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Knight Fellowships 2007 SymposiumHow Will We Pay for the Journalism We Need?
2007 Symposium Panel
David Talbot, founder of Salon.com
Insiders debate how to pay for quality news coverage
Stanford Report, May 23, 2007
Just days after the San Francisco Chronicle announced plans to cut its newsroom by 100 employees—a quarter of its staff—a group of journalists and media analysts gathered May 21 in Kresge Auditorium for a symposium titled "How Will We Pay for the Journalism We Need?" While the problems plaguing the print newspaper industry are clear—the bulk of its traditional revenue base is shrinking as paid advertising shifts to online web portals—no one, so far, has figured out how to ensure the survival of independent journalism in its broadest sense, and the critical role it plays in shoring up a democratic society.
"We do need more competition in the newspaper industry," said David Talbot, who founded Salon.com, the online magazine, in 1995. "I think the Internet is our only hope. We are in a crisis right now. Hopefully, we can start to find a way out of it." Talbot joined Lauren Rich Fine, an online and publishing financial analyst, and Lem Lloyd, vice president of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, in a lively, and sometimes contentious, 90-minute discussion moderated by Vindu Goel, an editorial writer and blogger at the San Jose Mercury News. The John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists sponsored the symposium, which attracted about 100 people. Goel asked how the newspaper industry can make money when readers increasingly are turning to web portals such as Yahoo! and Google to find news and information at no cost. "The traditional business model of putting out news and surrounding it with advertising won't keep working," he said. According to Fine, print newspaper circulation has been in decline for decades, and the trend is unlikely to be reversed as younger generations grow up reading news online. The real issue facing the industry, she said, is the precipitous decline of classified advertising. In the past, newspapers had a virtual monopoly on automobile, employment and real estate ads, but now people can find that online. "It isn't that readers aren't interested in journalism," she said. "This industry has been asleep at the wheel in selling advertising." Talbot also blamed the bureaucratic and unimaginative management of newspaper monopolies for the industry's demise. "Sometimes I feel guilty because I was at the cutting edge of the murder of the newspaper industry," he said. "But, in my defense, I think the industry was already committing suicide." As media conglomerates bought up independent newspapers, Talbot said, they became safe and boring: "Anyone who wanted to take risks, shake things up, was shunted aside." Furthermore, Talbot said, newspapers made bad deals early on with the web portal giants. "They devalued their own content," he said. "At this point, it's getting the genie back in the box." Newspapers have to insist that they will not sell their product cheaply, he said. Talbot certainly took risks as a journalist when he launched Salon.com and established a reputation for reporting not available elsewhere, such as its coverage of the Monica Lewinsky affair with President Clinton. "To be successful, it has to be a [type of] journalism you can't get most other places," Talbot said. "We had to build up some kind of rabid following." When Salon.com's advertising revenue began to tank with the dot.com implosion, Talbot turned to his readers for support through voluntary subscriptions. At its height, Salon had 100,000 paid subscribers. Today, Salon.com turns a profit two quarters every year, and Talbot said he is confident the magazine "can make a go of it" and become consistently profitable by 2008. "Now our challenge is to decide if we want to become an advertising-driven publication," he said. Lloyd had a different take on the industry, saying that many newspapers are willing to take risks today. The Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium formed last November now includes 271 newspapers in 15 major newspaper groups nationwide. Lloyd said the consortium "leverages" ad content by personalizing it for readers. "I'd like to shed a tear of optimism," he said. "Local online advertising is going to [be worth] $9 billion by 2010." Talbot was unconvinced by what he described as Lloyd's "very sanguine and very optimistic" take on the industry. "What I see is cutbacks and retrenchment," he said. "There is less space devoted to investigative reporting." He also bemoaned the disappearance of insightful newspaper columnists in the tradition of the San Francisco Chronicle's Herb Caen and decried the reduction of international news coverage. "This is a time when Americans need to know more about the rest of the world—not less," he said. "We see a creeping idiocy on the part of the consumer—the Foxification of news," he said, referring to the Fox News Channel. Fine agreed with Talbot that newspapers should not resort to staff-cutting measures to survive but instead accept lower profit margins, find new revenue streams and attract readers through innovative coverage. "There are no obvious solutions today but there are lots of experiments," she said. "It's going to come down to allocating resources. It's a very challenging industry." |
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