Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 3

How to save news?

There is still hope that California’s perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort. 

I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth in this paper and later criticized as amended. It has passed the Assembly and the Senate Judiciary Committee. A competing bill by Sen. Steve Glazer, which I also criticized, just passed the Senate. 

So now there are two bills in play for a long, hot summer of negotiation in Sacramento — not versus each other but versus a counterproposal from Google, which I’ll describe below. The good news is that Wicks made clear in her testimony before mine that her bill — though well along in the process — is a work in progress, and she is open to change. She and Glazer appeared together in the hearing to show unity of purpose. 

I continue to have problems with both bills. The Assembly bill is a tax on “accessing” content — thus a tax on reading. The Senate bill is a tax on gathering data — thus a tax on information. They each would benefit the hedge funds that are destroying the 18 of the top 25 newspapers in the state that they control. If anyone should be held responsible for the death of newspapers and taxed for it, it should be the hedge funds. Instead, the bills blame Google and Meta for news’ decline and hold them singularly responsible for its fate. The Assembly bill requires an unwieldly process of arbitration. They are each constitutionally questionable and could spend years in courts before a penny is paid. 

A negotiated agreement would be preferable. Google has proposed an alternative involving unused tax credits and a $30 million contribution to a fund for journalism. In my testimony, I say that I favor a fund, like the Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey. Rather than distributing money indiscriminately to hedge funds and out-of-state media conglomerates as both bills would, an independently administered fund could grant money based on goals and merit, with accountability. Rather than feeding corporate bottom lines with no assurance of supporting journalism, a fund could support specific efforts such as KQED’s quality news- and ad-sharing network; it could foster the creation of support networks like the NJ News Commons at Montclair State; it could invest in news startups such as Lookout Santa Cruz, which just won a Pulitzer; it could most importantly support coverage for underserved communities.

The negotiation should not — cannot — be just with Google, for it is ridiculous to hold a single company responsible for the fate of another entire (generally mismanaged) industry. Who else might join in such a fund is a crucial question. Before I testified, I reached out to Meta, which still insists that if a bill passes it will pull news off its platforms as it did in Canada, where — despite spin from publishers’ lobbyists — the situation is now dire. Meta is also ending the deals it was forced to make under Rupert Murdoch’s legislative gunpoint in Australia, threatening to ban news there. That would be catastrophic in California, for I fear it would give Meta an excuse to take down news across the U.S. Passage of one of these bills requiring payment would also lead to the death of voluntary contributions made through the Google News Initiative, which has done much good. 

I hope that Meta can be convinced (pressured by its home-state politicians) to contribute to a fund and bring news back to Facebook and Instagram just when democracy needs it most. I’d also like to see Amazon and Microsoft contribute. 

It shouldn’t just be tech companies taking responsibility for the health of the news and information ecosystem. It’d be great if Press Forward, the journalism megafund, would partner in a California fund, along with any of the state’s many billionaires. State and local governments could contribute as well, devoting large shares of their advertising budgets to quality local news media. 

On the other side of the table, negotiations must not be monopolized by legacy newspaper companies and their lobbyists. The hedge funds’ papers are zombies. The L.A. Times has a market penetration in L.A. County under five percent, but I hear that its billionaire owner thinks he’s owed an absurd payoff from Silicon Valley. They hardly matter anymore. As I told one legislator, you need no longer be intimidated by the people who bought ink by the barrel for they now buy it by the pint. Any discussion must include Black newspapers, Latino news organizations, not-for-profit news media, independent news organizations, and digital startups, all of whom should step up to be heard. 

At the end of my testimony, I urged the legislators to foster collaboration between news and technology, rather than divorce. California of all jurisdictions — as the headquarters state of the internet — should set an example for journalism and technology working together, especially as AI looms on the horizon (and so does fascism). 

Google and other tech companies can help in other ways. I’d like to see them develop statewide and regional ad networks for news and specifically for Black media, Latino media, and so on. They could collaborate on development of appropriate uses of AI in news (not to manufacture clickbait). Google and Meta have supported training for journalists in product and audience development (full disclosure: at my former school); I’d like to see that continue and grow.

How much better it would be to encourage such collaboration instead of extracting a pound of digital flesh from tech companies to reward the lobbying of hedge funds and investors. 

Who knows what will come out the other end of the legislative sausage extruder, for there are many other cards to be played, including what I think is terrible legislation trying to regulate AI from the wrong end and privacy. 

For more details on the Assembly bill, see an excellent and fair analysis of from the counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee here.

And here is what I had to say in my three minutes in Sacramento. 

Disclosure: My expenses for two trips to Sacramento — one for meeting with legislative aides and the other to testify — were paid or by the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, affiliated with the California Chamber of Commerce, which also commissioned my paper.

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The new pyramid of discovery

I’ve just started using Perplexity’s Discover news application and have to say it is impressive, compiling multiple news reports on a topic and producing a well-organized summary and explanation, giving users the opportunity to query the topic — and providing citations and links to news stories (revealing, by the way, just how repetitive they are). See this example on the Pope and AI.

Perplexity is doing to news organizations what news organizations have long done to their sources, which should make journalists reconsider their relationship with information and public need. Should. 

Journalists have, predictably, started screaming bloody murder, crying that the AI company is stealing and repurposing their valuable content. (I am amused it is Forbes leading this charge given that it has long since become a joke; I confess to laughing out loud every time I encounter its paywall. But it does have some good staff reporting among contributors’ output and the story at hand about military drones is one example.)

I’ve been asking lately what happens if the web is destroyed by all of media’s clickbait and now AI’s endless copies of it. And what if the web is superseded should chat and soon AI’s agents become primary means of discovery of information? Will authoritative news sources then need to make themselves discoverable through AI — as they had to through search and social? By that I don’t mean make deals with OpenAI, et al (Springer’s, Murdoch’s, Diller’s, The Atlantic’s, and others’ money grabs are not about licensing content but instead about selling their silence in lobbying and PR). Rather, I’ve been suggesting the news industry as a whole should look at creating an API for news and negotiating terms: payment, credit, links. See, for example, Tollbit; see also Norwegian media banding together to build a native-language LLM. 

All this is making me ask questions about the role of news media in the larger information ecosystem. What I’m about to discuss is basic media and communication theory, but the current row over Perplexity puts it in a new light, for it makes me see how news media have played precisely the same role with source information that Perplexity is playing with them.

News media insist on looking at this new reality from their perspective, as content creators and copyright holders. But now that the shoe is on the robot’s foot, let’s look at it the other way around, from the perspective of original sources of information, research, content, creativity, opinion, and art — and from the perspective of the public: individuals and communities that need or want access to all that. Since the birth of the newspaper in 1605 (see my Gutenberg Parenthesis), everyone who has wanted to reach the public has had to go through the gatekeepers of media. Today the gatekeepers of media have to go through the new gatekeepers of search, social, and AI. Who is adding value and who is adding friction?

