NewsBeat

16 NewsBeat February 2017 R eaders have finally understood that their payments for the news will actually make a difference in what they and their community know. That model needs to be extended down to states and cities. One of the most challenging periods in American press history began at noon Eastern, Friday, January20th. The cries of "Lügenpresse" (defended by the outlet until recently run by new chief strategist to the president) echo almost as much as the stiff-arm salutes in the nation's capital in late October. The Russian propaganda service Russia Today (now nicely rebranded as RT America) somehow taking over the airwaves of C- SPAN for 10 minutes is just icing on the cake. Who knows what language cable news' crawls will be in soon? As we feel the ever-louder banging on the doors of a free press, we should also hear, weirdly, another knocking. That's the knocking of opportunity. It's not just the "journalistic spring" that Jack Shafer predicts as the conflicts and controversies of the Trump administration prove fertile ground for investigation. It's the opportunity to rewrite the tattered social contract between journalists and readers, a chance to rebuild a relationship that's been weakening by the year for a decade now. That's not just some wishful sentiment expressed in the face of the reality of Trump. We've seen it proven out over the past several months, and we must grasp this chance to reset an American press that has been withering away. In both the immediate run-up to the election, and more so in its dramatic aftermath, we've witnessed one greatly ironic unintended benefit of Trumpism. More than 200,000 new subscribers signed up for New York Times subscriptions, many of them not even directly solicited — they just figured out it was the right thing to do. The Washington Post saw its own double-digit percentage increase in new subscriptions, and Jeff Bezos — sensing opportunity — has just taken the dramatic step adding more than five dozen journalists to the Post newsroom. Readers opened their wallets more widely, as The Atlantic, ProPublica, The Guardian, NPR, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, and the Los Angeles Times have all reported increased public support. What's the lesson here? Beyond "support," readers clearly recognize value. They reward reporting, factual reporting, secure in the knowledge that certain news brands are more immune from the fakeries, forgeries, and foolishness than others. They see their own questions being answered with dutiful reporting and thoughtful analysis. The Times, in its 2020 report, long in the works, renewed the new social contract, as it designated $5 million for deeper and wider national government coverage, given the Trump ascendance. Readers see courage and they support it. The Times and the Post led courageously in 2016, even as the din of press attacks got louder. (And, here, let us recognize the uneven but growing courage of CNN, its reporters and its hosts, for more insistently piercing the bellows of nonsense they encounter. At the same, time, let's recognize the potential of CNN-taming implicit in Trump's meeting last week with AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, the would-be buyer of CNN through the acquisition of its corporate parent, Time Warner.) And, yet, all of that outpouring of post- election support still amounts to a meager down payment on what the American press needs. The national news media lives on the thread of profit. It is not "failing," as in the Trumpian taunt, but it's just hanging on, having absorbed financial blow after blow of digital disruption. At the local level — where all but four of the nation's 1,375 or so dailies operate — the unraveling is far worse. Those dailies approached the election emaciated, their weakness exacerbated by 10 years of disinvestment. Make no mistake: Most of the U.S. daily press still returns profits. They just don't return as much news, or reporting, or knowledge, as they used to. Further, it's in that local press that Americans long got their basic news, the basic facts that informed their voting habits. We can draw a straight line between the decline of the American local press and a populace whose ignorance has been further distorted by the polarization of democratic discourse. We may struggle to point out a few direct illustrations of that straight line, but the impact — civic and electoral — is only logical. We can't cut the number of journalists in the American daily workforce in half — replacing the most locally knowledgeable with less experienced, lower- paid recruits — and expect no loss. Looking forward, though, it's that local press that we must look to cover the day-by-day repercussions of health, environmental, education, and racial justice policies and laws turned upside down. We'll see mad spin coming out of Washington, and the national media will cover that. That national media, stretched as thin as it is, has little prayer to cover what seems likely to happen in the 50 states to the formerly insured, the women facing clinic closures, the aggrieved looking to federal legal insistence on fairness and justice, and the families seeking clean drinking water. Those are stories that must be unearthed, and told, across the country. It's a question that comes down to a single word: capacity. Long-time media watcher Merrill Brown pointed recently to the drained ability of American news companies to adequately report on the administration that takes power today. "There are not enough institutions in the American journalism community that are healthy enough to deal with what the Trump administration is likely to do in its early years," he said on Brian Stelter's Reliable Sources on CNN a week ago. Speaking of both national and regional insufficiency, "We need more Newsonomics: Trump may be the news industry's greatest opportunity to build a sustainable model By KEN DOCTOR

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