It gives me no satisfaction to say this — indeed it fills me with trepidation for the nation — but The Times is broken.
I know some of you are thinking, “You only now realize this?” No, I’m only now saying it. I have been criticizing The Times for its willful credulity in the face of rising fascism and its bothsidesism, but also because it is the biggest and was the best we had and I wished it to be better. Now I come to wonder whether it can be.
The final straw is not just Politico’s report that Times Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger thinks he is entitled by birthright to interview the President of the United States — and, deprived of the privilege, allegedly and petulantly encouraged use of news columns to criticize Joe Biden. “It’s A.G.,” Politico quoted an unnamed journalist saying. “He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.” That is what we call a buried lede.
No, the final straw for me came with The Times’ response to Politico’s reporting from an unnamed spokesperson. Did the paper and its leadership use this as an opportunity for self-reflection, to finally ask what it might be doing wrong? No. The institution doubled down on entitlement and complaint, cloaking its hissy fit in condescension and the sacred language of the press: “For anyone who understands the role of the free press in a democracy, it should be troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”
At about the same time, Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn was addressing an industry conference and said the obvious part out loud (qouted by an attendee): “Our commitment to independent journalism is a commitment to make many of our readers unhappy most of the times.”
Sulzberger, too, talks often about “independence.” But independence from whom? Not the official sources and the powerful from whom they seek access. Often not the right-wing that manipulates them. No, they want to prove they are independent of liberals and their own readers — who happen to be the same people. The Times equates independence with making us unhappy. Jay Rosen spotted that dynamic years ago. That — and petulance — is what drives The Times to #ButHerEmails and now #ButHisAge.
I was struck reading former Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron’s book, Collision of Power, when he said that “by the fall of 2018, the percentage of our digital subscribers who considered themselves somewhat or very conservative was in the single digits, with slightly more than 80 percent ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ liberal.”
For Baron, that seems a lamentation. He, like The Times and most of journalism in the age of mass media, think it is their job to serve everyone the same. That is the unspoken form of bothsidesism that rules the institution. It is a business imperative as much as a mission; monopoly newspapers want the largest possible audience: everyone.
In truth, I say that Baron should have seen the paper’s apparent ideological imbalance as a blessing: Now you know who your audience is. It is a community of commonality. You should then understand how better to serve them. You could equip them with the facts, perspective, history, and intellgectual honesty necessary to win arguments with their misinformed Uncle Jim. But these papers think it is their challenge to serve Uncle Jim who never reads these papers because he’s happy watching Fox News.
The Post, under Baron, used to be better in my opinion; I thought it had surpassed The Times. But his replacement, Sally Buzbee, is bringing to the paper her anodyne ambitions from the Associated Press — the telegraphed voice from no one that Neil Postman, James Carey, and Jay Rosen warn of. In my view, The Post’s news judgment has been getting worse and worse. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is, make no mistake about it, Rupert Murdoch’s creature.
These three newspapers, which in the winners-take-most market of media today capture two thirds of subscription revenue, each have wonderful journalists doing good and important work. But they are betrayed by their institutions, which are losing trust and refuse to ask why.
Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the legacy newspaper industry is in dire condition, most of its big chains now owned by hedge funds that cut them to the marrow, copy each other, do not innovate. The one thing they still invest in is lobbying, with their trade association, the News/Media Alliance, writing and Xeroxing bills for legislators from Washington to Springfield to Sacramento to benefit old newspapers at the expense of Black, Latino, community, digital, and startup news media.
I have come to the belief that the status of legacy American newspapers is no longer the measure of the health of the country’s news and information ecosystem. It is time to separate them and to concentrate on the future of the ecosystem as a whole. That is where foundations and policymakers must turn their attention.
As I was writing this, I saw that Howard Stern had interviewed Joe Biden. I stopped and listened and came away with a better sense of Biden’s character and soul than from any interview or press conference held by political reporters or publishers ever. Their conversation was illuminating, revealing, touching, human, and meaningful. I hope Stern and Sirius make it public for all to hear.
