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| Revenue Riddle Redux |
Thursday, as part of my ongoing look into the Texas Tribune and its place in the political scene, I was fortunate enough to find my way into the Digital News Revenue Summit organized by Jake Batsell.
It was an impressive, international gathering of leaders looking for practical ways to address a crucial infrastructure issue that will determine the fate of open societies - and its enemies.
The subject of the day-long symposium? "Solving the Revenue Riddle." It's an age-old issue in the news business - how to put it on a paying basis (see here and also here for reportage on what went down).
Before getting to my take on the presentations and
workshop, let's put "Digital News Revenue Riddle" in context. That will help answer this nagging question I had all through the day:
Has news
EVER truly been on a paying basis?
The Great
Sage of Electronic Media, Paddy Chayefsky, laid out the harsh realities nearly 40 years ago in Network. From this
perspective, his cautionary tale is about the trade-offs needed to make the
news business pay for itself. What's the anchor of the evening news to do when
the ratings and the ad revenues slip?
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| Want profits? Get a prophet |
Howard Beale: I'm gonna blow my brains out right on the air, right in the
middle of the 7 O'clock news.
Max Schumacher: You'll get a hell of a rating, I'll guarantee you that. 50 share easy....We could make a series of it. "Suicide of the Week." Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? "Execution of the Week."
Howard Beale: "Terrorist of the Week."
Max Schumacher: You'll get a hell of a rating, I'll guarantee you that. 50 share easy....We could make a series of it. "Suicide of the Week." Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? "Execution of the Week."
Howard Beale: "Terrorist of the Week."
Max Schumacher: I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen,
automobile smash-ups: "The Death Hour." A great Sunday night show for
the whole family....
The bottom
line? You have to either carry news
financially or find some way to spice it up into a profit-center.
Chayefsky spoofed the compromises to achieve the later by drawing from changes in the news business. Four
years before the film was released, Roone
Arledge discovered that a
terrorist attack got more eyeballs than athletics while broadcasting the Munich
Olympics***. After, when he took over ABC News in 1977, he leveraged that
sensibility to realize the lighter side of Network's dark vision - celebrity newscasters
and infotainment.
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| No plans for a Katie Couric plaza at UT |
The effort to
make "serious" news a popular entertainment is a race to the bottom
with no finish line. It began when Arledge gave Barbara Walters the industry's
first million-dollar contract. Since, there have been notable markers along the
course. Katie Couric's failed stint occupying Walter Cronkite's seat on the CBS
Evening News is a notable milestone. Unfortunately, the celebrity news concept has proven to be problematic as a business model since those celebrities don't come cheap. Worse, it is corrosive to the news "product" since fat
multi-million dollar paydays inherent to this cult of personality starve other
parts of the news budget (for a more detailed - and upbeat - assessment, check
Marc Gunther's "The Transformation of Network News" from 1999. Also,
Paul Waldman's recent "Glorious, Ghastly News" gives an update from a broader
perspective).
Besides the star turn, the effort to transform network news divisions into a highly profitable
reality TV production units has only yielded lukewarm results. So what carries
the news business? Fortunately, the television broadcast industry in the United
States is increasingly the beneficiary of a corrupt campaign finance system.
You don't need to look up political expenditures on the Texas Ethics Commission's
website to know where most of the money in politics goes. Does that corruption
contaminate the reporting paid for in this political ad-based business model?
How money defines politics here (and how this fuels
economic injustice) may be second only to climate change as the story of our
era. Yet it is only on the margins of public awareness. Perhaps what is little more than legitimized
bribery simply doesn't translate well to the TV medium? Regardless of the
cause, don't expect much attention for the fact that Citizens United
(and, now, "Oligarchs United") has proven to be a bonanza for
broadcasters. No, you won't see the Wesleyan Media Project's findings get much
on air exposure on commercial TV news. Don't expect to find reporting about the
National Association of Broadcasters lobbying efforts to keep their good thing
going outside of Democracy Now!
But I
digress.
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| The Trib's Tim Griggs greets summit attendees |
What does all
this have to do with the Digital News Revenue Summit?
Let's apply
the lessons of financing broadcast news to reading-based news media. How
is the news there either carried, compromised, or some combination of the two?
The news part
of the newspaper, too, was once carried. The current crisis there comes from
the classified ads cash cow getting slaughtered. The search is on for what, if
anything, can replace it. So far, no good. That's part of the impetus behind
the search for a fundamentally different not-for-profit paradigm for digital
news.
The question
is - despite differences, is not-for-profit digital news fundamentally
different from print journalism or commercial broadcast? If not, then we should
look to how this, likewise, must be either carried, compromised, or some
combination of the two.
And yes. I'll be
getting to what I saw at the Digital News Revenue Summit in Part II.
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Tips? Suggestions? Ideas? Drop a line to carl (at) inanityofsanity (dot) com
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