It’s not nice to criticize a media reform effort, especially one launched with a lot of money and ambition. Media reform needs both. But we need media reform to succeed, and we definitely don’t need self-inflicted wounds from counterproductive efforts. ProPublica is well funded and ambitious, but also, unfortunately, counterproductive—and likely to be irrelevant, too.
The wrong problem and the wrong solution
paidContent and many others reported on ProPublica’s formal launch last week. It was news at a lot of different levels. Whereas most media reform projects are renegade efforts that survive only hand to mouth, ProPublica is very well funded and supported—over $30 million for three years, primarily from the Sandler Foundation, whose president, Herb Sandler, is chair of the ProPublica board. Other board members include Alberto Ibargüen, former publisher of the Miami Herald and president and CEO of the Knight Foundation; and Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of Pew Charitable Trusts. That’s a lot of firepower, and suggests that ProPublica won’t flame out as long as the board thinks it’s getting results.
ProPublica intends to attack a perceived growing lack of deep reporting on matters of serious public interest in mainstream media, by producing original investigative reporting projects whose results it will license to media outlets at no charge. Led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the organization plans to employ close to 30 reporters who will focus on what it calls “truly important stories, stories with ‘moral force.’”
ProPublica plans to concentrate on placing those stories on an exclusive basis with traditional print and broadcast outlets, thus redressing what it sees as an imbalance between the few media organizations—primarily traditional news outlets—who devote the resources necessary to produce original investigative news, and find themselves under financial pressure to curtail these investments, versus the many—meaning the search engines, news aggregators, and bloggers—who feed parasitically off those efforts, and as a result undermine the capacity of our society to engage in deep reflection on serious public matters.
So far, so good. What’s wrong with beating back the vandal horde that is ransacking the media institutions upon which societal progress depends, leaving only a rubble of infotainment, unfounded rumor, and superficial re-reporting in its wake?
No charitable case
The problem is that this perspective on the health of the commons hardly comports with the truth about mainstream corporate media’s role in promoting the public interest. With very few exceptions—and those, few and far between—the transformative reporting of the contemporary era has come, not from mainstream corporate newsrooms, but from independent magazines and newspapers that have broken the serious news stories and raised the key moral issues that have then been re-reported by the same mainstream news outlets that ProPublica seeks to protect.
These independent outlets—ranging from The Nation and Mother Jones on the left to the National Review and The Weekly Standard on the right, with special-interest titles like Ms., E/The Environmental Magazine, The Chicago Reporter, and a bewildering array of others feathered in between—represent the substrate on which the entire modern mainstream media infrastructure has depended. And their imminent demise—make no mistake about it—threatens the future of public discourse in a far more ominous way than any newsroom layoff or budget cut that ProPublica can cite in defense of its media reform theory.
In a recent remembrance of the late William F. Buckley Jr. published in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation magazine’s former publisher, Victor Navasky, recalls how his sometime nemesis and full-time colleague framed the case for their money losing enterprises: “You don’t expect the church to make a profit, do you?” That’s a trenchant statement in support of independent, public-interest media. What’s ProPublica’s case?
In producing news and investigative reports for syndication to mainstream media, ProPublica bumps up directly against the global investigative news establishment—amply represented by the Associated Press, Reuters, and others—whose business it is to distribute news on a non-exclusive basis to mainstream and independent outlets alike. These are joined in the media marketplace by the Guardian, the BBC, the CBC, CNN, Dow Jones, The Economist, etc.... respected national reporting organizations that have expanded their audiences to truly global dimensions. Add to this the domestic public radio and broadcasting networks that are also expanding rapidly in audience share and in public support—that is, money coming directly out of the pockets of listeners and viewers. It’s hard to see in this environment anything except a healthy, dynamic, and competitive space where ProPublica represents nothing but a superfluous entrant.
ProPublica does nothing to attack the greatest problem that impedes the flow of thoughtful civic discourse in the US—the lack of resources available for investigative reporting at the local level. Here, as with independent magazines and journals, a media reform effort designed to put flooring underneath this critical part of the information ecosystem would dwarf anything ProPublica could do with its 30 reporters and essentially redundant strategy.
The price of failure
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with ProPublica is not that it will be blowing Herb Sandler’s money at clip that will undoubtedly make Bill Buckley spin in his grave. It’s the opportunity cost—the chance that ProPublica, with its unprecedented resources, could have taken—but isn’t—to revolutionize the public media space for decades to come.
Serious traditional independent media is under enormous pressure to effect a transition to the new world of the social web. As we see with corporate media outlets, this is no easy task—the audience is moving faster than the revenues, and the gap between the two threatens even the strongest corporate outlets. Independent national and local media are experiencing this gap as a yawning crack opening up beneath them, threatening to devour them whole. These organizations simply don’t have the necessary R&D resources to devote to digital transition, much less the profit margins to survive lean times during the shift. They need the practical help that ProPublica could be offering them—but won’t.
Rather than 30 journalists, why not hire 30 database experts, researchers, and programmers to create the infrastructure that independent outlets could leverage in their transition to the social web? The role models for such a transition are being born daily, and with much smaller investments than ProPublica enjoys.
Check out what the relatively small Surdna Foundation is doing with exemplary public-interest digital media projects like NetSquared, funder of Maplight, an innovative social web application that connects the dots between legislators’ voting records and the contributions they receive from corporations. That’s public interest media at its best, and a project far more meaningful, in the long view of the information landscape of the future, than anything that will come out of ProPublica’s offices. The fact that media reform’s biggest dollars will be going to Hearst, Gannett, McClatchy, and the Tribune Company—and not to the Maplights of world—is the price that we will all end up paying for ProPublica’s abject failure of imagination.
