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Molly de Aguiar: "Fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust"

July 27, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

A conversation about public media in the Garden State with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Molly de Aguiar

WATERSHED: Your organization is a longtime, mainline public-media funder — and a household fixture in North Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, via the public-broadcasting anchors WNET and WNYC. How has the emergence of the small news nonprofits shaken up a public-media landscape that’s traditionally been oriented around large, centralized public-media institutions?

DE AGUIAR: The Dodge Foundation has indeed made many grants to public media over the past 35 years or so, but we didn’t actually have a specific “media” or “journalism” focus until about five years ago.

We felt compelled to do more comprehensive grantmaking in support of local news here in New Jersey in light of the dramatic shifts in the media landscape and an ever more urgent sense that we need strong local journalism for our communities and for democracy to thrive.

New Jersey has a very challenging media landscape — local news has always been in short supply because much of the news we get comes from New York or Philadelphia. You referenced WNYC and WNET as staple public media stations in your north Jersey household — those are both based in New York.

In fact, the state of New Jersey eliminated its support for public media in 2011 and transferred the public radio and television licenses to WNYC and WNET in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia.

However, over the past several years, a network of locally-owned and operated community journalism sites has been emerging alongside the remaining legacy media. These sites are being helmed by diverse local stakeholders, from former newspaper journalists to concerned community members and citizen reporters.

And this ecosystem of sites — large and small, nonprofit and for-profit — presents an opportunity, we believe, to better serve communities by being more collaborative and connected to one another, and by meaningfully engaging the public around the news and information that communities identify as being most important to them.

It’s fascinating how ideas about networks, news commons and news ecosystems have taken root in New Jersey and not, for example, in the cutting-edge, entrepreneurial Bay Area. What are the conditions in the Garden State that have produced this focus on innovation in practice and organization, rather than on technology and killer apps?

Our efforts to support and strengthen the local news landscape in New Jersey have grown out of necessity — a sense of alarm for losing what few local sources of news and information we had as the digital age disrupted the business of journalism, but also a sense of excitement and opportunity for reimagining what a 21st century news ecosystem looks like and establishing New Jersey as a leader in local news innovation.

Full_Color_Dodge_Logo_for_Websites_and_OnlineWhen we launched our focus on journalism funding five years ago, I think we were lucky to have an incredible mix of smart, talented people like Debbie Galant and Jeff Jarvis, willing to lend their expertise to help guide this experiment.

And I don’t think this effort could have happened without philanthropic dollars to launch such an ambitious effort, including our partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

There are too few funders in the U.S. who see journalism as crucial to strengthening the fabric of our communities.

You mentioned technology and killer apps — those are tools, as you know, that are often helpful and sometimes not. But fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust among and between news organizations and communities.

We have done this by establishing the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, which provides an incredible array of support, services, learning opportunities, and a collaborative community for journalists in New Jersey.

We are also working hand in hand with a number of partner sites to better understand what sustainability looks like for a local news organization, which we believe includes a diversity of (earned and contributed) revenue sources as well as robust and meaningful community engagement.

All of this work takes a massive amount of time and patience — building relationships is very labor intensive. Technology and apps can certainly facilitate and improve the work, but people power and human connection will always be needed too.

In terms of impact funding, with its need for data, how does the foundation’s theory of change quantify and define that sense of urgency? Does the foundation’s fundamental work of “building relationships and trust” make it necessary to expand our understanding of the actual information needs of communities?  

Our metrics for success are multi-layered, so there’s not a simple answer to this question. We care about the individual health of the partner sites we work with: are they creating new, solid revenue streams? Are they expanding their audiences? Are the owners of these sites able to pay themselves? Do they have to work 80 hours a week just to make ends meet?

But also, is the ecosystem itself healthy and growing? And, are we successfully facilitating better, deeper relationships between local news organizations and their communities? Is that resulting in more community investment in local news?

