Right analysis, wrong solution

If newspapers are going to survive, they're going to need government help. That's the diagnosis provided by Frank Blethen, one of the last independent newspaper owner-publishers in the U.S. What Blethen would like to do is turn back the clock to a time when government found it in its interests to subsidize the press, which is decidedly not the case today.

Blethen is the CEO and publisher of the Seattle Times, and one presumes a wealthy and powerful man, in the way that most newspaper publishers used to be. Now it's the executives of huge media conglomerates who are really rich, and who, according to Blethen, have bled the life out of a business model for the newspaper industry that's fatally greedy, and mostly killed independent journalism in the process.

I wanted to like Blethen's populist message, but everything he said was just so dang self-interested. I agree that corporate-owned media has not been good for journalism, and that local communities have been deprived of a strong editorial voice for many years as newspapers have gone soft. Professional, fact-based reporting is critical to the health of democracy, and we don't know where it's going to come from, if not from traditional-looking newsrooms. Blethen claims that readership at the Times (press and online combined) is at an all-time high, but that's not my experience. What I hear is that readership of newspapers (print and online) is in freefall. It's all a big mess, and enough to make you want to round up all those "rapacious capitalists" that Blethen maligns, just like the Feds did with Bernie Madoff.

But Blethen is wrong in his approach in two big ways. One, the government isn't going to put its money into newspapers. Public subsidies, low-interest loans, rebates to subscribers, and tax credits to the press just ain't going to happen. In any other business environment than the current one, he'd be considered certifiably crazy for suggesting it. But everyone is getting a government handout these days, so why not newspapers? Get in line, Blethen.

He's wrong in an even bigger way in not realizing that the demise of newspapers has opened the door for other forms of news creation and distribution in which his company doesn't participate. Blethen is so wed to print newspapers, from which his company generates 90% of its revenue, and its online equivalent, that he's convinced this is its only way forward. The local newspaper is likely to survive in some form, but online news in its many imaginative forms is the future. Someone will eventually figure out a way to make money at it.

Does this all mean that our democracy is at risk because we don't have newspapers to bird-dog the government and big business? In my opinion, no. Everyone is a reporter now, and malfeasance and corruption will be outed, only it will be through what we now consider unconventional sources and in unconventional ways. There are bloggers who are doing it now.

Print newspapers were, and still are, key parts of the news ecosystem. There is no going back to the old days, however, and most everyone knows that--Frank Blethen aside.

For a more objective analysis of why media consolidation is not in the best interests of journalism, read this article at freepress.net.