Take, for example, Becca Rothfeld’s excellent review of John Ganz’ new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, in The Washington Post. From The Post’s perspective, it did Ganz and his publisher, FSG, a huge favor, covering the book and even linking to it (through which both The Post and its owner profit every time a copy is bought). 

If Ganz and FSG thought like news organizations do when confronted with Perplexity, they would be in their rights to complain that Rothfeld took Ganz’ ideas, reporting, and research and repurposed it for the purpose of creating her essay, while the paper profited through advertising and audience attention and subscription. They would also, as newspapers do, ignore the value of citation and links. 

So The Post does to a content creator what news organizations complain Perplexity does to them. This is what news organizations have long done to authors, scientists, researchers, experts, theorists, and people who have useful experiences or ideas: extract, repurpose, and exploit. How’s it feel, guys, now that it’s being done to you?

Now, of course, Ganz wants to be discovered and not just to sell books but also to have his ideas spark larger public discourse. So it is a bargain I am sure he is more than willing to make. He and FSG have something to sell. 

But what of the people who simply have information that may be relevant and valuable to others and see their ideas, research, or experience taken and used by news media (often misshapen in the process)? Once sources speak to a reporter, they lose control of what they have to say. More than that, the reporter then asserts ownership of the result. The reporter now claims it as “my content” and cries when other reporters rewrite it without credit (to the reporter; nevermind the source) and when search and social quote it (while linking to it, for the benefit of the news organization). They are complaining now when Perplexity reads, summarizes, and links to their articles. Their publishers are not only suing AI companies but also lobbying for legislation to extend copyright and diminish fair use when it comes to technology.

Note well that copyright at its birth in the 1710 Statute of Anne did not cover newspapers and magazines. In its suit against Open AI, The New York Times claims that “since our nation’s founding, strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to secure the fruits of their labor and investment.” That is simply false. The US Copyright Act of 1790 protected only books, maps, and charts. Newspapers and magazines did not fall under copyright’s purview until the Copyright Act of 1909. As I explain in The Gutenberg Parenthesis [hey, I, too, want to be discovered and sell books; discount codes are here] the Postal Office Act of 1792 enabled newspaper publishers to trade copies through the mails for free to allow them to share stories — leading to the creation of the wonderful job title of “scissors editor” — with the explicit intent of creating a national network for news and with it, a nation. As I explain here, even in the infamous hot news decision favoring the Associated Press, the Supreme Court refused to grant a property right to news. 

Yet newspapers act as if news, information, ideas, and opinions are their property as content. No, they merely borrow it to exploit it for their own purposes, locking it behind their paywalls to sell subscriptions and using it to attract and sell attention to advertisers. 

How dare Perplexity do unto them as they have done unto others?

Now, before you @ me, let me make clear that I well understand the need to support journalists and their reporting. I spent a good deal of my career in the industry and the academe exploring business strategies. Journalism is a public necessity. 

But the real necessity is an informed and educated public. That means that authoritative, expert, useful, and relevant information needs to get to the public with as little friction as possible. Today, though, every effort is going into increasing friction: paywalls, link taxes, demands to take content down, and flooding the zone of good information with bad information: propaganda, spam, and clickbait. 

Am I suggesting that news should be a public utility? No. That is an impossibility given that news should operate on the public’s behalf to check power, not to lobby for favors from it. I believe that whatever we come to think of as journalism in the future must coexist in private for-profit and not-for-profit entities alongside technology, also in private but one hopes open entities.

And what is this journalism of the future? I cannot yet say. Our envisioning of it must begin not with concern for the claims of property rights to information. It must start instead with rethinking how best to make information available to the public: not to the imagined mass (that deformed creature I decry in The Gutenberg Parenthesis) but instead to each of us as individuals and members of communities.

Perplexity Discover is a nice presentation of news, richer and more compelling and convenient (because it brings much together) than Google News or even, dare I say, a newspaper. (“Reading a newspaper,” said Benedict Anderson, “is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.”) I haven’t used Discover long enough to come to conclusions about it. And as it is generated by AI, I have no doubt it is filled with errors and thus is unreliable and unusable as a primary source of news. None of this is intended as a recommendation to switch one’s news diet to Perplexity. 

But this moment does provide the opportunity to rethink the architecture of our news and information ecosystems. The goal should not be to support legacy institutions and their ways. The goal must be to improve the means by which quality, credible information is made available to the benefit of individuals and communities in the public and to the credit of the sources of that information. Intermediaries — whether newspapers or search engines or social platforms or AI companies — must add value or get the hell out of the way. 

(I asked Google Gemini, atop this post, and Meta.ai, here, to draw me a pyramid with “you, Intermediaries, and sources.” These are the results. AGI is nowhere near.)

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This is no way to save the news

California legislators have amended a bill written by newspaper lobbyists — and made it worse. New York has enacted a law pushed by newspapers to give tax dollars to newspapers — excluding some broadcasters and the true future of news: digital and not-for-profit newsrooms. And Canada further demonstrates what a disaster its newspaper lobbyists have caused with a law that drove news off Facebook and Instagram.

The newspaper industry in both countries is in great measure controlled by hedge funds. The only investment they make is in lobbyists to write protectionist legislation. The publishers blame technology for their own failures, seek payoffs for themselves, and threaten to expand copyright and diminish fair use to the detriment of internet freedoms. 

The field of journalism is a disaster from top (The New York Times and day-by-day The Washington Post) to bottom (Gannett, Media News Group, Sinclair). I will leave that lament for another day. Now I want to look at the latest in the legislation and its perils. 

California’s tax on reading

The California Journalism Preservation Act — which I dissect in detail in a paper I was commissioned to research for the state Chamber of Commerce — has been amended. It is no longer an explicit link tax. 

The bill demands payments from platforms for “accessing” news content online. That is a tax on reading. That is noxious to the Constitution and to an enlightened society. 

It requires platforms to negotiate — though it’s not clear with whom — or submit to arbitration, paying a fee — with no cap — to “journalism providers” (undefined) based on number of journalists (including freelancers). 

The bill now exempts only one technology company from its reading tax: any platform that earns at least half its revenue from “the manufacturing and sales of company-branded devices and hardware to consumers.” Guess who. That demonstrates that Apple has even better lobbyists than the newspaper industry.

Most of my problems with the bill remain: It still supports newspapers owned by hedge funds and national broadcasting companies. It still ends up supporting many out-of-state and national companies that have someone in California. It has another constitutionally troubling clause forbidding platforms from “retaliating” against news companies with whom they do not forge agreements by no longer linking to or changing ranking or placement of their content. That is a clear violation of the Copyright Act and Supremacy Clause and of the First Amendment. Compelled speech is not free speech. (This law would be locked in the courts for years.) Further, the bill sets no standards for what qualifies as journalism (though we would not want government to define that), opening the door to supporting pink slime and propaganda. Finally, there is no accountability.

