So you want to improve the economics of journalism...

Some ideas to save journalism are better than others.

“Ships in a Gale,” Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1660 (National Portrait Gallery)

I am not a futurist (or working an angle in pursuit of tech money), so my thoughts on A.I. issues are more blunt than fancy: If the first time you saw an authentic video of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore and presumed without checking that it was authentic, you are somebody primed to get duped by the Royal Palace.

When it comes to finding fact, generative AI models are currently far more efficient at making messes than cleaning up, so their first impact on journalists’ jobs is to immediately make them harder.

Maybe all this sounded a little dour when I was invited to a class of journalism students at Cal State Northridge to talk about the ethical implications of A.I. in journalism. One of the students asked about ways AI could improve collaboration with coworkers.

I responded that the whole economic logic of productivity enhancing software is to make it easier to work alone. If you’re using an AI engine that has ingested all obtainable data, what will be the reasons you talk to a human coworker who hasn’t?

Okay, that was a little dour. But I try to be as accurate and straightforward as I can when I talk about the ugliness of journalism’s current economic conditions, which has prompted a lot of people to try to wrap their minds around some solutions that we can actually live with.

If you are one of the Important Leaders out there thinking the Big Thoughts about How To Save Journalism, you probably talk about a ton of different things orbiting a single, gravitationally overwhelming economic problem: The costs of producing quality journalism often dwarfs the revenues it brings in. The civically valuable stuff that gets laws changed and boosts community participation often just isn’t profitable.

So you need to do something about journalism’s unit costs, being the big boss at the journalism factory that you are.

You can boost newsroom throughput, which most commonly looks like editors cracking down on journalists to write more stories and faster, inevitably at the cost of quality and staff turnover and other inefficiencies that are harder to detect in a management Powerpoint. Maybe you can be the first newsroom executive to license a story-writing generative AI model that isn’t going to get you immediately sued for libel or copyright infringement!

OR YOU CAN CUT LABOR COSTS, which includes a wonderful array of activities like not giving out raises for years, freezing pension and 401(k) contributions, shifting healthcare costs onto plan participants, outsourcing customer support to India or the Philippines, hiring permalancers and temps instead of staff, shifting printing to a non-union plant, or growing by acquiring non-union editorial units, or union-busting more generally, etc.

And of course to cap it all off you can lay off the employees you don’t like so much (=older/better-paid), sprinkling in just enough newer hires so you don’t get sued for age discrimination.

In related news, Gannett CEO Mike Reed got a compensation increase last year of 14% to a total of $3.9 million, while the median Gannett worker’s compensation actually decreased (not even counting inflation). This sort of person doesn’t really need help cutting journalist pay, though they might need assistance finding the exit.

But a recent article by Mark Nadel on “New Ideas for Improving the Economics of Producing Local Journalism” in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science volunteered an idea that nearly abandoned the idea of a living journalistic wage entirely.

Nadel’s first suggestion was to recruit “retired journalists, teachers, and local leaders for pro bono service.” Nadel notes that “not only are health care advances enabling retirees to remain sharp many years after retirement, but new media technologies have also reduced the cost and physical requirements of journalism.”

Nadel adds, “There are already many examples of those paid little or nothing to provide local news.”

With cost-saving friends like these, who needs private equity?

I’m being slightly ungenerous toward somebody who was approaching the subject earnestly. Nadel’s concluding idea was directed at revenue generation: creating a tort-like reward for investigative journalists whose expensive-to-fund work generates a major financial savings or award, akin to a whistleblower reward. Let’s do that. He also had some ideas about reinforcing libraries’ centrality in our information ecosystem, which I think is interesting.

Here are some other ideas: You can boost revenues by forcing Google et al to pay for the free journalist labor it’s already squeezing for profits (my current first preference). Or you can lower costs by offering tax credits that make it cheaper to employ journalists, or just directly fund public media more robustly overall, plus a variety of other tax-oriented ideas (my runner-up, or even choice no. 1b).

Or maybe you can convert to nonprofit status and get philanthropic grants from the profits rich people made off workers in other, more productive industries (third place).

Each of these are redistribution schemes of varying types. But right now they are some of the better ideas if you’ve seen the alternatives, as I have.