It’s called Three Branches, Three Amendments: A Constitution for Our Time. For today, tomorrow and Friday, it’s free on Amazon, where otherwise it sells for 99 cents (their minimum price). I put it there because it’s too long for a magazine, much too short for a book, and I hope it makes important arguments.

Here’s the gist:

A blueprint for practical, bipartisan constitutional reform. There have been no successful constitutional amendments proposed in more than a half century, and this extended essay argues that the time has finally come for a new wave of such changes. The detailed proposals range from limiting partisan gerrymandering in Congress to ending gerontocracy in the presidency to moving to meaningfully depoliticize the Supreme Court. The essay also debunks the usual constitutional reform impulse to abolish the Electoral College, explaining how that would end the two-party system and herald even greater instability. It also explains why enlarging the House of Representatives, while not requiring a constitutional amendment, would both ease passage of the limits on gerrymandering and soften some of the concerns with the Electoral College. With historical detail, Three Branches, Three Amendments offers critical steps toward a more effective and democratic republic.

Again, the essay is here. Second Rough Draft will return next week to our regular programming.

Leave a comment

There seems to be an increasing amount of heat, and precious little light, surrounding the issue of using AI to write. This week, I want to see if we can get past that, and begin to move toward a set of workable ground rules, for journalism and beyond.

Subscribe now

First, some examples of the sorts of things that are happening in the absence of such ground rules:

• The Financial Times appended a note to a piece by a Harvard Kennedy School professor because he had broken its rules by using AI to condense his own work. Violating a publication’s rules (assuming you know them) is surely bad, but does a rule forbidding using AI to condense something you have written yourself really make sense? Microsoft Word has long challenged some sentence structures. Should heeding it have been barred? If not, what’s the difference?

• A group of authors a year ago advocated that AI be banned not only from the writing of books but also from any use in their copy editing, design of their text or covers or narration of audiobooks. Does this mean that those news sites that have added AI-based audio narration options for stories are committing an unpardonable sin? Is the line between using spell-check and global find-and-replace and having a machine do an initial copy edit as clear to you as it is to these authors? It’s not to me.

• If we are going to seek to ban books created by AI, how do we feel about the corporate earnings or sports game-stories or bullet point summaries that are increasingly generated the same way? Even putting aside the serious First Amendment issues (book bans ought to be disfavored) and critical economic questions (who’s going to pay for the additional cost of returning to human writers for stories machines do perfectly well?), don’t we need to make some distinctions here?

• Just this week, a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Treasury Secretary Bessent’s recent misadventure in the bond market, bylined by Bessent mentor and investing legend Stanley Druckenmiller, was revealed to have been written with AI. Many journalists instinctively recoiled, but the Journal editorial page defended what they published, and as you will see below, I think they were mostly right to do so. (Also, Druckenmiller isn’t the only op-ed contributor using AI.)

Before we dive into the ground rules, let me set out where I come from on these questions. I have never used AI to write anything, but then again I like to think of myself as a writer. Most people don’t. I have experimented with AI as an editor a few times and mostly not liked (or used) the results, and I don’t use it regularly for this purpose. Its effect on writing mostly strikes me as similar to drugs that flatten people’s affect, which is not what I am seeking in my writing.

But I do use AI for illustrations (where I have a need, and no talent or budget), and also for research.

A reminder on how it helps, and why that matters

Let’s talk about research for a minute. I was recently writing about why I think we need, after two bad experiences in five years, to change the Constitution to prevent having more octogenarian presidents, and it got me to thinking about the order of presidential succession. Did you know that if a bomb exploded during one of Speaker Mike Johnson’s visits to Trump and Vance, Chuck Grassley, soon to be 93, would be President of the United States for the next two and half years? AI enabled me to determine, in just a couple of minutes, that presidents pro tempore of the Senate (the office that Grassley holds, by dint of seniority) have been elderly for all but eight of the last 45 years. That’s a pretty strong case, I think, for changing an important law, and instead placing the Senate majority leader in the line of succession. Just five years ago, before chatGPT, determining the underlying facts would have taken hours.

Moreover, I am old enough to remember life before Wikipedia, when the same research might have taken days, and been impossible for many people without access to an unusually good library. It is way too easy to forget how much we have benefitted from the democratization of information, even as it’s important to remember the costs. Twenty years ago, the same impulses rampant today led some people to forego using Wikipedia as a tool. Even now, I can’t bring myself to link to the site, despite knowing it’s frequently the best accessible source on historical facts. Do we want to inculcate more such silliness?

Now to those ground rules. Like almost all solid practices in journalism, transparency is the place to start. That means that using AI to compose a piece of writing should be fine so long as you disclose it. In a published piece of journalism, I would suggest something simple, such as “By chatGPT.” If a human mixes their own work with that of a machine, it could be “By Susie Smith and Claude.” Or vice versa if the machine was the principal author.

If you don’t want to read (or publish) pieces composed this way, that’s your prerogative. If you don’t want to read publications that use such material, ditto. The same would go for books, and even entire publishing houses or bookstores. The market for written information will adapt to people’s evolving preferences on this, as it should, and right now the market signal may be flashing yellow or even red on most such uses in journalism and books. If you don’t want to exclude machine-generated content from your own reading diet, that seems to me as much your choice as whether to eat ultra-processed food. (Also, the rest of us are equally allowed to judge you for it.)

What else needs to change

Let’s also admit that not all pre-AI work was conducted up to the standard I am suggesting. It should have been, and still should be. Those earnings and sports game-stories and bullet point summaries should have bylines revised to meet these standards. But so should ghostwritten books and articles. Surely, it makes no sense to say that help from a machine cannot be concealed but help from a human can be. The person who deserves the disclosure is the reader.

Does this mean that using AI to edit something you write must be disclosed? Here, I would be inclined to distinguish between substantive editing and copy editing. I know that’s more nearly a continuum than a dichotomy, but I also know most journalists believe they can characterize given work as one or the other. Copy editing, I would submit, need not be disclosed. Substantive editing should be. Condensing? Merely for space, it need not be disclosed, while to alter the substance conveyed, again, it should be.

But now let’s also concede that this is not how we have approached the editing and writing process in journalism generally, and maybe that needs to change as well. Perhaps editors who write entire chunks of stories, rather than asking authors to rewrite, even along specified lines, should start getting byline credit. Again, I think it would be hard to explain to a non-journalist how words written by a machine must be disclosed, but it’s fine to pretend authorship when a human editor does a thoroughgoing writethrough. And again, it’s the perception of readers on which we should be focusing.

Op-eds, or, more generically, opinion pieces signed by a non-staff member and published by a third party, present something of a special case. Many of these, over the years, have been written for rather than by the signatory, with no disclosure. (Think of pieces with the bylines of public officials, including presidents, or CEOs, few of whom are thought of as writers.) Readers likely understand roughly how this works, and thus disclosure seems less compelling, including for the use of AI in composition. Editors who publish op-eds, however, do have a responsibility for knowing who or what has done the writing, and for ensuring that the signatory stands behind every word.

Finally, we come to research. I’m sorry if this offends some people, but swearing off AI for research already feels like Luddism to me. I think the same will soon be true for copyediting, and some forms of illustration, and perhaps more down the road. I do not gainsay the human costs of this, and I think our society needs to grapple with that more forthrightly. Once again, as with the first digital revolution, profound things are changing, and we need to adapt our standards accordingly, while preserving our values.

Correction: This piece originally understated Chuck Grassley’s age by a year. He is already 92. Thanks to the reader who caught this.

Leave a comment

Tom Rosenstiel has been one of the nation’s leading thinkers about journalism for decades. He is the co-author of The Elements of Journalism (with Bill Kovach), now in its fourth edition. Rosenstiel founded and for 16 years led the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Centers, and then ran the American Press Institute for nine years. These days he is professor of the practice and the Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism as well as a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Much of his time as a working journalist came at the Los Angeles Times and at Newsweek.

Tom’s new book, The Next Journalism: How The Press Must Change to Serve Democracy, was published Tuesday. I strongly recommend it, even as I’m skeptical about some aspects, as you will see below. Our conversation about the book took place in late July, and has been edited for length and clarity.

RT: Tom, thanks for doing this. Let’s start with the basics. What’s the central premise of the book?

TR: I think the central premise is that the model that we’ve operated by, and that a lot of our routines were built around, was an advertising model in which we got people’s attention, and then we rented that attention to advertisers. We can no longer primarily build this business on advertising, so we have to find another way. We have to find a way of creating a journalism that has so much value that people will pay for the journalism.

And one of the problems that we have in making this shift is that so much of what was indispensable for people in the 20th Century wasn’t our journalism. It was the things that surrounded it. You couldn’t buy a house, or sell a bike, or know what was on TV, or what was at the movies, or get the coupons, without the classified and the listings in the paper, which weren’t the journalistic output.

People now get almost all of that elsewhere. Meanwhile, we as journalists did not think about how to make our journalism indispensable. We even denigrated some of that work as “service journalism” or “puff pieces.”

How can we make journalism have such value that people recognize ‘this is helping me live my life’? That’s what the book is about. It essentially identifies places where that is beginning to happen, and people who are exploring that technique-- journalism as a service-- and it explores in particular a concept from Clayton Christiansen called the Job to Be Done, which is understanding at a deeper level than we ever had to before how people use our product, why they use it. I mean at the story level, what job is this particular story actually doing for people?

Subscribe now

RT: You seem to me pretty disillusioned with investigative journalism, at least as it is often practiced in the U.S., describing it as typically “alarmist.” Is that right?

TR: Well, investigative journalism is a large bucket. Exposés are a category of stories that expose wrongdoing or hidden things. Outside of a handful of publications, there isn’t as much of that as journalists would like to think. But the work that’s done there, I think, is usually pretty good. In fact, some of it is spectacularly good. Much of what we know about things that, for instance, the President of the United States and his family are trying are trying to hide, both personally and within the administration, falls under that category.

Where accountability journalism falls short

TR: The broader category of accountability journalism, where we monitor the powerful, is where our work is often not nearly as good as we think it is. That is often a place where we lean toward “let’s pick out the things that are weird” or things that are extreme or things that we think are “newsworthy.” A lot of it amplifies establishment voices or extreme voices. There’s lots of academic research that shows that we over-index extreme voices in our coverage. That’s where my skepticism is.

There’s another category of reporting, which is to answer fundamental questions: Is childhood poverty increasing or decreasing? Is crime rising or falling? I might put that into a category that Bill Kovach and I once called interpretive investigative reporting, where you’re going through data and then doing assessments of it.

The Pentagon Papers was a classic example of interpretive investigative reporting. They got the Pentagon Papers, but they didn’t just put them in the newspaper the next day. It took weeks of interpreting and analyzing what those documents meant before you could write a story about it. I don’t think we have as much interpretive investigative reporting as we probably need. Is the mayor doing a good job? Are our roads safe relative to similar cities? What would be ways of fixing our healthcare system?

The amount of that is pretty marginal for good reason. It’s expensive. James Hamilton wrote a great book called Democracy’s Detectives where he talked about the average cost of a serious investigation. But he also established that it probably pays for itself in terms of reader value and subscriptions.

RT: So, this leads me into my next question. In reconstructing how news stories are structured, you advocate shifting, I think, from what has often been called a “nut graf” to what I would call a “nut query,” a question the story seeks to answer, which is what you were just talking about. Can you describe how that would work as a technique and why you think it would be an improvement.

TR: I’m glad you asked that. First of all, when we go out to report stories as journalists, there’s always a hypothesis that we’re trying to find out. It could be as simple as, there was a fire at that warehouse. What happened? How many people died? But often the hypothesis is why did this happen? How much trouble is Trump in at this moment with the conduct of the Iran War?, or What is the capability now of Ukraine to sustain that war? Some of these questions are hard to answer. They may be speculative, but there’s always a hypothesis.

I think being more transparent with our audiences about what the hypothesis is, and why we think the hypothesis is important, is a really important step for several reasons.

What objectivity was supposed to mean

TR: One is a deeper understanding of what some people-- but not me—like to call objectivity. That really has to do with process: What reporting process did you follow to do your story? Is it a process that I can trust? When the concept of objectivity migrated out of social science into journalism, that’s what people had in mind. It wasn’t objectivity of consciousness. It was objectivity of method.

We have a very hard time explaining that to audiences, and even have a hard time inside the field. People confuse objectivity with neutrality, or objectivity of consciousness, with objectivity of process, or objectivity of presentation.

I think starting with the hypothesis that you are trying to pursue opens up several new ways of storytelling. One is that if there is a journalistic method, we can reveal what that method is to audiences. That’s what they do in natural science and social science. Instead we simply write our conclusions in lecture form and offer some evidence, but we don’t say much about how we arrived at that, or even why we asked that question in the first place, or why it’s an important question. It may be the most important step that we could take in journalism to try to rebuild trust with skeptical audiences.

One of the chapters in the book is all about what we can learn from psychology. People are puzzlers. That’s one of the key lessons of psychology. People want to see the evidence for themselves, especially if they’re suspicious or skeptical of the answer.

Empathy and it limits

RT: You end the book with a strong call for greater empathy with a wider range of readers. Are there limits to this? How do we empathize with people whose views are bigoted or who refuse to accept basic facts?

