Q+A: Victor Pickard, professor and author

Victor Pickard, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Democracy without Journalism,” talks to Leo Schwartz about solutions to journalism’s dysfunctional revenue models.

As every week seems to bring a new round of mass layoffs, media workers are looking for solutions to the industry’s broken revenue models. Victor Pickard, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new book Democracy without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society, thinks he has the solution: rebuilding our news system around a public media model. While this might seem daunting, he believes we need to start having the conversation.

In a phone interview, he argued that we don’t only need emergency funds for journalism — we need to radically restructure our news system around a publicly owned, service-oriented model.

Interview by Leo Schwartz. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Study Hall: One of your central ideas is this market failure at the heart of the journalism crisis. When you’re talking about market failure, specifically in journalism, what exactly are you referring to?

Victor Pickard: Basically, it’s the failure of the market to allocate resources in a socially desirable way. Journalism in particular produces a number of [benefits] that are not accounted for in [most business models]. Especially during the pandemic crisis, there’s a higher demand than ever for quality journalism. But that demand is not monetized. So even though it generates positive [results], and there’s even consumer demand in this case, the actual transaction is not generating enough money to actually fund the journalism that consumers demand.

SH: How did that come about, and why does it seem particularly dire in the past ten or so years?

VP: When the press first commercialized and started moving towards an advertising revenue-based model, advertisers weren’t necessarily concerned about supporting journalism. They were instead trying to reach audiences, and the best way to reach audiences was to run their advertisements in the local newspaper, which in many cases had a kind of monopoly power over that given market. This kind of model was made in a way where news was treated as a commodity, not a public service.

The fact is, journalism has always been expensive to produce, but it has rarely paid for itself. Very rarely do you have cases where readers are paying enough in subscriptions to support journalism, especially in the US, where historically 80% of newspaper revenues came from advertisers and only 20% from direct reader support.

There’s this lazy narrative that the internet broke journalism, and I always try to contextualize and historicize it — that the original sin was to pay for journalism through advertising and to have this overreliance on advertising revenue. Once the internet came along, that marriage of convenience was no longer convenient for advertisers. As advertisers and readers migrated to the web, digital advertising only paid pennies to the dollar of traditional print advertising. And that’s what blew up the model.

As much as we want to blame the big bad duopoly of Google and Facebook, they’re not the core cause of this crisis. They are benefiting from gobbling up the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue — somewhere around 70%. They certainly deserve some culpability, but they are not the direct cause.

SH: What types of policy interventions do you think there should be?

We need to find non-market means of supporting journalism to unhook journalism from these commercial imperatives. There are two general ways of doing that. One is to help create nonprofit news organizations or perhaps low-profit organizations. By low-profit, I mean, for example, public benefit corporations. If we have nonprofit institutions, they’re still reliant, in many cases, on private capital such as philanthropists and foundations. We certainly have some successful examples that we can point to, but I would argue that alone is also not a systemic fix. It doesn’t solve the news deserts problem. They’re not going to make sure that all communities have access to news and information.

So that’s why ultimately I come down most strongly on a public media option. I think that’s our last best hope. A public system is not being driven by profit imperatives; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be sustainable, but it does mean that there should be equal access to news and information. With a commercial system, you might have what some refer to as news redlining: It’s going to focus on higher socioeconomic groups, especially if it’s being driven by advertiser preferences, or on the demographics that are most likely to buy the products that the advertisers are trying to sell. Whereas a public media system is trying to make sure that all groups within society have access. That includes different language groups, different socioeconomic classes, and different communities.

We can only do that through policy and government intervention. It doesn’t mean that the government should have control, but I think the government has an affirmative duty to help set up those mechanisms and to provide the resources the system requires in order to actually live up to that ideal.

When I’m talking about a public media system, I’m also advocating for not just another BBC model, but rather something that’s actually publicly owned and controlled. It’s truly public in that local communities themselves, and the journalists themselves, have ownership and control over the news outlets. Even though the federal government would have this affirmative duty to ensure that the adequate resources are in place, from there, it needs to be devolved to the state level and then further to community level of ownership and control, where local communities are engaged at every level of news production and institutional governance.

SH: I see the struggles in even funding PBS and NPR. Why are we resistant to talk about policy solutions [in journalism]?

VP: The idea of having policy within the realm of journalism seems very unnatural to many Americans. But if we know our history, we know that media subsidies are as American as apple pie, beginning with the postal system and subsidies for delivering newspapers. Policy has always been involved. It’s a question of how it should be involved — whose interests are being served.

SH: Do you see any models that you think are particularly successful right now?

VP: Governments are beginning to look to subsidizing local journalism. Canada has been an example of this [where the government set up a $50 million fund to sponsor over newsroom 160 positions] and the BBC has the Local Democracy Reporting Service, where the BBC has been allocating reporters to help out news organizations by focusing on local journalism.

Governments are also beginning to look at taxing Facebook and Google to mandate that they start reallocating more advertising revenue back to publishers. I would argue that’s actually not ideal. I’d rather see that money go into a public media fund, not back to the commercial publishers who are arguably complicit in exacerbating this crisis. That has also been a critique of the BBC model, as well as with the Canadian model. Many of those reporters were actually going to privileged, incumbent, commercial publishers over smaller, independent publishers.

There’s really no perfect model that I would point to. There are certainly places that are doing a better job than the US, and I think the most important thing right now is to simply expand our political imagination about what’s possible: to point to these stronger public media systems around the world…We have to make sure that we’re not just simply propping up failing commercial models. We need to entirely restructure our news media system from the ground up. The question is, how bad do things need to get first before we start building something new out of the ashes?

SH: I know as journalists, we’re feeling pretty powerless right now. What can journalists do to start building better systems?

VP: What we’re already seeing is this growing class consciousness among journalists. It seems increased levels of solidarity are emerging, especially when you look at this wave of unionization, both in new digital newsrooms and in traditional news outlets. What the News Guild is doing right now is really encouraging, including looking to ways where they can encourage newspapers to become nonprofits. For example, there are efforts at the Baltimore Sun and the Salt Lake Tribune [to establish nonprofit newsrooms].

Ten years ago, I first started getting involved in these conversations about the future of journalism, when it first became apparent that there really was not a long-term commercial future for the level of journalism that we need. It was often journalists themselves who were the hardest to convince. Even progressive journalists, who were fairly liberal on other issues, became fierce libertarians whenever I would talk about making sure there were policies put in place to help protect journalism and help transition it into something more structurally sound.

I’m hopeful that’s changing. I think journalists, by being more open-minded about what the future of their craft might look like — and more specifically, what the future of their institutions might look like — would have more control over what they do. It would actually allow journalists to be journalists. In some ways this could be liberating. In the short-term, though, basic, material support — that’s our main concern.

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