What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital JournalismMiami Herald building, with Herald logo on right and Apple iPad billboard on left, April 2011(Jeff Binion photo)* * *The difficult financial state of the U.S. news industry is no longer new. Mostbig newsrooms have faced severe cutbacks, and even though online-only outletshave sprung up in communities throughout the country, they haven’t fully takenthe place of what has been lost.These issues were explored in a precursor report 2 to this one, sponsored byColumbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and written by LeonardDownie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson,a professor at Columbia. At the end of that report, which was published inlate 2009, the authors provided a number of recommendations to stanch thelosses in independent reporting.Most of the recommendations were based in policy, including changes in thetax code to provide news organizations easier access to nonprofit status andencouraging philanthropists to support news gathering. Most controversially,2
Columbia Journalism School | Tow Center for Digital JournalismDownie and Schudson recommended the creation of a national “Fund for LocalNews” supported with fees the Federal Communications Commission wouldcollect from telecom users, broadcast licensees or Internet service providers.That suggestion drew praise from some, as well as criticism from those whosaw it as an intrusion by the government in a free and robust press. In the wordsof Seth Lipsky, 3 editor of the New York Sun, “The best strategy to strengthen thepress would be to maximize protection of the right to private property—and theright to competition. Subsidies are the enemy of competition.”This report stands on the shoulders of the first one, but takes a different approach.Without addressing the merits of philanthropists or governments supportingnews gathering, 4 we wanted to address another question: What kinds ofdigitally based journalism in the U.S. is the commercial market likely to support,and how?While this report will examine some traditional, or “legacy,” business modelsfor media, our focus is on the economic issues that news organizations—largeand small, old and new—face with their digital ventures.This report focuses on news organizations that do original journalism, definedfor our purposes as independent fact-finding undertaken for the benefit of communitiesof citizens. Those communities can be defined in the traditional way,by geography, but can also be brought together by topics or commonalities ofinterest. We also look into media companies that aggregate content and generatetraffic in the process.We confine our report mostly to for-profit news enterprises. We recognizethe outstanding work done by such national organizations as ProPublica and theCenter for Investigative Reporting, as well as local sites like Voice of San Diegoand MinnPost. But for the purposes of this study, we felt it was more valuableto spend our time examining organizations that rely as much as possible on thecommercial market.We do have a bias: We think the world needs journalism and journalists. Wewelcome the tremendous access people now have to data and information, butmuch of what Americans need to know will go unreported and unexposedIntroduction 3
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