TR: We need more empathy. What do I mean by that? We assume as journalists that people kind of view the world as we do. They think that people should be watched, that power is corrupt, that we should give voice to the less powerful in society. When we’re accused of bias, we often say, “no, I’m just doing my job.” Here’s some wrongdoing that you should know about, or here’s something really weird. Inside newsrooms; those frames are so familiar, they are ingrained assumptions about what will make people interested and what will seem credible.

But if you look more closely, and particularly if you look at things like moral foundational instinct theory, people do not necessarily share these sort of instincts and values that journalists have and that get ingrained in newsrooms.

Instead, we could think how would I write this story for somebody who is very respectful of authority-- which is one of the moral instincts that conservatives tend to lean toward-- or somebody who believes strongly in loyalty, another moral instinct that conservatives lean toward. Is there another way to frame the same story other than “here’s the stupid government; you can never trust them”?

When I was at the American Press Institute, and we did experiments writing stories with slightly different frames but the same facts, we discovered that those stories were credible to a wider range of people, but also more credible to people who were in sympathy with journalistic instincts. Now, are there limits to that? Which is the question that you asked. I think there are. In the book, I say, and I’m mirroring something that Marty Baron said, that 20% of people believe in witches. There’s some number of people who are not going to be reachable by fact-based journalism for various different reasons.

But 80% of the American public is a much bigger number than fact-based journalism is reaching now There is a tendency in the press to be more declarative, to call a lie a lie and a liar a liar, and to speak our personal truth more, to bring more voice. Human psychology research suggests that will alienate more people because it will sound more like we’re preaching. That our fact-based journalism will be tilting more toward opinion journalism. That doesn’t mean that we should be doing a neutral both-sided thing, but it does mean that if you’re going to say this is a lie, you offer the proof. You don’t just offer the declaration.

RT: One of the things you advocate is what you call a civic internet employing AI. Can you briefly just describe what that is? But then the real question I want to ask you is, what’s the business model for it?

TR: The civic internet is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a long time, which is that there’s a lot of data about our communities, everything that states and the federal government collect and often try and hide, to some simple information: How many people are coming to the airport? How many car accidents are happening in cities, and at what locations? This data is the Internet of Civic Life. I think that journalists should see it as an enormous opportunity, and in the public interest.

We often use that data very episodically to do one story, one investigation. We collect it, organize it, try and understand it, do a story, and then we move on. The more that we can see the Internet of Civic Life as a public resource, collate it, collect it, make it understandable, and do so on an ongoing basis, make that data available to people, the more that inclines us toward journalism as a continuing service and conversation with the public. We can lean into that and do stories every month. Here’s the 12 indicators of civic health of our community, and each month we’re going to explore one of them, and also provide you with a database so you can explore them. AI makes the management of that data much easier.

Monetization and audience

TR: How can you monetize it? One of the reasons I think this is an opportunity is that, for the last couple of decades, other people have been monetizing it instead of journalism. Lots of people have gotten rich on this, and these are things that we’ve let slip through our hands.

RT: But why should we think that publishers are going to be able to compete, for instance, with real estate sellers in real estate information, or with
health benefit providers about pharmacy information, or with any other industry about information related to that industry?

TR: I think there are areas that have not been developed. I think our ability to synthesize across categories and create higher level understanding of some things like a civic health index, or for education is an example. Our ability to synthesize data and then publicize that we have it actually exceeds some company that is new to the marketplace and is trying to get awareness for what it’s doing. In my imagining, this is both a B2C business in the sense that we’re providing this to customers, it’s part of a subscription. But there may be a B2B opportunity as well. It supports our fundamental business, which is B2C. It may create, in addition to that, some B2B businesses that we don’t have.

RT: We could talk about this all day, and I really appreciate it. But I’ve got one more question. You talk in the book about getting beyond storytelling, and you provide a number of anecdotal accounts of how this can work. My question is: Is there evidence that these techniques actually yield larger audiences?

TR: There’s evidence when stories are told more effectively, more visually. The New York Times this week did a story about where Trump has increased his wealth, and they did it graphically. It’s so much more effective as a way of narratively conveying that information than words would be. We know from data that it is also more persuasive. People believe information that’s conveyed visually.

There’s also evidence that these stories are way more evergreen, which bring them larger audiences over time. Today, our archives are enormously important and valuable to us because people become interested in something that we have done when it enters their life in some new way. I never read that story about Alzheimer’s until my mother had Alzheimer’s, or I didn’t care about that article on how to stay fit at 55 until I became 55. Now I want to hear about it.

RT: Tom, I really appreciate you taking the time. Good luck with the book.

TR: Thank you.

Leave a comment

The last stumbling block to Rupert Murdoch’s 2007 takeover of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, was agreement on the creation of a Special Committee to ostensibly ensure the editorial independence and integrity of the paper, especially given Murdoch’s penchant for meddling. The members of the Bancroft family, who owned a controlling interest in Dow Jones, proposed a committee with the ability to significantly constrain Murdoch’s management. In the end, as detailed in former Journal reporter Sarah Ellison’s excellent 2010 book, War at The Wall Street Journal, the Bancrofts caved, and Murdoch got a committee with more process than teeth.

I bring up this history because some are starting to suggest that the best solution to safeguarding CNN from Larry and David Ellison is to create an analogous mechanism there. The Journal itself ran a story about this possibility yesterday. This week, by delving into the experience at Dow Jones and the Journal, I want to explain how that could provide false comfort.

Subscribe now

I confess at the outset that this is a bit personal for me. I worked 15 years at Dow Jones and the Journal, ultimately as the newspaper’s assistant publisher, before leaving in 2004, and have worried here about changes in its culture even as I continue to admire much of its reporting.

Three of the five members of the Dow Jones Special Committee have, from the outset, been journalists, and I have been friendly with five of the six people who have filled those seats over the years. So I am not questioning the integrity or good faith of the Committee’s members. But the group had been neutered by design, and at times I think it has behaved naively and too circumspectly.

A history lesson

The history of the Special Committee is not an auspicious one. Under the charter agreed in 2007, the Committee is entitled to approve the hiring and review the firing of top editors at the Journal. But four months after Murdoch’s takeover, he fired managing editor Marcus Brauchli, and didn’t even tell the Committee about it until the day it was publicly announced as a “resignation.” The Committee noted that the agreement didn’t give it jurisdiction over voluntary departures, but said it considered the circumstances of Brauchli’s departure to have “violated the letter and spirit” of its charter, yet was powerless to reinstate him.

It said it was reassured by Brauchli that he believed Murdoch was entitled to his choice of editors. No public reference was made to what Sarah Ellison (no relation to Larry or David) pegs as a $3.5 million severance payment, above and beyond Brauchli’s legal entitlement to $3 million more. It does not appear that the Committee inquired about any such payment.

In light of the Brauchli fiasco, the charter of the Special Committee was amended the next month, including to require that Murdoch’s company not initiate communication with a top editor about their removal “without first notifying and consulting with the Special Committee,” and that such notification had to take place when the company “contemplates such removal.” (The Committee shared the amendment with me, although it has apparently never been published or filed publicly. I have therefore posted it to DocumentCloud.)

The Committee’s sole weapons, under the charter, are 1) to refuse to approve top editorial appointments and 2) to issue public statements, which must be published in the Journal. All four times Murdoch has replaced the top editor, the Committee has approved his choice. The Committee has issued no public statements in the last 15 years, other than those announcing new members.

Members receive $100,000 each per year, plus travel expenses to quarterly meetings in New York. (Meetings during COVID were held remotely.) So, cumulatively, Murdoch has paid members more than $9 million, with the sole original member still on the Committee having personally received more than $1.8 million.

A closer look

And it gets worse if you look closer: Murdoch has, as noted, named four top editors of the Journal over the last 18 years. One, Robert Thomson, had been at the Journal only four months, after having worked for Murdoch elsewhere for more than six years. The next, Gerard Baker, had worked for Murdoch for five years before joining the Journal as deputy editor. The current editor, Emma Tucker, spent 15 years in the Murdoch empire before joining the Journal in its top job. Independence, indeed.

The only exception, Matt Murray, a veteran of the Journal’s ancien regime, was dismissed in 2022, four weeks after his replacement by Tucker was first publicly rumored. Murray was given a one year consultancy, and later moved on to edit the Washington Post. The Special Committee said nothing publicly, even though the company violated the Committee’s amended charter in not telling them about the contemplated switch in editors, as it was obligated to do, prior to the leak. A similar sequence (albeit without a leak) had taken place when Murray replaced Baker, who became a columnist, in 2018; again, the Committee said nothing publicly.

Dow Jones did not respond to a question about the timing around Tucker’s replacement of Murray. Larry Ingrassia, the chair of the Committee told me, “Without getting into all the details of the committee's deliberations and interaction with the company, we fully exercised our power to approve a change in editors- before the changes were made,” in both cases. Unfortunately, that is true only if you consider the changes to have been “made” at the time they were publicly announced, rather than when the editors involved were first informed. Ingrassia continued, “Prior to giving our required approval, in no case did we hear from the departing editor that improper political or business interference from above, which has been the committee's essential focus, was a cause for the change.”

When the legendary David Carr, in late 2009, raised concerns about a tilt from the top in the Journal’s political coverage, the Special Committee had also said nothing. The one significant inquiry we know the Special Committee undertook was in 2011, in the midst of the phone hacking scandal surrounding Murdoch’s UK properties. In a statement published in the Journal, the Committee reassured us all that, “we have found nothing to even hint that the sort of misdeeds alleged in London have somehow crept into Dow Jones.” The one blemish: “We agree [the paper] could have done a better job with a recent story allowing Mr. Murdoch to get his side of the story on the record without tougher questioning. We have discussed this with the involved editors.”

That was the last substantive public statement the Committee has ever made.

More on what the committee says

I asked Ingrassia, a former senior editor at the Journal, the New York Times and the LA Times, if he could cite any influence the Committee has had on the news or editorial operations of the Journal, or on its independence. He replied that, “The committee’s discussions are confidential, so staffers know they can speak freely. It’s worth noting that since the purchase of Dow Jones by News Corp. in late 2007, independent surveys have found that the WSJ remains at or near the top of the news sources that Americans trust most.” Ingrassia cited a YouTube survey that shows modest growth in trust for the Journal from 2022 to 2026; a longer series, from Pew, shows roughly equivalent declines for the Journal from 2014 to 2025, but it’s unquestionably true that the Journal has suffered less than many peers from the declines in trust in the press.

As for the Committee’s practice, it “has reached out to and talked with many different reporters and editors over the years - certainly well over 100,” Ingrassia added. “We inquire about both routine coverage and the most sensitive stories, and have been told they haven’t seen any inappropriate efforts by the business/corporate employees to influence coverage. If they did, they say they would let us know - and the committee would investigate and exercise its prerogative to publish its findings in the WSJ if we determined there was interference.”

Others have told me privately over the years that they believe Murdoch interference is rare but not unknown, most often routed through News Corp. employees of long standing, and most frequently (although not exclusively) occurring on stories concerning News Corp. and its competitors.

Can special committees ever work? Marcus Brauchli told me this:

There may be some benefit to these structures in an era when the people who own big journalism outlets made their fortunes elsewhere, then bought their way into media. Bill Paley got rich in media. David Ellison inherited tech wealth. Paley wasn't above meddling at CBS News, as we all know, but it was his company; he built it. Ellison says he respects what came before him and will protect CBS News's integrity. The risk of a special committee calling out editorial infringements publicly is a guardrail, especially for people who didn't come up in or even build the business. That's not to say they can't jump the guardrail and go down the cliff.

As Brauchli suggests, David Ellison may well have been right last week when he said that the issue in challenges to Paramount’s attempt to take over Warner Brothers Discovery “is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN.” (I would add that the issue extends to his father, whose money he is employing.) Based on the Ellisons’ stewardship to date of CBS News, I have my own doubts. Either way, a group modeled on the Dow Jones Special Committee hardly seems like the way to instill such trust.

Leave a comment

In recent months, Knight Foundation has announced two investments, of $5 million each, in Indiegraf, which offers technical support for news sites, and Village Media, a Canadian local publisher, which said it will be expanding into 15 US communities, beginning in Wisconsin. Both entities are for-profits, and I wanted to know more about what this portends for Knight and the field.

Happily, both Maribel Pérez Wadsworth and Amalie Nash of Knight accepted my request to talk about it. Given that I have been critical of Knight on occasion in the past, I especially appreciated this.

Pérez Wadsworth is president and CEO of Knight, a role she assumed in 2024. She spent more than 26 years at Gannett, rising from reporter at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida to managing editor there, and then 13 years as an executive, ultimately president of Gannett Media and publisher of USA Today. Nash is VP/Journalism of Knight, which she joined a year ago. She came to Knight after stints at the International News Media Association and the National Trust for Local News. She is also a veteran of Gannett, where she spent 12 years, ultimately as SVP of local news and audience development for the USA Today Network. She had previously been executive editor of the Des Moines Register and assistant managing editor of the Detroit Free Press. Our conversation, which occurred earlier this week, has been edited for length and clarity.

Subscribe now

RT: Thank you very much for doing this.

Knight has recently invested $5 million in each of Indiegraf and Village Media, both of which are for-profits. How do you all think about making investments in companies like that?

