Journalism's New Economics

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As newspapers continue shrinking, Julian Friedland worries about how journalism will handle the "conflict of interest between pleasing the bottom line" versus "upholding its mission to educate the public by publishing a steady stream of hard-hitting investigative reports." As investigative journalism has been "eviscerated" by declining budgets, the "very best news sources in the country" are either family-owned newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post, or publicly-funded media, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Media represent an essential service like education and infrastructure. As such, media need to be protected from the corrupting influence of private interest, which has finally grown so massive as to exert a crushing grip on journalistic independence," Friedland argues. "If we look to Europe we can see media independence there is protected by public funds. Take the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is mostly funded by taxes, permitting it to hold every corporation and government's feet to the fire. In France, two out of the three major networks receive no more than 40 percent of their operational funds from ads. ... It's high time we start putting a lot more money where our mouth is."