What if journalism can’t be “monetized” ?

It has often been observed that democracy is munted when there are fewer  independent fact-gathering operations or avenues for a diversity of opinion — what we used to call journalism. The hope, for the past decade, is that some formula can be found to “monetize” journalism — to make money from it.

An important new book,  Digital Disconnect  by Robert W. McChesney (excerpted in this article in Salon Magazine)  asks the bottom-line question:  What if journalism just can’t be monetized? What then?

Robert W. McChesney

McChesney is a professor at the University of Illinois and one the nation’s leading and most thoughtful media critics.  He’s the author of many other books such as Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

In Digital Disconnect notes with irony that the media saw the Internet effect  coming for decades,   and that for all its thrashing around with new apps and gadgets, trying to set up paywalls and link up with advertising, it has not solved the basic problem.

 McChesney says:

The Internet does not alleviate the tensions between commercial­ism and journalism; it magnifies them. With labor severely underpaid or unpaid, research concludes that the original journalism provided by the In­ternet gravitates to what is easy and fun, tending to “focus on lifestyle topics, such as entertainment, retail, and sports, not on hard news.”

This isn’t the first time that low-rent content has driven out the better stuff. Fred Friendly complained that when “See It Now” was taken  off the air by CBS in the late 1950s, “It was as if a highly successful amusement park had gone up across the street from a school. Suddenly the property values changed.”  Something similar was said about radio in the 1930s, when commercialism drove out educational programming;  and magazines when they were being bought out by Frank Munsey at the end of  the Progressive era;  and  newspapers like the Journal of Commerce when the penny press came along in the 1830s.

Of course, if everything is getting worse, then we should be able to trace media history back to the moment when it was perfect — which of course, it never was.

Declining quality is not the cause so much as the effect of structural shifts in the media, McCheney says. Because there is almost no way to make money now, there is almost no way to support quality media.

As traditional journalism disintegrates, no models for making Web journalism—even bad journalism—profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible popular news media have been developed, and there is no reason to expect any in the future.

Or if perhaps there is money to be made, it will involve monopolistic structures that dominate the  market.

Two aspects of capitalism and the Internet loom large in digital journal­ism. First, if anyone can make money doing online journalism, it will almost certainly be as a very large, centralized operation, probably a monopoly or close to it. The Internet has proven to be more effective at centralizing cor­porate control than it has been at enhancing decentralization, at least in news media. “We are probably far more centralized than we were in the past,” one executive said.

It’s a spooky conclusion because it runs counter to what we have long believed about the digital revolution — that it has enhanced diversity.  McChesney argues that this isn’t so, and that top level digital media have constricted in diversity over time. We can all think of examples:  Google over Yahoo, Facebook over MySpace, etc.

The historical point to be made is that in times of crisis, business models revert.  If we follow Lippmann’s historical progression, from  monopoly to partisan press to penny press, we find that monopolies were the first kinds of successful media, and its no surprise that they might be seen as commercially viable now.

Recent moves by the extreme right-wing Koch brothers to buy up the right wing the bankrupt Tribune media services are another reversion, this time to the partisan mode.  In the partisan press, profits were not a problem — Editors merely had to keep their sugar daddies happy.

What is broken is the penny press model — the 200 year old idea, first advanced by John Walter II at the Times of London, and taken up in the 1830s by New York entrepreneurs — that more efficient production can be financed by general advertising.

Lippmann’s fourth stage was something he barely defined called “organized intelligence,” and that is the insurmountable opportunity confronting the media now.

Organization can mean  rationalization of content, in other words,  eliminating duplication, and there hardly seems any reason for me to prefer reading the wires on a local newspaper than on a regional or national or international paper.

But organization / rationalization is not necessarily the death of all content creation.  At a certain point, in certain ways, people will pay for the content they love. The real problem, quite frankly, is that not many people love journalism. Authoritarians don’t like the way it challenges their heroes, especially in local and regional markets, and people who live in pluralistic communities have long been disappointed by  monopolistic newspapers that worshiped the status quo and avoided controversy like the plague.

Some of us still have hope for the new media.  Startups cost much less than ever.  And the trends they are bucking were already in place before the digital revolution.

And — here’s  some good news — there are new business models for community media that McChesney and a good bit of the publishing community have missed.  Some will have to be tested in the US before anyone can stay they will  work, but it’s not at all true that digital publishers have reached their wits ends.