Paul Bass remarks about newspaper ownership
Paul Bass is owner/editor of the New Haven Independent, a local online news site funded by foundation grants and its users. Bass attended the "Media & Democracy: Sharing News & Politics in a Connected World," a June 29-July 1 summit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst organized by the Media Giraffe Project. During a Thursday, June 29, evening discussion, Bass, a former daily and alternative-weekly writer-editor, talks about his sense of optimism about the future of journalism. He asks, do newspapers and the profit motive work anymore?
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Below is a text excerpt of his remarks, part of a general session: "Can Ownership Make a Difference?"
(due to a technical error, the first 25 minutes are missing)
From 4:30 in the QuickTime video:
My name’s Paul Bass. I’m a reporter who publishes a five-day a week, online, purely online hyperlocal news site in New Haven, Conn. Hyperlocal is a word that used to mean local until media companies destroyed local journalism and make it all regional through their media monopolies. And I do think newspapers are dead. They are going to continue to make money like some companies make money. But their souls are dead. I respect the people here from dailies who are trying to figure out how to do what we we are doing. But, good luck. You’re not going to get very far. We’re going to be doing the innovating and you’re going to be following us.
I think ownership matters completely and I think its not just the chains that are the enemy. I think these right-wing local media monopolies that destroyed cities like mine over the years – the Loebs, the people who sit on the boards of the nuclear power companies and don’t let their decisions be challenged, I think they’re the enemy too. And I’m optimistic, I’m not griping. Because I think we’re at a great moment right now. I think the reporters in this room and across the country who have the guts to leave corporate newsrooms – and its hard because you lose your medical benefits, you lose the job security, but you gain back your life and you gain back the mission that you went into the business for. We’re going to take it back. Because I don’t think the problem is that wrong people are owning news outlets. I think there are too few news outlets There’s less reporting going on at the local level.
And I’m going to tell you my story of how I got to build the business model that I did in New Haven, which is one of an infinite number of business models -- it’s not necessarily the right one for your community – and to tell you why I am optimistic.
I’ve covered New Haven, Conn., for 25 years. I worked at the daily, the news radio station, at the alternative weekly -- and I watched these corporations destroy each of them. There used to be several dailies and then two owned by one family. They closed one of ‘em down. And it wasn’t the great old years before the big company came. They wouldn’t cover protests they didn’t agree with, they wouldn’t challenge decisions made by the corporate elite in town and their writing stank. OK? Very nice people. But the paper stank.
The big corporation came in, and it was better for awhile because it was in English and it wasn’t just nasty right-wing editorials saying that gays shouldn’t own mortgages so what are they complaining about. But eventually they just cut the thing to the bone. And when I started out in the city not only were there two daily papers covering news events – there were six radio newsrooms. There is now less than one. Only one station – because they’ve all been bought – only one has local reporters. They work one shift. When you hear the news it is usually read by a Clear Channel person in another state who is reading the AP wire copy that is based on the stories in the one daily newspaper in town’s stories -- and they are pronouncing the mayor’s name wrong.
I was pretty happy for a long time working for an alternative weekly. Because alternative weeklies filled that void for a lot of years in local communities. We got bought by Tribune Co. Everyone said they are not going to let you express your opinion. I stayed on because I didn’t think that was true and it wasn’t true. When I wrote a story criticizing the heads of Tribune for being hypocrites about they way they used stock options there were no repercussions. But they destroyed the paper because they operated like a big corporation. The place got less creative, the people they hired were less creative. You had to go to these seminars where you learned how to talk to each other, as though you’re talking out of a book all day, like a script . . . .
So meanwhile you don’t have any energy or creativity to put out a good product. And they’re continually cutting. Because even if you’re making money, because they bought us because we make money, because of all the sex ads . . . and the restaurant ads, they don’t care if you’re saying that Ralph Nader should be president. They even invoked that at a hearing in Washington to try to fight the rules preventing them from buying newspapers and TV stations in a market because they said, “Look, we own some paper that endorsed Ralph Nader for president – meanwhile they were ordering all their dailies to endorse Bush – but that’s another story.
It wasn’t about opinion. It was about resources for local reporting. And at all these outlets there are fewer and fewer if any people going to zoning board meetings, local government meetings or people who have stuck around long enough in one community because they haven’t been exploited so they remember what the mayor said five years ago to know that he is lying now, or remember that the same idea was tried 10 years ago.
I promise I’m not griping. Because I took a year off to work on a project and I really didn’t want to go back. Because everyone I knew in a corporate newsroom in any city was miserable. They feel like they are fighting to do a fraction of the mission that they went into the business to do.
So while I was wasting the time, I was working on this project and I was on the web a lot, and I was reading Jay Rosen’s blog and I was discovering sites such as Village Soup, or like Baristanet in New Jersey which is one of my favorites. And I noticed that people who work on these sites are exhilarated. They were tired, but they were exhilarated. Because not only are they able to do all that they went into the business for originally, but they are able to do it in new ways. When I followed them I discover one of the fun parts is that old fogeys like us are learning how to work digital cameras, how to tell stories in new ways, and how to give up some of our power in trying to tell people what to think and instead use our skills as fact gatherers and filters and give more power to citizens.
So, I decided I was going to jump into this thing. Because I was in my mid-40s I couldn’t do it for free. And I have kids. So I was looking at business models. And I was looking at business models . . . on Jay Rosen’s blog there was a great discussion going on and one guy said, ‘You know, maybe newspapers for profit just don’t work anymore – maybe that model doesn’t work.’ The combination of Wall Street demanding these quarterly returns that prevent long-term investment, with Craig’s List and the others taking away a big part of the ad base, maybe we have to look at newspapers as a public utility. Maybe like water, like electricity, like a voter-registration office, it’s what keeps the democracy going. So I kind of like that – reporters are idealistic at heart.