Last week, I went to Sacramento — brought there by the Chamber — and spoke with legislative aides in the offices of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold a hearing on the bill on June 25. (I might testify.) I’d never done such a thing and it was a fascinating and heartening exercise in democracy. Their doors were open and they were all ready to listen. I gave them my paper and in conversation presented them with a nightmare scenario and with alternatives. 

The nightmare is being endured in Canada, where passage of Bill C-18 led to Meta pulling news off Facebook and Instagram and ending all support for journalism while Google agreed to pay $73 million (US) but ended other support. (More on this below.) My fear for California is that Meta will follow through on the same vow there, banishing news, and that Google will kill its voluntary Google News Initiative (GNI), taking down a number of valued programs it supports. At the ISOJ conference in Austin a few weeks ago, I heard the editor of a major newspaper from California talk about what a good and useful funder GNI has been. 

In an L.A. Times report, I was relieved to see Sen. Tom Umberg, chair of the Judiciary Committee, take these concerns to heart. “I believe that we could screw up so that we make it so expensive that the platforms don’t carry [journalism] content,” he said. “That would be catastrophic.” Indeed.

As an alternative, I suggested that the legislators look to something like New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium — which distributes grants based on its goals and the quality of proposals, requiring accountability, instead of automatically doling out money to hedge funds’ and conglomerates’ P&Ls via newsrooms on the basis of say, number of employees. The Consortium’s fund is managed by a board appointed by top public universities and the legislature on a bipartisan basis. Such a fund could underwrite initiatives like a California version of Montclair State’s NJ News Commons, which provides support and training for local news proprietors; projects like KQED’s quality news sharing network; efforts to bring coverage to undercovered communities, addressing a long history of inequity in media; and perhaps investment in startups like Lookout Santa Cruz (winner of a Pulitzer Prize this year). Such a fund could also require accountability.

In Canada and Australia before it, legislation aimed at the platforms did not end up taking effect. Google (in both countries) and Meta (in Australia) voluntarily contributed to news and thus earned exemptions from the laws. Unfortunately, I don’t yet see such an opportunity in California. Google has made an offer involving contributions of unused R&D tax credits, a large contribution to a fund, and help raising further contributions from other tech companies, which could add up to well more than $100 million a year. I hope that legislators will look seriously at what this could accomplish. I also hope they will try to foster collaboration rather than divorce for journalists and technologists — especially now, with the advent of AI. If anyone should enable such cooperation, surely it should be California, headquarters state of the internet.

If such agreement could be reached, legislators may take credit for using their bills as forcing mechanisms to bring tech companies to the table. And what about the newspaper lobbyists? As I told folks in the capitol, the old newspapers no longer set the public agenda. Hell, the once-mightly L.A. Times has a digital market penetration under five percent in L.A. County. Media News Group’s and Gannett’s papers are so thin you could shave with them. They don’t matter anymore. Politicians no longer need fear those who buy ink by the barrel as they now buy it by the pint. In fact, if you really want to tax the people who have ruined newspapers in the state, tax the hedge funds. 

New York’s retrograde law

Meanwhile in New York, the legislature at the last minute passed a bill to provide tax money for job credits for journalists in the state. It is a disaster. The law specifies paying only print — yes print — newspapers and some broadcasters. Welcome to 1986. The legislation thus explicitly excludes digital outlets and not-for-profits. According to one account, it was the governor’s office that dictated this exclusion in the last-minute rush to get the bill passed without public comment.

The bill did, to its credit, specifically exclude publicly traded companies from receiving money — which should have left out the hedge funds operating in the state. But then it drilled a loophole by granting an exception to companies that have lost a quarter of circulation or workforce in the last five years, which likely lets the hedge funds back in. For Gannett or Media News Group to get money out of this but not TheCity is shameful. 

Digital outlets raised alarms but it was too late; the bill had already been rushed through the legislature and signed into law. Though there is a frantic effort to find loopholes to the loopholes, it is simply true that the law is designed to support only legacy news. It is bad law. I am told by the proprietor of one local and digital site that newspaper publishers in the state’s trade association — which still does not allow dues-paying digital members to even vote — told online folks that they should keep quiet and not rock the boat. I am disturbed to see legacy newspaper publishers holding an event at my former school promoting what they call the “NY Local Journalism Sustainability Act.” They’re trying to rename the law after its birth. The bill was named the NY Newspapers and Broadcast Media Act. The name says it all. 

This is what happens when politicians fear publishers and when publishers engage in conflict of interest by seeking favors from those we cover — and when they both shut down comment from the people who are doing the real work of rebuilding local journalism, and from the communities they serve. There is just no excuse for implementing something so shortsighted and retrograde — and in the media capital of the world, of all places. 

Canada’s aftermath

Legislative aides in Sacramento told me that newspaper lobbyists and publishers have tried to convince them that Canada was a win for news. That’s simply wrong. As I report in my paper (which, by the way, also has a lot of fun history about copyright, media consolidation, and anticompetitive behavior past), news sites in Canada believe they are worse off, losing Meta’s traffic and the opportunity to find new audience, losing Meta’s financial support for journalism, losing Google’s voluntary grants for journalism, and gaining a bit of Google cash. As Jeff Elgie, head of the very successful local news enterprise Village Media told me: “We will probably get a bit more money than we did before with Facebook and Google combined, but we lost the Facebook traffic. So if you ask me, any day I would say, keep your damn money and give us the Facebook traffic back.”

The deal in Canada called or Google to choose an independent body to decide how to divvy up the money it is now forced to grant. Google just announced the organization that will decide among the roughly 1,400 news outlets that have applied for their silver. Given the large number of recipients, the amount any one outlet will receive is unlikely to be life-changing. I note among applicants a fashion magazine, a B-to-B site, many radio stations (I doubt all of them are cornerstones of journalism), and many, many outlets from one company declared bankrupt by the investors that own the Toronto Star and from the hedge fund that controls the largest chain in the nation, Post Media. 

What now?

As I sat down with a policy aide in Sacramento —yes, in the lobby — I said, “I’m a Biden Democrat, but for the next 30 seconds I will sound like a libertarian. I am troubled by any government intervention in speech and especially journalism. But since the discussion has already gone over that wall to subsidize news, I just want to consider how to do it well.” 

Supporting news should mean not supporting the hedge funds that are killing newspapers and news. It should mean making judgments about quality, equity, serving underserved communities, and accountability to communities. It should support diversity, innovation, new business models, better listening, and independence. It should support collaboration over retribution against technology companies that did not ruin news — and in any fair exchange, recognize the value of platforms’ links to publishers. If you’re going to pass laws to support journalism, then don’t support news as it was, support news as it could be. 

