At root, the debate over whether Google and Facebook should pay for news is about how their duopoly destroyed the value of digital advertising and then kept most of the revenues for themselves.
News, which is expensive, can’t survive on the pennies brought in by Google’s programmatic ads. That’s why there’s been so much emphasis in recent years on reader revenue — an emphasis that, at least in a few places, is starting to pay off.
Still, it would surely be a positive if news organizations could develop a revenue stream other than digital subscriptions. When readers are empowered, they expect their preferences and prejudices to be catered to. You need a balance. That’s why it’s interesting to see Axios’ recent report that Gannett and McClatchy will combine forces to sell national advertising for their hundreds of local and regional papers.
Can Gannett and McClatchy’s efforts drive up the price of digital ads? That’s the real issue, and without that their effort is not going to have much of an effect. Of course, it also does nothing to boost ad sales at the local level, which have been on the decline for years. Yes, local businesses have gravitated to Facebook just like everyone else. But local newspapers aren’t exactly known for being aggressive and creative about selling to the local hair salons, pizza restaurants and funeral homes, either. It can be done. Just ask Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian in western New York state.
The partnership shows why I differentiate between Gannett and Alden Global Capital, even though their nuke-the-newsroom approach to the bottom line looks very much the same on the ground. Alden, by all appearances, is trying to squeeze as much money as it can out of the newspapers it’s killing and then get out. Gannett, on the other hand, is hoping to build a community news chain that can be sustainable in the long run.
Gannett’s biggest mistake, carried over from its predecessor company, GateHouse Media, is that its executives think they can build for the future while failing to provide enough journalism to retain readers. No matter how smart your business model, it’s not going to work if all you’re offering your audience is a shell.
Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2019 by the World Economic Forum.
It was quite a week for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire surgeon who owns the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
On Tuesday came the news that the hedge fund Alden Global Capital was offering $630 million to boost its share of Tribune Publishing from 32% to 100%. Alden would take Tribune private and then, presumably, do what it does: slash the newsrooms of the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant and others to ribbons. One unexpected benefit: The Baltimore Sun and several sister papers would be acquired by a nonprofit foundation.
The complicating factor was that Soon-Shiong, the second-largest Tribune shareholder at 24%, has the right to veto Alden’s acquisition. Would he? Probably not, guessed Poynter analyst Rick Edmonds. “I would bet that getting out with a good return on his investment will be Soon-Shiong’s main or sole objective,” Edmonds wrote.
Then, on Friday, came a bombshell. Lukas Alpert of The Wall Street Journal reported that Soon-Shiong was looking to get out of the newspaper business less than three years after he bought the Times and the Union-Tribune from Tribune’s absurdly named predecessor, tronc.
“The move,” Alpert wrote, “marks an abrupt about-face for Mr. Soon-Shiong, who had vowed to restore stability to the West Coast news institution and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the paper in an effort to turn it around.” Soon-Shiong denied it, tweeting, “WSJ article inaccurate. We are committed to the @LATimes.”
WSJ article inaccurate. We are committed to the @LATimes
We are left wondering what’s correct — “people familiar with the matter,” as Alpert described his sources, or Soon-Shiong’s on-the-record denial. Alpert is a good reporter, and presumably his sources are aware of at least some frustration on Soon-Shiong’s part. What’s especially worrisome is that Alpert’s sources say Soon-Shiong has come to believe his papers would be better off “as part of a larger media group.” Other than Alden or Gannett, it’s hard to imagine any other options. If Soon-Shiong is really tired of the business, why not sell them to a nonprofit?
Nevertheless, it’s hard for me not to think about all the times that John and Linda Henry have been rumored to be selling The Boston Globe since they bought it in 2013. Every so often they deny it, such as in 2018 and 2020. And there certainly haven’t been any signs that they’re selling.
Still, the Henry rumors never made it into The Wall Street Journal. Let’s hope that, whatever else comes out of the Tribune meltdown, Southern California’s major newspapers remain within the relatively safe orbit of Soon-Shiong’s protection.
There is terrible news to report tonight for readers and employees of the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the Hartford Courant — but good news in Baltimore.
A deal that had been in the works since late 2020 is close to being consummated, with the hedge fund Alden Global Capital on the verge of becoming the sole owner of Tribune Publishing. As has been documented on numerous occasions here and elsewhere, Alden is the most avaricious of the chain newspaper owners, squeezing the life (and the journalism) out of its properties.
