Online Journalism Is Becoming a Billionaires' Plaything (Again) 143
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, the titular newspaper magnate (played with cheeky insouciance by Orson Welles) gleefully tells a doubter that he's prepared to lose a million dollars every year in order to keep publishing. "At a rate of a million dollars a year," he smirks, "I'll have to close this place in 60 years." Over the past decade, of course, many newspapers and magazines have lost a lot more than a million dollars a year, and there are signs that online publications are having trouble holding their finances together, as well. But some very rich people are stepping in to prop things up: first Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million, then eBay founder Pierre Omidyar offered journalist Glenn Greenwald a whole lot of cash to start up a general interest publication. Billionaires and multimillionaires, of course, have total freedom to fund whatever they want—and that could be a good thing for publications with a mission and a serious need for cash. But what if the rich investor disagrees with something that his pet publication releases into the world? If (and when) that situation occurs, it could serve as an interesting test of whether the latest version of this "generous benefactor" model can work more effectively as an impartial channel for news than it has in the past (when conflicts of interest often sparked titanic fights between editors and owners)."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Billionaires, megacorps, what's the difference? (Score:5, Informative)
*Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Washington Post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The problem is for profit news... (Score:3, Informative)
.. always bends to business or advertisers.
That's the general rule, but the exceptions are even more interesting. (And the exceptions are the ones that I read.)
Before Rupert Murdoch took it over, the Wall Street Journal was my choice for the best source of general news in the English language. The paper was very profitable and had a wide advertising base, so it wasn't dependent on any single advertiser. They were owned by a family, the Bancrofts, that were quite liberal, hired good journalists to run the paper, and left them alone, except when they had to stand behind them. The conservative editorial page gave them cover for a news department that was actually one of the most liberal in the country. I was struck by their no-sacred-cows coverage of the pharmaceutical industry, automobile safety, mining, and the Reagan-era welfare reforms. They had long, ongoing coverage of people with life-threatening diseases who couldn't afford to get treated in the health care system. One of their reporters in New York profiled a young woman who worked in a news stand near her house, who was blind in one eye, and going blind in the other eye, because she couldn't afford to pay her bills at New York Eye and Ear medical center, and couldn't afford the relatively cheap drugs for glaucoma.
The best account of the Wall Street Journal, I think, was in a couple of articles written by A. Kent Macdougal (in More and in the Monthly Review) after he retired to teach journalism. He said that in all his career, he never heard of pressure from an advertiser or a political favorite of the management or publisher. He was a socialist, and he could write whatever he wanted as long as he followed the formula of balanced, objective journalism with every statement backed up by facts.
Macdougal said that the Journal earned its credibility in the 1950s when they got photos of the next year's GM model cars, which were a big marketing secret. GM said that if the Journal published them, they would cancel all their advertising. The Journal published them, GM cancelled their ads, and when GM finally came back begging to let them advertise again, the Journal took a long time deciding whether to take them.
Now that Murdoch took over, he started using his pressure not on behalf of his advertisers, but on behalf of his political ideology http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html [nytimes.com] I guess he thinks he's Citizen Kane.
I think the formula for good news is a lot of money (from whatever source), and good journalists who know how to report, edit and manage news. Ralph Ingersol paid for PM and The Compass. George Seldes used to publish his newsletter In Fact, which published news that nobody else would (and had a network of reporters around the world who sent them stories they couldn't publish in their own newspapers), like racism in the South. In Fact was a model for American newsletters and dissident newspapers that followed, including I.F. Stone's Weekly. Seldes didn't know this until much later, but his main financial backer was a Communist who was getting money to pay for the newsletter from the Soviet Union. Dostoyevsky said, "We all came out from under Gogol's overcoat." Well, we all came out from under Seldes' In Fact.
So that's what it takes -- good journalists, and money with no strings attached, wherever you can get it. Let's see if Omidyar and Greenwald can do it.
Re:The problem is for profit news... (Score:4, Informative)
> .. always bends to business or advertisers.
Exactly. I work in the media (radio), and you'd better believe it. But it doesn't only happen with "rich guys." (Or "gals.)
The classic example is that of a small local newspaper. The largest advertiser's son is arrested for drunk driving. The advertiser calls the paper and says, "please don't run that story." What does the paper do? If it agrees, it has compromised. If it doesn't, though, it loses its largest advertiser and (this example is based on a true story, can't remember the details now) goes out of business.
Classic example is Ms. magazine. Most of their advertising came from cigarettes. They ran stories about every cancer except lung cancer, every women's health problem except lung disease. An ad in Ms. magazine meant that their advertising acceptability department had approved it. Ms. was saying it was acceptable, even fashionable. They helped addict a generation of teenage girls to nicotine, and you can see it in the death rates in women from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, and strokes.
Re:more of the same (Score:4, Informative)
Well, what do you expect when the media turned on its heel in 2009 and became solidly pro-government? ... All because they're simpatico with the political leanings of the President.
What is it about rightists that so many suffer from the victim complex that they accuse liberals of? Talk about projection [wikipedia.org].
Remember all those in the media who were originally skeptical of Bush's rationale for the Iraq war? Me neither. I do remember Judith Miller, of the supposedly liberal NYT, acting as little more than a mouthpiece for the administration.