I was a panelist yesterday, Wednesday, April 15, at First Amendment Day at Iowa State University. Dr. Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State, opened with remarks that I recommend reading first. My response follows (I ad-libbed a few lines, but mostly followed this prepared text):
I’ll start with a couple requests. If you have a cell phone, please get it out and hold it up. Now, if you have used that phone today to send or receive written communication or images, whether by text message, email or web, please open or activate your phone so that the screen lights up. Now wave that phone and look around you. (Nearly everyone in the crowd, mostly students, waved a glowing phone.)
This is the future of freedom of the press. It is healthy, it is thriving and it will not be stopped, even if the companies that own printing presses can’t find their way to a prosperous future. The light of freedom shines as bright as those lights we see throughout this auditorium.
My parents taught me to be a polite guest, so part of me wants to thank Dr. Bugeja for his hospitality and to nod politely at his remarks. But a panel discussion without disagreement would be dull indeed, so I will be a polite guest and help my host present a lively discussion by disagreeing with nearly everything he just said.
Google is not the devil, the Internet is not hell and neither one is a threat to freedom of the press.
Print is far from dead, but if newspapers die because we failed to develop a new business model, I am confident that our First Amendment freedoms will carry on in digital communication.
Two years ago this month, I was in Germany and visited the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. If you love newspapers and love freedom of the press and if you ever visit Germany, you need to visit this museum and see the birthplace of the press and the history of printing. It was an emotional experience to see those artifacts from the early days of printing. I especially remember my feeling of reverence in a nearly dark room where three original Gutenberg Bibles were displayed under protective glass.
More than three centuries after Gutenberg printed those Bibles, this nation’s founders decided to guarantee freedom of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution. They didn’t guarantee healthy profit margins to newspapers, just the right to publish.
This freedom was promised in an era when newspapers served small niche audiences such as a political party or an ethnic community with a mix of news and strong opinion. Many newspapers were one-person shops that scraped out a meager living for that person. If that sounds a lot like today’s bloggers and niche sites, then maybe you can see why I feel like the First Amendment remains strong.
I do love newspapers. I broke into this business late in the First Amendment’s second century when I started delivering the Columbus Citizen-Journal in 1967 in Ohio. That newspaper stopped publishing in 1985. My first journalism job was for the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1971. The Sentinel stopped publishing in the 1990s. Ken Fuson and I were present for the death of the Des Moines Tribune in 1982. I was an editor for the Kansas City Times when it published its final edition in 1990. Every one of those papers died before Google was born and before the World Wide Web was more than a novelty. Newspaper circulation peaked in 1993, the year Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned 20 and five years before they founded Google. So let’s not blame digital competition for upheaval in the newspaper business. We were killing each other off and failing to innovate long before competitors started figuring out the secrets of success in the digital marketplace.
As a paper carrier, reporter, editor and writing coach, I have worked for eight different newspapers. Not a single one of them really charged for content. The price you pay for a newspaper, whether it’s delivered daily to your home or whether you pick one up occasionally at the grocery store, barely covers the costs of production and distribution, if that. We always made our money by assembling a large audience and helping businesses connect with the audience.
I remember the early days of the Web. Newspaper executives by and large regarded it with disdain. They neither recognized nor sought to develop this new medium’s potential for helping us revolutionize our core jobs of informing our communities and connecting businesses with consumers.
Too many newspaper executives ignored these new opportunities for too long. The more progressive ones tried to cram existing products into this new space, rather than exploring the possibilities of this opportunity. Our advertising fit as awkwardly into the new medium as our content did, and we left it to Brin and Page and Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Bezos and Craig Newmark and Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington and a lot of other people to figure out how commerce and journalism would work in the digital marketplace.
When newspaper executives should have been working, risking and thinking differently to develop new ways of telling stories and new ways of sharing information and new ways of serving business customers, their primary concern about the Internet was that staff members might spend some valuable work time looking at pornography.
Don’t get me wrong. I mourn the passing of each newspaper that dies. A final edition of the Rocky Mountain News hangs in my office. And I plan to fight like hell to ensure that The Gazette continues publishing for years to come.
But I don’t fear that Google or the Internet threaten our First Amendment freedoms. The greatest threats to freedom of the press are Americans who don’t understand the First Amendment or politicians who do understand it.
When I hear people talk about how the Internet or newspaper failures threaten freedom of the press, I think about the New York Times and Talking Points Memo. In 2002, the New York Times had a net income of $300 million after taxes. That year it also published lots of page-one stories that contained outright lies that helped push this nation along the path to a war that has cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. I should add that the Associated Press and Washington Post published similar lies. Only the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder, which no longer exists, performed the watchdog role for which we cherish our press freedom. And that was right after the dot-com bust, when newspaper publishers were heaving sighs of relief, thinking that this Internet thing might actually be a fad, not a threat to the First Amendment.
