A new report suggests that the using aportion of the fees the government collects from phone bills be used to subsidize local news.

From the New York Times

Those of us who work in traditional media have spent a fair amount of time wondering what part of the implosion in advertising revenue is cyclical (ad buying is suffering because of the recession) and what part is secular (we’re making horse buggies).

The beginnings of an answer came on Thursday, when Google announced that search advertising had come roaring back and said that stronger-than-expected third-quarter results suggested the global economy might be coming back. Net income rose 27 percent in the third quarter as strong advertising sales, most all of it from search, increased revenue 7 percent.

Oh, and there was good news for newspapers as well. Turns out while the McClatchy Company’s advertising revenue fell 28.1 percent in the third quarter, it was not as bad as the 29.9 percent it dropped in the first six months. O.K., not so great, but with net income of $23.6 million in the quarter, it was a huge improvement over the $4.2 million a year earlier.

The reason the balance sheet cleaned up so nicely? The company eliminated more than 30 percent of its work force in the 18 months.

What this suggests is that we’re facing a paperless recovery wherein old-line content companies need to continue to slash in order to stay ahead of what looks to be a broad secular decline.

Leonard Downie Jr. knows the story all too well. As executive editor of The Washington Post for 17 years, he watched as the Web first seemed to enable and eventually came to threaten organizations that support large newsrooms.

Mr. Downie and Michael Schudson, a professor at the Columbia University Journalism School, were commissioned by Nicholas B. Lemann, the dean of the journalism school, to write a report on the future of news and the newsroom. It was Mr. Downie who came up with the insight a few years back that the most important fight is not for newspapers, but for the newsrooms they support. The report’s title, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” telegraphs its sober intent, a realpolitik way of thinking that is reflected in the opening words of the report:

“Fewer journalists are reporting less news in fewer pages, and the hegemony that near-monopoly metropolitan newspapers enjoyed during the last third of the 20th century, even as their primary audience eroded, is ending.”

In other words, the current advertising model won’t continue to support so-called accountability journalism.

“Some of the advertising is going to come back as the economy does, but I think we all know that much of what has taken place is secular and not cyclical,” Mr. Downie said in a phone call on Friday. “And the Internet philosophers who suggest that individuals posting on the Web are going to replace what newsrooms have been doing are not being realistic. We have to find new ways to maintain professional news-gathering capacity.”

Clocking in at just under 100 pages, the report probably isn’t going to get looked at much beyond people in this racket, but it’s a worthy read, in part because it dwells less on the glory days — the amount of real news in 10 metropolitan newspapers doubled from 1964 to 1999 — and meets current realities head-on. The number of newspaper editorial employees grew to 60,000 in 1992, from 40,000 in 1971, and is now driving back to 40,000 in 2009, with no real bottom in sight.

Mr. Downie and Mr. Schudson came up with six recommendations, which include tinkering with the tax structure to accommodate nonprofit status for news-gathering organizations, persuading philanthropic foundations to fill the funding gap in more permanent ways, involving universities in news gathering, and opening up databases to make them more useful for both pro and pro-am efforts.

Two of the recommendations caught my eye, both of which will create significant turbulence if they gain traction in the discussion.

First, the pair suggests reorienting public radio and television to provide local news, historically not a big interest of public broadcasters. The report says somewhat tartly that much of the money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is spent on broadcast facilities and television production companies, with “very little money spent on local news coverage by individual public radio and television stations.”

It goes on to suggest that the C.P.B. should step in to consolidate competing fiefs and begin to require a minimum amount of local news reporting in return for funds.

 

While I am interested in local news except for quick read of the Washington Post each morning the only other time I get any local news is on the radio to and from work each. day.  I rarely watch any local news on television and I wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared in its current form. 

We have so many ways of obatining news tehse days it doesn’t seem feasible to set up a fund to encourage or force stations to report on local news.  And who sets the standards? The government?

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