Public and Government Models

Many people have begun to look to public broadcasting as a viable model for saving journalism. “The most successful hybrid of old and new media comes from the last place you’d expect,” the business magazine Fast Company recently wrote. “NPR’s digital smarts, nonprofit structure, and good old-fashioned shoe leather just might save the news.” The article notes that “NPR’s listenership has nearly doubled since 1999, even as newspaper circulation dropped off a cliff. Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today’s 2.3 million daily circulation or Fox News’ 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN.” Despite their continued success, public media aren’t immune from the recession, either: In December 2008, NPR canceled several shows and let go 64 employees.

One of the most attractive aspects of this model is the potential for tapping into the pre-existing structures and skills that constitute the country’s public media system. Another of public media’s primary assets is that the system is already set up to receive appropriations from the U.S. government. Such a ready-made system holds obvious advantages over creating an entirely new system or entity like a National Endowment for Journalism. Furthermore, public support for public broadcasting has remained high, with PBS consistently ranking second only to the Defense Department in surveys of good uses of federal spending. The shift to digital broadcasting means that NPR and PBS now have multiple TV and radio stations in thousands of communities around the country. Finally, an infusion of public media funding for journalism would fulfill the mandate of the 1967 legislation that first created the public broadcasting system to cover the stories and produce the content that the market typically fails to produce.

Indeed, the convergence of the crisis in corporate media and advances in digital production and distribution could provide an historic opportunity for public media’s reinvention. Such an overhaul is long overdue: The U.S. government currently spends a little more than $400 million annually to fund public media. That’s just $1.35 per capita, a paltry figure compared to the amount spent in countries like Canada ($22.48 per capita) and England ($80.36 per capita). With increased funding — say, to as little as $5 per person — the American public media system, like the CBC or BBC, could serve as a core institution for local and national journalism and could become the information backbone for communities across the nation. Better yet, Congress should create and fund a permanent trust that would shield public media from the political whims of Washington and invest for the long term. Devoting a few billion dollars to public media — a system that enjoys far more public support than failing banks — increasingly seems like a smart investment.

This investment in quality reporting would go far in improving and modernizing the existing public media infrastructure. We would also need to take a look at governance and broaden the tent, both in terms of diversity of programming and audience and expanding the definition of public media to include community outlets, Low Power FM radio and other types of nonprofit media. While the public broadcasting system maintains a strong presence in key geographic centers, with sizable Washington and foreign bureaus and a strong network of U.S. affiliates, it has been slow to adapt to the multimedia environment. If we were to transform the old public broadcasting network into new public media, providing multimedia news across several digital platforms including text-based media, it would go far toward establishing a strong anchor for America’s information needs.

There is a shrinking but still formidable coterie in Congress that for years has tried to “zero-out” appropriations for public radio and TV. But some 40 years after their birth, we may finally be at the point where public media can live up to the lofty goals of their founding.

As talk of bailouts and stimulus bills dominated the headlines last fall and winter, discussions picked up steam on whether federal funding should be allocated for rescuing journalism and journalists. One New Deal-inspired proposal was the creation of a new “Federal Writers Project” to employ reporters who had lost their jobs. The original FWP, a core initiative of the Works Progress Administration, employed more than 6,000 writers, artists and historians who produced a range of important local projects such as regional guides, plays and oral histories. Mark Pinsky, writing in The New Republic, describes the idea:

The FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media.

Another idea, modeled after the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to establish a federally funded National Endowment for Journalism that would provide grants to news organizations and individual journalists. The NEA and NEH have been able to fund a broad diversity of projects with modest budgets. In 2008, the NEA had a budget of roughly $160 million, and the NEH was working with just under $145 million. Both organizations welcome donations and occasionally partner with foundations, but they still receive the majority of their funding through direct federal appropriations. By focusing on seeding innovation, the endowments help establish new work and strengthen existing institutions. The endowments are governed by a presidentially appointed chair and guided by a council of advisers made up of private citizens (also appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate). Establishing a National Endowment for Journalism would require federal legislation.

