Journalism Funding Quotes

I worry about every newspaper. I worry about the financial undertaking, and I worry that somehow the loss of the sale of the paper version will affect their ability to have journalists and editors and producers. We really need those.

What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.

It simply is not cost affective to cover stories from independent sources.

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

The basic problem is with the business model of journalism. That business model is premised on the idea that talk is cheap and reporting is expensive.

In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.

Budget cuts are a sad reality in most newsrooms, and I am concerned that they reduce the collective muscle of journalists who are doing the expensive, and often dangerous, work of on-the-ground reporting.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

The amount of money that's being put into long-form investigative journalism has become less and less.

If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.

I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits.

For newspapers to continue to play an important role in civic engagement, they need more access to capital. Their decline has created a real threat to independent reporting at the state and local level.

In this very uncertain time for the media, serious investigative reporting - the expensive, time-consuming stuff - is under enormous pressure at newspapers and other commercial news organizations. Non-profits such as the Center for Public Integrity are taking on this vital work and without them the prospects for investigative reporting would be even more dire. The Center has been properly celebrated for its careful, rigorous work, and to my mind it has now ascended to the status of national treasure.

The most important thing the giant philanthropies could do - Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society Institute, and new ones emerging - would be to create a $2-to-$3 billion Trust for Independent Journalism. They wouldn't miss the money, and democracy would still have a fighting chance because of their investment.

Just as infinite access to free music ultimately leads to no one making a living at music anymore, free journalism just doesn't pay for itself - particularly not when a search engine is serving all the ads.

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism.

One thing we're doing with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit I direct, is providing financial support to journalists who were formerly middle-class.

Print is still responsible for a significant portion of the revenues that, you know, pay for the work of the newsroom. But, you know, digital is very important. And part of the thrill of having this job now is I get to lead us through what is both a thrilling and very challenging transition from a print world to a digital world.

The dilemma for early 21st century journalism is this: Who will pay for the news?

Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?