By popular demand, here is the complete version of my little weekend magnum opus on the future of the American press with all four of the related posts in one place.  If you read it in parts, I made a few minor revisions and corrected some misspelled words.  Thanks for reading and caring. JB

There is a wonderful scene in State of Play, Kevin McDonald's flawed, but thought-provoking, political thriller, when Cal McAffrey, the grizzled, oddly uncynical investigative reporter played skillfully by Russell Crowe, explains to the young gossip blogger from his newspaper's online group why he spends so much time checking and re-checking leads, working his sources, and making sure he has all the verifiable and double-sourced facts available before he lets go of a story:

"I still think they (readers) know the difference between real news and bullshit," he says. "And they're glad that someone cares enough to get things on the record and print the truth." 

For the sake of our democracy, I pray that he is right.  But the signs are not encouraging.  

The blurring of the distinction between "content" and "news" within mainstream news organizations is a runaway train that has already left the station.  Here in New York, for example, WNBC, Channel 4 has taken to calling its news center "the content center."   CNN now spends an enormous amount of air time promoting its blog and its Facebook page and its million+ Twitter followers.

But, content is not necessarily news.  News is the verifiable facts that trained, responsible journalists like Cal McAffrey often spend hundreds of hours tracking down and sifting through and verifying to get to the truth.  Real reporting is time-consuming and expensive.  It requires a level of investment that many traditional print and broadcast news organizations can no longer afford in the face of the tsunami of free content that is the web.

The problem is not the widely-lamented "death" of newspapers.  Newspapers are a medium around which people like the Ochs, the Hearsts, the Grahams and, alas, the Murdochs built business models that supported the practice of journalism. But, now the newspaper business model is failing.  The question is whether serious journalism can find a new economic model that will allow it to survive and serve its traditional role in society of separating the real news from the bullshit.  The answer is far from clear.

Social Media's Role in the Death of Journalism

Before CNN came along in 1980, and for several years after, most Americans got their news from their local newspapers or from the three major broadcast networks. For analysis of what it all meant, most turned to a weekly magazine likeTime or Newsweek. Although I was never able to convince my Appalachian grandfather that men had actually gone to the moon, most people accepted one set of  basic facts. If Walter Cronkite said it happened, and David Brinkley and Howard K. Smith agreed--it happened. 

The advent of 24-hour-cable news and other other news channels like MSNBC and Fox introduced a level of ambiguity to the notion of facts. Suddenly you had a choice of realities. If you didn't like the interpretation of talking head "expert" A on CNN, you could go listen to talking head "expert" B on Fox. I'm picturing now my grandfather explaining to Geraldo that God said the world was flat which pretty well takes care of that and those pictures of guys bouncing around with fish bowls on their heads were made in a television studio in Beckley or Bluefield. And there are 209 people on hold waiting to agree with him, 17 waiting to disagree, and four to say he's right but the studio was in Charleston.   

Alternative reality has turned out to be a decent business model. On any given night, you can surf between raving lunatics on MSNBC and raving lunatics on Fox and come away with the impression that we are living in a world in which facts are mere debating points, to be won or lost by those who make the loudest or most persuasive arguments.

Into this murky, highly politicized environment, comes social media--blogs, video-equipped cell phones, massively trafficed user-generated content aggregation sites like YouTube and suddenly everyone had all the tools they need to become a "citizen journalist." Catch Dan Rather peddling some faked documents and totally discredit a story that is almost certainly true. Record your local politician making some racist remark and force him to drop out of the presidential race. Catch Trent Lott yearning for the Old South and send him back to Mississippi. 

Spectacular scoops and great pieces of citizen journalism, to be sure, but they are extremely rare. The overwhelming majority of the thousands of daily blog posts are churned out by people more or less qualified to comment on the specific topic than my grandfather and virtually all their posts are little more than parasitic riffs on material lifted from the much maligned mainstream media. 

The downside of DIY media is that it has produced a climate of what might be gently termed "ignorant skepticism" that resembles nothing so much as the Maoist Cultural Revolution in which intellectuals and doctors were sent to the countryside to be re-educated while fervent student revolutionaries took over their jobs. If you've ever seen the film To Live or talked to anyone who lived through it, you'll know how well that worked out.

Social media produce content but they rarely produce news. Name a single internet-grown news organization of any scale. Name one that does actual news gathering and reporting that is not an extension of a traditional print or broadcast organization. Unless real news organizations like the Washington Post and the New York Times can find a way to be profitable on the net, journalism is doomed. And with it will go one of the essential pillars of a free society.

Why Journalism Matters

Journalists are not much beloved these days. The latest Forbes Most Admired Professions ranking has America's ink-stained wretches (as reporters like to affectionately call themselves although most of them haven't been near a printing press in years) charting in at number 18, behind bankers and accountants, and the lowest level for the press since 1977. That Jon Stewart is now the "most trusted" journalist in America does not speak well of the industry, although, in fact, Stewart embodies many of the qualities that great journalists have always had--integrity, fearlessness and a passion for truth.

There are many reasons for the decline in respect for the press, some external and uncontrollable, others self-inflicted. Constant sniping by conservative bloggers that the mainstream media is composed entirely of closet liberals who unfairly tilt their coverage toward candidates like Barack Obama has taken a toll. That Obama was something entirely new on the political scene, and the first serious black candidate to boot (and thus more newsworthy), is not enough to justify the extra attention in their view. 

