Making book (proposal)

Thinking about it always hurts worse than doing it. This afternoon I finished my book proposal — that is, I put a wrapper on the cover letter, the first chapter and the actual proposal, PDF’d them, stuck them in a ZIP file and sent the file off to a couple of people for their comments. Now I just need to find a publisher. And do the research and reporting. And write the book.

Sorry to be coy, but I’m not ready to tell all just yet. I can say that it’s about the new generation of community news sites, with a major emphasis on one in particular.

Death, life and the future of news

What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding “none.” Yet such purity has never been the reality in American life.

Heavy postal subsidies from the earliest days of the republic helped create the most vibrant newspaper and magazine industry in the world. To bring matters up to the present, media corporations are now given virtually free use of the broadcast airwaves, theoretically owned by all of us, with little expectation that they will fulfill the public-interest obligations that were once required of them.

Earlier today, John Nichols and Robert McChesney visited Northeastern to promote their new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.” (You can read excerpts of it here and here.) I won’t pretend to write an objective account — I introduced them, and we all said nice things about each other. Rather, I want to discuss briefly their idea that at a time when journalism is in crisis, government ought to step in and prop it up to the tune of some $30 billion a year — a number they say correlates, in 2010 dollars, with what was spent on postal subsidies in the 1840s.

To their credit, they do not propose taking taxpayer funds and handing them to Rupert Murdoch and Arthur Sulzberger. Instead, they would like to see a variety of initiatives that, properly implemented, would bolster journalism without raising the specter of government interference: greatly expanded support for public broadcasting with an arm’s-length funding mechanism; an AmeriCorps for young journalists; even a $200 tax credit for every family to spend on the news media of their choice.

And they are correct in asserting that other Western democracies, particularly the Scandinavian countries, subsidize their media to a far greater extent than we do without suffering any loss of freedom.

Yet I still worry that theirs is the wrong solution. Consider, for example, that non-profit organizations, including news operations, are forbidden from endorsing political candidates — a ban on free speech that dates back to 1954, when then-Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson acted to silence the opposition back home in Texas. That underscores what I think is the real problem with government assistance: once you start relying on it, you are forever subject to the vagaries of the political moment.

Afterward I asked McChesney about an idea recently proposed by Dan Gillmor, best known as the author of “We the Media,” to emulate the original idea of postal subsidies by using government funds to pay for universal broadband access. As Gillmor sees it, that, combined with a guarantee of net neutrality, should be enough to allow market forces to do the rest.

“I think we need that no matter what,” McChesney replied. But he added there was “not a shred of evidence” that universal broadband access and net neutrality would be sufficient to guarantee a vibrant press.

Nichols and McChesney’s presentation combined gloom-and-doom with optimism for the future of journalism, if only the public can be mobilized. Like Clay Shirky, they think we have entered a post-advertising era in which it will prove impossible sustain journalism as a commercial enterprise. But whereas Shirky has called for a variety of commercial, non-profit and volunteer-driven experiments, Nichols and McChesney believe the public ought to pay more directly for what it needs to govern itself.

“We are at a 1776 moment,” Nichols said “It is your democracy that is threatened.”

Nichols and McChesney are co-founders of Free Press, an organization that is fighting the good fight on behalf of local ownership of radio and television stations and government guarantees for net neutrality. My reservations aside, Nichols and McChesney are making an important contribution to the discussion over paying for news, and I look forward to reading their book.

How to write a lede

Thomas MacMillan writes in the New Haven Independent:

Michael Chaves was a “lumper”: He worked as a laborer for long-haul truckers and slept in their trailers. Dale Anderson was a lumper too. One night they were hanging out at a truck stop when Anderson, drunk, urinated on the spot where Chaves slept. They argued, and Chaves beat him to death with a bat.

That’s the story Chaves told to police in Phoenix, Arizona.

And that’s one hell of a good way to begin.

Media Nation heads for the Merrimack Valley

I’ll be speaking later today at a conference of the Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System, which Mrs. Media Nation reliably informs me is pronounced NIM-rils. The event is being held at Nevins Memorial Library in Methuen.

My topic will be a familiar one — reinventing journalism in the post-newspaper age — but I hope to add a few wrinkles to it based on some recent developments at the Boston Globe, and on the time I’ve been spending with the folks from the New Haven Independent.

I’ve posted the slideshow I’ll be using. For some reason, a few odd breaks crept in when it was converted from PowerPoint to SlideShare. But you’ll get the idea.

Tomorrow I head back to the Merrimack Valley for a panel discussion on how blogging on newspaper Web sites has affected the news cycle — and how that can create challenges in breaking-news situations.

The panel, part of a conference being held by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors (NEZ-nee? I’ll have to get back to you on that), will be held at the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover.

Accountability in the post-newspaper age

Here is the video of Princeton University professor Paul Starr at last night’s program on “Public Accountability After the Age of Newspapers,” featuring Starr, Boston Globe editor Marty Baron and me. Update: Video of the entire program has been posted here.