Philanthropy requires a lot of patience. This work is just starting, and I don’t think we’ll have clear answers to most of these questions – at least not the macro level questions – for some time.

To your second question, understanding the actual information needs of any community is fundamental to the sustainability of local journalism whether in New Jersey or elsewhere — it needs to be relevant to people’s lives.

A transformative factor for small producers is low-friction backbone services. How do ideas of networks, ecologies and the commons open up possibilities for shared services in operations, technology, marketing, development?

Sharing and collaboration are the new currency in this digital media landscape, and that includes content as well as the back shop functions you pointed out.

The Center for Cooperative Media has done a great job facilitating content sharing among news organizations across the state through its Story Exchange. My Dodge colleague Josh Stearns is currently exploring shared back-shop functions with our six local partner sites.

We launched a shared website tech-support back shop, which our partners thought they wanted, but after some experimentation, they realized that what they really wanted graphic design support more than IT support. So we’re looking into that.

We’ve also set up some legal support with a partnership with Rutgers-Camden, and the Center has an OPRA Sherpa which will help news sites craft and submit OPRA requests as well as staff who can help make legal referrals.

We are exploring a number of other shared functions including ad networks, sales support, accounting and events coordinators.

This is a huge area of opportunity for the sites as well as for entrepreneurs looking to build businesses serving the NJ news ecosystem.

Another Knight grantee along with the Dodge Foundation is Radiotopia, which amounts to a very interesting investment in pure infrastructure and program development. How has the philanthropic landscape changed for journalism-infrastructure projects? Should the other service and membership organizations out there be paying attention?

This is an interesting question. The trend in philanthropy is not to fund infrastructure — not to give general operating support and capacity building grants. It’s often more attractive to fund discrete projects with clear goals, outcomes and a set timeline.

Funding infrastructure requires patience, and philanthropy often doesn’t have enough patience.

I’m grateful that one of the Dodge Foundation’s core values is to make general operating support grants, recognizing that nonprofit have to pay rent and salaries and all the other costs of doing business.

We severely handicap nonprofits when we refuse to give operating support. Dodge also provides a variety of capacity building workshops for our grantees on how to build and develop a nonprofit board and also how to improve your organization’s communications; these wrap-around services are really critical for nonprofits.

So, it was a logical move, when we launched our Media grantmaking program, to focus on the infrastructure needs of the New Jersey news ecosystem — given the need for infrastructure support as well as Dodge’s willingness to give that kind of support.

In order to best support the whole ecosystem in New Jersey, it was clear that we needed a centralized system/hub to offer that support, which is why our first grant was to establish the Center for Cooperative Media.

Service and membership organizations are also vital to providing support — although I think there are perhaps too many separate service and membership organizations, and that they should join forces to provide more robust services for the field.

I very much appreciated INN’s focus on sustainability for news organizations under Kevin Davis’ leadership, and I hope INN doesn’t move away from that.

It makes sense that service organizations could network or join forces in some manner, but on the flip side, the member organizations in the journalism field emerged to serve distinct needs, and especially the smaller, newer ones (such as INN) lack scale to derive revenue from members to develop high-impact programs across geographic regions.
 
I don’t know that I agree that member organizations emerge to serve distinct needs. There are lots of nonprofits out there that duplicate efforts because they’re unfamiliar with or unaware of what already exists in the field. Or believe that they can provide services better than others, so they start their own organization rather than trying to improve upon what exists. (This is true of all nonprofits — I’m not limiting my comments to just the journalism field or membership organizations).

Is the future of journalism-service organizations one of large centralized institutions or of networks of small, highly focused bureaus?

I doubt the future of journalism service organizations is either or — it’s both large and small, centralized and decentralized, but I would like to see more connections and collaboration between them. There are probably some mergers that would make sense too.

Public media has a long history of content commissioning, especially on the film and video side. Do you see any opportunities for commissioning to take on a more significant role for all the “new public media” coming up in the digital medium?