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Demote the doomsters

This paper in Science on “managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress” with 25 co-authors (Harari?) is getting quick attention. The paper leans heavily toward the AI doom, warning of “an irreversible loss of human control over AI systems” that “could autonomously deploy a variety of weapons, including biological ones,” leading if unchecked to “a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.”

Deep breath.

Such doomsaying is itself a perilous mix of technological determinism and moral panic. There are real, present-tense risks associated with AI — as the Stochastic Parrots paper by Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Emily Bender, and Angelina McMillan-Major carefully laid out — involving bias of input and output, anthropomorphization and fraud (just listen to ChatGPT4o’s saccharine voice), harm to human workers cleaning data, and the environment. The Science paper, on the other hand, glosses over those current concerns to cry doom.

That doomsaying makes many assumptions.

It concentrates on the technology over the human use of it. Have we learned nothing from the internet? The problems with it have everything to do with human misuse.

It engages in the third-person effect and hypodermic theory of media brought to AI, assuming that AI will have some mystical ability to “gain human trust, acquire resources, and influence key decision-makers.” This is part and parcel with the doomsters’ belief that their machine will be smarter than everybody (except perhaps them). It is condescending and paternalistic in the extreme. 

It imagines that technology is the solution to the problems technology poses — its own form of technological determinism — in the belief that systems can be “aligned” with human values.

Now here’s the actual bad news. Any general machine can be misused by any malign actor with ill intent. The pursuit of failsafe guardrails in AI will prove futile, for it is impossible to predict every bad use that anyone could make of a machine that can be asked to do anything. That is to say, it is impossible to build foolproof guardrails against us, for there are too many fools among us. 

AI is, like the printing press, a general machine. Gutenberg could not design movable type to prevent its use in promoting propaganda or witch hunts. The analogy is apt, for at the beginning of any technology, the technologists are held liable — in the case of print, printers were beheaded, beheaded, and burned at the stake for what came off their presses. Today, the Science paper and many an AI panelist say that the makers of AI models should be held responsible for everything that could ever be done with them. At best, that further empowers the already rich companies that can afford liability insurance. At worst, it distracts from the real work to be done and the responsibility that also lies with users. 

All this is why we must move past discussions of AI led by AI people and instead hear from other disciplines — the humanities and social sciences — which study human beings.

It is becoming impossible to untangle the (male, white, and wealthy) human ego involved in much of the AI boys’ discussion of AI safety: ‘See how powerful I am. I am become death and the machine I build will destroy worlds. So invest in me. And let me write the laws that will govern what I do.’

Take the coverage of “safety” at OpenAI. The entire company is filled with true believers in the BS of AGI and so-called x-risk (presumptions also apparently swallowed by the Science paper’s authors). The “safety” team at OpenAI were the more fervent believers in doom, but everyone there seems to be in the same cult. They— the humans — are the ones I worry about. Yet in stories about the “safety” team’s departure, reporters take the word “safety” at face value and refuse to do their homework on the faux philosophies of #TESCREAL (Google it) and how they guide the chest-thumping of the doomsters.

The doomsaying in this paper is cloaked in niceties but it is all of a type.

All this is why I wrote my next book (I won’t turn this post into a plug for it) and why I am hoping to develop academic programs that bring other disciplines into this discussion. It is time to demote the geeks and the doomsters.

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News bills: From bad to worse

I recently wrote an extensive analysis and criticism of a proposed California link tax, offering many alternatives. A state senator just proposed his own alternative — and it is even worse.

Sen. Steve Glazer’s SB1327 would tax the collection of data for advertising by large platforms — onlyl those earning more than $2.5 billion in ad revenue — to support a job credit for local news organizations. Glazer calls this a “data extraction mitigation fee,” analogizing the collection of data to chemical companies polluting the land. Oh, please.

I have many problems with this:

Data are information and information is knowledge. To demonize and tax the collection of information should be abhorrent in an enlightened society. His rhetoric at moral-panic pitch sets a perilous precedent. He argues that he is taxing a barter exchange users make when they give data to internet platforms and receive free content in return. Well then, shouldn’t that tax apply to the exchange we all make when we give our valuable attention to TV and radio and much of the web in exchange for free content? But the bill exempts news media. The bill offers a tax credit of 25–50% of the salaries of full-time journalists. As I said in my paper analyzing the prior legislation, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), this disadantages much of Black, Latino, community, and start-up media that cannot afford full-time staff and rely on freelancers. The bill earmarks funds for ethnic media but supports larger incumbents over small and new competitors. The hedge funds that now own 18 of the state’s top 25 newspapers — the hedge funds that are ruining journalism in California and across America — will benefit. They should not receive a penny. If anyone’s cash flow should be taxed, if anyone should be punished for the state of news today, it is them. Though the money is intended to go to supporting reporters, money is fungible and it will doubtless support hedge funds’ bottom lines more than journalists. I remain disappointed to see journalists standing with legislators to lobby for and support legislation for their benefit and to use editorial space to promote it in a clear conflict of interest. Journalists should not be seeking favors from those in power whom we should be covering independently. In his presentation of the bill, Glazer in one breath notes the growth of revenue for California’s own platforms and the decline of revenue for the legacy news indusry and says “the correlation is unmistakable.” In a next breath he goes farther, saying that “the fee in my bill assigns the cost of reviving local journalism to those firms whose data extraction and economic activity is causing the news industry’s decline.” (My emphasis)

I’ve spent 50 years in journalism and I can testify that much of the injury to the legacy news industry is self-inflicted. It is unproductive to try to pin entire blame and responsibility for the health of a state’s news and information ecosystem on one industry and a few companies in it. Under this logic, as I say in my paper, A&P (if it still lived) would owe reparations to every corner grocery, and solar- and wind-power providers should subsidize coal mines.

I have long been on record saying that I am concerned about government intervention in speech and especially journalism. Glazer says his formula for journalist employment tax credits doesn’t interfere because it gives the credit “to all qualifying news organizations.” But for government to decide what news organizations qualify is itself a thumb on a scale. 

If government wishes to subsidize news, I will ask again whether there are better alternatives. In my paper, one of many that I discuss is the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. It receives state as well as private funding and solicits grants for news entities and projects. Its board, which is appointed by state universities, the governor, and the legislature, makes independent judgments about what to support according to its goals. It is housed at Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media (where — disclosure — I am on an advisory board).

If I were to get over my objections to government involvment in journalism and, for the sake of discussion, endorse use of government funds to support news, then I would at least want to find an alternative that was not based on punishing one behavior, one industry, or one set of companies. If news matters to everyone in the state, shouldn’t everyone in the state take a measure of responsibility for it? 