The event was sponsored by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service and the Ford Hall Forum, and was held at Suffolk Law School. The moderator was law school professor Alasdair Roberts.

As you will see, one of Starr’s main themes was that, with the Internet having hollowed out the economic model for the newspaper business, government needs to step up with some type of subsidy — preferably an indirect subsidy created by tweaking the tax code, for instance. (Here is Starr’s recent congressional testimony on that subject.)

Before you start spluttering, Starr would not favor newspapers over other forms of media. And he pointed out that he’s not talking about anything new: Newspapers as we have come to know them got a huge assist in the earliest days of the republic through massive postal subsidies.

“Newspapers … have helped to create a self-aware urban public,” Starr said.

Baron disdained subsidies, saying, “I feel very strongly about our independence, and we have to maintain that.”

Instead, Baron suggested two governmental changes — a shift in the copyright law aimed at extracting money out of Google News and other aggregators, and an end to what he called the “antiquated” cross-ownership ban, which prevents media companies from owning a daily newspapers and a television or radio station in the same market.

Starr disagreed with Baron on copyright, noting that if linking without permission were made illegal (an extreme remedy that Baron did not actually suggest), the Web as we know it would soon cease to exist.

(Personally, I think the fair-use provision of copyright provides all the protection that newspapers need. If Globe executives want to opt out of Google, all they have to do is insert some code. They don’t for the simple reason that Google provides the Globe and other newspapers with a considerable amount of Web traffic.)

I talked about emerging alternative models at the local level, such as the New Haven Independent, CT News Junkie, Baristanet.com and the Batavian — projects that are too small to replicate the newspaper’s traditional mission in its entirety, but that have established themselves as vital news sources in a time of cutbacks.

Blogging takes a back seat

Please pardon the lack of blogging. I’m overcommitted this week, and, other than my students (of course!), my main priority is getting ready for tomorrow evening’s event with Princeton University professor Paul Starr and Boston Globe editor Marty Baron.

Hope to see you there.

Journalism ethics in real time

Melissa Bailey, the managing editor of the New Haven Independent, has written a fascinating story for Slate’s Double X on the steps she took to protect the identities of the fiancée and the ex-girlfriend of Raymond Clark, who’s been charged with the murder of Yale University student Annie Le. Bailey writes:

We learned the girlfriend’s identity, as well as the names of Clark and his current fiancee, before their identities were public. This was in the days after Le had disappeared but before her body was found, when slews of national reporters had descended on our city to find clues to the killing. As we chased the story, I wanted to break news — that’s my job. But I also wanted to shield the women caught up in the case from an onslaught of judgment and national attention that would make things harder for them.

Bailey writes about the decision to use material from the women’s Facebook and MySpace pages even while withholding their names. The Independent also withheld Clark’s name until he had been formally charged, even after New Haven police put it in a press release and repeated it at a news conference.

Her essay is an interesting, close-up look at applied journalism ethics. I’m not sure whether I’d have made the same calls as the Independent. But I’m impressed at how much thought went into Bailey’s and editor Paul Bass’ decision-making.

Thinking about the post-newspaper era

Princeton University scholar Paul Starr, author of “The Creation of the Media” (2004) as well as a provocative essay in The New Republic earlier this year titled “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption),” will speak at Suffolk Law School next Thursday, Oct. 1.

Delivering responses to Starr’s remarks will be Boston Globe editor Marty Baron and me.

Sponsored by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service and the Ford Hall Forum, the event will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in Suffolk University’s Moot Court Room, at 120 Tremont St.

Admission is free, but you do need to sign up in advance. You can simply e-mail an RSVP to Senka Huskic at shuskic {at} suffolk {dot} edu. (Change {at} and {dot} to create a normal-looking e-mail address.)

Hope to see you there.

How meta is this?

Media Nation links to the New Haven Independent’s coverage of the Annie Le murder, noting that the news site refrained from naming the suspect, Raymond Clark, until he had been formally charged. The Independent links back to Media Nation’s commentary on said decision and asks its readers to comment.

Check out the discussion.

Torturing a Cheney photo

Well-known photojournalist David Hume Kennerly is ripping mad at Newsweek for cropping his photo of Dick Cheney and his family to make it look like the former vice president is picking over the remains of a small animal. (Be sure to click through so that you can see the before and after pictures.)

Appropriately enough (make that inappropriately enough), the photo was used to illustrate something Cheney had said about torture, of which he’s all in favor.

Noting that Newsweek had taken a picture of a warm family scene and cropped it so that it looked like an animal sacrifice, with Cheney as the knife-wielding priest, Kennerly writes:

This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Kennerly’s right on target, as the lame response from a Newsweek spokesman makes clear. The photo was tortured into something that it was not. As a result, it’s not journalism, either.