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Thursday, August 20, 2015

Four Approaches to Providing Political News, Given that So Many People Don't Want It [Updated]

By Jonathan Ladd

In his newsletter this week, Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point that I want to pass along and expand on. He writes:
I enjoyed Ravi Somaiya's piece in the New York Times about everyone's Cecil The Lion hot takes and how digital media is basically garbage. But like most such takes, it strikes me that it fails to grapple in a remotely serious way with the fact that analog media was also garbage
Of course there was lots of important, substantive journalism in analog media. But these pieces tend to act as if classic newspapering was a blend of fearless investigative reports maybe leavened by earnest writeups of school board meetings. 
Actual newspapers were selling a lot of commodity information services -- weather, sports scores, stock prices -- alongside things like crossword puzzles ("quizzes" in today's parlance), horoscopes, comic strips, syndicated George Will columns, and soft focus lifestyle features. Lots of hard national and international news was either straight wire service syndication or else rewrites ("aggregation") of accounts from more prestigious outlets. Local television news was an infamous cesspool of violence ("if it bleeds it leads") and sensationalism.
This highlights a more general problem. All news media organizations throughout U.S. history have had to face the tough fact that only a minority of the public is interested in what political elites would call informative or high quality political news (see here, here, here, and here). There are different strategies for dealing with this fact, but you can't just wish it away.

One option is not to bother with political news at all. Many websites today (and many magazines and newspapers in years past) have focused on various other entertaining topics and with little or no political information. As Yglesias points out, local TV news programs have for decades had more viewers nationally than other other type of news programming. Yet not coincidentally, local TV news contains very little political news. These programs' successful strategy is to follow what marketing surveys tell them viewers most want from their broadcasts: weather, crime, sports, and other human interest stories.

Illustrated story on whales from the New York World
on Aug. 13, 1911See here for more.
Largely eschewing politics was essentially the strategy of the first mass market newspapers that developed in the United States: the commercial broadsheet newspapers of the mid-to-late-1800s. Starting with the New York Sun in the mid-1800s and reaching full flower with the rival national newspaper chains of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the late 1800s and early 1900s, U.S. newspapers for the first time adopted a business model of making money through large circulations that attracted lucrative advertising. To do this, they had very low prices (the New York Sun was labeled the "penny press") and featured very little politics. In the 1800s, these mass-market broadsheet dailies were 8-12 pages and featured mostly stories about almost everything besides politics, including: business, crime, accidents, fires, celebrity divorce, suicide, labor, education, religion, sports, recent inventions, diseases, weather, books, theater, music, fashion, recipes, and even serialized fiction (see here, here, here, and here).

A second strategy is to include informative political coverage, but to bundle it with more entertaining content. As Yglesias points out, this was the approach of major U.S. newspapers through most of the twentieth century.  The idea is that, even though newspapers could have made money without political coverage, reporters and newspaper owners wanted to cover politics. So they covered lots of other entertaining topics and included political news as well, all bundled in the same newspaper. Advertisers and subscribers were mainly paying for the more entertaining types of news, and that subsidized the political news. (Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York American also followed this strategy after about the turn of the twentieth century, when they were huge bundles of different sections but also included political news coverage.) This worked until the advertising base for all newspapers collapsed. Yet this model is still used by newer outlets, It is basically the financial model for the news operation at sites like Buzzfeed, and to some extent Vox. All those quizzes and top-10 lists that Buzzfeed posts, the lifestyle stories that Vox runs, and all the other entertaining content appeals to a broad audience, brings in clicks and ad revenue, and that subsidizes the political news.
A cartoon page from the New York World in
the early 1900s.

A third approach is for political parties, activists, or politicians to directly subsidize money-losing political news organizations. This was how newspapers were financed during the revolutionary era through through the Jacksonian era. Political newspapers were subsidized by incumbent politicians, who gave the papers lucrative government printing contracts or employed editors as postmasters or in other government jobs. Newspapers were also subsidized with direct payments from party coffers or wealthy party supporters. This economic model led newspapers to serve their economic masters (politicians and parties) rather than needing to appeal to the mass audience with less political interest. These papers were usually 4-page weeklies or dailies entirely filled with political content, in which information and propaganda mixed seamlessly. (See here or chapter 2 in my book.)

The only area where this media model still survives in the U.S. is in ideological magazines and websites such as the New Republic, American Prospect, National Review, Weekly Standard, etc. These news organizations and others like them rarely sell much, if any, advertising, and don't sell enough subscriptions to avoid consistently losing money. They are supported, not by political parties directly as the old party newspapers were, but by ideologically sympathetic owners and/or donors.