NiemanLab published excerpts from the paper on the flaws in the legislation and alternatives. I thought some might enjoy other sections, including this one about the tactics newspaper publishes have brought to bear against intruders in what they claim as their turf: news. I also write about some of this in The Gutenberg Parenthesis. It’s a wonderful if in some ways appalling tale:
With the birth of radio a century ago, print as a medium faced its first competitor for attention and advertisers. It is instructive to examine parallels to publishers’ tactics today, involving copyright, antitrust, criticism in editorial coverage, and political lobbying.
Newspaper publishers were, to say the least, inhospitable to the new medium. As early as 1922, the Associated Press — as a cooperative owned by publishers — forbade the use of its news on radio. In 1932, members of the AP sought the help of the American Newspaper Publishers Association “to curtail broadcasting of AP news,” but an association attorney warned that the groups could not collaborate “without violating the statutes relating to conspiracy in restraint of trade.”¹
In Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939 (Praeger, 1995), Gwenyth Jackaway recounts the many efforts publishers made to exclude broadcasters from news, most notably strong-arming the two nascent networks at the time into signing the Biltmore Agreement of 1933. It prohibited the networks from building news operations (Columbia Broadcasting disbanded its news operation with a half-dozen bureaus, a few dozen on staff, and 1,000 correspondents globally); required them to pay for news updates from the publishers’ wire services; forbade commercial sponsorship of news; and limited twice daily news broadcasts to 5 minutes each, filled with 30-word bulletins, which could air only after local newspapers had come off the press at 9:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. The bulletins had to be written to encourage reading newspapers. In a perverse rendition of the hot news doctrine, according to Jackaway, on-air commentators were not allowed to discuss news until 12 hours after the event.
Why would radio networks agree to such concessions? Politics. As Broadcasting reported in 1934, they thought “a friendly and cooperative attitude would preclude newspaper agitation against radio during the coming session of Congress.”² “If you ask why broadcasters accepted such an unsatisfactory and humiliating agreement, the answer is simple,” said H.V. Kaltenborn, who straddled both media. “They feared the power of the press. That power was ready to swing into action against them.”³ In Harper’s, Isabelle Keating called the agreement “a metaphorical Versailles Treaty which by inference, placed the war guilt on the broadcasters, disarmed them, and sought to make them pay.” Senator Clarence Dill called it “news suppression.”⁵
The Biltmore Agreement fell away because, from the start, independent stations ignored it. Also, newspaper publishers entered the radio business, with 208 of 717 American stations owned by newspapers by 1937. By then, 80% of homes had radios. As Harper’s reported, newspapers “found that news broadcasting stimulated the sales of their papers.”⁶ The New Republic editorialized, “For years, newspaper publishers have fought the bad fight, using boycotts, reprisals, intimidation, ridicule and injunctions in a relentless effort to make radio shut its many-tubed mouth.” Newspaper publishers would regularly complain about filching, stealing, and pirating of content and also contend that radio was a breeding ground for disinformation, for they contended that the eye was superior to the ear for learning. But their underlying complaint was this: “Their revenues were dropping, radio’s were mounting — ergo: radio must be stealing the business from the newspapers… Radio was not only hamstringing advertising receipts, but it was dishing out free what newspapers had to sell.”⁷ Or as Editor & Publisher complained, “But the newspaper, apparently, is only a queer kind of business which gives its product away to a competitor, and stands idly by to see a natural and rightful function supplanted.”⁸
The California Newspaper Publishers Association called for “the return to the people the air channels now used by commercial interests, similar to the plan now in effect in England.”⁹ Throughout their battle, newspapers threatened to drop publishing of broadcasters’ program listings, but when they followed through, readers protested and listings returned. Most profoundly, newspaper publishers lobbied for broadcast to be regulated, leading in 1927 to the creation of the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in 1934 — thus carving a considerable exception to the First Amendment and its protection of freedom of the press. With no apparent sense of irony, after forcing radio to be regulated by government, newspaper publishers then tried to ban radio reporters from Congressional galleries, asking, in the words of Keating, “whether radio was not in fact subservient to the reigning political party because of its governmental license; whether, as a result, it was not unqualified to purvey disinterested news.”¹⁰
