Or is it “aligning one’s model with one’s goals?” The venerable Mother Jones is touting how it’s going to stay afloat in the future in its donations solicitations letter:
But here’s the bottom line: Unprecedented economic problems for media, or unprecedented political attacks on journalism, would be bad enough on their own. But both at once—that’s a synergy so unusual and dangerous that we haven’t even begun to grapple with its implications. And those implications reach well beyond Trump: What happens when future demagogues follow this playbook? What is to stop them from leveraging an increasingly desperate media industry for visibility and power, and then using that power to knock back press freedom? It’s not hard to imagine a death spiral that ends in banana-republic territory.
This is a problem for the media—and news consumers—that can’t be fixed with more creative advertising strategies, or “do more with less” newsroom pep talks. The economics of news simply no longer guarantee the kind of deep, unflinching reporting that we’re going to desperately need. Yes, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been hitting it out of the park—but the vast majority of newsrooms are unable to follow suit. And how long will the likes of Jeff Bezos be willing to subsidize accountability journalism?
We need a different model. And as MoJo readers like you know, we’ve placed our bets on an admittedly radical idea: that journalism is a public service, not a profit center, and that its survival rests with the people it serves. You.
MoJo has been an independent, reader-supported nonprofit since 1976, because our founders knew that car manufacturers were not going to bankroll investigations of exploding Ford Pintos. Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, putting MoJo—and our supporters—on a path that others in the media are just beginning to explore.
What they call radical seems to me to be simply the alignment of the goals of their publication with their funding sources. There’s long been a tension in commercial publishing between the advertisers that often carried the majority of the costs of publishing, from news collection to delivery of the final product, because, as the letter makes clear, any significant investigation into an advertiser will be at risk of suffering pushback from the target.
By secularizing the funding source, by which I mean selecting a funding source generally indifferent to the content of the publication, that risk is removed. Finding enough subscribers is not a new risk, as a magazine has to be able to show it reaches the audience targeted by advertisers; now it must find enough subscribers willing to meet a specified price in order to fund the writers, editors, and sales force for the publication. But at least the risk of catastrophic disappearance of funding will disappear.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. In my mind, the free press is, of course, a public service. In a perfect world, it would be completely separate from the commercial interests that characterize the private sector, because the contamination can result in no information, or false information, on a topic. Removal of private sector interests is a step in the journey of delivering truthful news to a citizenry that depends, in part, on truthful news for its continued prosperity.
And long term readers should not be surprised at my sentiments.