Lukas I. Alpert reports in The Wall Street Journal that Alden is paying an estimated $630 million to bring its share of Tribune from 32% to 100%. Tribune, currently a publicly traded company, will go private.
Last month the News Guild, the union that represents workers at seven of Tribune’s nine papers, filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission charging irregularities in Alden’s bid. No word on whether that challenge is over or if it will continue.
Meanwhile, there’s good news in Baltimore. As part of the transaction, Tribune will sell The Baltimore Sun, The Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland, and several other publications to a nonprofit organization called the Sunlight for All Institute. The sale caps a campaign of many months on the part of community activists.
Joseph Lichterman of the Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit that owns The Philadelphia Inquirer, tweeted:
Nonprofit ownership won't solve the Sun's issues by itself, but having a locally based owner that cares about supporting journalism that serves the community will give the Sun a fighting shot.
Last Thursday we had a terrific panel discussion at Northeastern’s School of Journalism about the local news crisis in Greater Boston. Our panelists were state Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, the lead sponsor of a state commission on local news that was recently created; retired Boston Globe editorial page editor Ellen Clegg; Yawu Miller, senior editor of The Bay State Banner; Bill Forry, managing editor of The Dorchester Reporter; and Julie McCay Turner, co-founder and managing editor of The Bedford Citizen, a nonprofit website that started as a volunteer project and that has gradually added paid journalism.
You can read Mihiro Shimano’s account at The Scope by clicking here. But I want to pick up on something that Ellen (my research partner on a book about local news) said about The Boston Globe’s role.
I was moderating and couldn’t take notes. But when I asked her about the Globe’s role in local news, she said the paper discovered about 20 years ago that it couldn’t make much of a dent at the hyperlocal level. Readers looked to their community weeklies and dailies for coverage of day-to-day life in their cities and towns. What the Globe could provide, she said, was regional coverage of issues that affected everyone — which is pretty much the mission statement for the paper in general.
As she also pointed out, the Globe now has a digital Rhode Island section, which is in keeping with the regional focus, and covers Newton through a partnership with Boston University. But could the paper do more?
Now that corporate-owned chains have decimated most of the once-strong community papers that circle Boston, I wonder if the Globe might be able to play more of a role. One idea would be to revive the YourTown websites that were unveiled during the last few years of New York Times Co. ownership. YourTown covered not just the Boston suburbs but neighborhoods within the city as well, which remains a crucial need. That was back in the days of the free web, and it proved impossible to sell ads for the sites. Now that everything is subscription-driven, though, would it be possible to try again?
There’s no substitute for independently owned community media, but a greater presence by the Globe — which itself is independently owned — might be the next best thing.
The Overton Window has opened a bit wider for the idea of requiring Google and Facebook to pay for news content. At Axios, Sara Fischer reports that Microsoft president Brad Smith has endorsed the Australian government’s move to do just that — and thinks such a system ought to be considered in the U.S. as well.
What’s taking place in Australia is complicated, but essentially it requires Google and Facebook to bargain with the news business and come up with a compensation system. Both companies have said they would stop offering some of their services if Australian authorities don’t back off.
In the U.S., the News Media Alliance, a lobbying group for news publishers, has been pushing for several years for an antitrust exemption that would allow them the right to bargain collectively with the tech giants — which is exactly what is going to happen in Australia. With the sheen wearing off Big Tech’s once-sterling image, the likelihood of Congress passing such an exemption has increased. A lawsuit brought by a group of West Virginia newspapers that I wrote about for GBH News last week may serve as a further goad.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s Smith cites a News Media Alliance study showing that Google makes an estimated $4.7 billion a year “from crawling and scraping news publishers’ content.” That study came under fire at the time of its release a couple of years ago. But regardless of the actual figure, Google — and Facebook — are surely making a lot of money from other people’s content without paying for any of it.
Smith makes no bones about his own business imperatives, saying that Microsoft is prepared to play by Australia’s rules through its Bing search engine, writing:
Microsoft’s Bing search service has less than 5% market share in Australia, substantially smaller than the 15-20% market share that we have across PC and mobile searches in the United States and the 10-15% share we have in Canada and the United Kingdom. But, with a realistic prospect of gaining usage share, we are confident we can build the service Australians want and need. And, unlike Google, if we can grow, we are prepared to sign up for the new law’s obligations, including sharing revenue as proposed with news organizations. The key would be to create a more competitive market, something the government can facilitate. But, as we made clear, we are comfortable running a high-quality search service at lower economic margins than Google and with more economic returns for the press.