A more serious charge is that the press abdicated its responsibility to adequately fact check and challenge the Bush administrations assertions leading up to the Iraq war--an abdication magnificently skewered by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Press Dinner to the discomfiture of the Washington press corps poobahs in attendance, most of whom chose to pan his remarks or ignore them. In his column in today's New York Times (called The American Press on Suicide Watch) the indispensible Frank Rich (who, coincidentally, is also thinking about the future of journalism this week) notes that the video of Colbert's performance went on to be one of the most popular YouTube videos ever.

Curiously, or perhaps deliberately, Rich does not mention the outsized role the New York Times played in betraying the public trust by cheerleading the Iraq war through its top intelligence reporter Judith Miller. Miller wrote, or co-wrote, most of the scary stories about Iraq's WMD which, as almost everyone now concedes, were non-existent. In so doing, Miller revealed herself to be something of a Manchurian reporter, manipulated superbly by the CIA and operatives like Ahmad Chalabi. Going to jail for refusing to out Scooter Libby will never be enough redemption for her in the eyes of her peers.

A second possible reason for the Times' accidental complicity may have been the replacement in 2003 of Howell Raines as Executive Editor by Bill Keller, who had been an early supporter of the war. Raines was forced out when one of his proteges--a young reporter named Jayson Blair--was discovered stealing or making up many of the stories he wrote.  

Yes, Dorothy, journalism, like all other professions, does have some bad apples. But, they are thankfully few in number. There are no secret handshakes or initiation ceremonies (unless being yelled at by a City Editor is an initiation rite), but every real journalist I have ever met is committed to Adolph Ochs's famous dictum to resist special interests and follow stories wherever they lead "without fear or favor." This is true of reporters at the Wall Street Journal, which is viewed as a conservative paper, and equally true at the New York Times, which is a liberal paper. Editorial pages and bloggers have opinions; reporters have facts, no matter where they work in an environment that tolerates a free press.  

As Rich notes in today's column:  

"...news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating — including that practiced here. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise, some of them gems, even as we might be moved to write our own blogs about local restaurants or the government documents we obsessively study online.

"But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive."

The press industry has not done a good job of communicating to the public that its member organizations do hold those who gather and report the news to high, long-established standards of accuracy and fairness. Reporters are taught to resist pressures from all special interest groups--including their own advertising departments. (Most news organizations have separation of "Church" and "State" policies that forbid anything more than casual contact between the two sides.) I have worked on the editorial side at Dow Jones and with the business side at Fortune, Forbes and Business Week and I've never met anyone who didn't understand and respect those boundaries. 

Whether the press can find a new sustainable business model is a matter of national urgency because an honest broker is essential to the functioning of a free society. Thomas Jefferson said so, and he was right. In my lifetime I have been a real reporter and I have been a marketer and producer of content. Democracy can survive without the latter, but it cannot survive without a free press.

What Will You Pay for a Free Press?

So, what kind of business model might allow large, standards-based news gathering organizations to survive and prosper in the face of the web's competitive advantage of free content and cheap delivery?  Forget advertising.  No large news organization can survive on internet ad revenues alone.  The numbers just don't add up.

There are lots of trial balloons being flung in the air.  What about NPR style donations?  (Imagine stories being interrupted every 10 paragraphs for a couple of paragraphs of begging).  Maybe, some sort of pay as you read micropayments scheme, a la iTunes?  Maybe the Pew and the Chubb Foundations will get together and fund some large news organization.

As Frank Rich so aptly puts it:  "...someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won't."

The basic survival question is whether internet users who have grown accustomed to the notion that content is free (or that it's all being paid for by advertising) and that copyright is some kind of old fashioned concept are willing to pay for a daily diet of  original, premium news.  

Rupert Murdoch thinks they will and just this week he announced that his company, News Corp., would begin charging readers of  its newspaper sites (which include  The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, the Sun and The Australian) within the next 12 months.  And he has said he will aggressively fight copyright violations. 

I, for one, hope he is right. Having readers pay subscription fees for access to original reporting and special features is the best of the possible solutions that have been offered up so far because it is the most likely to allow news organizations to maintain their independence.  But, the results of experiments with the subscription model have been mixed thus far.  The New York Times abandoned its short-lived effort to charge for access to material by its colummists, probably because it lost more in buzz and traffic than it gained in revenues.

On the other hand, the online subscription model seems to be working fine for Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and that may be the source of his optimism.  I suspect he is both right and wrong.  The WSJ is a must read publication for many people in business and I can see corporations buying multiple subscriptions for their employees. Faithful web users will grumble a lot but they will eventually pay for access to the Times and the Washington Post online.  Whether anyone will pony up real dollars to access the New York Post or many of the other Murdoch stinkers--or lots of good, but struggling, local papers--is more problematic. 

The bottom line is this:  Someone is going to have to pay to have the Cal McAffreys of the world--backed by healthy news organizations with access to the corridors of power and a commitment to pursue stories whereever they may lead--to  separate the real news from the bullshit for them.  If that's not you and me, then it won't happen and American society will be the real loser.