Orgs like http://www.propublica.org/about/ are funded privately by people or orgs who believe that there is a public interest in maintaining independent journalism.
Orgs like http://www.npr.org/about/ are paid for by the public, using a distributed model. There are local stations that are paid for locally, who in turn help fund the umbrella organization of NPR. Likewise there are private individuals who have left endowments or other contributions to maintain NPRs independence.
Journalism is alive and well. Corporate journalism is dying. And i can't say i'm hugely sorry. Sucks that the industry has crashed as opposed to transitioning, but i can't say that it wasn't at least in part their own fault.
Capitalism. This is the magic of capitalism. There's demand for journalism on one side and supply on the other, and if there's a profitable way to bring them together, it will be found. Newspapers can stand in the way of that by constraining what people think of.
You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are millions of examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or your credulity is not the path to understanding.
In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the problem is that there are a staggering number of ways to bring the supply and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that newspapers are the answer, though.
The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News" and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no answers to be found in extremism.
The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.
Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public broadcasting.
You miss my point entirely. You can only conceive of the old system going, so you want to get the government to fund it. But there's another way: Let the market figure something out.
Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if they can, they can't get them past committee.
The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate" function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with that.
But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, every niche works that way. The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry, it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It can, on the other hand, be legislated out of existence.)
Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting something new happen?
Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.
"letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism is exactly the extremist economic policy nonsense that created the mess we are in. When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services industry, what that "let the market figure out" is that it is very, very easy to steal money when there is little regulation.
Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.
> When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services industry
Since Bush did no such thing....
> Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money, people steal that money.
Libertarians recognize that govts don't protect money all that well and that big thefts always involve a govt.
""letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism."
No, Adam503 chooses to misinterpret "letting the market figure it out" as unregulated capitalism so that (s)he can go off on a more-or-less entirely unrelated rant.
What letting the market figure it out really means here is that instead of a glorious upper authority picking the "winner" by handing out government funds to a proven-loser business model to prop it up ("winner" hardly seems like the right word), that we unleash the creativity of thousands or millions of people in the confident belief that where there is unmet demand, someone will find a way to supply it.
Did you think my example list was just randomly tossed in there or something? It's the core of the point; government action can only look to the past. Your actions will simply guarantee the extinction of journalism, because the system you want to prop up is dying before competition even fully matures, which is the ultimate proof of economic death.
What regulations you may or may not want to lay down on such actions is an entirely separate point, and if you can't see that, you're simply being willfully blind to the point I'm making because you've been so conditioned in your response to the word "capitalism" that you can't see past it anymore. The fact that Amazon.com created a new meeting point for supply and demand is neither here nor there in the question of whether they are regulated (hint: yes).
Again... this sort of thing has happened millions of times. It's not a wacky theory, it's how we got from the dark ages to the economy of today. (The wacky theory is that this creation is impossible and only happens when central authorities help it along; this flatly contradicts the historical facts.) This time is only different because now the town crier is facing disruption, and he's being loud about it. Other than that, it's hardly different than any other industry which has been transformed over the past 50 years, which is most of them.
> The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News"
and the New York Times....
> and the economic collapse we are currently experiencing.
Nope, but that's other threads.
> Elimination of monopolies.
With one exception, the US govt hasn't broken a monopoly while it was still a monopoly. And, in that case (Standard Oil), the break up took out the low-cost-to-the-consumer supplier, resulting in increased prices....
The combination of Fox "News" the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. left 85% of Americans believing Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 at the time the Congress was voting on whether to invade Iraq.
That was, of course, proven to be complete and utter nonsense with evidence people like Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, etc. had at the time of that vote. That information was not provided to the American people by any of the major outlets of corporate-owned media.
So, discovery of municipal corruption will be paid for entirely by people who lack the conviction that they shouldn't have to pay extra just to have a clean government? Are you sure there are no flaws in this plan?
I'm sorry I don't follow. If you are a writer known for uncovering government waste, and I like to hear those stories, I'll pay you for it, or someone else will indirectly.
It's just not that simple. If you like Ford automobiles, but GM comes up with a new technology that allows them to sell GM cars profitably at 150 dollars, Ford is out-of-business. It doesn't matter if a million people prefer them. Unless you want to pay a 10000 percent markup for a preference, well... But perhaps GM will hire another design department to imitate the old Fords? Sorry--design's cost hasn't gone down. The extra $25/unit wasn't a big deal on a $15,000 car, but is on a $150 car.
This is what has happened to news. The internet has made the price of distribution dirt cheap, but content-production is the same price as ever. And so content will be spread thin. You'll read CNN.com's national news for free, rather than read about the local Rotary club at $1.50 an issue. Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Here in Chicago, The Windy Citizen, my local news startup has just hired its first ad rep. We're basically a local Digg, loosing connecting together all the little local sites in the city through links and buttons. People are going to keep starting little local news sites. We're here to help them get that first 500 readers they need to get off and running.
Companies like the AP and Reuters will pay for it, because they can then sell the content to publications (both online and dead trees).
People will still pay for content, and hence someone will still get paid to produce content, but the simple fact is that traditional newspapers can't compete as a distribution medium with other, newer, mediums.
