Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.I quite enjoyed this article, which argues that "there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions". As much as it seems inevitable to me that paper will die, I keep thinking to myself, there has to be a solution. I'm a big fan of citizen journalism and crowdsourcing (duh - why do I wrote a blog? :), but journalism, with all its editors and standards and professionalism and bureaucracy and in-fighting and competition, also has an important place in society.
David Swensen and Michael Schmidt for the New York Times
There's nothing quite like in-depth feature articles in the NY Times, or a well-researched local story in the LA Times, or a bare bones wire from AP or Reuters. Something just seems right about having professional sources of information that we can more or less believe are more or less reliable. Something seems right about having singular institutions that monitor and disseminate information centrally. Even if good (and maybe even better) alternatives exist in the blogosphere. If blogs are dispersed, then newspapers are centralized; both have their place.
I'm no businessperson, so I have no idea just how feasible it would be to actually put this into place. It seems, though, that if newspapers and publications go nonprofit and carry an endowment, they could very well continue without the burden of profit margins (though with the burden of fundraising). I just can't imagine this is easy to swallow for a megapaper like the New York Times Company, whose shiny new building (pictured here) I've watched come together over the past few years.
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