David Scharfenberg, writing in the Boston Globe, proposed a $100 million investment in journalism that could “seed low-cost, Internet-based news operations in cities large and small — combining vigorous, professional reporting with blogging, video posts, citizen journalism, and aggregation of stories from other sources.” These sites, Scharfenberg writes, would “build on an emerging nonprofit news model that may be our best hope for preserving serious reporting.” Given the recently expanded labor pool of laid-off journalists, such an effort could keep skilled workers on the job while serving the greater social good. Stanford University Professor Ted Glasser has called for an endowment that would specifically fund “alternative forms of journalism,” described as “journalism aimed at minority communities, journalism where communities are deemed to be demographically unattractive [to advertisers].” For Glasser, any new public investment should serve places and people that have historically been neglected by commercial journalism.

Apart from the serious question of political viability, the critiques of this model mirror the critiques surrounding other public media models: Where would the money come from? How would you establish a political firewall between funding and reporting? How would the board be selected and the money distributed?

One of the strengths of the national endowment model in addressing the journalism crisis is its potential to foster experimentation and study replicable best practices. While few agree on the solution to the crisis in journalism, there is nearly universal agreement on the need to experiment with new models. Just as government invests in medical and scientific research and development, it could establish a fund to support innovative journalism projects and foster new models for news and information. Based on models that already exist in the sciences, transportation, energy, defense and health, the federal government could establish a federally funded research and development center. Funding for such centers comes from different agency budgets and is often distributed to academic institutions and other nonprofit research centers. In the case of a Journalism R&D Fund, the money could flow through the NEH. Such a fund might function as a private/public partnership, in which government funds match investments made by foundations, universities or private companies.

Insisting that this funding go to institutions like universities, however, may actually hinder innovation and development of individual projects that are unaffiliated with those institutions. Ideally, a Journalism R&D Fund would include two funding streams, one focused on research and the other on new models. This second funding stream would function like a public-interest-oriented venture capitalist firm. Some new journalistic initiatives may be attractive for investors given that quality information will always be in demand. Back in 2007, Wired magazine reported that citizen journalism was “red hot,” with Associated Content landing $10 million in financing from Canaan Partners; NowPublic receiving $10.6 million in financing from Rho Ventures; and OhMyNews getting $11 million from SoftBank. However, funding for this kind of experimentation has since become mostly the province of a few foundations like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, whose Knight News Challenge plans to invest “at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news and social media experiments.” It is possible that such a model could be replicated on a much larger scale at the federal level.

Just as Congress has voted to dramatically increase funding for the federal service program AmeriCorps, Eric Klinenberg of New York University has proposed earmarking federal funds specifically for a program to train the next generation of local journalists. These “journalism fellows” would most likely be recent college graduates who would be trained to do multimedia reporting for outlets in their cities and towns. Such efforts may be done in partnership with local media organizations, and foundations could provide outlets for content or office space. Klinenberg notes:

The idea stems from a specific concern: that the federal stimulus and bailout programs are pumping billions of dollars into state and local governments (as well as the private sector) at the very moment local news organizations are eliminating their local political beat reporters. By all counts, statehouse and City Hall reporters are disappearing quickly, and thus far no one has emerged to replace them..

As with the “Teach for America” program, the journalism fellows could step in as reporters. Our taxpayer dollars would likely be better spent if we had watchdogs on the ground covering government spending. Media analyst Ken Doctor has also promoted this idea, calling it a kind of news corps and suggesting that it could help foster “a movement of the young in embracing the reinvention of the news, of remaking journalism in the digital age.”

While such a program could serve to educate the next generation of watchdogs, there are still nearly 20,000 journalists who have lost their jobs in the last year and a half. Perhaps these funds could also be used to provide multimedia training for laid-off journalists. The Poynter Institute has pioneered a series of trainings designed to do just that. Similar efforts have also been undertaken by NPR and the Knight Digital Media Center. This kind of program could be expanded to help veteran journalists learn new reporting skills as well as aid them in setting up new local journalism ventures.