Here’s one promising idea. What if a state’s — for example, New Jersey’s — existing library funding were expanded to also support the news information ecosystem — and, importantly, to recognize the role that libraries (in towns, colleges, and schools) already play in supporting local information. The funding for news could be distributed by the NJ Civic Information Consortium, which could also encourage more collaboration among libraries and news organizations — another benefit. Rather than supporting only incumbents, it would also support new competition and innovation and serving communities ill-served in the past. 

Thus far, the debate over government support of news media has been driven by lobbyists for news media. In an op-ed of mine just published by Editor & Publisher (a trade publication that, I’m grateful to say, encourages such debate), I track the history of the newspaper industry opposing new technologies and competitors, cashing in political capital earned through their journalism to attack those competitors — radio a century ago, then TV, then telcos, now internet platforms — and seek political favors of protectionism and subsidy. I wish we could break free from this cycle of self-interested good-guy/bad-guy myth-making and instead have a mature, responsible, productive, and open discussion about society’s priorities and how to support them. 

I believe that rebuilding news — not legacy news companies and not their investors, but news — should be a high priority. I hope to find ways to support it. I wish that this agenda would not be set by hedge funds’ lobbyists but instead by the communities and institutions affected.

California’s latest bill does not do that. It supports incumbents over innovators. It demonizes not just internet companies (odd, given that California benefits tremendously from their presence, employment, and taxation) but worse, the collection of data — ultimately, of learning. California can do better. (And if it doesn’t, New Jersey could show the way.)

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The Times is broken

It gives me no satisfaction to say this — indeed it fills me with trepidation for the nation — but The Times is broken. 

I know some of you are thinking, “You only now realize this?” No, I’m only now saying it. I have been criticizing The Times for its willful credulity in the face of rising fascism and its bothsidesism, but also because it is the biggest and was the best we had and I wished it to be better. Now I come to wonder whether it can be. 

The final straw is not just Politico’s report that Times Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger thinks he is entitled by birthright to interview the President of the United States — and, deprived of the privilege, allegedly and petulantly encouraged use of news columns to criticize Joe Biden. “It’s A.G.,” Politico quoted an unnamed journalist saying. “He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.” That is what we call a buried lede. 

No, the final straw for me came with The Times’ response to Politico’s reporting from an unnamed spokesperson. Did the paper and its leadership use this as an opportunity for self-reflection, to finally ask what it might be doing wrong? No. The institution doubled down on entitlement and complaint, cloaking its hissy fit in condescension and the sacred language of the press: “For anyone who understands the role of the free press in a democracy, it should be troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”

At about the same time, Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn was addressing an industry conference and said the obvious part out loud (qouted by an attendee): “Our commitment to independent journalism is a commitment to make many of our readers unhappy most of the times.” 

Sulzberger, too, talks often about “independence.” But independence from whom? Not the official sources and the powerful from whom they seek access. Often not the right-wing that manipulates them. No, they want to prove they are independent of liberals and their own readers — who happen to be the same people. The Times equates independence with making us unhappy. Jay Rosen spotted that dynamic years ago. That — and petulance — is what drives The Times to #ButHerEmails and now #ButHisAge.

I was struck reading former Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron’s book, Collision of Power, when he said that “by the fall of 2018, the percentage of our digital subscribers who considered themselves somewhat or very conservative was in the single digits, with slightly more than 80 percent ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ liberal.” 

For Baron, that seems a lamentation. He, like The Times and most of journalism in the age of mass media, think it is their job to serve everyone the same. That is the unspoken form of bothsidesism that rules the institution. It is a business imperative as much as a mission; monopoly newspapers want the largest possible audience: everyone. 

In truth, I say that Baron should have seen the paper’s apparent ideological imbalance as a blessing: Now you know who your audience is. It is a community of commonality. You should then understand how better to serve them. You could equip them with the facts, perspective, history, and intellgectual honesty necessary to win arguments with their misinformed Uncle Jim. But these papers think it is their challenge to serve Uncle Jim who never reads these papers because he’s happy watching Fox News. 

The Post, under Baron, used to be better in my opinion; I thought it had surpassed The Times. But his replacement, Sally Buzbee, is bringing to the paper her anodyne ambitions from the Associated Press — the telegraphed voice from no one that Neil Postman, James Carey, and Jay Rosen warn of. In my view, The Post’s news judgment has been getting worse and worse. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is, make no mistake about it, Rupert Murdoch’s creature. 

These three newspapers, which in the winners-take-most market of media today capture two thirds of subscription revenue, each have wonderful journalists doing good and important work. But they are betrayed by their institutions, which are losing trust and refuse to ask why. 

Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the legacy newspaper industry is in dire condition, most of its big chains now owned by hedge funds that cut them to the marrow, copy each other, do not innovate. The one thing they still invest in is lobbying, with their trade association, the News/Media Alliance, writing and Xeroxing bills for legislators from Washington to Springfield to Sacramento to benefit old newspapers at the expense of Black, Latino, community, digital, and startup news media.

I have come to the belief that the status of legacy American newspapers is no longer the measure of the health of the country’s news and information ecosystem. It is time to separate them and to concentrate on the future of the ecosystem as a whole. That is where foundations and policymakers must turn their attention.

As I was writing this, I saw that Howard Stern had interviewed Joe Biden. I stopped and listened and came away with a better sense of Biden’s character and soul than from any interview or press conference held by political reporters or publishers ever. Their conversation was illuminating, revealing, touching, human, and meaningful. I hope Stern and Sirius make it public for all to hear. 

Take that, A.G. 

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Newspapers can be jerks

In my paper on the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), I examine the history of newspapers’ hostile reception of new technologies and competitors, reaching back a century to the dawn of radio.

NiemanLab published excerpts from the paper on the flaws in the legislation and alternatives. I thought some might enjoy other sections, including this one about the tactics newspaper publishes have brought to bear against intruders in what they claim as their turf: news. I also write about some of this in The Gutenberg Parenthesis. It’s a wonderful if in some ways appalling tale: 

With the birth of radio a century ago, print as a medium faced its first competitor for attention and advertisers. It is instructive to examine parallels to publishers’ tactics today, involving copyright, antitrust, criticism in editorial coverage, and political lobbying.

Newspaper publishers were, to say the least, inhospitable to the new medium. As early as 1922, the Associated Press — as a cooperative owned by publishers — forbade the use of its news on radio. In 1932, members of the AP sought the help of the American Newspaper Publishers Association “to curtail broadcasting of AP news,” but an association attorney warned that the groups could not collaborate “without violating the statutes relating to conspiracy in restraint of trade.”¹ 

In Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939 (Praeger, 1995), Gwenyth Jackaway recounts the many efforts publishers made to exclude broadcasters from news, most notably strong-arming the two nascent networks at the time into signing the Biltmore Agreement of 1933. It prohibited the networks from building news operations (Columbia Broadcasting disbanded its news operation with a half-dozen bureaus, a few dozen on staff, and 1,000 correspondents globally); required them to pay for news updates from the publishers’ wire services; forbade commercial sponsorship of news; and limited twice daily news broadcasts to 5 minutes each, filled with 30-word bulletins, which could air only after local newspapers had come off the press at 9:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. The bulletins had to be written to encourage reading newspapers. In a perverse rendition of the hot news doctrine, according to Jackaway, on-air commentators were not allowed to discuss news until 12 hours after the event.

