Internet News

By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 13, August 13, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Dismal and discouraging numbers are emerging from the world of newspapers — sharp plunges in circulation, dizzying fall in revenues, burgeoning debt, mounting losses, and a relentless march of layoffs and buyouts.

The New York Times executive editor Bill Keller deplored the "diminishing supply of quality journalism" at a time of "growing demand." By quality journalism, he said, he meant the kind "that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards." The supply of such journalism "is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work. ... The wonderful florescence of communication ignited by the Internet contains countless voices riffing on the journalism of others but not so many that do serious reporting of their own."

David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and the creator of The Wire, offered a barbed put-down of bloggers during recent testimony in the Senate on the future of journalism. The Internet, he declared, "leeches ... reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary, and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host."

This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. But such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium's pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are still at it. Kaus, who started the blog kausfiles in 1999, is now at Slate, and Sullivan, who began The Daily Dish in 2000, now posts at The Atlantic. Both still use the style they helped popularize — short, sharp, conversational bursts of commentary and opinion built around links to articles, columns, documents, and other blogs.

Sullivan's multiple links to a wide array of sources, processed through his idiosyncratic mind, produces an engaging and original take on the world. For example, just after the Iranian elections his site became a clearinghouse for e-mails, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, photos, and e-mails from Tehran, many posted before mainstream news outlets could get hold of them. The Daily Dish served as a nerve center for news from the Iranian street, and it seemed that Sullivan outperformed CNN's entire global network.

The snip-it-and-comment approach has given rise to a number of other models. Among the most prominent is Talking Points Memo (TPM), begun by Josh Marshall in 2000, when he was the Washington editor of The American Prospect. After constantly clashing with his fellow editors, he began freelancing and blogging on his own. But he was a reporter at heart and the result was a new type of blog that not only commented on the news but also occasionally broke it.

As TPM's readership expanded, Marshall was able to attract advertisers, which in turn allowed him to hire staff, which helped him break more news. Tips flowed in from readers about politics in their communities. In 2007, Marshall detected a pattern in the firing by the Bush administration of US attorneys across the country. His angry posts on the matter helped bring it to the attention of the national press, earning him a George Polk Award.

Today, TPM is one of the most visited political sites on the Web. Marshall told me that he spends much of each work day reading through reader e-mails. "Relative to size, the volume of quality e-mails we get is an order of magnitude greater than either The New York Times or The Washington Post," he said. "It allows us to do more than even a newspaper can. Political reporters have good sources, but they tend to be professional sources, who are used to picking up the phone and giving tips to reporters. We're into a whole class of people who are not acculturated to the world of political journalism."

The Internet is offers a podium to Americans of all ages and backgrounds who are flush with ideas but lack the means to transmit them. For example, Marcy Wheeler, a resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan, began blogging in 2004. Last April, her name appeared in an article in The New York Times about the release of Bush-era memos on interrogation techniques, after she deduced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times in one month.

"The idea that our work is parasitical is farcical," Wheeler told me by phone. "There's a lot of good, original work in the blogosphere. Half of all journalists look at the blogosphere when working on a story." At the same time, she said, "I'm happy to admit I'm still utterly reliant on journalists." What disturbs her is "the compliant, unquestioning, conventional wisdom that comes out of Washington."

Even on the financial crisis the Web offers insight and revelation. Ryan Grim is one of the reporters at The Huffington Post, the Web site known widely for its entertaining jumble of tangy stories, eye-grabbing headlines, and celebrity blogs. It also has a Washington bureau with seven editors and reporters. Grim covers Congress, and he recorded Senator Dick Durbin's anguished observation that "the banks — hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

For the most part, the coverage of the financial crisis in the daily press has been episodic, diluted, cloaked in qualifiers, and neutered by comments and disclaimers from businessmen and their paid spokesmen, to whom mainstream journalists feel obligated to give equal time.

Bloggers who reject such reflexive attempts at "balance" make the blogosphere a lively and bracing place. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and former litigator, began blogging in December 2005. In contrast to the short, punchy posts favored by most bloggers, Greenwald offers a single daily essay of two thousand to three thousand words. In each, he draws on extensive research, amasses a daunting array of facts, and builds his case like an attorney.

Greenwald initially made his mark with fierce attacks on the Bush administration's policy of warrantless surveillance, and he continues to comment on the subject with great fury. Other recent targets have included the national press in general for its insistence on using euphemisms for the word "torture". For the press, Greenwald added, "there are two sides and only two sides to every 'debate' — the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment."

The polemical excesses in the blogosphere are real. Headlines are exaggerated so as to secure clicks and boost traffic — the all-important measure of Web success. Writers on the Internet are under constant pressure to post so as to keep the traffic flowing. Readers seem allergic to reading extended pieces on computer screens. Also, the Internet remains a hothouse for rumors, distortions, and fabrications.

A fundamental change is taking place in the world of news. The current turbulence in the news business is like the disorder brought about by the invention of the printing press. A profound process of decentralization and democratization is under way.
 

Internet News 2

By Michael Massing
The New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 14, September 24, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

The first quarter of 2009 was the worst ever for newspapers, with sales plunging $2.6 billion. Yet statistics from the Internet suggest that interest in news has rarely been greater. According to one survey, Internet users in 2008 spent 53 minutes a week reading newspapers online, up from 41 minutes in 2007. And the traffic at the top fifty news Web sites increased by 27 percent.

How could the financial fortunes of a $50 billion industry decline so swiftly while its product remains so prized? The most immediate explanation is the collapse of advertising. But of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web. And of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web. Print is not going away anytime soon.

For publishers, the key is to find a way to maximize revenues from print and the Web. With the steady fall-off of advertising since 2006, there is growing recognition of the part that free access to the Web has played in the hemorrhaging of circulation. In the next year, many publishers are expected to erect "pay walls" around their sites.

