So, there’s the usual Monday morning bad news in the news business (layoffs and buyouts at the McClatchy chain’s Charlotte Observer); but there this also a novel idea from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“The time has come for the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities to rescue its leading newspapers — resources almost as vital to higher education’s purpose as libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and concert halls,” suggests retired Fortune writer Lee Smith. “The plan I have in mind would call upon the richest institutions to set aside 3 percent of their endowments to buy The New York Times. That’s for a start. Additional purchases of other newspapers by other endowments should follow.”
As for the economics of Smith’s idea, it’s easy to imagine the likes of Stanford and Harvard, with their embarrassing surpluses of endowment funds, forking over the money. It would be good P.R.
As for the chance this will happen, don’t hold your breath. One huge problem for all owners of news media companies is the conflict-of-interest issue. Let’s posit that Harvard owns a chunk of the Times, and Columbia doesn’t. How can the public trust the newspaper will hold Harvard just as accountable as Columbia?
It can’t, and perception is reality for all media.
Still, this is the first time I’ve seen this particular ownership model floated. “What must be preserved is the complex and expensive enterprise of collection that underlies a newspaper,” Smith argues, “— the labor and brain-intensive work of reporting, writing, and editing the millions of fragments of information scattered across the planet every day.”
He’s describing the intellectual process of creating a great news source, which simply cannot be duplicated by any known algorithm. This is why online taxonomies don’t work very well, why aggregator sites lack “voice,” and why Web 3.0 will feature renewed interest in original content creation.
You read it here first.
Meanwhile, since Apple now has a whopping $19.5 billion in cash reserves, maybe it should buy the Times. Then Steve Jobs could redesign the Gray Lady into a sleek, sexy, digital babe!