I’m going to punt on this question primarily because I’m not focused on content at all right now — although I get many many requests to support content for public media.

I will say this: if I transition to funding content, I would seek out work that better reflects the diversity in our communities than the requests I currently get.

The public-broadcasting divestment by the state of New Jersey in 2011 took place under Gov. Chris Christie, and the subsequent emergence of the community-media projects you describe seems like an almost organic response. What are the characteristics of the “information ecosystem” in New Jersey that is making (and will make) it possible for these community media organizations fill in the gaps?  

The divestment was perhaps a catalyst to what was already a shifting landscape, but the upheaval in the media sector — the democratization of publishing tools, newspaper industry layoffs, unemployed journalists, the major gaps in coverage — is what shaped the ecosystem we have in New Jersey.

I would recommend this blog post by Jeff Jarvis which is a very clear explanation of what we mean by the ecosystem concept and what it looks like in New Jersey and elsewhere.

Let’s close with a question of deepening concern — that of what I’m calling, for lack of a better phrase, “information inequity,” in which issues of social import and communities with acute information needs are more often than not overlooked by the systems we have built. What do we need to learn and understand in order to turn this around? What needs to change?

I’m glad you asked this question — it’s a big issue and one that I care about deeply. In fact, it’s probably what I care about the most.

The recent Pew research (“Local News in a Digital Age”) that studied Macon, Sioux City and Denver showed that while Hispanic residents in Denver and African-American residents in Macon follow local news at significantly higher rates than white residents in those cities and expressed a “greater sense of agency when it comes to improving their community,” there aren’t nearly enough news outlets and sources serving their needs.

Also, we partnered with the Democracy Fund to support research led by Rutgers looking at access to and availability of news and information in three cities in New Jersey — we’ll be releasing this research soon, but what we found about the disparities of access to news and information is both revealing and troubling.

We are currently trying to tackle this issue on several fronts in New Jersey (although there’s so much more I want to do):

On the journalism-education front, we support Dr. Todd Wolfson at Rutgers to help journalism students become better listeners and community members through community-based storytelling projects; this project also trains community members how to be media makers themselves, empowering them to tell their own stories.

Related, we fund Media Mobilizing Project on a just-launched project to work in several communities in New Jersey on citizen media/storytelling training, as well as The Citizens Campaign, which conducts comprehensive citizen journalism training.

We also support Free Press, in partnership with the Democracy Fund, to build relationships between local news organizations and their communities, which we believe will lead to greater participation and inclusion of diverse voices from our communities. The Knight Digital Media Center recently wrote a good piece summarizing that work.

We also have a new grant to New America Media to help build relationships with foreign language news outlets in New Jersey and nurture collaboration between them and the English language media.

I would also point out that ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting (both grantees) do tremendous work fighting for those who are the most overlooked and the most impacted by the systems we have built.

There’s so much work to do on this front. We need a bigger pipeline of journalists of color and more opportunities for them to take leadership roles in news organizations. We need more diverse news rooms at every level.

We also need to support and lift up community voices and have community-led (not just journalist-led) conversations.

There are many opportunities for philanthropy to support work that breaks down these entrenched systems we have built.

We welcome discussion and feedback on our work via the Local News Lab and also on Twitter:

  • Molly de Aguiar: @grdodgemedia
  • Josh Stearns: @jcstearns

Your readers might also want to sign up for Josh Stearns’ weekly newsletter The Local Fix which offers practical tips and advice, trends, and thoughtful conversation about local news.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: democracy, funding, journalism, philanthropy, public media

Priority problems: Journalism's position in the charitable-giving ecosystem

April 8, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

Amidst the news industry’s many challenges, and the hopeful flowering of a new nonprofit-news movement, the low position of public-interest news reporting in the charitable ecosystem is a troubling puzzle.

It also speaks poorly of our cultural and democratic priorities. Billions are spent on media that sell and influence, producing messages that serve vested political and commercial interests — yet the room sure clears out fast when the conversation turns to the topic of paying for public-interest journalism.

