In their analysis of what ails the journalism business (CJR.org, 10/19/09), Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson seem to pooh-pooh the idea that newspapers could be turned into non-profits funded by endowments, “as though they were museums.”
“It would take an endowment of billions of dollars to produce enough investment income to run a single sizeable newspaper,” Downie and Schudson write, “much less large numbers of papers in communities across the country.”
But would it really? At another point in the article they note that the Baltimore Sun is down to 150 reporters–but it seems like you’d still have to call that a “sizeable newspaper,” able to do a great deal of the “accountability journalism” that Downie and Schudson are rightly focused on…particularly since, based on the figures they give, the typical state capital only has seven full-time reporters. Let’s say you can hire a reporter for $100,000; that would give you a journalistic payroll of $15 million. To get that using the average rate of return for college and university endowments for 1998-2007, you would need a nest egg of about $174 million. If you had an endowment of $2 billion and got that rate of return, you could hire more than 1,700 reporters–maybe that’s what Downie and Schudson mean by “sizeable.”
Is it possible for the public to amass that kind of funding to support journalism? The same group that provided the college investment income figures, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, reports that a total of 785 academic institutions across North America had a combined endowment of $411 billion–enough to hire 350,000 reporters.
Education is important; so is journalism. The difference is that our society recognizes that capitalism is not going to provide us with all the educational institutions that we need. When we realize that the same thing is true for journalism, we’ll be able to find the resources.
“…our society recognizes that capitalism is not going to provide us with all the educational institutions that we need. When we realize that the same thing is true for journalism, we’ll be able to find the resources.”
Um, isn’t it the profit created by capitalists that provides the majority of funds to endowments, though? (Moreover, aren’t endowments “grown” by investing their money in capitalist instruments like stocks, bond, etc.?) In which case, your argument would be that we need capitalism to fund newspapers, too. But, given the way big business is infiltrating higher education — by pushing schools to create the workforce with the skills they need at the moment — is this really what we want for journalism? Isn’t the whole reason FAIR exists because of the already undue influence of big money over journalism? Why think an endowment system would be much of an improvement?
There is no such thing as “non-profit”. Think about it. Everyone must get paid.
Endowed or not, any newspaper still needs competition with other newspapers or similar daily news media to keep it honest, or it WILL go bad. Case in point is the St. Pete Times, endowed by the Poynter Institute.
This once great newspaper just chose to endorse a creationist conservative for Mayor who wants to see “creationism” taught in public schools along side evolution.
Endowed or not, the SP Times is still plagued by the same kinds of small town bossism that can hogtie stressed ad dependent newspapers. Some of the management is grossly undereducated but well connected, and the paper itself seems swamped with politically and socially regressive cronyism and raging ignorance about communities it has lived with for over a 100 years.
Lately poor ad sales have cut it’s staff and pages down to half what it was even 3 or 4 years ago. It STILL needs a competitor to keep it honest, and to get people to read it again. Instead of giving the public any differentiation in news, it’s actually aligned itself with the local, dominant TV cable local news station. Amazing.
bbuc (and the other comments):
It’s a pleasure to read responses from apparently rational, educated people; most websites are overrun with the typical, ignorant web dreck.
Please note that “its” is the possessive form of the word; “it’s” is the contraction of “it is” or “it has.” I have spent a lifetime noticing this common error–you have much company.
By the way, Democracy Now! Grit TV, Free Speech & Link satellite channels as well as the various stations in the Pacifica Radio Network are all very interested in getting endowed…without strings.
Does ‘endowed’ only cover traditional newpapers? I would think there is a great deal of room for inovation if individuals are free to report responsibly in many different venues…blogs, collaborative websites, letters to editors as well as conventional journalistic outlets. Collaborative websites (‘wikinews’?) might easily pave the way for trustworthy reportage even without endowments. But some recurrent stipends might certainly lead to again establishing a good feeling in the breast of reporters put off by corporate games. How endowments would be implemented with impartiality is really of more interest than whether it is a winning idea. rm
We’re Americans, right? The can-do people. Will is what’s needed. I would contribute my little bit to the cause and others would too. Ask me.
Profits from endowments are not “free money” – profits are stolen from the labors of exploited workers worldwide. It’s called capitalism. That surplus value is monetized into profit and then, after finance capital gets its claws on some of it, a remainder would be left for journalists. I can’t believe that genuinely progressive and humane journalism for the relatively well-off (i.e., readers of FAIR’s blogs) could ever result from such a vampiric relationship with billions of workers. On the other hand, a local activist community of 10,000 (out of an overall population of 250,000) could each pay $40 a year and pay 5 or 6 people to blog on matters related to their town. With some volunteer part-time help, you can have a well-run website or monthly newsletter that keeps us informed in a reasonable way and a local way. It won’t be as slick as FAIR and (hopefully) they won’t join up with CNN or FOX like Jeff Cohen did, but it will be unglamorously useful to real people.
To this day, my favorite source of news is the Dominican laundrymat I go to. My Spanish isn’t that great, but it’s getting better – and I get the scoop on a lot of stuff from the schools, the police, and the local plantation-hospital that’s swallowing up the neighborhood. Others go to church or clubs or activist meetings… these are really useful sources of meaningful, accountable, neighborly information and perspective. Not as clever or researched as the FAIR folks, but in the end – more useful for my life. There should be a place for pro journalists (see the idea above), but a lot of “progressives” are proudly isolated in their smarter-than-thou worlds. That’s not just a stereotype – I’ve been guilty of that for most of my life.
The MSM never has been liberal – it’s a fallacy invented and perpetrated by right-wingers. To the right wing, liberal media means that which reports the whole truth, despite how it makes some politicians look. And “fair and balanced” to them means putting forth opposing views to absolutely everything Democrats suggest, most often even if there is no valid “opposing view” — the more outrageous the “opposing view” they put out, and the louder the big mouth stating it, the higher their TV ratings go. It’s all entertainment to too many viewers.