Why would radio networks agree to such concessions? Politics. As Broadcasting reported in 1934, they thought “a friendly and cooperative attitude would preclude newspaper agitation against radio during the coming session of Congress.”² “If you ask why broadcasters accepted such an unsatisfactory and humiliating agreement, the answer is simple,” said H.V. Kaltenborn, who straddled both media. “They feared the power of the press. That power was ready to swing into action against them.”³ In Harper’s, Isabelle Keating called the agreement “a metaphorical Versailles Treaty which by inference, placed the war guilt on the broadcasters, disarmed them, and sought to make them pay.” Senator Clarence Dill called it “news suppression.”⁵ 

The Biltmore Agreement fell away because, from the start, independent stations ignored it. Also, newspaper publishers entered the radio business, with 208 of 717 American stations owned by newspapers by 1937. By then, 80% of homes had radios. As Harper’s reported, newspapers “found that news broadcasting stimulated the sales of their papers.”⁶ The New Republic editorialized, “For years, newspaper publishers have fought the bad fight, using boycotts, reprisals, intimidation, ridicule and injunctions in a relentless effort to make radio shut its many-tubed mouth.” Newspaper publishers would regularly complain about filching, stealing, and pirating of content and also contend that radio was a breeding ground for disinformation, for they contended that the eye was superior to the ear for learning. But their underlying complaint was this: “Their revenues were dropping, radio’s were mounting — ergo: radio must be stealing the business from the newspapers… Radio was not only hamstringing advertising receipts, but it was dishing out free what newspapers had to sell.”⁷ Or as Editor & Publisher complained, “But the newspaper, apparently, is only a queer kind of business which gives its product away to a competitor, and stands idly by to see a natural and rightful function supplanted.”⁸

The California Newspaper Publishers Association called for “the return to the people the air channels now used by commercial interests, similar to the plan now in effect in England.”⁹ Throughout their battle, newspapers threatened to drop publishing of broadcasters’ program listings, but when they followed through, readers protested and listings returned. Most profoundly, newspaper publishers lobbied for broadcast to be regulated, leading in 1927 to the creation of the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in 1934 — thus carving a considerable exception to the First Amendment and its protection of freedom of the press. With no apparent sense of irony, after forcing radio to be regulated by government, newspaper publishers then tried to ban radio reporters from Congressional galleries, asking, in the words of Keating, “whether radio was not in fact subservient to the reigning political party because of its governmental license; whether, as a result, it was not unqualified to purvey disinterested news.”¹⁰

H.O. Davis, publisher of California’s Ventura Free Press, waged a campaign to organize small, independent newspapers — those less likely to own broadcast towers — against radio. According to Broadcasting, Davis sent publishers letters advising them to use their news columns to “show up the moronic quality of most programs. Get interviews with all kinds of people who are disgusted with the character of radio programs and annoyed by the constant intrusion of advertising…. Emphasize the danger of uncontrolled broadcasting for the spreading of insidious propaganda.” He suggested enlisting clergy against “the evils of broadcasting supported entirely by advertising…. Tell them of the danger that uncontrolled commercial television will bring movie sex smut and idealized gangsters right into the home.”¹¹

Publishers draped themselves in “the invocation of sacred rhetoric,” in Jackaway’s words. “Radio journalism, they warned, posed a threat to the journalistic ideas of objectivity, the social ideals of public service, the capitalistic ideals of property rights, and the political ideals of democracy…. Now they are no longer simply annoying competitors; they are invaders who pose a threat to some of the culture’s most sacred ideals.”¹² See for comparison, the sacred rhetoric in the preamble to the federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act: “A free and diverse fourth estate was critical to the founding of our democracy and continues to be the lifeblood of a functioning democracy.” See also the opening of The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI: “Independent journalism is vital to our democracy.¹³ It is also increasingly rare and valuable.”

Radio would not be the last new competitor to inspire such sacred claims. As Jackaway observes, “When people feel threatened by the arrival of newcomers who do things in a new way, they often respond with hostility. They frequently claim some form of superiority over these outsiders, and thus dismiss them as lacking any value.” Come television, we see a replay of the drama between newspapers and technology. “For the past dozen years,” Morris J. Gelman wrote in Television Magazine in 1962, “newspapers with little regard for facts or proportion, have used television as the nation’s number one whipping boy.”¹⁴ Publishers complained about the still-new kid on the block taking their national ad revenue, even though the industry at the time was enjoying record circulation and held a third of the total ad market, more than double TV’s take. And one-third of TV stations were affiliated with newspapers.

The script was acted out once again against telephone companies when, following the 1984 breakup of AT&T into Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), the Baby Bells were freed by court order in July 1991 from a prohibition against offering information services. “Stunned, the publishers are now scrambling to persuade Congress, in effect, to overturn the court ruling,” The New York Times reported. “Behind the scenes, the publishers and telephone companies have hired some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and political advisers. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, for example, has hired several heavyweights.” One year later, both sides were taking out full-page newspaper ads and Congress was debating a bill to again limit the telcos, but that came to nothing. Another year on, however, the mood changed when, as one might say today, enemies became frenemies and Times Mirror was in talks to collaborate with the phone companies in its newspaper markets, L.A. and New York.¹⁵

And now, with the arrival of the internet and lately artificial intelligence, the leitmotif of newspapers’ fears, objections, accusations, and lobbying can be heard again. Journalists write headlines asking, in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” while The New York Times declares, “It’s Time to Unfriend the Internet.” Meanwhile, publishers worry about competition, contending once again that “their” revenue has been “stolen” from them and trying to protect news as their property. In early days online, when Reuters began licensing its content to the then-king-of-the-web, Yahoo, AP management was met with stiff resistance to doing the same by its board of newspaper owners. (The compromise: the AP could sell its main wire but not its local wires.)

(One further quote by Jackaway from The Gutenberg Parenthesis:) 
“Never,” said Jackaway, “is there the admission that public opinion might be manipulated by the printed word as well as the spoken word, or any recognition that by attempting to control radio news the press was actually infringing upon the broadcasters’ freedom of expression. Instead, the print journalists cloak themselves in a mantle of self-sacrifi cing virtue and depict the broadcasters and the government as enemies of the most essential values of our political system. Throughout these journalistic criticisms of radio is an appeal to an idealized model of the press, in which newspapers dutifully protect the people from the abuses of governmental excess or political propaganda. The radio in contrast, is portrayed as a medium through which the public could be manipulated and exploited.” The old medium is always the solution to the problems the old medium says the new medium is causing.

