May14

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

There Are Green Shoots in the Media World

The media landscape is very grim. Thomas Jefferson once famously said he would prefer newspapers without a government over a government without newspapers. A modern version of that would replace "newspapers" with "media outlets," since recycling trees isn't really the essence of journalism in the 21st century. It is about investigative journalists looking for and publicizing things the government would rather not publicize. They are not going the way of the dodo, but times are tough and courage is scare in legacy media outlets.

There is a lot of bad news on the news front, what with mergers, retrenchments, and billionaires buying and silencing publications. As more and more legacy media companies are bought by billionaires or silenced by their owners, is there any hope for investigative reporting?

Here are some of the problems. The billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times killed endorsements of Kamala Harris carefully prepared by their respective editorial boards. Donald Trump has sued the Post, the Times, The Des Moines Register and even the Rupert-Murdoch-owned Wall Street journal. He hasn't won all of them, but he has put them on notice to behave or else.

Now on to television. When Trump threatened ABC News, it paid him $16 million in tribute. Paramount, which owns CBS, also paid Trump $16 million to make him leave them alone (for the moment). If you think this will not interfere with their editorial policy going forward, good luck with that. And Bari Weiss, who now runs CBS news, is not likely to be compared to Edward R. Murrow or even Walter Cronkite. Trump has also sued NBC. As soon as Paramount completes the deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ellisons, who run CBS, will also run CNN.

The Times is often critical of Trump, but still pulls its punches a lot now. Other than that, the legacy media, both print and broadcast, has been completely cowed. And if they published something critical and got sued, they know that finding a law firm would be difficult because most of the big ones have been neutered by Trump as well.

Is journalism and its buddy, Truth, now dead? Maybe not. Let's take a look.

• Wire Services: First, some legacy media companies are still alive and well. The Associated Press is a nonprofit and has been going strong for 180 years, although it did take a hit last year when Gannett (the biggest newspaper chain in the country by readership) and McClatchy (#6) dropped the AP simply for business reasons (they want to use the money to hire their own reporters). Reuters, which is headquartered in London and is owned by a Canadian company, has 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists. Over 1,000 newspapers and 750 broadcast TV stations subscribe to it. Reuters produces 2 million stories a year and reaches a billion people every day. The AP is slightly left of center and Reuters is smack in the middle. As a nonprofit, the AP encourages people to read its website and support it by making a donation.
  
  
• ProPublica: What got us thinking about this subject is this story in ProPublica. It turns out that there are a few green shoots out there in medialand—small media companies that do real journalism and could one day become bigger companies. When the late Ted Turner started a network broadcasting news on cable 24 hours a day, everyone thought he had lost his mind. It did pretty well, although the Ellisons may finish it off.
  
  ProPublica is a small investigative journalism company that has been around for 18 years and is growing quickly. It just opened a new office in California, staffed by four reporters and a fellow, to cover West Coast news. It expects to hit 250 employees this year. Revenue, partly from donations from foundations and individuals, hit $70 million last year and is growing rapidly. It has partnered with 90 news organizations and has won several Pulitzer Prizes. Here are a few of its recent stories:
  
  
  • He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway.
  • Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth.
  • Trump Exempted Some of the Nation's Biggest Polluters From Air Quality Rules. All It Took Was an Email.
  • The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families.
  • Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit.
  • Puerto Rico Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report.
  • Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme "Locked Up." Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges.
  • A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.
  • A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America's Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm.
  
  
• Politico: Another outlet that does investigative journalism is Politico, which has been around for 19 years. It was founded by media executive Robert Allbritton in 2007. It is online, but is also a physical, paper newspaper (which is why we italicize the name). When Mike Allen was at Politico, he started Politico Playbook, an early morning e-mail newsletter By 2016, it had 100,000 subscribers in D.C. alone, including insiders, outsiders, journalists, lobbyists, senators, presidents, and would-be presidents. Politico was recently purchased by German media company Axel Springer for over $1 billion. As the name suggests, its focus is on politics. It has versions for the U.S. and Europe. It has over 700 employees in the U.S. and 375 in Europe. It does lots of investigative journalism and has broken a number of scandals. It won one Pulitzer Prize and various other awards.
  
  One thing it does that no other organization does is cover congressional committee meetings. If a company is in, say, the agriculture business and the House Agriculture Committee has a hearing or meeting, the company will pay big bucks to know exactly what happened there. That is also true of nonprofits and local governments that have a keen interest in what some part of the federal government is up to. Highly tailored (and very expensive) subscriptions are available for folks with very specific interests. Half of Politico's revenue comes from this part of the company.
  
  
• Axios: In 2016, veteran journalist Mike Allen left Politico and, along with Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, founded Axios. Its goal was to do investigative journalism and report the results as concisely as possible, for busy readers. Most articles are under 300 words. It now has 500 employees. In addition to the website, which is free, there are multiple paid newsletters. It also runs ads, some of which double as content. It has gotten into some trouble for not always adequately distinguishing between editorial content and paid ads. In 2022, Cox Enterprises bought the company for $525 million.
  
  
• NOTUS: Another news source with Politico roots is NOTUS, a digital news outlet owned by the Allbritton Journalism Institute. NOTUS stands for News Of The US. It was founded by Politico founder Robert Allbritton in 2023. It has a website but also distributes content to other nonprofit news outlets. Notable about NOTUS is its focus on training the next generation of investigative reporters. Recent college graduates who want to become investigative journalists can apply to become a (paid) "fellow" for 24 months. Those accepted get a month-long immersion course in the ways of D.C. and then watch how the professional staff journalists work. After a while, they can start doing their own investigations and writing their own stories. After the 24 months, the good ones have a nice résumé and list of articles they have published, making it easier to find jobs as journalists elsewhere.
  
