It's Time to Let Go of All That

There’s a lot of noise out there — offline and on — about how to “save” newspapers and other crumbling media institutions, but precious little signal to it all.

A U.S Senator is calling for allowing newspapers to attain non-profit status, under which they could do everything they did traditionally except endorse political candidates.

• The Speaker of the House calls on the Justice Department to relax anti-trust rules so media companies might explore new ways of collaborating in media markets free of competition.
• Unions representing some media workers explore whether their membership could take over ownership of a newspaper that otherwise may be shut down.
• Wealthy benefactors propose putting up the capital needed for someone new to ride into town and save the local paper.
• Some propose that a consortium of major media companies be formed, in order to erect a pay wall around its members’ online content, preserving the paper version with the resulting profits.
• Select newspaper execs have asked Google to help them by adjusting its search algorithms to ensure their stories appear higher in Google’s results pages. (Read my colleague Cathy Taylor’s take on this one).

But the salient question here is not whether any one of these moves (or some combination of them) would help individual news operations to survive. Maybe they would, for a while.

The real issue is whether helping a broken business model survive is the right thing to do?

Over the past year covering the media for Bnet, I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that it is not the right thing to do. Propping up institutions that are doomed to fail makes no more sense than propping up AIG (also a terrible idea, but that’s a different story).

Yesterday, when Erik Sherman and I both posted about the value of tech companies taking over media companies, we were simply employing business logic to the problem at hand.

Newspapers are very valuable institutions in our society, but as presently constituted, they cannot survive long into the (digital) future. Technology companies, however, have the resources and the know-how to reconstitute newspapers (and radio, TV and magazine companies) into optimized content providers in the digital age.

There is still one huge problem with the idea we are advocating: As Erik and I later bemoaned in an email exchange, both the tech and the media execs currently running the shows at places like Google and the San Francisco Chronicle, to cite two random examples, are arrogant in the extreme, utterly unable to see past their own biases.

The tech people are so in love with their “data-driven” management style that they wouldn’t know a creative business opportunity if it hit them right between the algorithms. And the media execs have dug themselves into such a deep hole of denial, even conflating their survival with the survival of democracy itself (talk about arrogance!) that they still blame Craigslist for taking away their classified ad revenue.

Poor babies. Maybe all of this deadwood needs to burn down before we can begin the hard business of establishing a new media model — a networked, interactive, community journalism, as cognizant of its global reach as of its hyper-local responsibility, committed to producing sustainable journalism, as opposed to the rhetoric of fear, denial, and blame.