H.O. Davis, publisher of California’s Ventura Free Press, waged a campaign to organize small, independent newspapers — those less likely to own broadcast towers — against radio. According to Broadcasting, Davis sent publishers letters advising them to use their news columns to “show up the moronic quality of most programs. Get interviews with all kinds of people who are disgusted with the character of radio programs and annoyed by the constant intrusion of advertising…. Emphasize the danger of uncontrolled broadcasting for the spreading of insidious propaganda.” He suggested enlisting clergy against “the evils of broadcasting supported entirely by advertising…. Tell them of the danger that uncontrolled commercial television will bring movie sex smut and idealized gangsters right into the home.”¹¹
Publishers draped themselves in “the invocation of sacred rhetoric,” in Jackaway’s words. “Radio journalism, they warned, posed a threat to the journalistic ideas of objectivity, the social ideals of public service, the capitalistic ideals of property rights, and the political ideals of democracy…. Now they are no longer simply annoying competitors; they are invaders who pose a threat to some of the culture’s most sacred ideals.”¹² See for comparison, the sacred rhetoric in the preamble to the federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act: “A free and diverse fourth estate was critical to the founding of our democracy and continues to be the lifeblood of a functioning democracy.” See also the opening of The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI: “Independent journalism is vital to our democracy.¹³ It is also increasingly rare and valuable.”
Radio would not be the last new competitor to inspire such sacred claims. As Jackaway observes, “When people feel threatened by the arrival of newcomers who do things in a new way, they often respond with hostility. They frequently claim some form of superiority over these outsiders, and thus dismiss them as lacking any value.” Come television, we see a replay of the drama between newspapers and technology. “For the past dozen years,” Morris J. Gelman wrote in Television Magazine in 1962, “newspapers with little regard for facts or proportion, have used television as the nation’s number one whipping boy.”¹⁴ Publishers complained about the still-new kid on the block taking their national ad revenue, even though the industry at the time was enjoying record circulation and held a third of the total ad market, more than double TV’s take. And one-third of TV stations were affiliated with newspapers.
The script was acted out once again against telephone companies when, following the 1984 breakup of AT&T into Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), the Baby Bells were freed by court order in July 1991 from a prohibition against offering information services. “Stunned, the publishers are now scrambling to persuade Congress, in effect, to overturn the court ruling,” The New York Times reported. “Behind the scenes, the publishers and telephone companies have hired some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and political advisers. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, for example, has hired several heavyweights.” One year later, both sides were taking out full-page newspaper ads and Congress was debating a bill to again limit the telcos, but that came to nothing. Another year on, however, the mood changed when, as one might say today, enemies became frenemies and Times Mirror was in talks to collaborate with the phone companies in its newspaper markets, L.A. and New York.¹⁵
And now, with the arrival of the internet and lately artificial intelligence, the leitmotif of newspapers’ fears, objections, accusations, and lobbying can be heard again. Journalists write headlines asking, in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” while The New York Times declares, “It’s Time to Unfriend the Internet.” Meanwhile, publishers worry about competition, contending once again that “their” revenue has been “stolen” from them and trying to protect news as their property. In early days online, when Reuters began licensing its content to the then-king-of-the-web, Yahoo, AP management was met with stiff resistance to doing the same by its board of newspaper owners. (The compromise: the AP could sell its main wire but not its local wires.)
(One further quote by Jackaway from The Gutenberg Parenthesis:) “Never,” said Jackaway, “is there the admission that public opinion might be manipulated by the printed word as well as the spoken word, or any recognition that by attempting to control radio news the press was actually infringing upon the broadcasters’ freedom of expression. Instead, the print journalists cloak themselves in a mantle of self-sacrifi cing virtue and depict the broadcasters and the government as enemies of the most essential values of our political system. Throughout these journalistic criticisms of radio is an appeal to an idealized model of the press, in which newspapers dutifully protect the people from the abuses of governmental excess or political propaganda. The radio in contrast, is portrayed as a medium through which the public could be manipulated and exploited.” The old medium is always the solution to the problems the old medium says the new medium is causing.