The fourth and final way to get around the fact that many people dislike political content is to restrict people's media choices so that they have very little choice but to consume political news. This was the economic model of network television newscasts from the 1950s until the 1980s. As Markus Prior has shown, in the network television era, households had very few options when the network evening news aired. Most household televisions in the 1950s and 1960s could pick up three channels or less, which tended to air all network evening news broadcasts at the same time, leaving no escape. Few other media options existed. Hardly any households had cable, and obviously none could go to the internet for news or entertainment. Even independent stations were rare, and often carried on UHF frequencies, which had weaker signals and which many televisions in use couldn't even receive through the late-1960s. With these limited options, many people watched network political news who would have preferred less political content. And networks faced very little pressure to reduce the amount of political news on their broadcasts (i.e. make them more entertaining) in order to keep their audience. This only works when people have (from a modern perspective) very limited choices. When choices increased, the network evening news audience shrunk, especially among younger generations, causing these programs to reduce the percentage of political content per show to try to compete.

It is easy to hector journalists and say that news organizations should cover things this way or that way. But it is important to keep in mind that American news organizations have always operated within this basic limitation that only a minority of folks want to consume lots of political information. News organizations need to adopt one of these four strategies (or some combination of them) in order to stay in business.

Update 8/25/2015:  

I received a lot of great feedback since I posted this. I'd like to share and respond to some of the comments. First, someone pointed out to me that in 2009 Jay Rosen put together a very comprehensive list of 21 different ways to subsidize news production. Here it is. I still think that my four categories cover the vast majority of political news operations, but Rosen mentions some things that I didn't cover. It is worth taking a look.

Second, several people asked me how Fox News and conservative talk radio fit into this. That is a good question. It is another type of bundling that I didn't mention: bundling political information with inducements to outrage and ideological solidarity. There certainly is political information provided by these media. But the new information takes up a small percentage of the broadcasts. They way these programs are made entertaining is, as Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj describe in their book The Outrage Industry, by discussing and getting outraged about the news, and mad at ideological opponents. Ideological cheerleading can be quite entertaining, and is another way to subsidize news coverage.

Finally, a few people asked about the business model of National Public Radio. This is a bit complicated. The public radio system overall is subsidized by the federal government (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)), state and local governments, donations from private individuals and foundations, universities that own affiliate stations, and advertising/underwriting. But the national and local government support is not necessary to keep in business the national NPR organizations or the NPR affiliates in most major cities. Without government subsidies, many rural NPR affiliates would probably need to shut down, but the national organization and the major urban affiliates could continue, funded mainly through donations, grants and sometimes universities.

But these are still subsidies. If it wanted to, could NPR survive through advertising alone? Given its audience size, it seems that it could. NPR is actually one of the media success stories of the past 30 years. While network news and conventional newspapers declined or stagnated in audience, NPR has grown. As Pew's State of the Media annual reports have documented, NPR went from an average weekly audience of 6.98 million in 1985 to 14.7 million in 2000 to 26.2 million in 2014. That's on top of 28 million unique monthly hits on its web site and 54 million podcast monthly listeners. If a transition to a commercial business model didn't reduce these audience numbers too much, this is probably enough to support the national network and major metro area affiliates through advertising.

NPR's audience growth is a bit of a puzzle, because pretty much every other form of media that reports in a similar style has faced audience declines in the past 30 years, while NPR's audience has gone the other direction. It shows that, while the audience for this type of news is not as big as the network news' audience in the decades when folks had no choice but to tune in, it is enough to sustain a viable commercial business. If the public radio system ever did give up subsidies from government, foundations, and private individuals and moved to an advertising only model, they could provide a rare exception to the generalizations I make above. They could be a fifth viable business model. The key for them seems to be to have very high brand recognition and very positive reputation among liberals interested in political news. That's not an easy task. But if you can do it, that audience should be enough.

2 comments:

  1. I would like to add what I think is a logical conclusion to what you wrote. 1. It is unrealistic to expect private businesses to serve as a branch of government, which is essentially what we're doing by expecting them to provide the public with the political news they need in order to maintain a democracy. 2. If people aren't interested in political news, then the problem is not them, but rather the expectation that they should be interested in it. If our political system has unrealistic expectations for people, it is flawed, not the people. Our system of democracy is based on fantasy.

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  2. Unfortunately, oligarchical republics don't work that well either, or at least they haven't been maintained in any countries I can think of. I don't know that much of the history, but the voting franchise in the US has kept expanding, and we have to wonder why that would be if most people didn't care.

    Lincoln explained our kind of democracy a long time ago. You can fool people for a while, but a majority or plurality figure it out eventually. Compare that to the problems if we start fiddling with the voting lists and laws on who qualifies for the vote. Can you even propose some criteria that would be fair?

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