Future for news is you, dear reader
In this case, it may mean bureaucrats in Ottawa will try to pick winners and losers in news business
William Randolph Hearst had a problem.
His New York City newspaper was battling one owned by Joseph Pulitzer for domination of the world’s biggest market.
He needed a damsel in distress. Enter Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros.
She was a looker – 20 years old, cultured, attractive. And in 1897 she was in a Cuban jail facing decades of hard time for helping the rebels. She was perfect.
Newspapers then survived by attracting readers with stories that interested them. The reader was king and newspapers had to be relevant or die.
Hearst splashed Cisneros story on his front page – again, and again, and again – playing on her youth, her beauty, her agony in prison.
Finally, Hearst arranged her escape. At least, that’s the story his paper told.
Drugged fellow inmates, prison bars pried loose so Cisneros could squeeze through, a flight to safety in the dark of night. Readers could not get enough of Cisneros and Hearst knew it.
That era is now known as the time of yellow journalism, when truth took a back seat to whatever sounded good, and sold.
That’s true, but the business and its customers were joined at the hip. Stories had to be important to readers because readers paid the bills. That changed early in the twentieth century when advertisers began to pay the bills and readers became second-class citizens.
The advertising age of newspapers lingered for decades, finally taking it in the chin when the internet went user-friendly in the 1990s. Readers started drifting away and advertisers went with them.
Welcome to 2018. Money’s tight and newsrooms are shrinking.
Which brings me to the federal government – and the ancient writer Virgil.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, wrote Virgil in the Aeneid just over 2,000 years ago. Yeah, I had to Google it. Translation (loosely, I suspect): “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
That’s a warning the news business may want to take to heart following an announcement days ago by the federal government. It’s going to drop $595 million on the news business over the next five years to try to help the industry as it struggles to find its way.
The plan will include, said one news outlet, “measures to facilitate fundraising by non-profit news organizations and tax breaks to fund the production of original content.”
That sounds swell. And it has a precedent. After all, the government put up serious money to rescue the big auto makers when they looked doomed, saying thousands of jobs.
But in this case, it may mean bureaucrats in Ottawa will try to pick the winners and losers in the news business. That’s always dangerous.
Journalism is important to democracy. Our Supreme Court has said so repeatedly in cases setting out the rules on when reporters can protect sources.
Often, those sources point the finger at government misbehavior. How popular is a news organization likely to be with the government if its reporters have a history of being a pain in the side of those controlling half a billion dollars in bailout money?
Not very, if history is any indication.
Still, the money is welcome. After all, when you’re battling to survive, you can’t be too choosy.
But until the news business overcomes its addiction to advertising dollars - rediscovering its readers, so they’ll pay for what it sells - it remains unclear where that money should go.