Note recurrent trends: Publishers react to competition by trying to extend copyright and deprive others from using news, by accusing others of antitrust or seeking exemption from it, by decrying the methods and morals of the new medium, and by seeking protectionist legislation.
¹ Rudolph D. Michael, “History and Criticism of Press-Radio Relationships,” Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 15, №2 (June 1938), 179. ² Gwenyth Jackaway, Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939, Praeger (1995), 27–29; Martin Codel, “News Plan to End Radio-Press War,” Broadcasting (January 1, 1934), 10, 30. ³ Codel, 10. ⁴ Kaltenborn quoted in Robert McChesney, “Press-Radio Relations and the Emergence of Network, Commercial Broadcasting,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, Vol. 11, №1 (March 1991). ⁵ Isabelle Keating, “Pirates of the Air,” Harper’s (September 1, 1939), 468–469. ⁶ Keating, 464. ⁷ T.R. Carskadon, “The Press-Radio War,” The New Republic (March 11, 1936), 132–133. ⁸ “Editorial: Radio and Elections,” Editor & Publisher (November 10, 1928), 30. ⁹ Quoted in Jackaway, 100. ¹⁰ Keating, 468. ¹¹ “A Vicious Fight Against Broadcasting,” Broadcasting, December 1, 1931, 10, 33. ¹² Jackaway, 44. ¹³ Jackaway, 7–8. ¹⁴ Morris J. Gelman, “Newspapers,” Television Magazine, November 1962, 88. ¹⁵ Edmund L. Andrews, “‘Baby Bells,’ Newspapers In a Brawl,” The New York Times (November 11, 1991): www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/business/the-media-business-baby-bells-newspapers-in-a-brawl.html; “Bill to Curb ‘Baby Bells’ Advances,” The Washington Post (May 28, 1992); William Glaberson, “The Baby Bells Are Finding an Unlikely Ally in the Information-Services War: Newspapers,” The New York Times (July 5, 1993): www.nytimes.com/1993/07/05/business/media-business-press-baby-bells-are-finding-unlikely-ally-information-services.html.
There is so much to parse in this Times column inspired by a paper examining alleged political leanings of large language models.
First, the myth of a “center” is imposed on the machine as it is on journalism. That is an impossibility, especially when extremists weigh down the equation & move “center” by gravity downhill, towards them.
Second, in its raw state the model reflects the collected corpus of digital content from those who had the power to publish. Thus, it will reflect that worldview; it is a reflection of that power. Imposing left/right/center on that says little about the machine, much about the that imposition.
But, third, given that — as the Stochastic Parrots paper preaches — the models are too huge to audit. It is impossible to judge the effect of the choices made in training them. That is the problem with size-matters, macho model-making.
Fourth, when, as the article says, models are “fine-tuned,” some of that effort comes in reaction to fears of political and media pressure on the model-makers, to compensate for what is lacking in the material used to train the model. Thus, the tuning says more about that pressure and those fears than it does about the technology per se. See: the fuss over Gemini’s images. So when a model puts a Black person at the US Constitutional Convention, its makers are trying to account for society’s biases; when it is called “woke” by the right, that reveals their further biases. The issues are all human.
All this is why I argue that we must study technology in the context of humanity, examining not the software as if it had a worldview but instead understanding the conflicting worldviews imposed on it and what that reveals not about the machine but about us.
The tl;dr of all this is that just as there is no mythical center in politics, there is no neutrality in technology (AI or social media) and there is no objectivity in journalism. Each is an attempt to impose a given view as a norm.
In my upcoming book (coming not soon enough), The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic, I quote Terrence Sejnowski on his theory of the Reverse Turing Test in the context of Kevin Roose’s affair with ChatGPT. The episode says more about the reporter than the machine he reported on . That snippet:
In my book, I argue we should understand the internet not as a technology but as a human network and enterprise. Similarly, we should not try to analyze the biases in AI so much as we should endeavor to \understand human biases imposed upon it in design or reaction.
AI as it exists could be understood as a reflection on society, in what it summarizes of the collection of human text and image it is trained on, in how our reaction to it exposes our fears or dreams, in how we choose to command it.
