AUGUST 11, 2009

The Future Of Media - Public Funding?

Ever since I was a teenage kid with snobby taste in music, I’ve loved the Canadian indie rock band Metric. (OK, “rock” is a bit of a strong word for the group, but “emo” reflects poorly on me, so that’s what I’m going with). After a two-year layoff, the group recently came out with a new album called Fantasies, which is pretty good but nothing to write home about. Much more interesting, though, is how they funded the album - rather than putting themselves through another onerous major label deal, one that dictates creative direction and only nominally compensates artists for record sales, Metric decided to start their own label and build their own studio with the help of grant funding from the Canadian government.

To me, this speaks volumes about where, exactly, paid media is heading. As I’ve written before, plummeting-to-nonexistent distribution and publication costs have ended major media companies’ role of “gatekeeper” - one that they held solely due to the scarcity of space on record store shelves, or column inches in a newspaper.

But even more notably, I think the Metric experience points one viable way forward for media outlets struggling with the competition of the web - government and/or nonprofit funding. Canada, for instance, has decided that to a certain degree, cultural protectionism is preferable to a completely free market. They’re fine with having a somewhat distinct Canadian culture that exists with government protection and subsidy - a goal that’s accomplished in a number of ways, including “Canadian content” laws that require 35% of content broadcast by radio stations be of Canadian origin, as well as the grant system. Of course, this priority is made a bit more urgent by the presence of a culturally and linguistically similar behemoth on the southern border, but many western countries have similar laws.

Like the Canadians, who have decided that it’s worth sacrificing free market efficiency for a little diversity in culture, I think it’s worth exploring a similar model for journalism. We’re quickly finding that in an age of cutthroat competition for journalists, bloggers like Perez Hilton (who commands $72,000 for a full-day sponsorship) are rising to the top. Far be it from me to criticize a guy making money, but I think we can agree that celebrity gossip won’t fill the void left by the increasing unprofitability of investigative journalism. This is a place that I think a well-targeted government grant program, or an equivalent non-profit organization, might be able to step in and cover the significant costs of hard-hitting journalism - recognizing that a vibrant but protected press is superior to the alternative of no press at all.

Enough seriousness - let’s rock (kind of). Here’s “Gimme Sympathy” from Metric’s Fantasies.