Lew Friedland Question 7

Is there a way that citizen journalism can be made more civic minded in light of all the limitations you were just talking about?

I think there are ways. I think that there are new models that are emerging; there certainly are experiments going on that are worth watching and in some cases emulating. Voice of San Diego is one such model that people point to as a Web-based, online journal; the MinnPost and Twin Cities Daily Planet in Minneapolis-St. Paul point toward a new model. I think that there are experiments that are taking place locally. Of course, Walter Isaacson recently pointed toward the possibility of micropayments , and that would follow the OhMy News model of South Korea to some extent.

People also have raised the question of philanthropic support. Paul Starr recently wrote an important piece in the New Republic that said we might have to and perhaps we ought to be looking not simply at non-profit models but large philanthropies as a model for sustaining more traditional journalism and reporting. I think there’s validity, potentially, to all of those models and almost certainly ones that we haven’t thought about yet. I probably would throw our own Madison Commons model into the mix as well, where there’s an active effort to go out and organize the community to report on itself, to supplement the reporting of the mainstream news organizations. We had to train people to do that. So there are if not a thousand, at least dozens of flowers blooming as potential alternatives.

Having said that, and I hate to be very pessimistic but I think I am realistic in saying that all of those are very fragile. I am not convinced that the philanthropic sector, which of course is under significant economic pressure right now like every other institution, is going to step up to the degree necessary to replace something like the role of robust local journalism in the United States. The Voice of San Diego model is working at some levels; it’s having some significant success. But it’s also having some trouble sustaining itself economically. They’re also relying on philanthropy and the public radio model; that is part of their business model. But, they’re struggling. Madison Commons struggles because people work [at other jobs], for example, and journalism is real work. People don’t necessarily want to do the work of journalists. So it’s hard to have citizen reporters replace professional reporters on any kind of scale. I’m not that sanguine that any of these experiments that are being tried are necessarily going to succeed. I don’t think there’s enough money there. I don’t think that micropayments are going to be sufficient to support local newsrooms, although that could change.

Ironically, this goes with a question about the future, if and I think unfortunately when newspapers actually start to collapse in the United States as opposed to limp along so that – to go back to my ecological metaphor we have the actual death of a population as opposed to simply the war of each against all for a more limited resource pool – once we’ve cleared the field we might see new ways of combining display ad revenue, micropayments, various public-private subsidies and so on, that might support a new kind of local journalism. But we don’t know what those are yet. Some of the models that we’ve seen are very creative and important experiments. By no means am I putting them down because they are not economically sustainable – but they aren’t economically sustainable. I’m not sure what will happen. It’s possible that – and I think this goes to another question – but it’s not clear to me that the structure of civic life that we have in the United States at this point demands or will support local journalism. It may be that we’ve just moved on from there historically.