If we saw generative AI as a creative tool, then I’d say imagining the founding of America with women & Black people at the table and the Catholic Church headed by Black women and Native Americans is a proper revision of history the way it should have been.
The reaction to #WokeGemini says more about society than the tool itself; that’s what fascinates me about AI: its reflections. Right-wing columnists fear the anti-white machine programmed by commisars of what we used to call political correctness.
And the extremist Murdoch media and pols hunt for enemies: technologists who dare to recognize “white privilege.” Their strategy of projection works in media today: calling anti-racism racism to deflect from their deep racism, just as calling Biden old and doddering deflects from the truly doddering Trump. In today’s credulous media, it works.
Ultimately, this little episode shows the folly of “guardrails” in AI, for a tool can be made to do anything and what it is proscribed from doing — and reaction to that — can be more revealing and risky than the tool alone. It is like telling Gutenberg what movable type must never say. The Church tried to do just that with his successors as, at first, the technology was held responsible for what it produced: printers were beheaded and behanded for what their machines produced. Then booksellers were held liable and controlled via licensing and the Stationers Company in Britain. Finally, authors were the responsible parties — and Foucault says that is the birth of the author.
We debate responsibility over the technology of AI today: Some want the model makers to be responsible for everything that could (or now could not) be produced from their machine. Some try to blame an application of the model (looking at you, Air Canada). Some want to blame the technology for making just what it was asked to make (looking at a certain lawyer and a certain reporter).
The episode also reveals the fraud in associating generative AI with truth. If it were seen instead as a concordance of all society’s biased text and images and a creative tool that can be told to remake that, then there’d be no story here, only interesting reflections of ourselves, our aspirations, our faults, and our fears.
I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news: It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry.
I say this with no joy, no satisfaction at having tried to get newspapers and magazines to change, and much empathy for the journalists and others caught working in a dying sector and those who count on them. But the old news industry is gasping for air. I’m not suggesting performing euthenasia on what is left. Nor do I dance on the grave. In my time running a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, now ending, I have tried to balance support for startups and legacy companies. But I wonder whether it is time stop throwing good money and effort after bad.
The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionnaires — has failed them. Hedge funds have bought up chains and papers, selling everything not bolted down, cutting every possible cost, and taking every penny of cash flow home with them. The one thing the old companies are still investing in is lobbying.
In my testimony in the Senate last week, I engaged in the wishful if futile act of urging the legislators not to enact protectionist legislation written with the industry lobbyists who sat beside me, but instead to support the emergent reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere. Not likely.
The bad news for news is constant. Just in the last month, the Los Angeles Times islaying off 115 people, throwing its newsroom into “chaos” and “mayhem.”Time magazine lays off 15 percent of its unionized editorial staff. Meanwhile, The New York Timeschronicles the pains of billionnaires losing fortunes trying to save old news. I didn’t think it was possible for hedge funds to torture journalism more, but Alden just did something even worse than buying a paper: sellingThe Baltimore Sun to the mini-Murdoch, David Smith, chair of right-wing Sinclair, hater of news and newspapers. In the UK, the Mirror’s circulation has fallen from 5 million to a quarter million, its local papers are sputtering, and the company predicts print will be unsustainble — something I’ve been warning about for two decades. Once-grand Sports Illustrated is being murdered in plain sight. The FCC just announced it is trying to support local TV news, nevermind that audience for local broadcast news is small, old, and dying … and more and more made up of people watching the faux Fox, Sinclair.
Meanwhile, trust in journalism falls to ever-lower records. The Reuters Institute at Oxford tells us that a third of people actively avoid news, and who can blame them? I myself am fed up with old news’ wishful doomsaying, its credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait. Semafor and Gallup report that trust in journalists is falling now among Democrats, too.
And now here comes artificial intelligence to manufacture and devalue that thing we call content, robbing the old news industry of its sense of value and purpose in making the commodity. I’ve been trying to convince news organizations that they are not, or should not be, in content business, but that journalism is instead a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration. I have failed.