Note recurrent trends: Publishers react to competition by trying to extend copyright and deprive others from using news, by accusing others of antitrust or seeking exemption from it, by decrying the methods and morals of the new medium, and by seeking protectionist legislation.

¹ Rudolph D. Michael, “History and Criticism of Press-Radio Relationships,” Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 15, №2 (June 1938), 179.
² Gwenyth Jackaway, Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939, Praeger (1995), 27–29; Martin Codel, “News Plan to End Radio-Press War,” Broadcasting (January 1, 1934), 10, 30.
³ Codel, 10.
⁴ Kaltenborn quoted in Robert McChesney, “Press-Radio Relations and the Emergence of Network, Commercial Broadcasting,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, Vol. 11, №1 (March 1991).
⁵ Isabelle Keating, “Pirates of the Air,” Harper’s (September 1, 1939), 468–469.
⁶ Keating, 464.
⁷ T.R. Carskadon, “The Press-Radio War,” The New Republic (March 11, 1936), 132–133.
⁸ “Editorial: Radio and Elections,” Editor & Publisher (November 10, 1928), 30.
⁹ Quoted in Jackaway, 100.
¹⁰ Keating, 468.
¹¹ “A Vicious Fight Against Broadcasting,” Broadcasting, December 1, 1931, 10, 33.
¹² Jackaway, 44.
¹³ Jackaway, 7–8.
¹⁴ Morris J. Gelman, “Newspapers,” Television Magazine, November 1962, 88.
¹⁵ Edmund L. Andrews, “‘Baby Bells,’ Newspapers In a Brawl,” The New York Times (November 11, 1991): www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/business/the-media-business-baby-bells-newspapers-in-a-brawl.html; “Bill to Curb ‘Baby Bells’ Advances,” The Washington Post (May 28, 1992); William Glaberson, “The Baby Bells Are Finding an Unlikely Ally in the Information-Services War: Newspapers,” The New York Times (July 5, 1993): www.nytimes.com/1993/07/05/business/media-business-press-baby-bells-are-finding-unlikely-ally-information-services.html.

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AI in Reflection

There is so much to parse in this Times column inspired by a paper examining alleged political leanings of large language models.

First, the myth of a “center” is imposed on the machine as it is on journalism. That is an impossibility, especially when extremists weigh down the equation & move “center” by gravity downhill, towards them.

Second, in its raw state the model reflects the collected corpus of digital content from those who had the power to publish. Thus, it will reflect that worldview; it is a reflection of that power. Imposing left/right/center on that says little about the machine, much about the that imposition.

But, third, given that — as the Stochastic Parrots paper preaches — the models are too huge to audit. It is impossible to judge the effect of the choices made in training them. That is the problem with size-matters, macho model-making.

Fourth, when, as the article says, models are “fine-tuned,” some of that effort comes in reaction to fears of political and media pressure on the model-makers, to compensate for what is lacking in the material used to train the model. Thus, the tuning says more about that pressure and those fears than it does about the technology per se. See: the fuss over Gemini’s images. So when a model puts a Black person at the US Constitutional Convention, its makers are trying to account for society’s biases; when it is called “woke” by the right, that reveals their further biases. The issues are all human.

All this is why I argue that we must study technology in the context of humanity, examining not the software as if it had a worldview but instead understanding the conflicting worldviews imposed on it and what that reveals not about the machine but about us.

The tl;dr of all this is that just as there is no mythical center in politics, there is no neutrality in technology (AI or social media) and there is no objectivity in journalism. Each is an attempt to impose a given view as a norm.

In my upcoming book (coming not soon enough), The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic, I quote Terrence Sejnowski on his theory of the Reverse Turing Test in the context of Kevin Roose’s affair with ChatGPT. The episode says more about the reporter than the machine he reported on . That snippet:

In my book, I argue we should understand the internet not as a technology but as a human network and enterprise. Similarly, we should not try to analyze the biases in AI so much as we should endeavor to \understand human biases imposed upon it in design or reaction.

AI as it exists could be understood as a reflection on society, in what it summarizes of the collection of human text and image it is trained on, in how our reaction to it exposes our fears or dreams, in how we choose to command it. 

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Reflections in the ‘woke’ mirror

Regarding the supposed furor over #WokeGemini…

If we saw generative AI as a creative tool, then I’d say imagining the founding of America with women & Black people at the table and the Catholic Church headed by Black women and Native Americans is a proper revision of history the way it should have been.

The reaction to #WokeGemini says more about society than the tool itself; that’s what fascinates me about AI: its reflections. Right-wing columnists fear the anti-white machine programmed by commisars of what we used to call political correctness.

And the extremist Murdoch media and pols hunt for enemies: technologists who dare to recognize “white privilege.” Their strategy of projection works in media today: calling anti-racism racism to deflect from their deep racism, just as calling Biden old and doddering deflects from the truly doddering Trump. In today’s credulous media, it works.

Ultimately, this little episode shows the folly of “guardrails” in AI, for a tool can be made to do anything and what it is proscribed from doing — and reaction to that — can be more revealing and risky than the tool alone. It is like telling Gutenberg what movable type must never say. The Church tried to do just that with his successors as, at first, the technology was held responsible for what it produced: printers were beheaded and behanded for what their machines produced. Then booksellers were held liable and controlled via licensing and the Stationers Company in Britain. Finally, authors were the responsible parties — and Foucault says that is the birth of the author. 

We debate responsibility over the technology of AI today: Some want the model makers to be responsible for everything that could (or now could not) be produced from their machine. Some try to blame an application of the model (looking at you, Air Canada). Some want to blame the technology for making just what it was asked to make (looking at a certain lawyer and a certain reporter). 

The episode also reveals the fraud in associating generative AI with truth. If it were seen instead as a concordance of all society’s biased text and images and a creative tool that can be told to remake that, then there’d be no story here, only interesting reflections of ourselves, our aspirations, our faults, and our fears. 

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Is it time to give up on old news?

I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news: It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry. 

I say this with no joy, no satisfaction at having tried to get newspapers and magazines to change, and much empathy for the journalists and others caught working in a dying sector and those who count on them. But the old news industry is gasping for air. I’m not suggesting performing euthenasia on what is left. Nor do I dance on the grave. In my time running a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, now ending, I have tried to balance support for startups and legacy companies. But I wonder whether it is time stop throwing good money and effort after bad.

The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors — from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionnaires — has failed them. Hedge funds have bought up chains and papers, selling everything not bolted down, cutting every possible cost, and taking every penny of cash flow home with them. The one thing the old companies are still investing in is lobbying.

In my testimony in the Senate last week, I engaged in the wishful if futile act of urging the legislators not to enact protectionist legislation written with the industry lobbyists who sat beside me, but instead to support the emergent reinvention of journalism occurring in communities everywhere. Not likely. 