A final thought. If Congress isn’t prepared to act, might it be possible to require Google and Facebook to compensate news publishers at the state level? Jack Nicas reports in today’s New York Times that a proposal has been made in North Dakota to forbid Apple and Google from collecting app-store fees from North Dakota-based businesses.
The legislation strikes me as more than a little half-baked. Yet the principle — that states can impose their own regulations on Big Tech — is one worth pondering.
Gannett is selling three daily newspapers in Oklahoma to a small, family-owned chain. It definitely sounds like good news. Even better news is that it may be part of a Gannett strategy to get rid of its smallest papers. I can give them a list if they’d like. Kristen Hare of Poynter Online has the details.
Can comments on news platforms be salvaged? Hailed two decades ago as a forum for empowering what Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen called “the former audience,” they have in all too many cases devolved into an open sewer of lies, hate and racism. Remember the adage that “our audience knows more than we do”? Well, there may be something to that. But it turns out that scrolling through the comments is not the way to tap into that wisdom.
The Philadelphia Inquirer this week became the latest news organization to drop most of its comments. Closer to home, when my other employer, GBH News, ended comments a few years ago in the course of upgrading its content-management system, I didn’t hear about a single complaint.
In a talk via Zoom sponsored by Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, Gupta discussed her study of Make America Dinner Again, started in 2016 by two women in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tria Chang and Justine Lee, to bring people with differing political perpectives together over food and conversation. It took off, and Facebook approached Chang and Lee with the idea of making it a Facebook group as well.
To the extent that it’s worked, Gupta said, it’s because the group has grown slowly (to date, there are still fewer than 1,000 members), with lots of personal intervention. Some of the steps they’ve taken include staying away from hot-button topics such as whether abortion should be legal or if teachers should have guns. Instead, they aim for “detailed, specific, ‘sideways’ questions,” as Gupta put it in her presentation. For instance, rather than asking about abortion rights, members were asked a lengthy question about how religious people justify a particular biblical quote.
They also implemented a “one-hour rule” that limits members to posting only one comment per thread per hour, which tends to keep the temperature down.
Some of the challenges they’ve faced, Gupta said, involve questions about what to do regarding members with false or offensive views. Their decision was to take aggressive action in such cases and encourage people to leave — a different approach compared to the one generally taken by the news business.
“A lot of news organizations are uncomfortable with this ‘if you don’t like it, you can leave’ attitude,” Gupta said.
I had a chance to ask Gupta about two issues that have bedeviled news organizations: Would requiring real names make a difference? And should comments be screened before they’re posted? Gupta’s take was that real names don’t matter all that much. Even in community online forums with real-names policies, she said, “you will be shocked about what people say about their neighbors.” (Actually, no, I wouldn’t.)
Moreover, insisting on real names can drive away people afraid of being harassed. That’s especially true with women, who, studies and anecdotal evidence show, are disproportionately singled out for online abuse.
Pre-screening, she added, is a problem because it is so labor-intensive, and it may not be realistic for larger media outlets. She also said pre-screening turns comments into something like letters to the editor, since commenters know their views are going to be read by someone at the news organization.
Although it can be difficult to find a news site that has healthy, productive comments, there are a few. One is the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City.”
The Independent doesn’t require real names, but it does have a number of commenters who’ve used consistent pseudonyms over time, which Gupta said is helpful in maintaining civility. The site also screens every comment before it’s posted. The editor and founder, Paul Bass, believes that leads to more and higher-quality comments, since people who want to be constructive aren’t scared off.
Still, the Independent has had its glitches. As I wrote for the Nieman Journalism Lab a number of years ago, at one point an outbreak of sociopathy led Bass to shut down the comments temporarily. When they relaunched, commenters were required to register under their real names, though they could still post pseudonymously. That action put them on notice that they could be sued — Section 230, much discussed of late, protects the Independent, not the individuals who comment on the site.
Screening is essential. We screw up sometimes, and sometimes it gets toxic. But overall almost everyone involved with our site (readers, reporters, etc.) agrees that comments section is the best part. Lively, very wide range of points of view and racial/economic backgrounds; and some people who really know a lot more than we do! But occasionally it does feel like a sewer. I do feel comfortable zapping comments and banning people. Without our comments section, we would be more removed from readers, especially those who disagree with us. I learn so much from commenters!