Of course, there are exceptions. The Boston Globe and StarTribune seem to be surviving or better. My old colleagues at Advance are innovating in Alabama, living on past print. (In his lengthy lamentation on death in news, Ezra Klein lists Alabama going out of print as a loss when I say it is a victory: life after the death of the press.) The Times is growing on the backs of games and food. The National Trust for Local News is saving papers here and there.
But then there’s Scranton, its paper now in the clutches of Alden. The Washington Post has chroncled their pain. On Feb. 9, I’ll be speaking at the University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum about what to do now. What should I tell them?
I will warn them to expect cutbacks and no investment or innovation at their dear old Times-Tribune. I’ve seen how Alden operates. As a member of a Digital First advisory board a decade ago, I saw the company innovate under John Paton and Jim Brady, but when that didn’t yield a sale in 2015, both of them left and the hedgies proceeded to cut to the marrow.
I come with no solution, no salvation; nothing’s that simple. There are many examples of people trying to find new futures for news. In my Senate testimony, I spoke of the 450 members of the New Jersey News Commons, which I’m proud to have helped start a decade ago at Montclair State University; and the 475 members of LION, the Local Independent Online News Publishers; and the 425 members of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. See also today’s news that The 19th is starting a new network for sharing news (something I tried in New Jersey years ago). This is where innovation in news is occurring: bottom-up, grass-roots efforts emergent in communities.
But as my old friend and colleague Peter Bhatia said when he made the controversial decision of dismissing the editor of the new Houston Landing, “We’re basically putting out a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for success for us for the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.” I don’t know Houston Landing well enough to comment but I do worry that some of the efforts at new news still emulate and aspire to the form and function of old news.
I think we need to be more radical than that, much more radical than I have been.
I note with optimism Mike Masnick’s just released report, The Sky is Rising, about the impact of the internet on media writ large — reading, watching, listening, and playing. It concludes, “More creative content is being produced that ever before. More people are able to create content than ever before, and more people are able to make money doing so…. And almost all of this is thanks to the power of the internet.” The report is talking mostly about entertainment but also notes that according to Census Bureau data, “it appears that internet publishing jobs more than replaced the jobs lost in newspapers and periodicals.”
There can be life after legacy. There will be roles for journalists. But journalism schools must expand their horizon to teach more than making content. How do we serve many publics in a networked world?
For the last two decades at least, I have told newspaper editors and publishers that they must imagine a day when print is no longer sustainable, and if they are not profitable digitally by then, they will die. Now I will tell the good people of Scranton to imagine a day when their paper dies, or is as good as dead.
What then? Citizens will have to come together to understand their needs as a community: for information, yes, and also for understanding, collaboration, accountability, repair, and service. They will need to decide what is best for Scranton and its many communities.
They might find some help, though never enough. Press Forward is bringing $500 million to the effort, but that can stretch only so far. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is doing interesting work granting state funds to bolster innovation. Perhaps Pennsylvania could do likewise. (Though I worry about what equivalent efforts in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma would support.) California, like the US Congress with its JCPA, are talking about helping news — but what they’re actually doing is looking to blackmail tech companies on behalf of legacy news companies and their hedge-fund owners. JCPA specifically excludes news enterprises making less than $100,000 — which is to say most of those hundreds of innovators I listed above. No thank you.
The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in so-called media literacy, but in media leadership, in taking responsibility for the health of their communities and their public discourse. That is a big, complex, nuanced, unsure order that will require marshalling the wisdom of disciplines far beyond journalism: history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, community studies, ethics, design, and the arts.
I am afraid to say that the newspaper and TV and commercial radio station of today are inadequate to the task. Their news was invented in the long century of mass media, which began (as I recount in Magazine) when Frank Munsey realized he could sell his eponymous periodical at a dime and a loss, but profit by selling his audience’s attention to advertisers. Thus was born the attention economy that now corrupts not only old media but new. The internet isn’t killing news. It is killing the mass and the myth that kept media alive all these years: that our attention is a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold.
I say this with reluctance and sadness but also with hope, for I am priviliged to watch some of my alumni try to create a new journalism at human scale, built on listening and serving communities, not nostalgia. How might Scranton do that? That will be up to Scranton, not to the heartless hedge fund — the Dunder-Mifflin of newspapering — that has come to town.