The bad news for news is constant. Just in the last month, the Los Angeles Times is laying off 115 people, throwing its newsroom into “chaos” and “mayhem.” Time magazine lays off 15 percent of its unionized editorial staff. Meanwhile, The New York Times chronicles the pains of billionnaires losing fortunes trying to save old news. I didn’t think it was possible for hedge funds to torture journalism more, but Alden just did something even worse than buying a paper: selling The Baltimore Sun to the mini-Murdoch, David Smith, chair of right-wing Sinclair, hater of news and newspapers. In the UK, the Mirror’s circulation has fallen from 5 million to a quarter million, its local papers are sputtering, and the company predicts print will be unsustainble — something I’ve been warning about for two decades. Once-grand Sports Illustrated is being murdered in plain sight. The FCC just announced it is trying to support local TV news, nevermind that audience for local broadcast news is small, old, and dying … and more and more made up of people watching the faux Fox, Sinclair. 

Meanwhile, trust in journalism falls to ever-lower records. The Reuters Institute at Oxford tells us that a third of people actively avoid news, and who can blame them? I myself am fed up with old news’ wishful doomsaying, its credulous coverage of politics as sport, its bothsidesing and normalization of the rise of populist fascism, its refusal to call racism racism, its chronic lack of diversity, its dependence on access to power, its moral panic about technology, and the resource it wastes on copying and clickbait. Semafor and Gallup report that trust in journalists is falling now among Democrats, too.

And now here comes artificial intelligence to manufacture and devalue that thing we call content, robbing the old news industry of its sense of value and purpose in making the commodity. I’ve been trying to convince news organizations that they are not, or should not be, in content business, but that journalism is instead a service built on conversation, community, and collaboration. I have failed. 

Of course, there are exceptions. The Boston Globe and StarTribune seem to be surviving or better. My old colleagues at Advance are innovating in Alabama, living on past print. (In his lengthy lamentation on death in news, Ezra Klein lists Alabama going out of print as a loss when I say it is a victory: life after the death of the press.) The Times is growing on the backs of games and food. The National Trust for Local News is saving papers here and there. 

But then there’s Scranton, its paper now in the clutches of Alden. The Washington Post has chroncled their pain. On Feb. 9, I’ll be speaking at the University of Scranton’s Schemel Forum about what to do now. What should I tell them?

I will warn them to expect cutbacks and no investment or innovation at their dear old Times-Tribune. I’ve seen how Alden operates. As a member of a Digital First advisory board a decade ago, I saw the company innovate under John Paton and Jim Brady, but when that didn’t yield a sale in 2015, both of them left and the hedgies proceeded to cut to the marrow.

I come with no solution, no salvation; nothing’s that simple. There are many examples of people trying to find new futures for news. In my Senate testimony, I spoke of the 450 members of the New Jersey News Commons, which I’m proud to have helped start a decade ago at Montclair State University; and the 475 members of LION, the Local Independent Online News Publishers; and the 425 members of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. See also today’s news that The 19th is starting a new network for sharing news (something I tried in New Jersey years ago). This is where innovation in news is occurring: bottom-up, grass-roots efforts emergent in communities.

But as my old friend and colleague Peter Bhatia said when he made the controversial decision of dismissing the editor of the new Houston Landing, “We’re basically putting out a newspaper on the web. And that’s not a recipe for success for us for the long term, nor is it a recipe for sustainability.” I don’t know Houston Landing well enough to comment but I do worry that some of the efforts at new news still emulate and aspire to the form and function of old news. 

I think we need to be more radical than that, much more radical than I have been.

I say we must fundamentally reimagine journalism and its role in a society under threat of authoritarian, anti-Enlightenment, fascist takeover. I recently wrote about a journalism of belonging. With my colleague Carrie Brown, I helped start a degree program — a movement carried on by our alums — in Engagement Journalism. There are other movements seeking to remake journalism: Solutions Journalism, Collaborative Journalism, Constructive Journalism, Reparative Journalism, Dialog Journalism, Deliberative Journalism, Solidarity Journalism, Entrepreneurial Journalism, and more. What they share is an ethic of first listening to communities and their needs and an urgency to innovate. 

I note with optimism Mike Masnick’s just released report, The Sky is Rising, about the impact of the internet on media writ large — reading, watching, listening, and playing. It concludes, “More creative content is being produced that ever before. More people are able to create content than ever before, and more people are able to make money doing so…. And almost all of this is thanks to the power of the internet.” The report is talking mostly about entertainment but also notes that according to Census Bureau data, “it appears that internet publishing jobs more than replaced the jobs lost in newspapers and periodicals.” 

There can be life after legacy. There will be roles for journalists. But journalism schools must expand their horizon to teach more than making content. How do we serve many publics in a networked world?

For the last two decades at least, I have told newspaper editors and publishers that they must imagine a day when print is no longer sustainable, and if they are not profitable digitally by then, they will die. Now I will tell the good people of Scranton to imagine a day when their paper dies, or is as good as dead. 

What then? Citizens will have to come together to understand their needs as a community: for information, yes, and also for understanding, collaboration, accountability, repair, and service. They will need to decide what is best for Scranton and its many communities. 

They might find some help, though never enough. Press Forward is bringing $500 million to the effort, but that can stretch only so far. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is doing interesting work granting state funds to bolster innovation. Perhaps Pennsylvania could do likewise. (Though I worry about what equivalent efforts in Texas, Florida, or Oklahoma would support.) California, like the US Congress with its JCPA, are talking about helping news — but what they’re actually doing is looking to blackmail tech companies on behalf of legacy news companies and their hedge-fund owners. JCPA specifically excludes news enterprises making less than $100,000 — which is to say most of those hundreds of innovators I listed above. No thank you. 

The way out of this will be to educate and empower our next generation, not in so-called media literacy, but in media leadership, in taking responsibility for the health of their communities and their public discourse. That is a big, complex, nuanced, unsure order that will require marshalling the wisdom of disciplines far beyond journalism: history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, community studies, ethics, design, and the arts. 

I am afraid to say that the newspaper and TV and commercial radio station of today are inadequate to the task. Their news was invented in the long century of mass media, which began (as I recount in Magazine) when Frank Munsey realized he could sell his eponymous periodical at a dime and a loss, but profit by selling his audience’s attention to advertisers. Thus was born the attention economy that now corrupts not only old media but new. The internet isn’t killing news. It is killing the mass and the myth that kept media alive all these years: that our attention is a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold. 

I say this with reluctance and sadness but also with hope, for I am priviliged to watch some of my alumni try to create a new journalism at human scale, built on listening and serving communities, not nostalgia. How might Scranton do that? That will be up to Scranton, not to the heartless hedge fund — the Dunder-Mifflin of newspapering — that has come to town. 

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