The Financial Times allows visitors to FT.com access to a few free articles a month, but to get more they have to subscribe. This has netted the FT 117,000 subscribers paying up to $299 a year. Affluent and educated, those readers are very attractive to advertisers. The Wall Street Journal allows visitors to WSJ.com free access to all articles about politics, culture, and other general-interest topics. Only those seeking entry to the Journal's business and finance reports must pay.

As evidence that pay walls don't work, Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor in chief of the popular Internet news-and-blog site The Huffington Post, points to TimesSelect. Introduced by The New York Times in September 2005, it placed the paper's columnists behind a pay wall and charged online readers $49.95 a year for admission. Two years later, the Times, concerned by the fall-off in traffic, reinstated its free-for-all policy.

The Times has devoted far more money and manpower to its digital edition than any other paper. At its Midtown office, teams of cybergeeks, futurists, and "creative technologists" combine traditional journalistic practices with the protean powers of the Web. Their imprint is apparent in videos, multiband graphs, pie charts, slide shows, and time lines at NYTimes.com.

Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, told me: "The prerequisite for establishing a pay-for-content model is good content — must-read content. It's extremely important in the modern news business to be clear on what your comparative advantage is. If you want to be everything to everybody and spread your resources too thin, you're going to get into trouble."

The FT's comparative advantage, he added, "is business and financial." The New York Times's advantage, he argues, is its "global network" and its "deep and original reporting." While some observers maintain that the FT and The Wall Street Journal are uniquely able to charge for content because the information they offer is so valuable to businessmen, Barber believes that a high-quality general-interest paper like The New York Times can charge as well.

As gatherers and purveyors of information, newspapers are without peers, and the retrenchment they're undergoing is seriously eroding their ability to enlighten and expose. At the same time, the industry's travails are serving as a stimulus. A restless array of entrepreneurs, innovators, and idealists has emerged, testing new ways of delivering the news.

So far, the attention paid to new Web ventures has focused mainly on the for-profit sector. Most of these sites are pursuing roughly the same strategy — building sufficient Web traffic to attract advertisers. Three of these enterprises in particular seem to be making a go of it.

Slate was founded in 1996 with the help of Microsoft. Since being purchased by the Washington Post Company in 2004, it has generally been profitable. Deriving 95 percent of its revenue from ads, Slate owes its success both to the Post's backing and to its sharply written contrarian pieces offered for free on its site.

The online arm of Foreign Policy magazine, ForeignPolicy.com offers free access to both punchy articles from the magazine and a roster of contentious, thoughtful blogs. It also has offered some original reporting.

After not quite three years, Politico attracts on average about 3.2 million unique visitors a month. Its founders say it's in the black. Fully dependent on ad revenue, Politico gets much of it from its print edition, which is published five times a week when Congress is in session and has a circulation of 32,000.

Talking Points Memo has turned a profit without the aid of print or a sponsor. In nine years, Josh Marshall has built it from a one-man blog into a bustling political journal with 1.5 million unique visitors a month. TPM relies mainly on advertising and its combination of low overhead and an engaged readership has enabled it to thrive.

The Huffington Post has been coy in discussing its earnings. In just four years, it has conjured up a cast of bloggers numbering in the thousands, a Washington staff of seven, an investigative unit, and local editions in Chicago and New York. Ad revenue has been growing briskly, but the company feels it needs to attract far more display advertising.

Global Post was launched in January with close to $10 million in start-up funds from private investors The site already has 74 part-time correspondents in 50 countries. The co-founder and editorial chief, Charles Sennott, says that the "void" created by the cutbacks in foreign reporting has created "an opportunity. We want to be one of the sites that Americans regularly go to when they think about the world."

I found all kinds of excited activity in the nonprofit world. Much of it had been set in motion by an op-ed piece in the Times in late January. David Swensen, the chief investment officer for Yale's endowment management team, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst there, argued that newspapers should consider turning themselves into nonprofit endowed institutions.

Swensen is widely known as an expert on university investing, and the article set off a storm of speculation. On his blog at The New Yorker, Steve Coll calculated that The Washington Post would need an endowment of $2 billion. In Washington, Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, designed to make it easier for newspapers to qualify as nonprofits under federal law.

The image of the Times and the Post protected by huge endowments is entirely unrealistic. Where would all those billions come from? They simply aren't out there. In light of the dramatic fall-off in the value of Yale's own endowment, Swensen's proposal seems doubly unpersuasive.

In the last two years, nonprofit sites have sprung up in Austin, San Diego, the Twin Cities, New Haven, Seattle, St. Louis, and Chicago. The same entrepreneurial spirit has led to a surge of interest in investigative reporting not seen since the days after Watergate. Investigative reporting has also caught fire at the nation's journalism schools.

National Pubic Radio has thrived. In 2008, the cumulative weekly audience for its daily news shows increased by 9 percent, to a record 20.9 million listeners. NPR draws on several money sources: its endowment, foundations, corporate underwriting, and dues and fees from its more than 860 member stations.

A new type of news system in the United States could be rooted in the public radio stations that reach into nearly every town and county in the country. These stations could provide nodes of collaboration for Web sites. These sites and stations, in turn, could enter into relationships with daily newspapers. The network could also provide a home for bloggers.

America has enthusiasm and initiative that, in the age of the Internet, counts for more than transmitters and printing presses. The retreat of the giant corporations and conglomerates is creating the opportunity for fresh structures to emerge. The opening won't last forever.
 

AR  The Web is the future and Sir Tim is the new Gutenberg. A viable micropayment infrastructure is needed to put the world of web news on a sound footing. Pay for access, but automatically, every time, cent by cent. The system must be secure and widely understood, and generate revenues that do not seem excessive.