When the Internet proved more durable, newspaper companies still stumbled and bumbled in their efforts to innovate, while others took the lead in finding our digital future. Do you remember the scandal that brought down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales? That was the result of a classic piece of investigative reporting. It could have been the work of the New York Times, redoubling its watchdog efforts to atone for its shameful reporting on prewar intelligence. That could have been the work of the Associated Press, which has a nationwide news-gathering network, with reporters in each of the states where U.S. attorneys were being fired.
But finding the pattern for those firings was actually the work of Talking Points Memo, an independent blog. Working with their audience in one of the first and best examples of journalistic crowdsourcing, Josh Marshall and his small TPM staff pieced together the disparate reports about scattered U.S. attorneys being fired. They blew the whistle on the efforts by Gonzales and the White House to use the Justice Department for political ends. Those digital journalists launched the scandal that eventually attracted the attention of the supposed giants of the free press. There was, Dr. Bugeja, enough “there” there to force the attorney general of the United States to resign. TPM’s reporting on this story had substantially more “there” than all the New York Times reporting on weapons of mass destruction.
I am pleased that many newspaper companies are now, better late than never, understanding the needs of innovation and the opportunities of the digital age. In fact, it was the Detroit Free Press that toppled Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick through some more outstanding watchdog reporting of the digital age, including obtaining copies of the mayor’s text messages.
The truth is that Google, bloggers and other Internet news sources, whether they aggregate or originate, are exercising freedom of the press, even if they own servers, rather than a printing press. And the Associated Press and newspapers will not protect the First Amendment or their business by using the courts (an arm of the government) to attack the fair-use doctrine, a principle based in press freedom. We won’t protect the First Amendment by finding a way to charge Google or direct customers for Internet content. Those are strictly business matters.
Remember that darkened room I told you about in the Gutenberg Museum, where I saw three original Gutenberg Bibles? Off to the left, in another case, were even older Bibles, handmade by monks in the centuries before Gutenberg developed movable type. They were beautiful works of art, passed from generation to generation as family treasures.
I think newspapers today are living in a similar time to those monks in the time of Gutenberg. If their product was that beautiful handcrafted book, then its days were numbered. But if their product was a message that they believed in their souls was the word of God, this new technology was going to take that message to untold millions who never had a chance to own one of those precious heirloom Bibles.
We face the same situation. If freedom of the press rests in the machine or in its product, ink on paper, delivered to your home daily full of yesterday’s news, then maybe we are in a dire situation. But freedom of the press is not a reference to a machine or a product. Freedom of the press is freedom of watchdog reporting, of storytelling and opinion. It’s freedom to bring insight and meaning and truth to our communities. Just as Gutenberg’s new machine gave new life to the Scriptures, I believe Google and those machines you waved a few minutes ago will give new life to freedom of the press.
After we delivered our opening remarks, three other panelists spoke and then Dr. Bugeja and I discussed these and other issues with the panelists and the audience. He followed up today by email and asked me to pass this along as I posted our exchange: While you may disagree with all that I wrote in the opening statement, I agree with almost everything that you said. The issue here is more complex than I can make in 10 minutes and that took years of research in Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.
[…] Content Conductor at Gazette Communications « Twitter liveblog for Edge workshop Google’s no threat to press freedom […]
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That’s all well and good, but I have the same question every time I come across this same idea (which seems to be everywhere on the Internet): How exactly do news organizations make enough money to remain viable by giving away the news for free while also trying to sell it in print? Online ads? Not likely for smaller papers like The Gazette. Oh, there are a few national politics sites that will thrive. But even nytimes.com, one of the most viewed Web sites out there, gets only a small fraction of its revenue from online ads. Sure, we can all agree that technology is changing and that the means of delivering the news is changing. Print will likely become something of a luxury in the future. But how is the money made to hire reporters, develop an experienced staff and produce quality news that seems to be going the way of the dinosaur? Newspapers continue to close while sites like Huffington Post live off of a non-paid staff and the hard work of struggling publications. A good business model is more than cyber bells and whistles.
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[…] NB: Steve Buttry’s contribution to the panel can be found at this link. […]
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Stu,
I will address the issues you raise in more depth in the coming days. But the quick answer is that lots of people are making money online. But they aren’t doing it by taking old business models and trying to cram them into technology where they don’t fit. Paid content has been tried and tried and tried. It only works for highly specialized content with high value to a narrow audience. If newspapers want to survive in the digital world, we need to develop a model built around direct sales opportunities, local search, email marketing, lead generation, SMS marketing, video advertising, target advertising and tools and techniques appropriate for the digital marketplace. And if we don’t figure it out, someone else will.
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One thing I worry about is that the list of potential moneymaking avenues and efforts you mention in your response to Stu might lead to the digital version of the “Do Not Call” list. The micro-social networks and niche sites that are out there could lead to targeted marketing and advertising opportunities, but what if the users or administrators of those sites and networks choose not to allow such advertising? Or, if we’re the administrators, what if our users say they don’t want the targeted advertising? (For example, users of the local soccer enthusiasts’ social networking site only want to talk about soccer, not hear about the latest deals from Dick’s Sporting Goods.)