Where’s the soup kitchen for the information economy? Image: The New Yorker / Franco Pagetti

It turns out, in fact, that for all the declamations and examinations of journalism’s importance to our democracy, actually funding its noncommercial, public-interest practice is one of the lowest priorities of the charitable sector — inclusive of major and individual philanthropy.

Priority disconnect

This lack of subsidy has crippled public-interest journalism, which is not competitive in the commercial attention economy, and not easily or ethically monetized, particularly at the local level.

The good news is that such harsh conditions have produced a tough strain of nonprofit survivors. These organizations — members, for example, of the Media Consortium or the Institute for Nonprofit News — are drought tolerant. They take root in niches and keep blooming.

In organizational terms, they’re high-achieving, efficient, networked and media savvy. Their potential as engines of public-interest information is off the charts.

Yet the opportunity and mission they represent has not yet been fully recognized and embraced across the spectrum of philanthropy.

The sap may be rising for the new crop of news nonprofits — but a garden will not grow unless you water it.

In today’s parsimonious funding economy, that means infrastructure for new news nonprofits is rudimentary, newsrooms operate on shoestring budgets, founders heroically take on operations as well as editorial roles, and their ventures only thrive relative to their ability to sacrifice and work for free.

Their dedication is beyond question, as is the lack of support. Let’s look at the numbers for a better sense of journalism’s low position in the current funding ecosystem.

Journalism as a subset of media funding

Up-to-date numbers for journalism philanthropy are elusive. A good benchmark comes via a Foundation Center report that tracked $1.86 billion in grants of $10,000 or more to “media” projects of all sorts in the United States from 2009 and 2011.

That alone, however, did not necessarily add up to more money for news production.

Of that sum, 55 percent — about $1.02 billion — went to developing “media platforms” across the Internet, broadcast, film and video, TV, mobile, etc.

Actual journalism production (and training) received about half that — $527 million, accounting for 22 percent of all media grantmaking during the three-year period under scrutiny.

Journalism’s position in the individual-giving spectrum

Individual Americans gave $335.17 billion to charity in 2013, according to Giving USA, the majority of which went to religious organizations ($105.3 billion) followed by education ($52.07 billion) and human services ($41.51 billion).

In fact, Journalism itself doesn’t come up as a category, at least in the public summary of the report.

The nearest you get is arts, culture, and humanities — all noncommercial arenas of discourse, narrative, study and exchange — with an estimated $16.66 billion in giving in 2013.

For perspective, that’s a bit more than 30 times in one year what nonprofit journalism was given over three years.

Profits, politics and influence money

The forthcoming 2016 elections, with billions of influence dollars lining up for media prime time, reframe journalism’s funding struggles in the context of a full-blown ecosystem crisis.

One projection expects election-ad spending to hit $12 billion next year — a tide of influence messages choking media channels like an offshore toxic-algae bloom fed by unregulated fertilizer runoff.

That $12 billion in influence funding is a bit more than 22 times the $527 million in charitable funds invested in journalism and media from 2009 to 2011.

It will also make up a handsome 18.4 percent of the estimated $65 billion in revenue the U.S. news industry as a whole is expected to earn in 2016.

Mass media are are handily adapting to the information economy and developing all sorts of marketing and revenue streams. The philanthropic sector remains enormously wealthy. And individual giving remains a deep and largely untapped wellspring.

Yet nonprofit journalism — and specifically public-interest news production in communities that lack it — remains a neglected, and even unrecognized, priority.

Where is the imagination, the conscience, the commitment and the will to strengthen this emerging, and desperately needed, charitable sector?

 

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: democracy, funding, journalism, media, philanthropy

Ted Glasser: Imagining a National Endowment for Journalism

March 17, 2009 by Josh Wilson 1 Comment

Go big or go home! Stanford communication professor Ted Glasser brings a fifty-state strategy with his modest proposal for the creation of a National Endowment for Journalism.Glasser also weighs in on the FCC and its adequacy to the changing media moment, and the importance of developing journalism support structures that can serve basic civic needs, particularly in communities outside of the commercial news-publishing model’s target audience.