MPW: The overarching philosophy for us at Knight is to make sure that we are taking a very diverse and comprehensive view of the whole ecosystem. We feel a great urgency toward finding lasting solutions and sustainable business models for local journalism in particular, and that means that while a lot of our grant making would fall along more traditional lines, and particularly in the nonprofit area, we look at investments like Village Media and Indiegraf on the for-profit side as another really important piece of the puzzle toward finding those long-term solutions.

Toward local ownership

RT: These are investments in for-profits. Do you intend them ultimately to make money? That is, would you expect to eventually sell them at a profit?

MPW: Let’s talk about Village. What we’ve done there is take a 50% equity stake in the individual local structures that Village is setting up, to start in each of these three states [including Pennsylvania and Illinois]. Our hope is that we will ultimately be in a position, with the markets thriving, stable and profitable, that we would be able to sell our stake into local hands. We believe in the value of that local ownership, and so would love to see that.

We’re not necessarily looking at this as a means to make a profit for Knight, but definitely to be able to ultimately recapture that capital, reinvest it, ideally into additional markets, and certainly to bring local ownership to the operation.

RT: Does that mean that you all, as opposed to Village, would have some say over who the buyers would be locally?

MPW: I think it would be important for us to collaborate on that. The buyer or buyers looking at investing in Knight’s stake in these operations would still be in partnership with Village, and Village has been successful because they have a good formula, they know what works, they bring a lot of operating experience to the table, so I think it would certainly be important that we arrive at that collaboratively. But yes, of course, we’ll have a say in who, and particularly that it be someone that is local.

RT: When you say, Maribel, that you would envision reinvesting if you got your money out through a local buyer, would you anticipate reinvesting it in further Village properties or just in other Knight grants?

MPW: I think either is possible. At the moment, we’re just getting started, but feeling very positive, having high conviction in what Village has already demonstrated in the markets where they’ve operated across Canada. I think in an ideal scenario, we would see them be equally successful in the States, and be in a position to help invest in further expansion of that model here.

RT: At Indiegraf, I know that you have a member of your staff on their board. How does he balance his fiduciary duty to their shareholders with his work for you? And do you envision taking more such board seats?

MPW: We sit on any number of boards. Across our grantees, we think that’s helpful to be close to the business and how it’s performing. One of the things that Knight deeply cares about is learning alongside our grantees, making sure that we are deeply understanding the strategies and tactics that are showing progress and promise, because we can then use that knowledge to help inform how we think about other investments. We also care deeply about these organizations on their own being financially strong and doing well by their stakeholders. [Knight’s director of communications later clarified that the Knight staff member is a board observer at Indiegraf and “has no fiduciary responsibility or voting authority on board decisions.”]

RT: Do you have seats on other for-profit boards in the journalism space?

MPW: Amalie, you might need to help me with that, because I don’t want to miss something.

AN: I don’t think for-profit. I’m on the [American Journalism Project] board, you’re on the [Report for America] board, but I can’t think of one specifically that would be for- profit. We will have board observer seats at Village Media on their national board, and Duc [Luu, Knight’s director of business sustainability grantmaking] and I are serving on the initial board of the Wisconsin operation that’s being set up.

RT: So Wisconsin will be a separate for-profit corporation that’ll be a subsidiary of Village, but with your ownership as well?

AN: Correct. They’re setting up three separate ones for the three states that they will be in.

Competitive concerns

RT: When you invest in a for-profit, where does that leave you vis-a-vis other grantees or potential grantees with whom that for-profit may be competing, such as, for instance, Newspack or Blue Lena with Indiegraf or Wisconsin Watch with Village?

MPW: A lot of these that you’re naming are our grantees, and again, we take a very holistic view of the field. We think it’s really important to be investing in all of the players that are showing effective strategies, that are bringing new ideas to the table, that can help strengthen the overall business models for journalism. So we see this as part of a very holistic, comprehensive strategy that is meant to not exclude any viable player or viable solutions from this big, urgent challenge that we all feel.

RT: So, if I’m running a nonprofit that is competing with a for-profit in which you have an investment, I shouldn’t be concerned about that?

MPW: I would hope that’s not a cause for concern. I think that, if anything, we should feel it’s frankly a confidence boost-- that journalism still can be a profit-making business. That’s how I would look at it.

Looking ahead

RT: Do you anticipate more for-profit investments in news companies anytime soon?

MPW: We are always scanning and in conversations with a lot of key players across the system. It was only in the last couple of years that we created an expansion fund that does include some for-profit investments in established legacy companies that were looking to expand their offerings and/or expand their coverage areas. The [$900,000 2025 grant to the] Post and Courier in the Carolinas is one good example of that. So while there’s nothing imminent in that regard, it’s always a possibility.

RT: I know that resources are always constrained for any foundation. Do these two recent significant commitments to for-profits, notwithstanding what you’ve said about an ecosystem approach, indicate some loss of faith in the nonprofit model?

MPW: Oh, absolutely not! The majority of our investments are still across the nonprofit landscape. In our doubling down of our commitments to journalism, we’ve done $300 million to the field [in the three most recent fiscal years], the vast majority of which has been to nonprofits. So in no way should what is still a relatively small number of for-profit investments be seen as anything other than that. We do not want to exclude any part of the field where solutions can be found to strengthen and sustain local journalism, but we are still deeply committed, as we always have been, and as our funding shows, to the entire sector.

AN: If I can just jump in for one second, Knight has a long history of helping different elements of the sector. One of the ways that I got to know Knight Foundation was many years ago during the Table Stakes program. When Jennifer Preston was the VP, Knight created this Table Stakes program to do transformation among newsrooms. It was right after Gannett had acquired Journal Media Group, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (a for-profit part of Gannett) was one of the first major metros in that program. So certainly there is a long history there of working with different sorts of models and helping with business sustainability and transformation initiatives over the years.

RT: Anything you wish I had asked in this area, or that you’d like to say, bearing on this?

MPW: I don’t think so. I appreciate the interest in these investments and in the work that Knight is doing. We’re proud of the work that we’ve been doing, but more specifically, we feel a lot of gratitude to be in real partnership with our grantees and optimistic about ultimately finding these lasting solutions we’re all seeking.

RT: Amalie?

AN: I would also just note that we’ve known Jeff [Elgie, the CEO] and Village Media for quite some time. He’s been very involved in the American media ecosystem. I first met him at Newsgeist many years ago. He’s someone who has been very active in the International News Media Association. Maribel is on the board of that; I worked for that previously. So the mission alignment that we’ve had with Village and with Jeff goes back a fair bit, and for us that certainly gives us a stronger comfort level; this is not an unknown entity. This isn’t someone who’s just come on our radar. We’ve looked very closely at the business plans and the pillars. I’ve seen the CMS, I’ve kicked it around. I’ve looked at the SPACES program that they created, the Cares program. We believe in the business strategy. It was more than simply having a replicable model, it was having a real leader and a company that we could believe in as part of it, and so it made a lot of sense for us.

RT: Anything you’d like to say about Indiegraf as well, since they are clearly one of the subjects we’re discussing?

AN: I got to know Indiegraf when I was with the National Trust for Local News, and they provided the CMS for the Georgia Trust for Local News. They’ve proven to be really innovative. Their leaders, Erin [Millar] and her sister Caitlin [Havlak], are both extremely strong. They’ve gone through a couple of acquisitions recently of Hearken and Stylebot. They’re acquiring RevEngine from News Revenue Hub. I think they’re really thinking about the full ecosystem and where they fit in and how to meet the needs of their customers. I’ve found them to be very collaborative, very innovative, and very much thinking about the customer at the center of their business and what they need. So for us, that one also feels like a real partnership.

RT: Great, thank you both very much. I really appreciate it.

MPW: Of course, thanks. Anytime.

Leave a comment

You can read a lot these days about how the emergence of AI and especially the changes in search are triggering declines in the audience for news. While that’s a very real problem, I sense that there’s a pervasive feeling among publishers of a deeper, much quieter crisis in the audience for news that people are reluctant to discuss, and that’s therefore receiving much less attention, and precious little careful thought. This week I want to try to say what I can about it.

Subscribe now

The search/AI story is, I think, relatively straightforward. It is affecting peripheral, lower value traffic the most, and, in the aggregate, hitting hardest those publishers for whom such traffic was a larger part of their offering. That is more of a business problem for publishers, candidly, than it is a larger loss for society. Cheap, commoditized traffic was hardly the cornerstone of democracy.

To be sure, if the transformation of search eventually bleeds into most people getting news directly from a chat bot or agent, that could pose a much more fundamental problem. But I continue to think it’s way too soon to be confident that’s where we are headed.

To the extent that publishers today are being driven back to the core of the communities they have created, that might, eventually, even be a valuable trend, compelling them to focus on those communities, and how else they might serve them. I worry quite a lot, however, that so far we talk about this more than we do it.

Along similar lines, I think the industry right now is spending far too much effort trying to devise new cheap tricks to replace the old cheap traffic we have lost. That means things like new paid social campaigns and clever techniques for maxxing out on Reddit or TikTok. It’s a tactical approach to a strategic problem, and, at best, offers short-term stopgaps that only forestall a longer trend.

Not just AI and search

As I said at the outset, I also don’t think the problems here are limited to changes in search or to the impact of AI more broadly.

Every time someone subscribes to this newsletter, I get an email from Substack, which provides a nice little dopamine hit for me. Of greater interest, many of these emails also tell me how many other Substacks the new Second Rough Draft subscriber receives. Recently, I took a look at a week’s worth of these emails, and found the following: One out of every six of those new subscribers gets more than 50 other Substacks (one person gets 412!). More tellingly, the median new subscriber gets 20. (I get 10.)

Part of what’s going on here is that people are simply putting too much food on their information plates. When you do that, you “eat” a smaller proportion, which, from a publisher’s perspective, translates into falling open rates and less consumption from the average reader. Along the same lines, therefore, was the recent Atlantic article decrying the “end of reading” (especially of books and things like serious articles in the Atlantic) which along the way noted that we are, on average, actually reading more words than ever before.

The proper response to that trend is a tricky mix. To the extent what is being lost is more of the casual and unengaged traffic also implicated in the problems around search, part of what we need to do is to relax. These were never the readers that were going to sustain newsrooms, and while the advertising implications of their loss will be unavoidably negative, I have long believed that advertising will continue to decline as a source of support for news.

On the other hand, any loss of previously engaged readers should be of much greater concern. Here, one critical response is to redouble efforts to make content more distinctive. Another is to find ways to build or deepen ties to your community of readers, whether that is a locale or a community of interest. As I suggested above, while we talk about that a lot these days, I worry that the hard and innovative work of doing it is many times falling through the cracks.

More fried, still frozen

In particular, the phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago of newsrooms too stressed to think clearly and so overburdened as to become paralyzed when they should be activated—being, in the evocative phrase from Laura Frank of COLab, “fried and frozen”-- appears to me to be both widening and deepening.

All of this is occurring in the context of many news sites never having achieved the audience size to which they and their funders initially aspired. While funder pressure to demonstrate results in these cases seems to have eased somewhat compared to a few years ago, I do worry that it could resume, especially when there is an economic downturn and hard choices about funding become even more widespread.

I know these are difficult problems, and it feels like the vibes in newsrooms, and especially among newsroom leaders, are darkening somewhat. I hope we can be more open and honest with each other in talking about this. If you’re in a position to do so, I especially welcome reactions in the comments this week, or even privately by email, about issues of audience—what you are seeing, and what might be done about it.

Leave a comment

One strand of investigative journalism that has long fascinated me is what has come to be called algorithmic accountability. Stories in this realm have uncovered bias in all sorts of platforms and systems, affecting such crucial areas as criminal justice, with inequities in probation, improper healthcare insurance denials and racial discrimination in housing. This field has existed for years, but it is becoming even more critical with the rise of generative AI, and this week I want to talk about biases of a different sort I see becoming apparent in the AI models which are assuming such influence in our society.

Subscribe now

One of my favorite colleagues used to say that news is what happens to an editor, and while I am not an editor, I want to start with two experiences I had recently that seem to me both significant, and troubling in what they suggest.

Adventures in AI illustration

Both involve my use of AI to create illustrations for this column. I use AI for this purpose most weeks because I have no budget to hire an illustrator, no talent for illustration myself and because most often the ideas discussed here are a bit too abstract for the use of stock images.

A couple of months ago, I sought to create a photo gallery of four congressional candidates, and instructed the machine to source these from the candidates’ own websites. To my surprise, the initial result did this with two of the candidates, but, in place of the other two, created photo-like generic images of “people” who looked a good bit like the candidates but were not.

When I noted the error and asked why it had done this, the model readily confessed its mistake, but, when you cut through the verbiage, indicated that the generics had been substituted to conserve what AI professionals call “compute,” expensive processing power. In other words, it hoped I would be satisfied with a cheaper version (for the AI firm) of what I had requested even though it was wrong—and even though the model did not volunteer that it had disobeyed my instructions and knowingly delivered an inaccurate result.

Earlier this month, I sought to create an image for the column on the future of CBS News and CNN under the aegis of Paramount that included the iconic logos of both networks. Multiple models refused to do this. Having practiced law in this realm for more than two decades, I pushed back, noting this was a classic “fair use” under the copyright statute. Here’s what ChatGPT said in response:

“your request was unusually defensible. It wasn’t asking for counterfeit branding or commercial advertising. It was for an editorial illustration accompanying a column about the relationship between CBS and CNN. That’s a context in which human illustrators and publications often make use of recognizable visual references….