It wouldn’t be as annoying as getting telemarketing phone calls at night or having to sift through a big inbox to get rid of unwanted solicitations, but I worry about the potential of users or administrators to block ads, and thus, advertisers might end up choosing not to market through these channels we see as potential revenue generators.
I personally get annoyed seeing marketing e-mails, tweets or messages in the sites I use, yet I also realize we in the journalism industry need to find a way to make money and be financially viable.
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Valid concerns, David. The key word in your comment is “unwanted.” And your last paragraph is important, too, making the point that we have find a way to make money. Using your soccer networking site example, what if we enabled people using our C3 to create a local soccer network to decide whether to turn advertising on or off for their site. If they want to keep the site pristine, they can say no. But if we give them a cut of the advertising, they most likely will turn that on, to raise a little money for new balls or the end-of-the-season pizza party. And maybe we offer people on the site a chance to opt in to receive an email newsletter, offering soccer coaching tips. Dick’s might want to sponsor that newsletter. So it would be welcome email and an effective advertising vehicle reaching a target audience. As I detailed in my database report for Newspaper Next, Pizza Hut stopped using direct mail to send out coupons in Lawrence, Kan., because so many college kids were using online Marketplace directory to sign up to receive coupons by email. We can work these problems out if we are resourceful and think in ways that get valuable jobs done for consumers and businesses.
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Oh, that’s right! “Jobs to be done” fulfillment. Forgot about that and all its potential. Thank you.
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I’ll be very interested in seeing your response in the coming days. Because, essentially, your answer so far is “if we don’t figure it out, someone else will.” That’s not much of a response. It doesn’t answer the question. You’re essentially just hoping that things work out. That’s not much of a business plan. The operative philosophy of newspapers these days is, ‘hey, if we die, we deserve it.'” No, local news is needed, as are real ideas about keeping news organizations afloat. Ask yourself, what would happen if every news organization shut down their free news sites. What would happen? Sure, there would be some AP copy floating out there, but would you really lose money. Or would your print operation suddenly gain an inherent value? Mr. Buttry, please don’t be ashamed of the fact that you have invested in a news product and should be compensated for the investment.
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By the way, the “plenty of people” making a living online are largely aggregators. They make their money by having no overhead and sponging off the work of struggling publications. The others? Porn and the modern equivalent of mail order catalogs.
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Stu, please let me know your reaction when I post about the business model. I can’t guarantee that we will have the solution, but I can assure you that we are not waiting for someone else to figure it out. And we aren’t going to waste our time trying solutions that have already failed, such as charging for content.
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[…] Google’s no threat to press freedom « Transforming the Gaz This was written by gkamp. Posted on Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 8:17 am. Filed under IMHO, Noteworthy. Tagged ap, first amendment, google, journalism. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback. […]
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[…] NB: Steve Buttry’s contribution to the panel can be found at this link. […]
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[…] Address disagreement. You won’t necessarily agree with other speakers. Your advance research may turn up some significant disagreements or you may hear something during a presentation that you think is wrong. Don’t feel as though you need to address every disagreement. The event planners asked you to address one topic and the other speaker to address another. If your topics don’t overlap, the best course is usually to address your own topic and leave the disagreement unspoken (but don’t shy away if it comes up in a panel discussion or in questions from the audience). If your disagreements are central to the issue you were asked to discuss, address them squarely but respectfully. State your case strongly, but keep in mind that you might be wrong. You can see how I addressed disagreement with a previous speaker in my blog post, “Google’s no threat to press freedom.” […]
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This comment is ridiculously late but Steve has focused new attention on it recently, so here goes. In his post, Steve offered a nice hat tip to the folks at the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau for their critical coverage of the Bush administration’s Iraq war strategy. I agree. John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel did smart, courageous — and very lonely — work on Iraq. Steve said,
“Only the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder, which no longer exists, performed the watchdog role for which we cherish our press freedom.”
It’s the “no longer exists” part I wanted to comment on. Steve was no doubt referring only to corporate KR as no longer existing. But the reality of what he was describing does live on. It’s just called McClatchy now, after the company that bought Knight Ridder in 2006. (I headed the post-merger operation for a little more than 2 years before heading to USC.) In fact, the same people that did this work on Iraq are all still there, as are most of their Knight Ridder colleagues plus a few McClatchyites who joined them in the summer of ’06.
I have an obvious bias here. But I mention it because I don’t think many people are aware of how committed McClatchy has remained to its DC bureau. There are 15 national reporters, 10 regional reporters and 11 editors listed on its site. That’s down from the peak, but still a remarkable DC powerhouse in the context of the financial struggle McClatchy has faced.
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[…] discussing newspapers’ “original sin” of the Internet age and in discussing the future of freedom of the press. I thought Omidyar had as good a chance to figure out the business model for local news as anyone. […]
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[…] Google’s no threat to press freedom […]
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[…] on the revenues of mainstream media may harm the ability of journalists to report on stories. Dr Michael Bugeja warned “Google so dominates distribution… that fewer readers are subscribing to print […]
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