APRIL 15, 2009

Democracy, Publishing and Money

If you’ve been anywhere near the blogosphere in the past few months, you’ve noticed that one of the dominant themes of conversation has been the apparent demise of “traditional media” - i.e. newspapers and, to a lesser extent, the publishing industry as a whole. The list of major dailies that have either shut their doors or moved to online-only distribution is quite startling and probably familiar territory for anyone reading this blog.  Indeed, on our social media team, it’s become kind of a predictable cliche when someone e-mails us a story about yet another newspaper folding.

The blogosphere is all about commentators, and there are a few that have buttered their intellectual bread by loudly and apocalyptically predicting the demise of the newspaper industry’s business model. Clay Shirky is my personal favorite, with Jeff Jarvis coming a close second. These folks are feted all over the web for saying out loud what everyone intrinsically knows - that there’s little future in a business model that requires consumers to pay for creative intellectual property. I can make a copy of a band’s best song in five seconds and send it to everyone I know in about a minute, without that group ever seeing a dime. I can re-post a newspaper article on this blog or my own, even challenging it or refuting it in the process, destroying not only the article’s credibility but also the protection the newspaper has over its own created content. We know this. Bottom line: people are no longer willing to pay for media or information except in very specific circumstances.

What’s disappointing, though, is that none of these thinkers seem to be considering the social ramifications at play here. Shirky, for instance, punts in his latest blog post. But if anything is clear, it’s that the development of a commercial model for news and information distribution pre-figured modern democracy, and continues to uphold it. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution, was not only a work of philosophy and political activism - it was a cash cow for its author and publishers, going through 25 printings in the first year alone. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book often credited with galvanizing the abolitionist movement and providing the spark for the Civil War, was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. I’m most familiar with American history, but every social movement of the modern era - from civil rights to feminism to gay rights (as well as other movements we might consider less savory) - has had, at its heart, one or more works of for-profit journalism or advocacy.

And that continues today. Without the profits to sustain long-term investigative reporting, do you think we would’ve seen the Abu Ghraib expose in 2004? The story on Walter Reed that surfaced in 2007? More important, would anything have been done about those gross miscarriages of justice had journalists not shined a light on them? On a local level, who covers City Council meetings? Who pesters the city comptroller about missing funds? Who writes a story on the potholes in that dilapidated neighborhood on the other side of town and ultimately gets them fixed?

This isn’t to lionize journalists or authors. There’s been a lot of shoddy work in those fields, to be quite honest. But the for-profit press serves as a vital check on the excesses and inadequacies of government, and there’s one reason that those writers, thinkers, and activists have been able to do the work they’ve done - money. I just think that the sooner we figure out a way to re-monetize creative intellectual property, the better.