The press is a societal sector that is separate from the private sector, and yet it is often run as if it was simply another private sector entity: demanding profits, open to be sold to a big offer.
And sometimes seeing its core mission, to report the news, biased by ownership.
So there may be even more significance than already credited to this deal to save the venerable Baltimore Sun:
… a coalition of wealthy business executives has put together an 11th-hour offer to buy not just the Baltimore Sun but the entire Tribune Publishing chain that a special committee of the Tribune’s board said Monday “would reasonably be expected” to beat out Alden’s offer. The all-cash proposal from Stewart Bainum Jr., chairman of Maryland-based Choice Hotels International, and Wyoming-based Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, is valued at $680 million, about $50 million more than Alden has proposed paying.
The duo then plans to sell many of the individual papers to local owners. Bainum is primarily interested in the Baltimore Sun, where he has told associates he wants to expand the newsroom. Wyss has told colleagues he plans to invest in the Chicago Tribune, according to an executive who is familiar with the discussions. [WaPo]
And then?
And so they launched their campaign. A petition to return the Sun to local ownership and run it as a nonprofit organization received more than 6,000 signatures, including from CEOs and Baltimore cultural icons such as Cal Ripken and John Waters.
The idea of journalism as a non-profit operation reduces the pressure to run a profit, while still permitting the important notion of charging a fee. Long time readers will recall that I regard free news to be, potentially, the equivalent of cotton candy – it may taste good, it may cater to what you want to see as news, but it will almost certainly give you a warped view.
By paying a fee, there’s an implicit contract between the news source and the reader. Of course, the audience must be honest; walking away in disgust simply because the news doesn’t cater to their desires is not being honest. But upon finding that the news source isn’t being honest, failing to pay and refusing to read it then becomes the feedback mechanism by which the news source measures its excellence – or lack thereof.
The advertising model, taken to an extreme, removes the notion that a news source must be measured on journalism excellence and substitutes profit, clicks, and the rest of the trivia of the current technological age. The non-profit approach helps take the focus off of money, if not entirely, and returns to the question of how to measure excellence to its traditional form: what make for an excellent free press, and not an excellent private sector entity.
I encourage all of my readers to subscribe to at least one traditional paper. I subscribe to The Washington Post, myself.