“Your request is exactly the sort of editorial illustration that has a long tradition in journalism, but I don’t have the ability to exempt it from the image system’s automated safeguards.”

Beyond irony

That might even sound a bit noble—OpenAI, the purveyor of ChatGPT, has higher standards even than required by law in protecting other people’s intellectual property. Except, of course, that the central proposed defense of OpenAI and the other platforms in their current threat to much of the news business is that they are engaged in fair use.

That is, OpenAI refuses to let its own customers express themselves employing as a shield a legal right it itself wields as a powerful sword. The apparent reasons: they seek to curry favor with other big companies (corporate customers) and don’t want to run even minimal risks just to vindicate individual customers. I asked OpenAI to comment. They offered a background conversation with a senior executive, but declined any comment on the record, so I passed on the backgrounder.

The bottom line is the bottom line

There is a common thread in these two incidents, and it is that the AI platforms have perhaps the most troubling possible algorithmic bias. They are biased in favor of their own profitability.

Profit trumps accuracy. Profit trumps initial candor in dispensing inaccuracy. Profit trumps the expressive rights of customers. Profit compels rolling over the legal rights of publishers. The highest value of some of the most valuable companies on the planet appears to be accumulating the largest pile of money in the history of business.

This obviously matters enormously for society, but my focus is journalism, for which I think it matters especially. Journalists need to understand in their use of AI models that the results can be enormously useful, but that this may not hold true if the economic interests of the AI companies dictate otherwise. It will require great care to insure that we are not settling for, and publishing, responses that are “good enough,” which may sometimes mean invisibly wrong but cheaper to provide.

We will also need to better understand what policies the platforms are actually employing, and to inform both our conduct and our audiences regarding how those policies may be at variance with not only societal values but the even companies’ own rhetoric. (The stated mission of OpenAI is to “benefit all humanity.”) This will be especially tricky because the AI platforms, like the search and social media companies before them, are offering increasing funding for journalism, no doubt at least in part to soften their images. In other words, algorithmic accountability is work growing more urgent every day.

Leave a comment

The subpoenas to reporters for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times in recent weeks seeking to identify the sources of important national security stories have received a lot of attention. But I think what’s going on here is not quite what you’ve been told, either by the Trump Administration or even by aggrieved journalists. This week I want to try to explain why.

Subscribe now

Let’s start with the facts, insofar as we know them. Two sets of stories seem to be involved: first, articles detailing the influence of the government of Israel in convincing Trump, over the objections of officials ranging from the Vice President to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Director of the CIA, to launch his misbegotten war of choice on Iran, and more recently, pieces reporting the apparent security deficiencies, even after hundreds of millions of dollars in retrofitting borne by American taxpayers, in the airplane given to Trump by the Emir of Qatar to serve as a new, fancier Air Force One. Both sets of stories were profoundly embarrassing to Trump; both seem to be true.

The stories revealed information that, we should acknowledge, is properly classified. Any president should be able to consult with other nations and to deliberate on the use of force in secret—although very few get to do so in practice, as all presidents understand. And the defensive measures incorporated into Air Force One—the old one made to specs by Boeing and the new one apparently rushed through a partial retrofitting after the Qatari gift—are the sorts of things the government is entitled to try to keep from our adversaries.

Consider the motives, while noting the facts

So I am not going to defend the legal position of the leakers here, and I don’t think you should either. That said, once officials decide to leak, for reasons of their own, it is emphatically not the job of the press to refuse the information they are offering. Voters are entitled to know that Netanyahu seems to have hornswoggled Trump into a disastrous war, and the fact that Trump was impatient to fly on a plane because he liked its larger size, greater gilding and fancy couches, even though short-cuts had been taken with his safety and that of the hundreds of others who might be aboard, is further important evidence of his seemingly boundless recklessness.

The stories revealing this were published only after the war had begun, and only after Trump was convinced not to use the plane on a flight from Ankara to Britain, but then insisted on using it to fly home. The airplane stories did not reveal any details of the security shortcomings, repeating only previously-published information on the capabilities of the older plane. Those capabilities are so not-secret that they were dramatically depicted in a Harrison Ford movie almost 30 years ago (see clip below).

While the FBI asked the New York Times not to publish the story about the Qatari plane, it did not say why. I have been privy to a number of such requests from the government to the press over the years, some of which were granted, others refused; in no such cases did the government refuse to provide a reason.

This isn’t a real hunt for leakers

The earlier subpoenas to the Journal and the Post were withdrawn in the face of litigation, and my guess is that those now to the Times eventually will be as well. Why? Because the government doesn’t really want to find these leakers. They are likely highly placed, and quite possibly acting out of desperation brought on by Trump’s insulation from unpleasant facts. (See Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s excellent Regime Change for a devastating account of how pervasive this has become.) The Times filed papers yesterday to quash the latest subpoenas.

Seen in this light, all of these recent subpoenas are not the would-be aggressions that are often depicted by both sides, so much as they are reflections of weakness and internal division. For instance, leaders of the Secret Service, having convinced Trump not to fly in the Qatari plane near Iran, but not having overcome his insistence on taking it trans-Atlantic, may have sought through publicity to foreclose future international flights until retrofitting is complete. In the case of the decisions to go foolishly to war, some of the leading dissenters may have wanted to establish a record of their own sagacity, or to shift blame from Trump himself to the Israelis. In almost all leaks, if you want to know the source, ask who benefits.

On the other side of the equation, seeking to bring the weight of government down on smaller and less well-resourced news organizations can actually be intimidating, and raises much greater dangers. But in my observation and experience, trying this with newsrooms like the Journal, Post and Times only provokes and emboldens them, rallying their staff and many of their readers. Even Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos have gone along with the resistance. This phenomenon is one of the most enduring lessons of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate under Nixon, and it amazes me how many people in White Houses in the decades since have failed to learn it.

The law and these cases

Finally, let’s look at the law in these situations. Trump’s Department of Justice folded in the face of challenges from the Journal and the Post because they knew they were going to lose in court. That’s not because the law protects leakers of classified information—mostly it doesn’t—but because, once again, the Trump team’s impatience, sloppiness and transparent bad faith make them their own worst enemies in litigation.

In 1972, the Supreme Court denied that there was a constitutional privilege protecting reporters’ sources in criminal cases. Because the Court was closely divided and issued a confusing set of opinions, lower courts in the following 34 years had significantly eroded that ruling, to the benefit of reporters. But in 2006, in cases involving Judy Miller of the New York Times and two reporters from Time Magazine, all that came undone. Miller served 85 days in jail rather than reveal her source. The leak investigation ultimately deprived the George W. Bush administration of the vice president’s chief of staff and the deputy secretary of state. No administration appears to have launched a real leak investigation at that level in the decades since then.

If the government does launch a serious investigation of an important leak of legitimately classified information, and establishes that it requires a reporter’s limited testimony against a potential defendant leaker, they will quite likely prevail.

But that is not the Trump modus operandi.

The epitome of bad faith

Even in the 1972 case, the Supreme Court noted that a bad faith subpoena for a reporter’s sources could be met with a constitutional defense. Bush’s Justice Department in the Judy Miller case said it agreed. Now Trump and his lackeys at the FBI and US Attorney’s office in New York have managed to create an almost perfect record of what proceeding in bad faith means.

How can we know that, given that bad faith is a subjective test, placing us in the mind of the procurer of the subpoena? The first story on the security lapses in the Qatari airplane was published last Wednesday. The subpoenas were served on three Times reporters on Friday. (Subpoenas apparently prepared for two other Times reporters remain unserved.) Clearly, little or no investigation of the leakers intervened. Instead, the President had yet another temper tantrum and his sycophantic FBI director leapt into the fray. (We learn this from yet more leaks. The subpoenas are not deterring high-ranking leakers, presumably because they know the effort is unserious.)

It is quite possible that the very first actions of the Manhattan grand jury considering the Qatari plane leak were to authorize the subpoenas. All you need to know, by way of contrast, is that the subpoenas to the Time Magazine reporters two decades ago came four months after a special prosecutor convened a grand jury, while that to Miller came after six months.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here: Trump’s subpoenas are an abuse of power, and legally specious. They are a disgrace. If such an effort were being directed against more vulnerable targets, our concern should be much greater. If the government was run by more serious people in a more serious way, they would be threatening to our freedoms as citizens.

As it is, it may be that some sources, especially of lower rank, aware of other failings of government, are being deterred from telling the public things it needs to know, which is a loss for us all. But as things stand, these particular subpoenas just aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.

Leave a comment

.

It is very likely that CBS and CNN will soon be under the common ownership of Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount. Given the inept way the Ellisons (David’s management, father Larry’s money) have run CBS News since they acquired it 11 months ago, that’s probably bad news for both organizations, a subject on which many words have been written. This week, rather than add to that spillage, I want to talk about how such an association ought to be managed. I think there’s a lot that can be learned about news brands and news positioning from such a thought experiment.

Subscribe now

I hope you didn’t recoil from the word “brands” in the previous sentence. It should be the key to managing such a combination.

Managing multiple brands

When you control two established brands in the same space, their coordinated deployment is key. And it makes a big difference if the brands are products or services. If they are big-ticket products, that is, if consumers are unlikely to purchase both, the different brands can, up to a point, be left to contend with each other. The management of General Motors (Chevy, Buick, GMC and Cadillac, and formerly Olds and Pontiac) in its 20^th Century heyday and more recent modest renaissance is the classic example.

But if the brands are services and can be consumed almost simultaneously and nearly interchangeably, it makes much more sense for the common owner to see that they are substantially differentiated. How should this be applied to CBS News and CNN?

In the eye of CBS News

You wouldn’t know it from its management under Bari Weiss, a TV and hard news neophyte, but the heart of the CBS News brand is—or should be—accountability reporting and context and sense-making. On accountability, at least until recently, 60 Minutes included almost the only investigative reporting left on commercial television. Neither ABC, NBC nor Fox have anything serious in this realm. The failure to revive CBS News Reports from the 1960s as programming tastes shifted has long been a mistake in my view. The legacy of the CBS Evening News, under Walter Cronkite and the first two decades of Dan Rather, was of providing an authoritative aggregation of the news of the day, delivered with accuracy and fairness.

An important digression: Weiss misunderstands this, perhaps having been taken in by Roger Ailes’s clever but dishonest presentation of Fox News—a response to late Rather and more recent MSNBC and ultimately CNN—as “fair and balanced.” News is supposed to be fair, and accurate. Balance is an option for opinion journalism, the field in which Weiss does have experience.

Coming on top of accuracy and fairness, however, balance adds nothing to news reporting. In the news realm, balance that comes on top of fairness is what we have come to deride as “false equivalence.” (And—a column for another day—I think balance is a false goal for opinion journalism, where the strongest players, such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page, don’t even pretend to it. If you want a balance of opinion, consult multiple sources.)

This is CNN

The distillation of the CNN brand is quite different from that of CBS News. The heart of CNN remains breaking news—not the omnipresent, devaluing chyrons to that effect, but the real thing, stories with genuine salience for large audiences. Next, CNN is fundamentally more international, the most global of the video-centric US newsrooms. CNN has more than twice as many international bureaus as CBS, ABC or NBC, and more than five times as many as Fox.

CNN is also more digitally-oriented than almost all news brands. It has well more than twice as many YouTube subscribers as CBS, and substantially more than NBC or Fox, with ABC a close peer. The comparisons are largely similar on TikTok. CNN’s YouTube subscribers are more than twice those of MSNow, three times greater than those of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, more than five times that of the Washington Post, six times larger than the Associated Press.

How it might work

If you start with those strengths and characteristics, and have control of both brands, how should you manage them? Essentially, the idea would be to accentuate (invest in) their strengths, and cross-promote in a way that shores up weaknesses. On true breaking news—a natural or technological disaster, the outbreak of war, an assassination, some planned event of genuine mass interest—CBS should probably just take the CNN feed, and perhaps contribute leading analysts if it has any on staff. CBS News investigative reports, should the network continue to have the integrity and courage to produce any, should be featured heavily on CNN, as should CBS’s explanatory capabilities.

To the extent that each of the two networks has assets in each other’s core capacities, these might be realigned, for instance by shifting and increasing the regular analytical work of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Fareed Zakaria and John King (other than on election nights) from CNN to CBS. It is some measure of how much CBS News has been weakened in recent years that I have a hard time conjuring examples of talent that could be shifted in the opposite direction.

CBS News suffered earlier in this century from not having the sort of cable outlet and capabilities of NBC, although the rise of streaming has made the advantages of pairing linear and cable much less significant. Even so, someone of vision controlling both CNN and CBS would do well to look at how ABC Sports and ESPN, long under common ownership, have been increasingly and seamlessly integrated.

All of this, of course, is happening as technology continues to shift, the linear TV audience continues to age, mobile video continues to proliferate, perhaps as AI changes news habits altogether. Managing CBS News and CNN together was an idea Ted Turner toyed with more than 40 years ago. It wouldn’t have been easy for him then, and certainly won’t be easy for the far less visionary Ellison and Weiss now. But I do hope it’s something some thoughtful people at these important newsrooms are approaching creatively today, and not just in the derivative and ideologically-driven ways they appear to be.

