Public newspapers?

[dougo]

The future of the newspaper business is looking pretty dire, as people prefer to read news online rather than get printed copies, and it's a lot harder to charge for news online; also, newspaper classified sections can't compete with Craigslist, and that was a big part of their revenue. It makes me wonder, though, why newspapers must be a business. We have public television and public radio, why don't we have public newspapers? Maybe it smacks too much of Pravda, the state newspaper of the Soviet Union. But PBS and NPR certainly aren't propaganda outlets, so it should be possible to have non-profit newspapers, funded by the government and by private donations, that are journalistically independent. How come this hasn't happened yet? Do you think it will happen?

Update: I just found out about MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, and St. Louis Beacon, non-profit local papers. Are there others?

Comments

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

But PBS and NPR certainly aren't propaganda outlets...

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying they don't have their own biases. But they are not government propaganda outlets the way Pravda was. (If they were, Bill Moyers would not have kept his job the last eight years.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, Kenneth Tomlinson tried to get Moyers fired. But, at least he failed?

[temvald.livejournal.com]

Brad DeLong linked to a really interesting post by Clay Shirky about newspapers, journalism, and economic models. The key point in there being that, for various historical reasons, print media does a lot of the "heavy lifting" of journalism. And that it's that journalism work more than the actual newspapers themselves that people are worried about going away.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

He's right, of course, and I don't really care about newspapers per se, just journalism in general. I think publicly-financed journalism could work even better online than in print, since it would presumably be public domain and easily reproduced everywhere.

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

As a sign of the times, NPR has stopped its paper subscriptions to newspapers, going online only.