So I said, ‘How am I going to make a living?’ So I decided to do it the way All Things Considered operates on NPR – get several revenue streams that are based on the self interest of donors. So I went to a few foundations to support kinds of reporting. And a health-care organization was comfortable with the idea of, ‘You are not going to tell me what to write, but I’ll cover health-care issues.’ And they gave me a grant to get started. I knew some of the people. It helps to know people in a community. I went to the local charitable foundation which cares about neighborhoods. Daily papers and radio don’t cover neighborhoods anymore. I was going to be doing neighborhood reporting.
So I cobbled together enough money that I could make a living at it. And I had to learn how the web works a little bit. I’m still not that much of an expert. But I also kind of figured the experiment would be fun because I figured if I could figured out how to post things and crop photos than really anybody can. And it was a lot of fun. We started up in September (2005) and I’m working on a budget of about $120,000 to about $130,000 a year. I have another fulltime reporter, a couple of part-timers, some free-lancers and a webmaster. We’ve broken a lot of stories. I’ve come to love the idea of non-competitive journalism. Even though like any reporter I love breaking a story and having it be mine, the vast majority of stories you do it really doesn’t matter that you wrote it, it’s that you need to have more reporting in town. I love the linking to other papers in town, I love linking to source reports that come out.
And the two other revenue streams I pursued were sponsorships – so you don’t go through a whole grant process which takes months and has some strings. So I went to some charitable donors and said, ‘If you sign up for two-year contracts and give between $500 to $1,000 a month. We won’t run ads; we’re not going to clutter it up with ads. But you get your logo there and it can link to your website.
And the third revenue stream I’ve not been successful at but I think that other people will be more successful than I have been, I just haven’t been good at it, is getting people to sign up the way public radio stations do to have you deduct $10 or $18 a month off a credit card so you have a consistent revenue stream. You get 200 people like that and you’ve already got a reporter position.
I believe in this model. I don’t think the only way to go is not-for-profit. But I think for-profit media is largely a bad idea. At this point. I live in a city and in a lot of cities our economies have turned to not-for-profit. Because the difference between profit and not-for-profit. Not-for-profit is a legal term. It refers to your mission, and the way you are structured economically. You are not trying to get an extra profit off of it. You’re serving a public mission. But you can have more money. In my city of New Haven, like other northern industrial cities, our manufacturing base disappeared. But our not-for-profit base went up. These are companies that are not going to move in a global economy. Yale University is not going to move. Our two great hospitals, they grew with the greater need for health care. They don’t pay property taxes, which are important in Connecticut. But you get a large percentage of your property taxes reimbursed from the Legislature which is as it should be. Jobs are created, pumping money to revenue stream.
I think similarly with media, we don’t have to be stuck in this idea that capitalism, especially monopoly capitalism, somehow works greater or produces a greater good for a community.
Ownership matters.
(Applause)
Oh, can I say one last thing. What I was saying earlier about the number of sites – there is a down site to this model, which is that it is going to crash and burn. I don’t think necessarily each site is sustainable for 100 years as your 150-year-old newspaper with an endowment or millions of dollars. But that’s OK, because this stuff is constantly being reinvented and what we are going to get back to in every city is to have five sites in a small city of people who cover news on a website with one person or three people and all be a little bit different. One will be more video oriented, one will be more liberal, another more conservative, or non ideological. And this is a capitalist idea which is creative destruction – true capitalism which is the thing that the Republican Party destroyed, you know where you actually have competition of ideas, competition in the marketplace. And I think I might last one year, five years, other sites a little show can be done. And I think in each of your cities just like you used to read several newspapers a day, hear several radio stations a day, you’re gonna’ get a bunch of websites that tell stories different ways and it’s gonna be good. And that’s why I’m not grippin.’
Ends at 15:10 in the QuickTime video
(More applause)
At 32 minutes, Poynter Institute senior editor Rick Edmonds proposes that the future of journalism will not be an either-or-proposition between mainstream, print media and Internet efforts. Bass agrees.
From 32:53, Paul Bass replies:
You are going to be a little bit disappointed in my answer because I actually do thing there is room for both. I think what Greenville, S.C., has done, what Bakersfield, Calif., has done, the daily, what the WashingtonPost.com has done, bridges that because the final product is gonna’ be a combination. I think Bakersfield, Calif., the website gets citizen involvement, the paper, they put out a weekly paper because the daily paper didn’t want to cover the suburbs there, and they sell the ads into the paper product. I do think in five years there is not going to be a relevant distinction between paper and internet. But I still think the innovation is going to come from the web. It is more entrepreneurial. I think that the daily companies are basically dinosaurs and clueless and they’re just gonna’ cut and cut to get short-term profits while we innovate and they’ll eventually co-op us the way they co-opted the so-called alternative media and then we’ll just invent the next thing because it will be time to do that.
READ THE COMMENTS OF JOSEPH MCQUAID
Adds Mr. Bass:
I’ve found over the years that people love local news about their neighborhoods and even about their governments if it’s not boring. I agree with you we need to get more creative. I think the reason people don’t vote, one of the reasons, is because they really don’t have a choice. The Democrats and the Republicans are both basically an incumbency protection racket. And I think that it is the same thing about newspapers and media. And while I’m a child of the Ben Badikian era and I learned to hate consolidation, I do think that it’s time to stop wining about it. The Internet is our possibility. You know it’s sort of like rain and the global economy. It’s happened, the question is to how to react to it. I think with media consolidation, yea it stinks, they destroyed our local media, but we don’t have to keep making all our charts about how fewer people own it and talk in long boring speeches about it. We can start our own websites, we can do what we believe in about it. Because the tools are cheap now. You don’t have to own a printing press anymore.
