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I’m a big fan of both @peretti (savviest operator/observer of digital media business) and @benthompson (all my academic colleagues should study aggregation theory) but think they veered into some problematic terrain on the “saving journalism” front here: https://stratechery.com/2020/an-interview-with-buzzfeed-ceo-jonah-peretti/
2/ In brief, @peretti’s solution to the broken business model for high quality local journalism is to get #bigtech to allocate $2bn/year to pay for 30,000 or so journalists to make the kind of content that current ad-supported and subscription models struggle to fund at scale.
3/ @peretti acknowledges the firewall & regulatory challenges, but seems to think solving the funding/subsidy gap is sufficient, since distribution is ubiquitous & journalists are hungry/ready. We need to shed all the “legacy” infrastructure that is really just “friction.”
4/ But here’s the thing: Information doesn’t hold local power to account, local institutions do. The power of high-quality local news is only partly in the information reporters and editors publish.
5/ The power of local media also resides in the institutional weight of an independent local press represented by specific and recognizable local organizations that are embedded in their communities through governance, funding, and audience relationships.
6/ A good chunk of what @peretti considers “legacy” is actually the fabric of institutionality at risk. Yes much is in severe decline, suffering mediocrity, provincialism & outpaced by digital practices. But the underlying civic assets should be nurtured, not deleted.
7/ Local media orgs can have community engagement managers, product designers, photographers, data visualization teams, event managers, membership coordinators, newsletter editors, and copy editors who contribute to the quality of their local service.
8/ Local media orgs can have local owners who are worried about the quality of civic life in their regions. They can have sales teams that have relationships with local businesses. Many have brands that people associate with trusted information and community pride.
9/ From the pure-play POV of a vertically integrated digital media company, all these local, redundant, & overlapping resources are inefficient at best. I agree some are. You don’t need a film critic in every media market. And God help you if you’re building a custom CMS in 2020.
10/ But a centralized, at-scale local news and information service that hires all of the reporters and editors in this country tomorrow will fail to build the kind of thriving, responsive, locally-governed, independent media institutions that we now need.
11/ And a single national source of funding - whether big tech or a government subsidy - poses too great a risk as a single point of pressure/failure.
12/ Decentralization and local governance are the keys to civic resilience and responsiveness. Do we need anything more than the last three weeks of stress-testing our electoral infrastructure to prove that?
13/ The business model problems of supporting local digital news need to be solved. But I am wary of seductive digital media thinking that more/better information, powered by scale and efficiency, is always the solution.
END/ Information does not hold power to account, local people inside of local institutions do. Here's how we are thinking about funding and building new institutions in local news. https://medium.com/the-national-trust-for-local-news/the-national-trust-for-local-news-e7a710255038
P.S. Always happy to invite a deeper conversation @peretti @benthompson. (And hey @emilybell maybe we could host these folks for a convo on local news @TowCenter!)