Leave a comment

Rather than a regular column, this week I want to provide an update on the plan, announced in early April, to create a paid subscription option for this newsletter and to donate almost all of the net proceeds to nonprofit journalism before year-end. Key to this: the recipients —no more than four of them—will be limited to orgs nominated by readers.

The bottom line is that we’ve already raised about $7400 for this fund, and I hope it may approach $10,000 by year’s end. There are more than 170 active paid subscribers right now, and you are more than welcome to join them if you like. I’m also happy to report that free subscriptions, which receive the same content and which will always be possible, have increased by more than 450, more than 6%, to nearly 8300 since the paid option was added. In the interest of transparency, I should also say that open rates have declined into the mid-forties and that average readership each week seems to be down about 15%. Unfortunately, that seems not unusual these days.

Subscribe now

Whether or not you can contribute or want to, I hope you’ll participate in the conversation about where the money should go. You can nominate recipients, or discuss those others have nominated, in the comments on the April column, or in the comments this week below. I’ll also solicit contributions and nominations twice more this fall.

You’re also welcome to comment more generally on how the money should be directed. Some have already suggested that such donations, necessarily not huge, should be sent to smaller orgs where they might make a larger difference. I hear that, but also know from experience how much of a difference smaller contributions, in the aggregate, can make to larger entities. I’d be very interested in hearing more perspectives on this debate.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to know about the potential recipient orgs. There have been 37 nominations so far, and they can be broken down into the following groups:

Local newsrooms (19): The 51^st, Abridged.org (KVIE), Alabama Reflector (States Newsroom), Arizona Luminaria, Baltimore Beat, the Beacon, Buffalo’s Fire, Fresnoland, Kansas City Defender, LA Taco, Lookout (Arizona), Louisiana Weekly, Mat-Su Sentinel, Minnesota Reformer (States Newsroom), MLK50, Open Vallejo, Shasta Scout, Streetsblog, WORT-FM.

National newsrooms (10): Borderless, City Bureau, The Conversation US, Guardian US, Haitian Times, Marshall Project, NewsHour, NPR, Prison Journalism Project, Rewire News Group.

Intermediaries (6): Institute for Rural Journalism, Lenfest Institute, NewsMatch, PBS, Student Press Law Center, Trans Journalist Association.

Education (1): CUNY Newmark School.

International (1): Kyiv Independent (via the King Baudouin Foundation).

That’s a great start, but more nominations are welcome.

A thought on the Fourth

Before I go for this week, just a word about the holiday we are about to celebrate. What I will be thinking about on Saturday will be not so much what happened 250 years ago, remarkable as that was, but what occurred 50 years later. This year, the Fourth will mark exactly two centuries since the two leading members of the small group charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence died, just hours but more than 500 miles apart at a time when the fastest mode of transport was by horse.

The fact that the lives of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson— colleagues, friends, adversaries—ended almost simultaneously and precisely a half century after their greatest achievement has always seemed to me a powerful suggestion that a higher power exists, and that it may occasionally guide our nation.

Whether or not you agree, let us together hope that is so. We could surely use the help. Happy Independence Day to you and your loved ones.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

On March 12, less than two weeks into the war on Iran, the Wall Street Journal headlined a Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could reach $150 per barrel if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed on April 1. This followed an AP story to the same effect the previous day, citing an analyst report from Wood MacKenzie. Two weeks later, The Times of London cited a JP Morgan prediction of $150 oil if the Strait was not opened by May 1. The same day that story appeared, a similar UBS report was featured by MarketWatch.

In the event, the highest wartime daily close for oil was $115 in late April, even though, under Trump’s deal with Iran, the Strait may not be fully open until July 17, or even later. Yesterday, oil prices fell to nearly pre-war levels, while Strait traffic remained quite limited. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS and others all got it wrong. And the press amplified their errant calls, badly serving readers. This week I want to talk about what the journalism business might learn from this episode.

What they missed

Let’s start in the world of oil, where a number of solid stories have appeared on what the analysts mistook. There’s this one from Barron’s from early this month, and this one (gift link) from the Wall Street Journal a week later. The Barron’s piece, almost humorously, can be summed up by saying supply turned out to be higher and demand lower than analysts had expected. Of course, predicting supply and demand is analysts’ most basic job.

The Journal piece is more nuanced (and worth reading if you find the substance here interesting), but largely to the same effect, including noting the impact of drawdowns from strategic petroleum reserves. But that should hardly have been unexpected: I remember a graduate school exam question more than 45 years ago that focused on calculating the optimal use of such reserves to confront an oil shock.

What we had here was a failure of expertise, compounded by a failure of journalism in amplifying it.

Lots of people have heard screenwriter William Goldman’s Hollywood motto, “Nobody knows anything” (sometimes more colorfully attributed to Sam Goldwyn, the “G” in MGM, as “Nobody knows nuthin’”). This latest adventure should remind us all that, while that isn’t literally true, its applicability ranges widely.

Where does that leave reporters and editors? There seem to me to be a number of lessons:

Beware interested parties, and herd effects. The first prominent warning of $150 wartime oil prices came not from a financial firm but from the energy minister of Qatar, who made it in an interview with the Financial Times just a week into the war. He asserted this could “bring down the economies of the world.” Of course, the Qataris weren’t disinterested observers of the conflict. They had tried to mediate before war broke out, felt caught in the middle, and were, when the minister sounded his alarm, worried about just the sort of attacks on their own infrastructure that soon followed. Journalists, knowing this, would tend to discount a prediction from such a source. But they needed to go father, and to guard against putting more credibility in the same prediction when it was echoed by others.

Resist the temptation of the outlier. This case also serves as another reminder of a truism in our business: that the most dramatic story is not always—and may even rarely be—the smartest one. In the first hours and days, the undeniable facts of the war were plenty dramatic: the killing of many key Iranian leaders, the closing of the Strait, the bombast from US leaders and their apparent manipulation by the Israelis. But as initial headlines fade in a crisis, journalists need to guard against the peril of becoming adrenaline junkies, latching on to the next claim of even more drama ahead, and the next after that. Gasoline going from under three dollars a gallon to over four almost overnight, and the impact on the lives of millions, is a huge story; it should not be necessary to breathlessly anticipate five dollars.

Have the courage to revisit your own coverage. One of the ways to take care in this regard is to follow the bouncing ball of what you have been reporting. When the predictions of $150 per barrel by April 1 failed to come even close to materializing, the same predictions for May 1 should have been received with greater skepticism.

Reporters have generally figured out that Trump is always saying things are “two weeks away,” and have gotten better at discounting his musings along those lines. The same lesson needs to be applied to other actors as well. Beyond this, a degree of self-criticism is in order; it might even boost our collective credibility if more stories noted how previous predictions we shared have failed to eventuate.

Keep score for next time. Finally, as I have said before with respect to politicians who come on live TV shows and lie, there needs to be a degree of accountability for sources whose mistakes we have amplified. To be sure, there is an important moral distinction between a lying politician and an errant analyst, but neither serve readers, listeners or viewers well. Neither need to be afforded our platforms as easily or as often.

One non-lesson that may surprise you. It’s become fashionable in journalism to decry coverage that is predictive rather than covering things as-they-are. I share that critique when it comes to partisan politics. What much of political coverage fails to grasp is that what is most significant for readers is not who is likely to win an election at any given moment but rather what is at stake.

Beyond politics, however, I am less persuaded. In sports, and in business, readers are looking mostly for reporting that yields an intelligent guide to future events; the basic facts of what has just happened is the stuff of commodity news. My own journalism hero, Barney Kilgore, felt that one of the highest purposes of journalism generally was to prepare its consumers for tomorrow. The problem with all those stories of $150 oil wasn’t that they were asking the wrong question, it was that they were offering the wrong answer.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Craig Newmark and Craigslist didn’t kill newspapers, or even classified advertising in print. Newspaper publishers did that, being too late to recognize the threat from digital and too clumsy when they finally did. But Newmark made a lot of money off the transition (although if he hadn’t someone else would have). So he gets more than occasionally blamed for it. A mild-mannered guy, he often becomes testy when accused of having hurt the news business, and thus undermined journalism.

Whether or not responding to that was part of his motivation (he insists not), he has devoted many millions of his gains to bolstering the new news, including giving enough to have the City University of New York’s journalism school named after him, as well as supporting lots of newsrooms and related efforts. Even as most of his philanthropy has more recently moved on to cybersecurity and veterans (and pigeons), journalism in this century has been lucky to have him on its side.

Who we need

This story, familiar to many of you, feels worth recounting just now, because, as AI destroys search traffic and perhaps much more, we are going to need some AI Craig Newmarks. The key trends right now in journalism philanthropy seem to me to be that legacy institutional foundations are retreating a bit from the high water mark of the debut of Press Forward three years ago, while more major donors (wealthy individuals) emerge, although not at sufficient pace to lift, or even float, all the nonprofit boats.

At the same time, however, as the SpaceX IPO and the teeing up of the same by Anthropic and OpenAI dramatically illustrate, an enormous wave of new wealth is about to wash over America, and with it, undoubtedly, a new wave of philanthropy. The OpenAI Foundation alone owns more than a quarter of that company, which could easily throw off more than $11 billion annually in legally-required charitable spending. That’s about one and half times what MacKenzie Scott gave away last year, and will make the OpenAI Foundation more than twice the size of the Gates Foundation, previously the world’s largest philanthropy.

Neither Scott nor Gates have given all that much to American newsrooms—neither, for instance, has matched Newmark in this regard. So our specific expectations for the OpenAI Foundation should be modest, at least until otherwise demonstrated. But the new wealth hardly stops there. Last week’s SpaceX IPO alone left more than 400 people with holdings exceeding $100 million each, and the three IPOs combined are set to yield 20 new billionaires. The seven founders of Anthropic have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, which collectively roughly equates to the current assets of the Gates Foundation. Unsolicited gifts of $100,000 or more from employees of these firms are starting to land in nonprofit mailboxes, including those of newsrooms. There will be much more, one hopes, once the platforms are public.

Follow the money

What can we say about where in journalism this funding might go? Some of it, you would expect, might end up fueling efforts at accountability for AI itself, not only directly to investigative shops, nationally and perhaps also locally, but to and through focused efforts mounted by places like the Tarbell Center (where I am an adviser).

If the past is any guide—and in this respect it will almost surely be—the philanthropic passions fueled by AI won’t all be related to the origin of the funds. Some will end up supporting initiatives in healthcare, climate change and other fields, and some of those funders will recognize, as others have, that journalism funding can and should play a role in any broad effort to better inform or shape the views of the public. Some of the money will surely aid local communities, which could be especially critical to local journalism in California and Texas—and elsewhere as AI becomes more pervasive, and the companies and employees involved more geographically dispersed.

Getting ready

Beyond punching up the “donate” buttons on their sites, what should journalism nonprofits do to prepare for philanthropy’s new riches? Most important is that this shift will result in ever greater relative importance for major gift fundraising, and considerably accelerate the trend away from focusing on institutional foundations. Other than the smallest nonprofits, if you don’t have someone focused on major gifts, you’ll need one; if the staff you have isn’t up to snuff, you need to address that.

On the small gifts/membership side, make sure you have tools in place to mine your lists for those with new-found “capacity” (wealth)—and that you are using those tools. This should also serve as a reminder to make sure your “about” pages are putting your best foot forward, and conveying the information relating mission, accomplishments and contact information about which prospective donors will be curious.

Like me, you may not think it’s cause for celebration for a nation with 35 or 40 million human beings living in poverty, with 40 million needing government help to eat, with perhaps 6 million families in substandard housing and more than half a million homeless, to have its first trillionaire. That too is part of the context for the coming wave of philanthropy. Many of us committed to journalism continue to believe that part of its promise and potential lies in confronting such unfairness, and eventually in redressing it. It is ultimately toward that goal that the new wealth commands our attention.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

One of the most significant problems in the news business these days seems to me to be that the pictures in our heads of how people get their news are quickly becoming outdated. I have written about this before, but this week want to try again, from a different angle, because it’s really important.

When we think about sources of news, we tend to imagine people making choices: Do they subscribe to particular newspapers, magazines, newsletters or podcasts? Do they listen to particular radio shows or stations, or watch television news or YouTube? Do they get news from social media, or, more recently, perhaps from AI agents? These are our competitors for their attention, we often think, and it’s quite a noisy jumble.

Brave new world?

But what if that’s not how it works anymore? I was moved to return to this question by a survey, passed along by a Montana publisher, that was commissioned last winter by the Greater Montana Foundation and released late last month. It found that about two thirds of Montanans were consuming news that was just delivered to them, rather than actively sought by them.

Before you reject that as a thin reed on which to base a big claim, here’s a larger national study of 12,000 people last year that found that 40% of registered voters said that “news comes to me,” as opposed to “I actively seek out news.” (And it’s worth bearing in mind that more than a quarter of adult citizens are not registered to vote—a group I think we can safely assume tends to be less active in its news consumption.) This trend toward passive news is not new, but it seems to be accelerating.

What does it mean to be a passive rather than active consumer of news? Such a posture would include getting news from friends, from a social media feed to the extent that you do not follow publishers, journalists or politicians, from screens in elevators, airports, taxis and other public places, from broadcast inserts and bulletins, maybe from print publications lying around at work or in places you visit.

