007 op-ed in the SF Chronicle that local, community foundations have a vital potential role in supporting this kind of work. The Knight Foundation seems to have taken a cue from that with their Community Information Challenge to get community foundations involved in local journalism.
Where I want to see public subsidy is twofold:
- For the creation of non-market-dependent fora for important discourse and information exchange that’s outside the market’s interest.
- For the no-strings support of focused civic inquiry that, again, falls outside the interest of traditional commercial markets.
While it could be argued that wide-open broadband infrastructure performs the same function as public libraries, town squares and the local Lyceum or civic meeting hall, I want to go further and assert that some form of staffing or curation is a vital part of that infrastructure.
By “public subsidy” I do include public money under private management by the private philanthropic sector, along with relatively novel (to the U.S.) ideas about directing some commercial profit towards non-commercial information exchange and inquiry. For example, a tax on ads, billboards, or electronic media hardware — the idea being that the price of commercial access to “the public” is the guarantee of the public’s access to non-commercial information and dialogue.
The make-or-break issue at that point becomes one of how the money is managed — and it’s a path full of peril for any management vehicle to navigate. The jagged rocks of Populism lurk, just below the water, on one side; the smooth and seamless cliffs of elite Meritocracy loom on the other.
Seems like an opportunity for some real social innovation!
Read a little more on the topic, in this interview with Stanford’s Ted Glasser on the potential for a National Endowment for Journalism.