E-Media Tidbits

National Archives He who pays the piper calls the tune. Could journalism handle this dance?

This option was floated by Columbia J-school dean Nicholas Lemann. He told Future Tense that direct government subsidies would be a "last resort" --  although he spoke highly of the BBC's reporting, which is heavily subsidized by the U.K. government.

Lemann sees promise for indirect subsidies, such as journalism being done by tax-advantaged nonprofit organizations such as the forthcoming ProPublica project. Also, the September/October 2007 Columbia Journalism Review ran a lengthy feature exploring possible press subsidies: The Uncle Sam Solution.

"[Government] funding doesn't have to equal control," said Lemann, noting that public radio and TV have existed for decades. Despite Congressional conflicts over Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, "They're not controlled by government."

The Jan. 30 Future Tense offered a rebuttal to Lemann by Ralph Whitehead Jr., journalism professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Whitehead has no problem with current subsidies for public radio and television, but he does not think newspaper journalism could be truly safeguarded from government control via purse strings: "It's awfully tough to say the solution for a financially depleted press is a government controlled press." Also: "It's one thing to import American Idol from Great Britain;  another to import U.K. laws and subsidies for the press. I don't know that we can pick up the U.K. model and drop it in U.S."

However, Whitehead offered no real answers to the thorny question of how quality journalism might develop more sound financial support in the online age. I found this disappointing, because (I've said this before) most news organizations apparently still fail to pursue online revenues intelligently and aggressively.

Until news organizations get serious about making obvious adaptations to their business operations in order to stop leaving money on the table -- and until journalists stop acting like where their paychecks come from is none of their business -- to me it seems ludicrous to even contemplate government handouts.

I agree with Whitehead: Uncle Sam probably wouldn't provide newspaper funding without very strong and uncomfortable strings attached. I wouldn't rely on any "journalistic safeguards" in that situation. News orgs have more leverage by dealing with a multitude of advertisers.