December 2009 Archives

Public broadcasters face grave risks of losing credibility and trust through increasing commercialism of their work, says David Fanning, founding executive producer of the award-winning series Frontline.

It is "shameful" he says about the ways some public stations use pledge drives to market products for local sponsors. "This is our deepest embarrassment as public broadcasters...we spend more of our energy and promotional time pushing programs that have nothing to do with our mission."

Fanning delivered remarks at the annual James L. Loper Lecture in Public Service Broadcasting in November before an audience of public broadcasting leaders, community leaders, scholars and students.

For last year's elections, major newspaper web sites introduced such innovations as issues tracking and geotagged election watches, evidently unaware that these very tools had been introduced by Evans Witt and others back in 1996 on the first newspaper election web sites, when new media were really new. Some sites even had audio and video clips in 1996. OK, video over dialup was pretty jerky, but it was there, 13 years ago, the dog walking on its hind legs.

Now we see print editors gearing up for tablet computers, as reported this week by the New York Times. The Times even describes a "consortium" of publishers to try to drive standards.

This article appeared as an op-ed in the Sunday, Dec. 13, edition of Newsday.

Will news nonprofits bankrolled by foundations and philanthropists be pillars of the future media ecology?  To judge by the fast decline of mainstream media's business model, and the fast rise in philanthropy-funded journalism, it's starting to look that way.

This has been an extraordinary year for the creation of new-media organizations and Web sites, and a big reason is the money that foundations and wealthy individuals are investing. Thousands of community news sites have been launched, and most of the prominent ones are nonprofits.  Just in the last month or so we've seen launch announcements about the Bay Area News Project (with $5 million from Warren Hellman), the Texas Tribune ($4 million from John Thornton and others) and the Chicago News Co-operative (grant money from several foundations).

One of them is fueled by a $2 million investment and embarked on a plan to establish community news network in 50 American cities.  Another is a south Los Angeles site serving a neighborhood just 1 square mile in geography.    One has been in the community news business for six years; another is just now starting to monetize his site.

These were among the news sites represented at Friday's "Entrepreneurship and the Community Web" conference at the University of Southern California.  To my knowledge, anyway, it was the first time a large group of community news sites had ever gotten together in California.  It was obviously overdue.  The participants fed off each other's zest for their work, and left Los Angeles with a productive list of good ideas.  You can watch the entire daylong meeting here -- and read another account by analyst Peter Krasilovsky here.

(Note: This is the second in a series of posts about this topic by Kelsey Browne & Ariel Fox)

Finally, on its 17th try, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send the proposed Federal Shield Law to the floor.   This is promising, particularly because the Senate bill’s definition of who would be eligible for Shield Law protection – as it currently stands – is pretty good for bloggers, and better than the House bill’s definition.  As we discussed previously, the House’s version restricts coverage to those who receive a substantial portion of their livelihood or substantial financial gain from their journalistic work, whereas the Senate’s new version protects those whose “primary intent” from the start is to gather and disseminate news to the public.   Why is the Senate’s current definition better?  Because an intent to disseminate news to the public, from the beginning of the journalistic process, is more reflective of an engagement in the journalistic process than a paycheck, particularly given the recent proliferation of volunteer reporters and news sites. 

We propose a definition of “covered persons” under the Shield Law in which primary intent to disseminate news to the public plays a threshold role. In addition to this primary intent, and closely related to it, is the requirement that the topic matter be of interest to the public – not personal gossip.  Once – and only if – those two requirements are met, a judge should consider three related factors: credibility, accountability, and the established nature of the news site. 

6:00 PM. USC Washington DC Office

701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Suite 540
Washington, DC, DC 20004

Remarks prepared for delivery Dec. 1 at Federal Trade Commission workshop on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?"

Today, anyone can aspire to be a news provider, and increasingly, people and organizations are deciding that’s exactly what they want to be. It’s this process -- many voices instead of few -- that is fundamentally transforming our news ecology. 

The new players come in all sizes and forms, including the traditional for-profit model.  I'll focus here on nonprofits and also on non-news organizations that are quickly emerging as news producers.  These newcomers are not making up for all the resources shed by mainstream media.  But they are making up for a significant, perhaps growing, share.  And in places like San Diego and New Haven, you can argue that a more robust news environment has already taken hold.