Notable Quotes  

BIG VISIONS: “We’re at the very early stages of talking about what a National Endowment for Journalism might look like … we haven’t figured out most of the details, but there are any number of opportunities to secure substantial funding for something like this. One good place to begin would be by tapping into the billions of dollars the FCC brings in when it auctions off our airwaves, those natural resources, and those auctions are likely to continue, and they bring in billions of dollars, and there’s no reason why that couldn’t be used to begin to create and endowment for journalism.”  

JOURNALISM ALTERNATIVES: “Alternative journalism is journalism aimed at people who aren’t well-served by existing newsrooms — they’re not hard to identify. They’re all over the United States. Almost every inner city lacks a serious neighborhood newspaper. You go up and down the [San Francisco ] Peninsula, and it’s not difficult to find the poorer communities without weekly newspapers.”  

REFORM: “[I]t needs to be radical reform, in the sense that it needs to get at the root of the problem, and that is the absence of the infrastructure to support the kind of journalism we would all agree we want. I’m not proposing any radical or strange form of journalism. I’m trying to find a way to support what almost everyone would agree is the kind of journalism we need.”  

THE INTERNET: “[T]he early talk about the Internet democratizing the world is far off base. We’ve made the same claims about almost every new communication technology. That’s not to deny that computerization of communication has fundamentally altered the landscape — it has. And it’s created all sorts of interesting and new opportunities.  But the opportunities depend on … a core of quality journalists. And that’s the very core that’s shrinking now. I mean, we keep firing some of the most talented, or encouraging them to take buyouts, and it gets reported in the most euphemistic ways. We don’t even use the word fired — it’s ‘laid off,’ ‘bought out’ — these people are being fired! At a time when we need more journalism, not less journalism.”  

NATIONAL DIALOGUE: “We need a national commission, and this coincides with — supports — a notion of a National Endowment for Journalism, that ask these larger questions: What system of journalism does a democracy of the kind we have in the United States need? To what extent can the marketplace sustain it, to what extent can it not? And to the extent that we agree that the marketplace cannot sustain the kind of journalism we all agree we need, then we need to ask ourselves what can we do to bring that about. Rather than accepting whatever the marketplace yields.”


Most of the folks I’ve been speaking to have been thinking about public media in a very broad sense, not in terms of state-sponsored media, but more generally in terms of developing new nonprofit models. And every now and then somebody says “oh, but then there’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting, using our money, maybe we should make them more responsive to our needs.” It’s odd that it’s so easy to forget that public media traditionally has had that presence in our lives. Or had it — and if it doesn’t anymore, why is that?

Ted Glasser: Well, it’s never been a major force in American society. We have an aversion to the state playing that kind of role. Now we have, as you point out, we do have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but it’s been systematically underfunded to the point where, compared to European countries and elsewhere in the world, we just don’t take it seriously.

So in general, you don’t think that um programs like McNeil-Lehrer and All Things Considered are important but don’t own as much of the public market share as they should?

I think they’re vitally important, although I’m not a big fan of McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, but I think public broadcasting is vitally important. I think funding for it ought to be strengthened, but more importantly the idea of publicly supported media, not publicly owned and controlled, but publicly supported media deserves more of our attention.

Okay …

But not just radio and television — there’s a particular bias in the United States in favor of talking about public support for broadcasting even though it’s marginal, but there’s virtually no conversation about creating a system of subvention for other media —

Subvention?

Subsidy.

For other forms? For example, online media?

It could be anything, we don’t need to talk about what it is, what we need to talk about is the importance of a system of strong, sustainable newsrooms. Whether those newsrooms produce material for websites or newspapers or radio or television is less important, and partly because most newsrooms are multimedia now anyway, so specifying the technology is really increasingly beside the point.

