The pressures are enormous, beginning with the desire of the great media monoliths to maximize profits at their news properties. That’s compounded by the fact that the American news consumer has never paid full price for the product. Advertising or sponsorship heavily underwrites newsgathering in all media, usually by half or more. This advertising-supported model has worked for a long time and serious journalistic organizations have evolved a “church and state” division to keep commercial influences from influencing news coverage.
But in the past few decades, the advertising industry has been moving more and more toward targeted messaging. Media planners–the powerful folks who buy the ad space on television, radio and in publications–now use statistics and spreadsheets worthy of the Human Genome Project to make sure that every dollar spent by a client to advertise a widget reaches the people most likely to rush out and buy one.
The big general-interest news sources–who can’t promise exactly what topic they’ll be talking about next week or next month, because after all it’s news–now have a harder time competing for ad dollars against “vertical” magazines or special-interest cable channels. Sure, the widget advertiser may be proud to have his message in a newspaper that is peeling the lid off some national disgrace–but his media buyer would rather have it in the section that reviews widgets. The result: less money for serious news, more coverage of widgets.
So how does the Internet fit into the financial survival of journalism? Right now, some people think it looks more like the kiss of death than potential salvation. The Internet forces us to produce news in all media types–text, photos, audio, video–and to do so twenty-four hours a day, with technology that requires high-priced maintenance and regular upgrading. And almost no one in the audience is paying a penny for it. There’s a business model straight out of Alice in Wonderland: let’s push costs through the ceiling and drop prices to zero!
But that’s going to change. We’re going to look back on this era as the Golden Age of the Internet–not because the content was so good, but because it was all free. News organizations simply can’t continue the giveaway. And with, say, another five years of technologic progress, Internet news will begin to be sufficiently compelling and integral to users’ lives that they will be willing to pay something for it–the nature of that fee yet to be determined.
And what about advertising? It’s now fashionable among some savants to say that Internet advertising hasn’t worked. But they’re talking about the tiny banners that were invented in the Stone Age of the medium. As technology improves, Internet advertising is rapidly morphing into larger ads that combine audio, animation and even video. And sites are finally beginning to deliver on the promise of delivering ads that are appropriate for specific users–the ultimate solution to the media planner’s search for targeting. Five years out, the combination of interactivity, multimedia and targeting could make the Internet one of the most effective advertising mediums yet devised.
In that future, news sites may evolve a business model in which users either pay a small fee, or else provide some personal information to help target ads. Just age, sex and ZIP code would greatly increase the value of a visitor for advertising purposes, because advertisers can finally really know that their ads are appearing in front of the people they’re interested in reaching. The audience would see advertising that might actually be relevant to their interests–or perhaps pay a little extra to avoid seeing ads altogether.
The notion of the audience paying for news leads to a final issue about which the Web can do nothing: journalism’s ingrained reluctance to promote itself. Even the severely understated dust-jacket of “The News About the News” reflects that bias. Journalists, of course, are not supposed to become the story, and Kaiser and Downie excoriate a few big names for doing just that. But what about promoting journalism itself? We live in an economy where every single fruit, nut, vegetable and dairy product grown in California has a multimillion dollar promotion campaign to sing its praises. Why not the news profession too?
Kaiser and Downie begin their book with examples of remarkable journalism that have saved lives, reformed institutions and manifestly bettered the national interest. Would it be a bad idea to do a bit more public promotion of those values? The Internet offers the tools to build a more secure financial foundation for journalism in this new century. But it’s up to us journalists to make it clear why we are worth the money.