I do wonder, though, if the Independent’s 2005 founding has something to do with Bass’ success with comments. Facebook was barely a thing at that time, and digital culture hadn’t become as toxic as it is today. By establishing expectations right from the start, Bass has been able to maintain a relatively civil environment for more than 15 years.
And I agree with Bass that screening — by humans — is essential. Anika Gupta said Thursday that screening by artificial intelligence isn’t going to be effective anytime soon, despite the efforts of Google to develop a system that would do just that.
At the local level, in particular, maintaining a useful comments platform is essential to keeping the audience engaged. Letting the trolls invade and taking action only after the damage has been done is exactly the wrong approach.
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Downtown Laconia, N.H. Photo (cc) 2018 by capleez.
In Laconia, New Hampshire, publishing a letter from someone who denied that the Holocaust took place ended up leading to something positive — a long-term exercise in engaging the community around the paper’s opinion journalism.
The letter, according to an essay at the American Press Institute’s website by Julie Hart, The Laconia Daily Sun‘s digital editor, was from a well-known person who had said he was considering running for public office. That, and the paper’s longstanding policy of publishing virtually every letter it received, led to those hateful words making their way into print. Hart acknowledged that people at the Sun quickly realized they’d made a mistake.
With the help of grant money, the paper embarked on a project to bring together people with different points of view for some deep conversation and reflection to see if they could bridge the ideological divide. The exercise involved techniques such as “looping,” with Hart describes as helping people “re-state what they’re hearing from a partner in conversation to demonstrate active listening and objectively capturing information, regardless of whether or not they agree.”
The one sour note was the Sun’s decision to drop editorial cartoons after a Mike Luckovich effort critical of police shootings of Black people led to “angry phone calls, advertisers canceling their marketing campaigns, a slew of Facebook comments and calls to boycott.” As you can see, Luckovich’s cartoon was over the top, but using judgment in deciding which cartoons to publish would have made more sense than a blanket ban.
Still, the Sun’s efforts are admirable and fit in well with the idea that local journalism can be a vital spark for civic engagement. As I’ve written previously, community life can be an antidote to the hateful discourse that now pervades national politics (sorry, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it’s mostly on the Republican side), and that reliable journalism is a key to making it happen.
Philadelphia City Hall. Photo (cc) 2016 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s one thing for the chain-owned Hartford Courant to outsource its printing. It’s quite another for an independent major metro like The Philadelphia Inquirer to do so.
The Inquirer, recently shorn of its online comments, is owned by a well-funded nonprofit organization, the Lenfest Institute, and it continues to be reasonably well-staffed. Nevertheless, Kristen Hare of Poynter Online reports that the Inquirer will sell off its suburban printing plant and outsource its production to a Gannett-owned facility instead.
The print edition of many newspapers has become such a small part of their operations that printing simply isn’t cost-effective unless they’re able to take on outside customers. No doubt they’re celebrating at Gannett, since the Inquirer deal means less time that their presses will be idle. But when the Inquirer’s shutdown takes place later this year, 500 people will lose their jobs.
You can be sure that Boston Globe owners John and Linda Henry are looking at this move closely. The launch of the Globe’s printing plant in Taunton in mid-2017 was plagued with problems, and after they were fixed the Globe found itself with fewer outside printing jobs than it had expected. With digital far outpacing print, at some point it may make sense simply to sell the Taunton plant and print the Globe elsewhere.
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The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester is hardening its paywall. Currently you can access seven stories a month before you are asked to pay. Now the T&G, as well as other Gannett papers, is going to remove “investigative stories, political commentary, sports analysis and other content found only on telegram.com.” More routine stories and public-safety coverage will remain within the seven-story allotment.
Look, I get it. But what I don’t like about this is that there are those of us who might need to download two or three stories a year from various papers around the country. Last year, I actually took out a subscription to an out-of-state paper for a month — and then had to call several times so I could cancel it after the reporting project I was working on was done.
I’ve long thought papers ought to be flexible enough to charge for $1 an article or to sell day passes to people for whom a monthly digital subscription doesn’t make sense. But I’ve been told it’s not cost-effective, as it would be difficult to set up and could take away from subscription sales.
I also hope that whatever extra money the company pulls in will be used for journalism and not to service Gannett’s massive debt.
