Meditations in a journalistic emergency

The worst thing journalists can do is give up hope.

"Read All About It!" Lewis Hine, April 1912. (National Gallery of Art)

This is my last day at the Los Angeles Times after more than 11 years as a staff writer. I've taken the buyout. It's been an extraordinary ride, but it was also just time to go.

Journalism, famously, breaks your heart. But in the words of Frank O'Hara, each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous.

For the near term, I’m keeping up on my dues and staying on as the (unpaid) president of our NewsGuild local, Media Guild of the West, which has exploded in size and now represents journalists from a dozen commercial and nonprofit newsrooms of varying sizes from Southern California to Texas. 

This is a time for action. If you’re a journalist, here’s what you can do to help journalism survive.

Journalists need to get involved in journalism policy, and they need to get involved right now.

For the past three years, I've been advocating on behalf of our Guild in Congress and the California legislature on bills that affect the working conditions of journalists.

There is a lot of interest out there by lawmakers to try to address the local news crisis in this country. They're just looking for good bills that make sense.

Check out Illinois' recent package of journalism policy proposals for an idea of some possibilities, which include tax credits for journalism jobs, a bill requiring platforms to pay publishers for the journalism they features and a WARN Act-style notification requirement if a local newsroom is going to get sold to an out-of-state owner.

We need more of these kind of wide-ranging proposals that understand journalism’s problems don’t have a single fix.

But one of the things I’ve learned is that relatively few working journalists have any input at all into the journalism policy that’s currently being debated around the country. The professional journalists who produce a lot of the journalism that Americans see are represented by many excellent unions (NewsGuild, Writers Guild of America East and West, SAG-AFTRA) and high-quality membership organizations (SPJ, IRE, NABJ, NAHJ, AAJA, ONA et al). They are largely an untapped resource in this space.

Find some like-minded members of your organization and explore the ideas and approaches that align with your conscience — because the journalism policy space, as it now stands, desperately needs more journalist voices.

The publishers are extremely active and the leading drivers of the journalism policy space. But they tend to see the problems of journalism through the lens of their own businesses, which creates sometimes enormous political conflicts.

This is true of both for-profit and non-profit newsrooms. The most vicious policy fight I’ve witnessed didn’t involve Big Tech but the proposed creation of a state-funded grant program for public interest journalism. It was a benevolent idea that, it turns out, would have pitted publishers against each other in a zero-sum competition for a limited pot of discretionary money.

Myriad board-governed 501(c)3’s from various intellectual tendencies often weigh in journalism policy. Most are very smart and well intentioned. They also commonly lack any kind of representation among working journalists, and correspondingly, some of their policy solutions imply the involvement of a lot of precarious, short-term or nonprofessional labor (grants, fellowships, freelancers, volunteers).

Life in that world is noble, but very hard, not sustainable for many, and vulnerable to law enforcement harassment or litigation by wealthy subjects in states without anti-SLAPP protections. Supporting small publishers needs a lot more work on a systemic level.

One useful area where journalism unions in particular can contribute is helping explore ways to make it easier to form news cooperatives like 404 Media and Defector, which allow journalists to pool their labor non-exploitatively without scale-seeking venture capitalists ruinously looking over their shoulders.

The antitrust advocacy space thinks much bigger, seeing larger publishers as a necessary counterbalance to Big Tech’s domination of the digital advertising. Antitrusters think that correcting that imbalance will return newsrooms to something closer to sustainability.

But this space often lacks a well developed or coherent labor analysis, making it quick to overlook the monopsony problems developing inside the same media industry it’s trying to help. The version of the story the public hears is that the Murdochs, Gannett, Alden Global Capital, the New York Times Company and Sinclair don’t have enough power and need more.

There’s a reason that makes people anxious, including sometimes the journalists who work for these companies. (Industry collapse and consolidation makes it easier to keep newsroom wages down while driving up the costs of quitting for journalists like you and me.)

But the antitrusters are right. The publishers actually do need more power to maintain a workable bargaining position with the platforms, which now dominate how knowledge is transmitted over the internet.

The pro-tech and market fundamentalist contingent in the journalism advocacy space has perhaps the most insane and unworkable vision of journalism’s future, which happens to look just like the crumbling journalistic status quo we already live in.

Platforms control the digital advertising market that non-paywalled news outlets rely on. Platforms control the distribution channels between news outlets and the audiences they might solicit for subscriptions. Platforms give out welcome grants to small publishers who are gasping for survival, which then turn into strings-attached economic relationships that further fragment the publishers as a lobbying bloc.

And then these same platforms reinvest their ill-gotten profits back into trying to stop democracies around the world from regulating their advertising duopolies.

This isn’t just a problem of economics but a major problem of political economy, a matter of power as much as money. American journalists are at dire risk of losing what’s left of our autonomy if we can even keep the journalism jobs we have left.

What journalists can fight for

In lieu of a powerfully funded public media in the United States — which would be amazing, but it won’t happen anytime soon — we should do the next best thing, which is to build up countervailing powers:

Journalists should continue unionizing media companies to counteract the consolidation that has taken place, and we should continue to be fearless about going on strike to hold publishers accountable.

Regulators should help publishers gain more bargaining power with Big Tech, but in exchange, they have to agree to payroll spending requirements that link these recouped revenues to the continued employment of journalists.

Future platform-publisher bills must take their cues from the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act and Canada’s C-18 settlement, which tie disbursements to newsroom employment.

Publishers don’t create journalism; journalists do. Nobody wants public policy to support more ChatGPT mills polluting the internet. The public doesn’t benefit if publishers confront AI developers to strike more favorable licensing deals only to turn around and deploy generative AI to replace their own journalists.

We must make it easier to roll over for-profit news companies into nonprofits, making newsrooms more attractive destinations for philanthrophy and other community support that’s built on an ethic of solidarity rather than zero-sum competition.

We should pursue more broad-based tax policies that make it easier to hire and retain journalists while minimizing the risks of political favoritism that come with more targeted government interventions.

There’s so much more that’s possible, and journalist organizations are capable of accomplishing a lot when motivated by solidarity. We just need the willpower.