News in the Internet Society

-- By AlexRouhandeh - 25 Oct 2024

A Broken Model

While the act of reading the news off a screen may deliver consumers the same result as reading off print, the shift has come with significant consequences. Newsrooms have shuttered, clickbait has proliferated, and fewer outlets are able to make the investment in accountability journalism. Alongside these developments, the transaction between media outlet and reader has changed, with dollars no longer delivering news in physical form. Instead, the reader agrees to temporary access in exchange for a digital subscription fee and/or collection of their data. It’s true that both models rely in part on advertising, yet before the advent of the iPhone, U.S. newspapers totaled nearly $49.3 billion in advertising revenue compared to the nearly $9.8 billion they’re estimated to have garnered in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. This has created a situation where much of the independent press has become dependent on social media platforms. Readers, used to the seemingly cost-free structure of the net, have become reluctant to shell out dollars on digital news subscriptions, feeding the incentive for outlets to collect digital ad dollars, sometimes at the expense of journalism and its readers. A system has been created whereby many news entities are providing consumers less than they used to during a time of increased competition for eyeballs. Politics, law, and technology have parts to play in correcting this flawed model.

Reaching Readers

Unlike most industries, where the primary roots of successful competition rest in producing quality product, a significant portion of the media industry competes over stoking outrage. Not only does this behavior flame political polarization, but it limits outlets’ abilities to form large, diverse, committed audiences. Before its revocation in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine played a role in thwarting this phenomenon, yet even if it were reinstalled today, its scope would be ill-suited to address polarization across the web. A 2020 report published in the UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal writes that a “Fairness Doctrine 2.0 could likely not reach the Internet based on the Scarcity Principle alone,” the principle being that airwaves are scarce enough to be regulated. In turn, the report states that solutions lie with consumers. How news and hedlines are discussed and contextualized has long been a fixture of the public square. To replicate this on the net, posts to article links could be subject to a system of interactive commentary, whereby users are free to contextualize and platform given works. If such a system were permitted on search engines, for example, the public could help elevate journalism worth promoting and downgrade journalism worth ignoring. Assuming the masses favor accurate and revelatory information, quality reporting should rise above sensational and flawed commentary.

Collective Empowerment

Despite raging polarization, American lawmakers have shown bipartisan interest in passing legislation to support the news business. Ten Republicans and nine Democrats co-sponsored Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar’s Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2023. Under the bill, newspapers employing less than 1,500 individuals would be empowered to negotiate with tech platforms regarding terms of content distribution. The bill’s details go beyond that, yet the core objective raises a central issue regarding the rights of users and content creators. A 2023 study conducted by researchers with the University of Houston, Columbia University and the Brattle Group estimates that Google and Meta owe U.S. publishers between $11.9 and $13.9 billion a year for revenue generated from their content. The platforms dispute these findings, illustrating the lack of clarity around ownership rights on the web. User behavior over the past decade and a half indicates that news hedlines and deks are products with inherent value, given the interactions and profits surrounding them, yet news outlets do not receive such value unless users take the effort to click on their site. If news outlets cannot achieve compensation for their goods, politics could play a role in realizing that outcome.

Beyond the Net

Solutions regarding a more effective business model for online journalism are paramount to the industry’s wellbeing, given the web’s standing as the dominant medium for news. However, publishers could also benefit from expanding their offerings to patrons. A 2018 study produced by the Journal of Consumer Research found in five experiments that “people ascribed less value to digital than to physical versions of the same good” and were more willing to pay for physical goods than digital ones. This dynamic is being witnessed among film fans who preserve ownership of their favorite films by collecting them in DVD and VHS form, as covered by The Guardian in 2024. Media entities could consider packaging news into an object of permeance for subscribers. While 60 percent of Americans expressed a preference for reading newspaper articles online versus the 22 percent who prefer print, according to a 2022 poll by YouGov, 47 percent of Americans would prefer to read a magazine in print opposed to the 29 percent who prefer online. This raises the question of whether news subscribers would be willing to pay newspapers for printed collections of the outlet’s top stories for that given week, month, or year.

For the Public Good

The foundation of these proposals rests upon the problem of power imbalances created by the rise of the net, an issue that many once cash-flushed news agencies failed to take seriously before time passed them by. Other industries may have perished under such circumstances, yet the Fourth Estate endures, maintaining its central part in democracy and human communication. Given journalism’s relationship with the public good, leaders within the space have advocated for diminishing its reliance on commodification through its transformation from private companies to non-governmental organizations. Such a metamorphosis could address many of these concerns, yet such a model would present continued reliance on the web and thus continued discrepancies in capital and power between journalistic outlets and the entities they cover. Finding solutions to the industry’s flawed business model do not lie simply in the goal of cash-flushed news organizations. Rather, these actions aid in the goal of offering democracy a watchdog endowed with sharp teeth.