You do have a prescription for the situation you just described, and I’m wondering if you could describe that a little.

Well we’re at the very early stages of talking about what a National Endowment for Journalism might look like … we haven’t figured out most of the details, but there are any number of opportunities to secure substantial funding for something like this.

One good place to begin would be by tapping into the billions of dollars the FCC brings in when it auctions off our airwaves, those natural resources, and those auctions are likely to continue, and they bring in billions of dollars, and there’s no reason why that couldn’t be used to begin to create and endowment for journalism.

And then the task would be to define what we mean by journalism, what kind of journalism do we want to support. The goal would be to create the conditions for supporting journalism that the marketplace no longer supports or never supported.

So it would be alternative forms of journalism, journalism aimed at minority communities, journalism where communities are deemed to be demographically unattractive. You know, the places that have historically been disenfranchised and are increasingly disenfranchised given the failure of the business model of journalism.

What about the seeming lack of interest by the American public in serving the underserved via public media, i.e., viewing it as “alternative” journalism, which I suppose has all sorts of political implications.

Alternative journalism is journalism aimed at people who aren’t well-served by existing newsrooms — they’re not hard to identify. They’re all over the United States. Almost every inner city lacks a serious neighborhood newspaper. You go up and down the [San Francisco] Peninsula, and it’s not difficult to find the poorer communities without weekly newspapers. The stronger communities like Palo Alto are amply served with local media.

So by alternative news you mean —

I mean alternative to the marketplace.

Can you speak about the strengths and weaknesses of public media in the Internet era?

By public media you mean — ?

Everybody has been defining it in their own way, so I’m reluctant to impose my own definition. I’d like to use an inclusive one — to say that both existing traditional public media, publicly owned media, as well as emerging publicly supported models.

Do you include privately owned?

You know, Geneva Overholser suggested, when I was talking to her, that subscriptions and newsstand sales do constitute a form of public support for commercial and privately owned papers … but I think we do need to speak about the tax-exempt sector.

I think there’s a very weak and underdeveloped infrastructure for public media. That’s not to say that there aren’t great examples of people doing wonderful work, but it’s hit-and-miss, there’s no systematic support for it, and that’s why I think there needs to be public support for public media, not simply philanthropic support, not simply entrepreneurial support, but something that we can count on that will create not simply outlets, but outlets that coalesce into a larger system.

I think what the United States desperately needs is not simply alternative media or minority media that serves the needs of the particular community, but [to] find ways to create linkages to successively larger media, which is to say that there needs to be a relationship between mainstream and minority media, so that local communities get to participate in successively larger discussions, so that we create opportunities for participation in society through a system of media —

You are describing something a lot more aggressive than the piecemeal approach of, “Let’s support this small project here.” That’s the philanthropic approach right now — very cautious, focused on the entrepreneurial side and lacking vision for what you describe as a system.

I think you’re absolutely right. And it needs to be radical reform, in the sense that it needs to get at the root of the problem, and that is the absence of the infrastructure to support the kind of journalism we would all agree we want. I’m not proposing any radical or strange form of journalism. I’m trying to find a way to support what almost everyone would agree is the kind of journalism we need.

Does the Internet provide that opportunity? Is it the ideal mass medium for what you’re talking about, or does it need to be more inclusive of traditional media?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. There’s still a digital divide in the United States. And it’s in part a divide grounded in funding and funds. It still costs money to buy a computer. And there’s a literacy question. You need to be able to operate the software. I don’t know of a recent study that suggests how big this divide is, but we need to find ways of getting computers into the hands of more people and getting more people to be comfortable with computers if the Internet is going to serve the role of an alternative newspaper.

But it sounds like you don’t think the Internet is itself a magic bullet that’s going to make it all better.

Oh no, the early talk about the Internet democratizing the world is far off base. We’ve made the same claims about almost every new communication technology. That’s not to deny that computerization of communication has fundamentally altered the landscape — it has. And it’s created all sorts of interesting and new opportunities.