It’s also more complicated than that, of course, because even those who actively seek out news, subscribing as they will, engaging in appointment listening and viewing, and carefully curating their feeds, will also get news from friends, keep scrolling after clicking with intention, bump into news in the physical world in the same manner as passive news consumers.

We don’t know enough about how this really works

We know all this is happening, but have precious little quantification of it. What data we do have, moreover, may not be all that reliable. When asked by a researcher where you get your own news, for instance, would you be inclined to include the video you saw after the one you clicked on, or the screen in your office building’s elevator? Likely not.

I have frankly no more idea about how we can get those who receive news only passively to convert to active consumption than I do about how to get non-voters to register. (Actually, it’s less—as we know automatic voter registration legislation works.) But I do think a passive approach to news is becoming more widespread, likely in response to the seeming ubiquity of information, possibly because so much of the news in recent years has been dispiriting, perhaps because some of the greatest long-term trends in our society—growing inequality and attendant corruption—seem impervious to change.

Whatever the reason, more consumers are moving beyond what consultants might call the “addressable market” for news. Passive news consumers, of course, aren’t going to subscribe or follow or donate. For passive news consumers, “good enough” is sufficient by definition, because it’s all they see.

Understanding this trend, and gathering more detail on its contours, seems imperative. The industry urgently needs better research on the true behavior of both attentive and inattentive audiences. And the rest of us need to be doing some hard thinking about how we can better serve those who remain active news consumers, using all the old and new tools at our disposal, to keep them that way.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In the last technological revolution to transform journalism, beginning in the mid-1990’s, our industry was seized by the mantra, imported from Silicon Valley, that “information wants to be free.” It was taken from Stewart Brand, he of the Whole Earth Catalog from the Sixties. What the mantra recklessly omitted was Brand’s book’s very next phrase: “information wants to be expensive.” The consequences included a raft of strategic errors, most significantly a decade of delay in deploying paywalls where they are viable—and they would likely have been viable in many more places absent the delay.

Now, another technological revolution is upon us, and I have no doubt that it will be at least as transformative as the consumer internet, perhaps more so. But the contours of that transformation for our business are only just beginning to emerge. Despite this, just as was the case in the 1990’s, predictions and typologies and visions offered with great certainty are increasingly grabbing the attention of leaders in the field.

Not the best TED Talk

This week I want to offer a note of caution and a plea for some modesty. I know that a deterministic tone makes for a better TED Talk and is more likely to make an essay go viral, but that way could also lie a new set of strategic miscalculations. I’m not telling you not to consider some of the important new thinking about AI and journalism. I’m looking hard at it, and you may want to do so as well. (I especially recommend this recent column on using AI for writing specifically and learning generally.)

There are, to be sure, big things we know about AI and journalism as we come up on four years from the debut of ChatGPT:

• Search is being radically transformed;

• Agentic AI is just beginning in earnest, and will become much more important;

• Certain tasks and functions previously performed by humans are already now more efficiently performed by machines, and more will be soon. Some of these efficiencies will make economically feasible desirable products and services that previously were not affordable;

• As a consequence of all this, some jobs will be destroyed, and others created; and

• Many of the shortcomings of AI will be overcome as products and services improve, and as users understand how to generate better results.

There are other big things, however, that seem to me not yet established, including:

• How average humans—not early adopters or tech geeks or news junkies—will choose to interact with new capabilities as they emerge. People are entitled to guess about this, and some guesses will surely be more educated than others. But if you think even the most clever analyst can draw a straight line from here to, say, 2035 or even 2030, well, I’ll take the under on that;

• Relatedly, so far AI has been a revolution largely confined to software. Will it also spawn fundamentally new hardware? I would guess so. If so, what will be the implications of that?;

• Will there be a shake out in the emerging AI platforms, or will they all just merge or grow to the sky? In the last great technological revolution, there were a lot of early casualties: AltaVista, AOL, Excite, Friendster, Gateway, the New Century Network, the Newton, Palm, Pathfinder and Pets.com to name just a few. (If you’re too young to remember those, you might get a kick out of looking them up.) If there will be a new list to go with that old one, what will be the consequences?

• Is the apparent growing political backlash against AI, and data centers in particular, just a lot of noise, or will it have impact? Will European regulatory efforts amount to anything outside of that region? What will be the technological implications of increasingly bipolar geopolitics with a second power center in China?; and

• What will be the impact on politics and philanthropy of the trillions in new wealth being generated by AI-related investments, and how much of that wealth will be sustainable?

One of the greatest known unknowns about the future of AI and journalism is the resolution of a set of legal cases brought by content providers against the platforms, mostly centered on a question of copyright law. (In an important speech earlier this week, the chairman of The New York Times Co. said they had already spent more than $20 million on these cases.) The lawsuits have moved more slowly than I had first expected, but unless the Congress suddenly rediscovers its ability to craft groundbreaking legislation (which seems to me quite unlikely to occur in this decade), the cases will eventually need to be decided in the Supreme Court.

The median justice of the Supreme Court has been on the federal bench—a pretty isolated existence, not least technologically—for 20 years, since roughly the advent of consumer broadband. Three justices have been on the bench since before the first internet browser. To confidently predict how these people will view the factual issues and resolve the critical legal questions in these cases—and thereby potentially rebalance the leverage between publishers and platforms—strikes me as foolhardy.

That said, get on with it

None of this plea for modesty in prediction and projection should be taken as a call for complacence. It remains my view that newsrooms are doing too little in the way of AI-driven product development, and devoting relatively too much of their AI efforts to internal processes. I worry increasingly that a sort of newsroom Luddism, much of it encouraged by unions, is retarding necessary investment and progress.

The future, as ever, is coming. And for journalism, as for so much else, artificial intelligence will be a big part of it. It’s just not as clear exactly what that means as some people would have you believe.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

It’s rare that you encounter a serious inside account of the fate of an online news business, so I read Nate Silver’s recent post on the demise of FiveThirtyEight with great interest—and you should too. (If you do, you can skip the rant on Disney’s petty, indefensible destruction of the site’s archive, and start with the subhed on the site’s origins.) But whether you read Silver’s account or not, this week I want to draw from it seven significant lessons about our business.

For those who may not recall, Silver ran FiveThirtyEight as an independent politics and sports site from 2008-09, and insistently predicted Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain when many others worried that America wouldn’t, in the end, vote for a Black candidate. He then moved the site under the umbrella of the New York Times from 2010-13, correctly calling all 50 states in Obama’s 2012 defeat of Mitt Romney, before selling the brand (but not the statistical models) to Disney, where he directed it, first as part of ESPN and then of ABC News, through 2022. Following an unhappy parting with Disney, after which they placed 538 (as they re-branded it) under new management and last year shut it down, Silver now publishes independently through the Silver Bulletin on Substack, where his piece ran outside the paywall last week.

Here are the lessons I see in his account:

Rounding errors matter. Silver found himself frustrated that Disney, a huge company, wouldn’t significantly invest in FiveThirtyEight, likely because, as he notes, it was simply too small to matter to the economics of the parent, or even ESPN or ABC News. He was particularly disappointed by Disney/ABC’s refusal to invest in a paywall for FiveThirtyEight in 2019, despite what he saw as considerable upside. Silver sagely observes, “If you’re a rounding error when you’re losing a couple of million bucks a year, you’re a rounding error if you’re making a few million also.”

The size of rounding error (an amount of money which isn’t material to the running of a given business) is equally relevant to smaller companies as to larger ones. As independent newsrooms grow, the rounding error increases and they gain the freedom to watch pennies less, and to be more opportunistic; conversely, smaller entities are forced to be more risk-averse, which can be hobbling.

Underinvesting in the business side always hurts. During its time at ESPN, Silver notes,

The core mistake… was that almost nobody was thinking about how to make FiveThirtyEight a viable business. We had essentially no dedicated business people or “product” people or anyone else whose job description depended on the site being economically viable. We never developed the muscle memory or the infrastructure to be a commercial product.

I continue to be surprised, more than a decade later, how many times newsroom leaders, especially in the nonprofit world, make this error.

COVID was a (permanent?) blow to newsroom culture. Silver cites the long-term increase in remote work as well as what he calls the internal “political reckoning.” Both continue, I think, to resonate in many newsrooms, where personal ties among staff, by all accounts, are not as strong as they were in 2019, and where deference to hierarchy has declined, and labor-management tensions in particular have increased. These cultural issues are matters on which newsrooms have to keep working. I expect to have more to say on the labor aspect of this sometime soon.

Paywalls require technology heft. The principal investment Silver unsuccessfully sought from Disney was the creation of a paywall, as he believed (correctly, as it turns out) that this would be key to the eventual success of the business. The rounding error problem noted above was why Disney declined. But the reminder here for all of us is that paywalls for a modern digital site, if they are to be done right, are not technologically simple. They need to be metered and optimized (and made temporarily permeable) in ways that AI is facilitating and will simplify, but the commitment, expertise and expense is, for the moment, far from trivial. For big companies, this should not matter so much, but for smaller ones, it is a real issue, and goes a long way toward explaining the value of platforms like Substack (and its direct competitors) to many news creators.

Aligning newsroom and company interests is critical. FiveThirtyEight proved an awkward fit not only for Disney, but for the New York Times before it. As Silver suggests, however, it would likely have fared much better at the Times in later years, and especially in the wake of the Innovation Report of 2014, drafted by a group led by the man who is now the paper’s publisher. Bloomberg, Silver says, might have been a better home, although I’m not so sure, as FiveThirtyEight rarely focused on business or finance, which are Bloomberg’s core, and Silver’s individualistic streak would likely have been a poor long-term fit for the corporate culture of the Bloomberg Way.

The lesson is that newsrooms which find themselves in larger empires need to make sure they and their corporate parents are aligned in interests, values and approach. The same considerations apply in evaluating merger and acquisition partners.

Founders are quirky. One of Silver’s key mistakes, as he more or less points out, was not exercising his right to opt FiveThirtyEight out of Disney in 2018, and to go independent or join The Atlantic when a deal with The Athletic (then not yet part of the Times) fell through. The apparent reason: not much more than stubbornness.

In saying this, and in seeking a more general point, I don’t mean to pick on Silver. I wasn’t the founder of ProPublica, but I did more or less run its business side for its first 14 years. We had a good bit of success, and I look back with pride and satisfaction. But it’s also true that I took particular pride in convening very few internal meetings and in keeping the business staff as large as I thought necessary, but as small as possible. As we were able to roughly quadruple the size of the place, however, and now in hindsight, I would acknowledge that, by the time I retired, there were probably too few meetings and too few business staff. The final test of leaders is how places fare after them. They ultimately need to be set up for evolution—and they can be.

Distinctive content is still what matters most. One mistake Silver notes from the Disney era is that “we put too much emphasis on quantity and not enough on core products.” While maintaining a sufficient cadence is essential, I continue to believe, with all of the complexities in our industry, that publishing distinctive content is the greatest imperative for any newsroom. The more choices readers, listeners and viewers have, the more they are surrounded by noise, the more new technologies commodify what they are being offered, the more important it becomes to set your offering apart. That even Nate Silver, a genuine innovator, forgot this for a moment should be an important reminder to us all.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Everyone who reads this newsletter understands, I hope, that these are difficult times for press freedom in this country. Tonight will be the last time the oligarch who owns CBS will permit one of the President’s smartest critics to ridicule him. The FCC has been thoroughly corrupted, turned into a partisan weapon against free speech in a manner appalling even to Ted Cruz.

Back at CBS, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Trump’s key foreign ally, was recently offered his choice of interviewers by the TV neophyte currently leading the news division to ever-lower ratings. That executive remains in the job in which the oligarch placed her, presumably for political rather than business or journalistic reasons— although possibly not for long.

The Washington Post has had its editorial voice rendered at once only semi-coherent and totally ineffective, while most of its best journalists have been driven away by draconian cuts ostensibly necessitated by business concerns, even as its owner found the money to pay what amounts to a large bribe to the President’s wife.

There is, to be sure, still great reporting being done about the incompetence and rampant corruption of the regime. The same Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic are among the publications whose editors are still regularly willing to reveal hard truths, and Trump’s sagging popularity is, in part I believe, a consequence.

At the heart of it

All of this said, the center of independent journalism at the national level remains the New York Times, and two events last week reminded me of how much we all owe the Times for keeping the journalistic faith, and for having the institutional courage to resist the threats of the would-be autocrat and his cronies at home and abroad.

I will get to last week’s events in a minute, but before that I want to repeat what regular readers of this newsletter already know: I am not unaware of the limitations and imperfections of the Times. I hear often from friends, inside our industry and out, who are frustrated with this Times headline or that point of emphasis, and who despair that it is not doing enough to singlehandedly stem the onslaught. It is principally to well-meaning people like that that this week’s column is addressed.

Here is the context those critics and worriers are missing:

On May 11, Nick Kristof, a Times opinion columnist who has worked for the paper for 40 years and won two Pulitzer Prizes (one each as reporter and opinionator), wrote a horrifying piece on rapes of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, security service interrogators, prison guards and West Bank settlers. If you have not read the article yourself, you need to do so, even at 3700 words, and as unpleasant as that will be.

