David Michael Miller
Let’s face it. In many markets the size of Madison, the daily newspaper no longer works as a private business venture.
As Isthmus has reported, Madison’s one and a half daily papers (The Capital Times tries to be the equivalent of an online daily) have been shedding staff again in another demoralizing downsizing. At the Cap Times, the staff has been reduced to under two dozen, down from about 65 just seven years ago.
This summer even the popular longtime columnist Doug Moe got a pink slip from the Wisconsin State Journal. Apparently, it wasn’t that people stopped reading Moe but that Moe was being paid too much by journalistic standards — which is to say he was probably getting something that kept him above the federal poverty line.
We can’t know for sure why Moe and others were let go because the editors never gave their readers any explanation at all. The same is true over at the Cap Times, where longtime and well-respected reporter Mike Ivey left and others were let go or had their hours cut back without explanation to the paper’s loyal readers.
All we get is silence and the occasional editor’s column claiming that everything is really just better than ever. It’s the kind of stonewalling and obfuscation that those same editors would blast in a politician.
There are lots of challenges for print media these days: the cost of newsprint and the presses, the competition from online sources and the generational shift away from reliance on traditional news sources, just to name a few.
But newspapers are vital to democracy and to the life of any community. It’s a void that radio and television can’t fill. If you’ve ever printed out the script from even a very good radio news story, like one from Wisconsin Public Radio, you must have been surprised by how brief it is compared to the same story that might have appeared in a newspaper.
And blogs are usually not sources of real news at all. As a blogger myself, I know that I rarely do any kind of original reporting. My blogs are opinion pieces built from information that I have gleaned from hard news sources. Without those primary news sources I could write about my dog — and he is kind of interesting! — and that’s about it.
All of which leads me to a modest proposal. If the free market is not producing the objective, high-quality professional journalism that is crucial to the health of democracy, then is it right to just accept the market’s determination?
We make these kinds of market-override choices all the time. Left just to the free market there would be no Overture Center for the Arts, no Monona Terrace Convention Center, no professional symphony, no Dane Dances. All of that is publicly and privately subsidized because there aren’t enough paying customers to justify any of it as a for-profit business venture. But how many of us would say we want those amenities to go away simply because they couldn’t survive on their own in a pure free market environment?
There is already precedent for such a model. Two of the best sources of information in our state are Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television. Both are funded by a mix of taxpayer and donor support. The government subsidy does not seem to affect content. For an even better example of quality journalism unaffected by its funding source, look to the British Broadcasting Company.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism is based on a similar concept, though it is entirely funded by private grants and donations. It produces some excellent work that it distributes for free to other media outlets. Ironically, the charitable arms of the Cap Times and the State Journal have contributed to the center. Finally, The Progressive magazine has long been a nonprofit that accepts donations in addition to subscriptions.
So, why not a Wisconsin Public Newspaper? Essentially it would apply the concept of WPR and WPT to a daily newspaper or online news source. Just like public radio and television, it could be funded in part by the government and in part by individual contributors. And, if it were just an online presence, it wouldn’t have the need for expensive printing costs or studios or broadcast facilities. Money could be invested in journalists and editors. What a concept.
The free market can be a wonderful thing. It can spark creativity and greater productivity and increase societal wealth. But the market doesn’t produce everything we want as a society. Sadly, the market is now failing to produce enough high-quality journalism. Good reporting is just too crucial to a good democracy to accept the market’s verdict.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