But the opportunities depend on … a core of quality journalists. And that’s the very core that’s shrinking now. I mean, we keep firing some of the most talented, or encouraging them to take buyouts, and it gets reported in the most euphemistic ways.

We don’t even use the word fired — it’s “laid off,” “bought out” — these people are being fired! At a time when we need more journalism, not less journalism.

One of the things that comes to mind when I think of a large system of support is — control versus independence. One of the key points of the SPJ Code of Ethics is to act independently, which is something that isn’t as possible in the hierarchical commercial newsrooms of the day.

With regard to control and independence, I think it’s a non-issue, in fact it’s easier to maintain independence and control in a publicly-supported media environment than a privately-supported one because 1) there’s more transparency and 2) there’s more accountability.

We can demand from the state transparency and accountability that we can never demand of Google or Yahoo or anything. Now that isn’t to say that the conditions for independence and autonomy seem to me to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector. And you know NPR has exhibited, if not more, certainly as much independence as any other news outlet in the United States.

I’m more fearful of the subtle but insidious control that advertising imposes on the press, and the insidious and not-so-subtle control that people like Murdoch impose on the press. and we as the public — there’s nothing we can say about that. There’s no one we can call, there’s no one we can convene, we just accept it.

And you hear the phrase constantly in journalism “these are the realities we have to accept.” And I think that’s the phrase we need to abandon. These are not the realities we have to accept. We should identify for ourselves the ideal set of conditions and then ask ourselves how do we get there. Rather than accepting the conditions that are imposed on us by a model that equates free enterprise with free press.

It seems like the media-reform community — who often focus on exclusively top-level policy and aren’t really involved with producing journalism — sometimes suggests that all we need is a friendly FCC and everything will be nice and pleasant and the corporations will behave. That’s a simplification of their message — but do you think that that is a step towards having transparency, being able to make demands on the private sector?

The FCC only deals with broadcasting. The whole media landscape calls into the question the role of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC was modeled on the Interstate Commerce Commission. It views communication as an aspect of commerce, not an aspect of culture.

It can’t figure out quite its regulatory framework given its supervision over computers and cable, all the things that don’t demand the scarce frequencies that were the original justification for the FCC back in the 20s and 30s. We need to re-think the role of the state in creating a system of diverse media and opportunities for diversity of journalism.

What would that look like?

We need a national commission, and this coincides with — supports — a notion of a national endowment for journalism, that ask these larger questions: What system of journalism does a democracy of the kind we have in the United States need? To what extent can the marketplace sustain it, to what extent can it not? And to the extent that we agree that the marketplace cannot sustain the kind of journalism we all agree we need, then we need to ask ourselves what can we do to bring that about. Rather than accepting whatever the marketplace yields.

Would this commission be public, or private, or a combination?

Conspicuously public and democratic.

State chartered, or — ?

To be honest, that level of detail I just don’t know. A few of us are working on that, but it will probably take us a long time to figure out some of the details, and even if we get to that level of detail, it’s going to mean nothing unless people understand and agree with the larger democratic premise that communication is a democratic enterprise. It needs to be operated democratically, it needs to be justified, defended, and supported democratically. It’s a democratic institution, journalism is a democratic institution, it shouldn’t be subject only to the whims of the private sector.

It is a little bit of a literacy and awareness, civics and media literacy and education issue.

I think that’s the biggest challenge, particularly among journalists. Journalists are historically, in the United States, libertarian in their view of press freedom. They have a right-wing bias among journalists, they might not like to think of themselves as right-wing, but their understanding of the First Amendment is very right-wing, it is very focused on individual liberty, not on the needs of the community.

And they celebrate the relationship between free press and free enterprise. And I think the education challenge begins with journalists and then spreads into the larger community. But I think you’ll find these ideas much more receptive in the larger community than in the journalism community.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: funding, interview, subsidy, talking public media

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