Kristof’s column cited a number of human rights reports, but he also spoke personally to 14 people who told him of their own sexual assaults. At least two of these were themselves journalists. Two Israeli agencies issued blanket denials to Kristof; the country’s national security minister declined to comment. None would answer detailed questions. The security service reportedly visited at least one of his sources after receiving queries for the piece, following which the source withdrew his permission for Kristof to use his name.

A former Israeli prime minister told Kristof that he “definitely” believes such sexual assaults occur. Importantly, Kristof’s piece did not by any means suggest that Israel was unique in having a problem of sexual assault by those in positions of power. He repeatedly referenced such brutalities by Hamas on and after October 7, and also noted episodes in Ethiopia, Sudan and the New York City Police Department. Let me hasten to add that I know Kristof, like all of our fellow human beings, is not perfect. Nor am I certain that every one of his sources is reliable. But the weight of his piece overall is overwhelming.

In response to this devastating account, Netanyahu accused Kristof and the Times of a “blood libel” and threatened to sue for defamation. (These allegations, by the way, are not what constitutes “blood libel,” and the Israeli government devalues that historically significant phrase when they deploy it so recklessly.) Netanyahu made a similar threat last year, over reporting about Gaza, and did not follow through.

Where would a foreign head of government get the idea to sue the New York Times for defamation? From the head of our own government.

Clogging the courts

Trump has one libel suit pending against the Times over reporting on his businees and finances; his second attempt at a complaint in the case is pending possible dismissal. Earlier suits, relating to an op-ed on Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and about coverage of his personal finances, were eventually dropped after being dismissed by trial courts. He has another suit against the Journal, about reporting on Jeffrey Epstein.

After CBS paid a thinly-disguised bribe in settlement of a bogus case about video editing to help ease the path for its sale by its prior owner to its current one, Trump has filed a similar case against the BBC. And in a game of Can You Top This?, the amounts sought grow ever higher: $10 billion! $15 billion!

Other Trump libel cases clogging the courts, now and in the past, have included as defendants the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Chicago Tribune, Bill Maher and the author of a critical Trump biography. Notably, while a couple of Trump cases have settled since he was re-elected, Trump has never prevailed in court in a defamation case against a news organization.

Netanyahu has not said where Israel plans to sue, but it presumably won’t be in this country, where seditious libel cases brought by government have been disfavored throughout American history, and essentially forbidden for more than a century.

Facts are not treasonous

Anyway, the Kristof column was last Monday. On Friday, winging his way back from a disappointing summit in China, Trump took a question from the Times’s White House and national security reporter, David Sanger, about whether and why he might renew the bombing of Iran. Sanger has also spent more than 40 years at the paper, and been a member of three Pulitzer-winning reporting teams. Trump responded by telling Sanger his writing was “sort of treasonous.”

Treason is the one crime defined in the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” It is punishable by death. Trump suggested Sanger should be executed for observing that 38 days of bombing “did not get the political changes in Iran” Trump seeks. That is, of course, simply a fact. We have all gotten too used to this sort of madness.

My point here is that it is most often the New York Times these days which is being accused of blood libel and treason by the authoritarians. The rest of us need to continue our occasional efforts to hold the Times to highest standards, and to call it out when it falls short. But week in and week out, we need also to rally around the Times, to justly celebrate it as the jewel of our industry, and to recognize that its adversaries are our own.

Correction: This piece has been revised to reflect the allegations of Trump’s latest case against the Times and to note that his earlier cases were dropped only after being dismissed.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

One of the most interesting stories in the news business these days is what’s going on at the Baltimore Banner. The site has the largest news staff of any local nonprofit, is unusual in employing a paywall (even as others, such as in Salt Lake City, move the other way) and just acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had been slated for shutdown after years of mismanagement and a long labor dispute.

The Banner has a principal benefactor in Stewart Bainum, and strong leadership in Audrey Cooper as executive editor (succeeding Kimi Yoshino) on the news side and Bob Cohn as CEO on the business side.

Cohn has been in his role since February 2024, after four years as president of The Economist. He previously spent more than a decade at The Atlantic, including more than five years as president there. Earlier, he was executive editor of Wired and of the Industry Standard. He began his career as a reporter for Newsweek. Cohn generously agreed to talk with me earlier this week on the heels of the Pittsburgh acquisition. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

RT: Thanks so much for doing this. Can we start with an update on the business side of the Banner? In particular, I think two things people in the industry are looking closely at are how many paid subscribers you have now, and what can you say on how much money you lost in 2025 before contributions from your founding funder, as well as what you project at this point for 2026.

BC: The business has four revenue prongs, and it’s important to put that in context: subscriptions, advertising, events and philanthropy. And by that I mean philanthropy, not from the Bainum family, but that our philanthropy team raises. About half of all revenue comes from subscriptions, and we have, right now, 81,000 paid subscribers. [RT note: That’s up from 69,000 eight months ago, but short of the original target for this point.]

We’ve seen pretty good growth in each of our four years to get to that 81,000. About 30% of our revenue is from the combination of advertising and events. And then a little more than a fifth of the revenue is from philanthropy.

RT: So where did you come out last year?

BC: Last year we did about $18 million in revenue, and this year we are budgeted to do about $22.5 million in revenue.

RT: Are you saying what you’re spending?

BC: No, but we’re spending more than that in each of those years.

RT: Stewart Bainum has said that his commitment to the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which is the parent company, he’s now taken up to $75 million, is that right?

BC: The total is actually $80 million. He pledged $50 million back when he started Venetoulis five years ago; then the Banner launched a year after that. He said this was to establish the Baltimore Banner as a going enterprise. And then recently, he contributed another $30 million to Venetoulis to help with the acquisition in Pittsburgh, and to take both properties to sustainability.

RT: Does that mean that the $50 million had been exhausted?

BC: It was on the road to being exhausted. It was not yet exhausted, but it would have been prior to us getting to break even.

RT: By the way, when you say that advertising and events are 30% of your revenue, it always seems to me that in both of those things, you want to talk about net revenue. So how much of that is net revenue?

BC: Both of those numbers are net numbers.

RT: So it’s roughly $5.5 million after expenses associated with those two things, right?

BC: Exactly, right.

RT: The Banner won a Pulitzer Prize last year and was a finalist again last week-- congratulations. What has been the impact of that in business terms?

BC: I think it’s just a shot in the arm for the whole organization. It lifts everything, the journalists and the journalism, the whole brand. What that means is more people have heard of us when we knock on the door for the first time, and folks we have relationships with have more confidence that the partnership is working for them because of the reach of our journalism and the recognition of our journalism.

Race and an expanding target

RT: I’m going to get to Pittsburgh in a minute, but before I do, I want to ask you a sensitive question. The original focus of the Banner, as I understood it, was going to be on the city of Baltimore, which is roughly 60% Black, but your more recent expansions have been in the suburbs, and I note that Baltimore County is only about 30% Black, and the other suburbs are mostly lower than that. What do you know about the readership of the Banner by race? And how do you think about all of that?

BC: Well, let me start by saying the original mission of the Banner was to be the news organization for all of Maryland, and we started with Baltimore, because Stewart, as you know, had just made a bid to purchase the Baltimore Sun that faltered at the eleventh hour. So he decided to go ahead and start the Banner as kind of a rival to the Sun. But when they set up Venetoulis as the parent organization, the idea was that the Banner would need to expand beyond Baltimore City in order to reach scale.

So all along, the goal was to be the leading news organization in the whole state, starting with Baltimore City, and then adding those counties that are kind of within the gravitational pull of Baltimore, like Baltimore County and Howard County and Anne Arundel County. And then, as I know you know, we turned our sights to the two largest counties in Maryland, which happen to be Washington, DC facing and not Baltimore facing.

So we now have journalists on the ground, dedicated coverage, in seven counties, six counties plus Baltimore City, accounting for about 75% of the state. The overall racial makeup of the audience is not as concentrated Black as it was when we were focused more specifically on Baltimore City. But as we’ve expanded, our makeup looks more like the makeup of the state.

RT: Do you have a sense of what the proportions are among your readers?

BC: I don’t think we have any recent quantitative research on that since we’ve expanded outside of Baltimore and the Baltimore suburbs.

RT: Would your aspiration be for the audience to more or less reflect the target market?

BC: Sure, we want readers wherever we’re producing journalism and so the overall makeup of the readership ought to reflect the makeup of the market. Absolutely.

Print is still “five years from dying”

RT: Okay, let’s turn to Pittsburgh. You’ve pledged to keep printing the Post-Gazette two days a week. How open ended is that commitment?

BC: We will keep a print newspaper so long as readers want it, are willing to pay for it, and advertisers like it and are willing to support it. As long as it makes financial sense, we’ll be fully committed to print. And frankly, we arrived thinking, you know, print is dead, right? What are we still doing with print here? But print has been five years from dying for the last 30 years. So we’re committed to print in Pittsburgh, so long as the community is committed to reading in print and paying for print.

RT: What do you think the effect on the economics of the Post-Gazette would be if the paper went digital only at this point?

BC: Revenues would suffer and the net would suffer as well. Print makes sense right now. So we’re not going to walk away until that’s not true.

RT: Do you think, from where you sit-- and I know that you’re not there-- that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as it turns out, went digital-only prematurely?

BC: I don’t know. It’s one thing to start a digital only publication, never having been in print, and be able to attract an audience. I think it’s quite different to take away something that people have enjoyed and expect as part of the their newspaper.

Sustainability soon

RT: I’ve heard that you all believe you can get the Post-Gazette to break even pretty quickly after it lost an average of more than $15 million a year over the last two decades. Is that true, and if it is true, how do you see that transition happening?

BC: I think Venetoulis will get to break even in a matter of a few years-- that is the combined operations of the Baltimore Banner and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We’re able to do that because of the power of shared services and the fact that everything from marketing and HR to product and technology and finance can be under the leadership of Venetoulis serving both markets and both properties, and there’s tremendous economies of scale in that, while still having, of course, dedicated newsrooms, dedicated advertising and events businesses, dedicated on the ground brand marketing. I think continued growth in the consumer business and subscriptions will take both places to break even and the overall Institute to break even over the next few years.

RT: Pretty significant staff reductions in Pittsburgh were announced even before the closing on your deal. What can you say about those?

BC: Well, we haven’t announced any staff reductions.

RT: I mean, just before closing. There were significant staff reductions in Pittsburgh, right?

BC: Well, it was an asset purchase, which means that the prior owner terminated everybody. We arrived with nobody in the newsroom, and then we rehired many people from the old Post-Gazette into the new Post-Gazette. So we started with a blank sheet of paper.

About 90 journalists from the old Post-Gazette indicated an interest in coming over, and we ended up hiring 58 of them. And, as you noted, the Post-Gazette had been losing a lot of money, and we had to make some hard decisions about having a smaller operation until we could stabilize the finances.

The Banner started with 35 people in the newsroom not even four years ago. And as revenues grew and as business improved, the newsroom grew. And I fully expect that the Post-Gazette newsroom will grow after we can stabilize the business.

RT: How many people are in the Banner newsroom now?

BC: A hundred.

RT: And how many were in the Post-Gazette newsroom just before the deal was announced?

BC: About 100.

RT: So it’s gone from 100 to 58

BC: Yes.

RT: And you would expect it, as you say, to go back up over some period of time.

BC: Yes. As to the comparison to the Banner newsroom, while interesting and potentially useful, the Banner now serves seven counties and 4.5 million Marylanders. The Post-Gazette footprint right now is quite a bit smaller than that.

Pittsburgh and beyond

RT: Would you expect over time to expand the Post-Gazette footprint as well in western Pennsylvania?

BC: I think it’s too early to tell, but we will go wherever we think there’s a need for high quality independent journalism and where the Post-Gazette brand has salience, and in the areas surrounding Pittsburgh-- where the Post-Gazette already is-- I suspect there may be value in continuing to explore those areas.

RT: What sort of support do you expect from the Pittsburgh philanthropic community?

BC: We’re just starting conversations but we believe that both the business community and the philanthropic community in Pittsburgh care deeply about high quality news, and have indicated that they could be supportive of a reimagined Post-Gazette.

RT: Do you foresee Venetoulis making other acquisitions around the country?

BC: Eventually perhaps. It will depend on how Maryland goes and now how Pittsburgh goes. When we launched the Banner four years ago, and really when we started Venetoulis five years ago, the goal was to do independent quality news in communities that need it most, and to build a model for local journalism that could work at scale and could be sustainable. And if we could build that model, to then take that and try it elsewhere. So we’re in that phase of it right now, where we think we have something that is working in Maryland, and we’re going to refine it in Pittsburgh, even as we continue to work it in Maryland. And it’s premature to think about going to other markets, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

RT: Well, on that intriguing note, thank you again.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

If you’ve been in the news business long enough, you’ve experienced that awful feeling when a story in which you find yourself even peripherally involved becomes the subject of coverage you know is off the mark. Of course, this happens also to people not in our business as well, and while it may not make them as unhappy, it surely doesn’t promote confidence in journalism.

I was reminded of this recently as a high-profile congressional primary in a district in which I have lived most of my adult life becomes the subject of national attention. I wanted to write about it this week because it can serve, I think, as an object lesson of how the press needs to be more careful than it often is when seeking national meaning in what are often essentially local stories.

