Editorial: When it comes to news, you get what you pay for

By Brandi Makuski

I’m amazed at how many people become genuinely angry if you ask them to pay for the news.

News reporting can be traced back to 59 B.C. Rome, but it wasn’t until the 1700s that it became thought of as a public service, one known as “The Fourth Estate.” This Thomas Carlyle-coined phrase references the “separateness” of journalists from the other three historically-accepted “classes” of society: clergy, nobility, and the commoners.

That separateness is important: journalists must be free from influence, and even the appearance of impropriety can stain their reputation—ergo, their work—in the public’s eye.

Until the mid-1800s, most entered the profession by way of an apprenticeship, often as a copyboy or cub reporter, but it didn’t become an area of academic study until 1879 when the University of Missouri offered it as a four-year program. About 35 years later, Joseph Pulitzer (yes, that Pulitzer) endowed a graduate program at Columbia University in New York, kicking off a series of similar programs at colleges across the nation.

In the 1950s and through the ’90s, standards for journalists rose to new heights. Procedures for verifying information, vetting sources, and writing style were standardized by way of training manuals like the AP Stylebook, often referred to as “the journalist’s bible,” or its older cousin, The Chicago Manual of Style. Both laid out rules for grammar and word usage, providing a great measure of consistency in mass communication.

Standardized training was reinforced at colleges or during newsroom internships, and ongoing professional development of these skills was offered, and improved upon, by various trade organizations, such as Poynter, Local Independent Online News Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association.

Training is necessary before professional journalists can report the news in a responsible way; it dictates standards of writing required to verify facts upon which the public depends. Journalistic institutions were autonomous but journalists were not: their interview notes were kept for reference, and their sources and stories were randomly audited by trained editors to ensure authenticity.

It was a nice balance: the journalists were held to a high standard, and as a result, the public was well-informed about their communities. The journalists provided an important, high-quality public service, and the public was willing to pay for it.

Social media changed that, as platforms like Facebook give everyone the chance to be a news reporter. That’s not always a bad thing; additional steps to vet sources are still required, but reputable news outlets often rely on observations, insight, or first-person video from those “on the ground” at a breaking news scene.

But those are just pieces of a story that must be placed into proper context, which also makes social media a very bad thing. Regardless of influence, or of verified sources—or lack thereof—and coupled with dwindling news consumer education and lower standards for journalists in recent years, social media has become “the news,” instead of the newsstand it should serve as.

It means the Fourth Estate is having a real identity crisis, placing the profession of journalism—along with all of its checks and balances—in danger.

So what’s the purpose of the news? Essentially, and in its purest form, it empowers the public. We live in a democratic society, meaning we elect our leaders. But for journalists, how would the public get its news?

These days, whether they realize it or not, many rely on the pages of various local elected officials—or their supporters—who place information in their own context and often, given human nature, with a personal agenda. Then, there are the “You Know You’re From Stevens Point If” or “Happening Now: Stevens Point” Facebook groups, where this reporter has seen everything from rumors about local construction projects, memories of the community’s past, false crime reports, and folks seeking phone numbers for local businesses. The groups have become part community hall, part barstool, and part phone book.

But there’s no attempt to ensure information is accurate before it’s shared, and it makes the job of local reporters much more difficult. More importantly, it eliminates any attempt to provide the public with a shared experience of news reporting, a “one-stop-shop,” if you will, of everything happening in the community.

The media provides a level playing field, placing events into context, offering contradictory views, asking hard questions, and independently verifying the information before it reaches the public. That’s our job.

Many unknowingly spread misinformation via memes or gifs that appear in their newsfeed. Facebook users are tempted to share those animated graphics with messages regardless of their implications, or the misinformation they contain, simply because of their humorous or sarcastic nature.

In a world where a lot of perceived “news” is packaged in gif or meme form, many have trouble identifying what is the news and what is not. Many are also hard-pressed to look at the news like the public service that it is and see no reason to pay for it.

That training I referenced earlier? It all costs money. Those with professional training—in any field—deserve to be paid for their expertise or they will, and do, leave the profession. That’s how professional news outlets are able to deliver news to the masses, and it’s why we charge a fee for advertising or subscriptions.

Even if a news outlet doesn’t require a subscription, we’re still paying for the news, but typically it’s passed along by an advertiser in the sale price of their goods. Subscription news sites do the same thing—we just remove the middleman. In a world where companies can advertise their product or event for free on social media, many avoid advertising with any news outlet at all, meaning news outlets can no longer rely on that ad revenue, once its chief source of cash.

Advertising revenue has plummeted by two-thirds since 2000, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That’s a looming death sentence for print publications, but even digital publications, like the Metro Wire, have overhead costs, despite not having a physical storefront or print publications. Staff salaries, website fees, insurance, legal and accounting costs, ever-increasing server space—it all costs money.

Those are hard things to pay for when the public demands free news or advertisers spend their dollars on social media.

It’s killing the news industry. While larger publications like the New York Times, or the “McPapers” operated by Gannett, have more of a cushion to weather the tough times, it leaves smaller, community news outlets sitting on the tip of a fencepost, constantly scrambling to cover their expenses.

Those smaller news outlets may not make a splash when it comes to state and national goings-on, but they do the best job covering the communities in which readers live—and far better than Facebook ever could.

So when it comes to getting news about your community, right now the best place to spend your advertising and subscription dollars is with that small community news outlet.

The community news industry is in real danger, and it’s up to readers and advertisers to save it.