  When Jeff Bezos decided to strangle The Washington Post in the hopes it would die a slow death and then, out of gratitude, Donald Trump would give Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, more NASA contracts, one of the things he did was drop local news coverage and sports coverage. Allbritton saw possibilities here. He hired a number of the Post reporters Bezos had fired and decided that NOTUS would now cover D.C. local news and local sports. The goal would be to ultimately replace the Post as the capital's leading newspaper, albeit only in digital form. It will start next month and be renamed The Star, which sounds more newspaperly than NOTUS. Also, The Star was the name of a now-defunct D.C. paper once owned by Allbritton's father, Joe Allbritton. The more Bezos degrades the Post to please Trump, the faster The Star will pick up the slack and become D.C.'s paper of record. Given his own background, Allbritton clearly has the smarts, the money, and the history to pull this off.
  
  
• Bolts: Yet another nonprofit digital newsmagazine is Bolts, which covers the nuts and bolts of the (political) news. It was founded by Daniel Nichanian in 2022, and is somewhat focused on local political news that other outlets miss. It lives on philanthropic grants and individual donations. It does some investigative journalism and often covers stories that are down in the weeds but actually important. It leans to the left. It has a focus on voting rights, what's on the ballot, and criminal justice, among other things. It also has a Q & A section called Ask Bolts, somewhat analogous to what we do on Saturdays. It is small, but growing.
  
  
• Talking Points Memo: Another small outlet that has a few investigative reporters is Talking Points Memo. It started as Josh Marshall's blog in 2000. It decided to offer paid subscriptions in 2012 and now has over 35,000 paid subscribers. It also runs a fundraising drive every year and runs ads for nonsubscribers. This has allowed it to hire 18 staffers, mostly reporters. It gets 400,000 page views every day now and has become a (much) smaller version of Politico, except it clearly leans left.
  
  Coverage includes more things on the fringe than other outlets. Still, it has had some scoops It also has a section with reader discussions and other features including TPM Cafe (opinion), Muckraker (think: Upton Sinclair), podcasts and more.
  
  
• Media Matters: Formally, Media Matters for America is a left-leaning Website that focuses on investigating and calling out hypocrisy and outright lies in conservative media, including radio, television, and online. Sometimes calling out misinformation or lies becomes a story in itself. Among other right-wing media figures that MMfA has written up for lying include Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Schlessinger, and Tucker Carlson.
  
  
• Slate: This is an online magazine that covers current affairs, politics, and culture from a liberal point of view. It does some investigative journalism and in-depth analysis, especially on the Supreme Court. It also has many (audio) podcasts.
  
  
• Vox: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell founded Vox in 2014 to explain current events in depth but in simple ways that people can easily understand. It provides more context around news stories than most other publications. It leans left. In addition to news articles, it has podcasts and a YouTube channel that has 12.5 million subscribers. In Oct. 2021, it had 20 million visitors to the Website.
  
  
• The Bulwark: When The Weekly Standard went under in 2018, founder Bill Kristol and editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes decided to set up a website to continue their mission. That mission has morphed into saving democracy. Although many of the staffers have a center-right background, virtually all of them savage Donald Trump on a daily basis. Part of the site is free and part is by subscription. There are 76,000 paid subscribers at $100 each, meaning it is taking in over $7 million in revenue a year and is growing rapidly. It has many newsletters, (video) podcasts and more. The YouTube channel has 1.25 million subscribers, about half as many subscribers as The Washington Post, but a huge number for a publication that has only been out there for 8 years, and it is growing rapidly.
  
  Unlike the others in this list, it doesn't do much investigative journalism. Its specialty is no-holds-barred political analysis. It is very rough on Trump and the corruptness of his administration. It has about a dozen podcasts and 10 newsletters, some daily and some weekly. One unusual podcast is Sarah Longwell's focus group podcast. She is constantly running focus groups talking to all kinds of voters—for example, 3x Trump voters, Trump-Biden-Trump voters, and many other combinations to see what makes them tick. That podcast features actual audio of voters saying what they think about the topic du jour. For highly educated and well-informed political junkies, hearing how ignorant and bigoted many voters are is quite a shock. Longwell keeps pointing out that the Democrats have to go with the voters that are out there, not the voters they would like to be out there. Some of the other podcasts are both informative and fun. Jonathan V. Last (JVL) and Longwell do a podcast together every Friday. JVL says Longwell is his best friend, and that comes through, even though he is a devout practicing Catholic and she is a nonreligious lesbian married to another woman.
  
  Of late, they have added a new feature. They do live shows in major cities around the country and then put them on the site as podcasts. Longwell also wrote a book entitled How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time describing how the voters (and the Democrats) can take the country back from MAGA.

The conclusion is that while legacy mass media outlets are mostly caving to Trump, there are some small to medium outlets that are springing up, mostly digital (which saves the enormous expenses of printing a paper newspaper or having television broadcasting equipment). A number of them do serious original reporting. Some of them have quite a bit of starting capital and large ambitions (like The Star aiming to supplant The Washington Post).

The media landscape is changing. For decades, newspapers and broadcast television were dominant. Newspapers are dying (or going digital) and increasingly many people, especially young people are "cord cutters" and no longer subscribe to cable television. They get their news from online sites like the ones above and others that straddle advocacy and reporting (like MMfA) and social media, which is an open sewer of misinformation. When new industries are born, initially there are many players. In 1910, there were an estimated 400 companies manufacturing cars in the U.S. Eventually some go under and others merge. It is likely that the many online news sites will eventually merge into a smaller number with larger staffs and more coverage. They will come to rival and probably surpass current newspapers and linear television, especially since younger audiences are not interested in newspapers or television. (V)