Setting the scene

My congressional district is New York’s 12^th, and the June 23 Democratic primary there will almost certainly be tantamount to election. (Kamala Harris got 81% of the district’s vote in 2024, running just ahead of Rep. Jerry Nadler, who was re-elected with 80%, and is now retiring after 17 terms.) The district is almost entirely in Manhattan, covering the island from river to river, and from roughly 14^th Street up to roughly 96^th Street, a rectangle about two miles wide and four miles long. (Roosevelt Island, with fewer than 15,000 residents, or less than 2% of the district overall, is also included.)

Two of the four leading candidates are not career politicos but are somewhat well known even nationally; the two better-funded candidates are elected officials but not as well known even locally, so the race is pretty interesting, and it’s far from clear who will win. All of the polls reported so far have been candidate-sponsored, and their results vary. Nor am I yet sure how I will cast my own vote.

Here, briefly, are the contestants:

• Alex Bores, 35, is a second term member of the State Assembly (representing about 40% of the congressional district) who worked nine years in technology, including five at Palantir, before entering politics.

• George Conway, 62, was a conservative Republican lawyer and a serious candidate to be solicitor general in the first Trump Administration, where his then-wife Kellyanne, previously Trump’s campaign manager, served in the White House. He moved into very vocal opposition to Trump and played a leading role in the Lincoln Project, switched parties and moved to New York after getting divorced.

• Micah Lasher, 44, is a first term Assemblyman (representing about one-third of the congressional district), and a former aide to Nadler, to former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and to current Governor Kathy Hochul.

• John Bouvier Kennedy (“Jack”) Schlossberg, 33, is the grandson of President Kennedy. In addition to his former senator grand-uncles and his current cousin in the cabinet, cousins of his have held office as governor of California (by marriage), lieutenant governor of Maryland and member of Congress (three of them). While Schlossberg is well educated (Yale College, Harvard Law and Business), he does not ever seem to have held a regular job.

What the press sees— and doesn’t

I was moved to write about this campaign by a New York Times story about the big money coming into the campaign both for and against Assemblyman Bores. Bores, in the State capital in Albany, has pressed for regulation of AI, infuriating OpenAI, allies of which are spending millions to defeat him. More recently, tech money more closely allied with OpenAI rival Anthropic, which is more amenable to regulation, is spending at least $5 million to support him. The implication of the Times story—echoing the same from other outlets, including earlier stories from Bloomberg, TechCrunch, NBC News, Politico Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair and a later one from Politico (again)— is that the primary is becoming a referendum on AI.

Except that there’s no evidence that I can see anywhere in the district that that is the case. The OpenAI-linked efforts deride Bores’s work for Palantir, but don’t focus on his views on AI at all. Bores’s own campaign has recently taken to leaning into to the identity of his enemies. Perhaps OpenAI and its allies seek to become a sort of newer version of AIPAC, a lobby that can punish political foes and reward friends, and perhaps as with AIPAC more recently, this will backfire.

But living in the district, I can tell you that very few if any actual voters seem especially moved by AI in the campaign. Lasher’s campaign website lists AI last of 13 issues; Schlossberg puts it last of six. Conway’s campaign site doesn’t seem to have an issues section; a recent extensive Washington Post profile of him indicated he may not have any campaign literature either—and then didn’t pursue the matter.

Meanwhile, the other big money in the race so far comes from one of Lasher’s former bosses, with Bloomberg spending $5 million to help him. And the most inquiring candidate coverage to date has been of Schlossberg, whose mere consideration of the race merited a long (and largely unflattering) profile from no less than Maureen Dowd.

As with many primaries in safely-partisan districts, the candidates differ remarkably little on the issues. At a recent debate, all seemed to suggest the greatest problem in the country is Trump, with the only real split coming on the question of whether he can somehow be ousted before 2029, as Conway insisted and Schlossberg implied was possible, while Lasher insisted it was not and Bores craftily remained silent.

Will we learn anything?

It seems to me that it is going to be very hard to draw any national lessons from the voting next month, no matter the result. (One possible exception: a Schlossberg victory, given his meager resume and more limited funding than either Lasher or Bores, would tend to indicate that the Kennedy name remains more magical in politics than some have come to believe.)

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill loved to observe that “all politics is local.” It’s surely less local than it was in O’Neill’s time (he retired in 1987), but the importance of the point remains. In an area of just eight square miles and a likely low turnout (the congressional seat is the highest actively contested office on the ballot), my own guess is that the victor in the primary will be the person who worked hardest, made the most connections, met the most voters.

That may well be as it should be, but it’s something hard to spot from Washington— or from anywhere if you insist on viewing someplace you don’t know well through the prism of where you’ve come from. My own neck of the woods, in other words, is reminding us right now that our coverage of politics still needs to get better.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Something I hear pretty often these days in our industry is a complaint about redundant intermediaries who are soaking up scarce philanthropic dollars, with resultant inefficiencies and unnecessary burdens on newsrooms overwhelmed with too many trainings, too many conferences, too many audits, just too many distractions.

Why, a funder asked me recently, do two intermediaries this funder saw as offering duplicative services both still exist? Because you—and your funder colleagues—let them, I said.

Something’s brewing

Now I am sensing the early stirrings of a movement to push back, to begin to rationalize at least some of the offerings, affiliations and services. Knight Foundation, the industry’s largest institutional funder, is taking early but seemingly meaningful steps in this direction, gathering data and, yes, planning a convening (always a sign of philanthropic seriousness).

Amalie Nash, Knight’s VP/Journalism, tells me Knight recently sent a survey to intermediaries “to better understand the conversations occurring around collaboration and consolidation and how we can best provide support.” Knight’s view is that “as the field matures, we believe this is a good time to assess the landscape... We share the same goals of ensuring the field can effectively innovate and scale.”

Erin Millar, CEO and co-founder of for-profit technology platform Indiegraf (they prefer the term “operating system”), which has just completed the acquisitions of Hearken and Stylebot, puts it this way in addressing clients and potential clients:

You’re exhausted by the fragmented ecosystem of tools and services. It’s frustrating to see precious philanthropic capital go to organizations who waste resources competing with one another or building duplicative solutions. You hate it when we won’t play nice together. We need to do better.

Indiegraf, Millar tells me, expects to announce another, larger acquisition in a couple of weeks. It sees more potential opportunities in what Millar calls “sub-scale,” “subsidy-dependent” tools which have proved useful to publishers but which are not independently sustainable, especially after declines in support from Facebook and Google. Indiegraf, it should be noted, has a program-related investment (PRI) from Knight, and a Knight program officer sits as a non-voting member of its board.

In my interview last month with scholar Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro (which has become easily the most-viewed column in the five years of this newsletter) on a study she did funded by Arnold Ventures and published by Media Impact Funders, Hansen Shapiro called for consolidation. While that column offered her views, this week I want to offer my own on this and related questions.

Before we dive in, a note on nomenclature: I continue to use the term “intermediaries,” as I have for years. The trendy phrase “journalism support organizations” (JSOs) feels to me like the sort of thing intermediaries waste time and money crafting—and also pre-judges the debate about whether particular entities, on balance, are proving more support than distraction.

Common premises

I have long been concerned about too much of institutional funding going to intermediaries rather than newsrooms, and that remains my view. (It’s not one Hansen Shapiro appears to share, by the way.) But beyond this, I think we can all agree on a couple of basic propositions:

• First, not all competition between intermediaries is inefficient or bad. It may be, in some areas, that competing offerings serve different sorts of newsroom customers or use cases. In others, optimal solutions may not yet have been developed, and competition may spur us to get closer to them. In general in our economic system, competition is healthy.

• With that said, however, devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior service. And in circumstances where competing services are roughly equivalent, mere duplication can also be inefficient—and, as noted above, may place an administrative burden on already over-stressed client newsrooms. Time is one of the scarcest resources of all.

The hard part, of course, comes in deciding which circumstance is which—where competition and overlap is still healthy, and where it is just wasteful. One interesting aspect of this is that in some cases, such as where competing providers offer services the effectiveness of which can be measured quantitatively, the funders paying the bills already have (or could readily demand) access to data which should enable them to recognize who has built the better mousetrap. I hope they will begin to do so, and to act on the results.

Choices to be made

Some people object to funders playing the more heavy-handed role that will probably be necessary if rationalization like this is to take hold. I am not one of them. As I have said before, the very job of program staff at institutional foundations is to make choices, to pick winners (and therefore, unavoidably, losers). That may not be the happiest aspect of such roles, but it is a responsibility that goes along with the many privileges of a well-compensated post giving away other people’s money. It would be important, however, for decisions of this sort to be made purely on the merits, with funders careful to avoid conflicts of interest that may arise, for instance, from board roles or other stakes in various intermediaries.

In some cases, it may make sense for intermediaries to try to get ahead of this emerging trend. With some degree of compelled consolidation looming, mergers may seem more attractive than previously, conferences can perhaps be combined, services streamlined to avoid overlap. All of that, driven by those closest to the work, could be preferable to foundations making choices based on less information.

While combinations are no panacea and don’t always work out, I have long pressed for more mergers among newsrooms, and I have been pleased to see such combinations as Mother Jones and the old Center for Investigative Reporting, or the recent absorption of The Current in Louisiana by Deep South Today. Intermediaries are actually late to this party, but if hard choices about funding and increased activity among them is coming, all of us should take that as a sign of progress.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Prediction markets, where people bet on the probability of future developments of all sorts as if they were securities or sporting events (choose your metaphor) are a big and growing business. They are also moving into newsrooms, with deals recently made to feature particular markets’ data by CNN, CNBC, Dow Jones (including the Wall Street Journal), Fox, Twitter and Yahoo Finance.

This week, rather than get dragged into the debates about whether this is good or bad for society, or whether prediction markets should be regulated more like financial markets or like gambling, I want to try to derive what the rules of the road should be in this emerging sphere for newsrooms.

What’s news in prediction markets

Let’s start by acknowledging that what’s going on in prediction markets can constitute important news. For one thing, there seems to be significant insider trading afoot in some of the markets, with people who apparently know big events are going to occur placing bets just before they do and making big profits. (It’s worth remembering that this was legal in the securities markets before the New Deal, and occurred frequently in the 1920s ahead of the Great Crash.)

Some of the most prominent insider trading has taken place on questions of national security, with major decisions by Trump seemingly front-run by a very small number of traders. No evidence has emerged to link Trump’s family to these bets, but, as the President would say, “some people are talking” about how his eldest son is on the board of one of leading prediction markets, Polymarket, and is a strategic adviser to the other, Kalshi.

Whatever is or is not going on there, it’s surely a story.

And that’s not the only news value in the prediction markets. The markets offer the wisdom of crowds, and there are surely subjects on which such wisdom is valuable. Examples would include consumer confidence, distilling political polling into the likelihood of election outcomes and tracking probable results as votes come in on election nights. Any newsroom that ignores this sort of data is missing a significant source.

On the other hand, crowds are not universal repositories of wisdom. There is no reason, for instance, to think they have special insight into the answer to currently unknowable questions. Moreover, the prediction markets themselves, as part of their aggressive marketing, have proven poor prognosticators when trying to edge into the news business.

Two issues newsrooms are increasingly dealing with, and that all newsrooms will likely have to confront eventually, are whether and on what terms to strike business deals with the prediction markets and how, if at all, to regulate the conduct of their own staffs with respect to participating in the markets. Let’s take up each of these in turn.

Benefits and costs of deal-making

The big benefit of aligning with one of the betting platforms is simply money, which I am painfully aware newsrooms need these days. But there are costs as well, and the relevant analogy seems to me news organizations sponsoring polls—a practice I have long disfavored.

If a newsroom ties itself up with one prediction market, the risks are that it will miss or downplay important stories emerging on rival platforms, or be tempted to tout what turn out to be phony stories emerging from its partner platform—or, even worse, be discouraged from pursuing some stories about insider trading. None of these risks is insurmountable given aggressive and determinedly independent editing, just as newsrooms that have sponsored political polls sometimes continue to produce strong political horserace coverage.

One thing any newsroom whose parent company has made such a deal should always do is to disclose to readers, viewers and listeners how the newsroom benefits, e.g. from increased betting or from promoting the visibility of the markets. Even with that, the business deals will make things harder for journalists and journalism, and they also tend to undermine reader trust when that is the last thing we should be doing.

We need to adjust our ethics policies

Whether or not they make a deal with a prediction market, I think the time has now come when all newsrooms need to take account of such markets in their conflict of interest policies. (This is a subject of more than passing interest to me, having been the principal author of a couple of such codes, even if they have been subsequently revised.) The risks are analogous to those I have long believed sports betting poses to journalism.

My own view is that, at the very least, top editors and business executives should be forbidden from participating in prediction markets, and that reporters, more junior editors and others should be barred from betting on subjects they now cover or might expect to cover in the foreseeable future. These restrictions would be analogous to those now in place in the codes I drafted with respect to the securities markets. It’s notable that CNN has apparently barred all employees from the prediction markets, and that CNBC follows a policy similar to the minimum I have outlined. ProPublica made changes to its code last week barring participation in prediction markets with respect to news events.

The fact that a level of corruption in this and so many other areas is now being widely tolerated in our national life should have no bearing on the standards to which we hold journalists and journalism. We should cover the news in prediction markets, the news they may reveal and the news, however unseemly, they represent or facilitate. But our standards must continue to be our own.

Leave a comment