Journalism’s Savior?

btw, steve, your kids are still stealing music. they're not just telling you. trust me on that one.

What is Brill talking about. Nearly every town and city has newspapers that exist purely on advertising. And communities value them. I'm sure this will work as beautifully as Contentville did. And the Clear card.

I think steve brill is on to something. provide a single monthly fee to access any and all journalism content. what a deal , especially if it is packaged in such a way as to be immeidately and easily accessible. also, it appeals to people who value solid reporting and analysis. where do i sign up?

The white house is standing by the "ninety percent" 100% lie. Liberal journalists standing by it uncriticly can go to any news venue they want and lose their credibility until they learn to be more factual. Less biases. More in step with reality.

The fact that Steve Brill has completely missed the point regarding journalism is indicative of how out of touch the people in that field are. It's not a marketing problem, Mr. Brill, it's a product problem. If ever there was any debate about the state of journalism in this country, it was settled once and for all in this last election cycle. Journalism is dead. Don't blame the Internet or talk radio or anyone else. Sadly, it is lack of objectivity and credibility that is doing in the jounalistic establishment and nothing else.

A huge part of the problem which isn't being addressed is that of the MSM's credibility. A vastly under-reported fact about the MSM is that their credibility has been about 10 points lower than that of former President Bush' final job approval ratings now for years. A huge portion of those people who previously were forced to rely on mainstream publications because of the lack of alternatives, or their ignorance of them, now have access to sites which provide a composite from various sources, the NY Times, Newsweek, Time, etc. being only a few of very, very many. Mr. Brill's assumption that journalism consumers are so desperate to be fed the same narrow perspective as before is simply fundamentally flawed. There simply aren't enough people who revere the NY Times et al as institutions anymore to pay for the privilege of sustaining them, as there once were. Individual pieces of reporting may be worthwhile, but the vast majority of content is so irrelevant, and/or information for information's sake drivel, that there simply isn't enough meaningful substance to justify the enterprises in toto.
Journalism is now being forced to compete in a truly reality based environment for the first time in it's history, and readers aren't about to go back to being hand fed smart-sounding bs anymore.
Mr. Brill is a dinosaur looking to save his own kind, which are already irretrievably extinct.

the problem is how BALANCED news is defined.which will follow right onto the internet.
In the present model if 2 people want a law to pass and 8 do not, the the two people and why they want the law get s85% of the coverage and the 8 get thier view cramed int the 15% of the balance.
The 2 will get uncritical coverage. The 8 have thier sanity editorially question.
Therefore, the coverage is NOTt in balance with the real situation! It is politicaly balanced! And is PREOMOTIONAL "journalism." Or ACTIVIST" journalism.But it is waAaAaAy out of balance with the real world. Real events;. Real correlary of opinion, so... NOT CREDIBLE! And the 8 KNOW IT!

If you think that newspapers are falling over dead because of the internet, and that people are willing to pay for access to newspapers, you can invest in Steve's venture. I think, however, that newspapers are in the death throes of a long death caused as much or more by television and cable news. It's the power of the image and the excitement of video that has killed off newspapers; the internet readership just closed the eyelids on the dead body. If the internet helped acelerate the death of newspapers, it wasn't as a result of the news pages being read online, it was via monster.com, realtor.com, ebay and autotrader.com. The internet stole the classified advertising revenues from the newspapers. That left display advertising. And Steve Brill's proposal isn't going to do anything for the display advertising revenues. Some readers buy the newspaper to see the sales and the coupons. Others buy the newspaper for the comics, the TV section and the crossword. They won't buy an online license for the newspaper. I suspect that very few people beyond Steve Brill's Yale alumni chums buy the newspaper simply for the news stories. Certainly not enough to make a business.

Steve's got the right idea. As a former print journalist, I'm probably in the minority in saying print newspapers brought their demise on themselves. They didn't plan for the paradigm shift from consuming news from a bulky pile of paper dumped on your doorstep to online sources and television. Yet, print journalists are still the best news GATHERERS. So newspapers long ago should have shifted their operations to strictly news gathering ones and sold their product to the outlets who were much better (and more current) at distributing the news. But instead, they continued to build printing plants, as my hometown paper did just a few years ago, and now they've had to lay off almost their entire staff. Yet another example of poor decisions at the top of the food chain. So maybe Brill's concept will help save some of those journalists who are victims of those incredibly bad decisions on the part of higher ups in the industry.

I have read the Los Angeles Times on-line for about 10 years. I prefer to read my news on line than in the physical paper form. I find large newspapers unwieldy and what a waste of paper and trees. I have absolutely no problem paying something similar to what home delivery of the physical paper would cost. An on-line subscription should include more high quality photos on feature stories and very limited advertising. I would pay. Readers need to support their local newpapers.