media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Crumple the Paper

Here in Humboldt, editors ask me how they can use Humboldt State students as unpaid reporters. At the journalism department we discourage that; it would hinder the creation of paid jobs which students need upon graduation.

But a non-profit news organization would be a different story. If the non-profit produced a real service to the community, the community might respond with continued and increased funding. That would allow the hiring of a professional staff that could oversee the inexperienced low-paid workers.

Except for a few years during the Internet boom, journalism was a historically low-paid profession. I don’t know any journalists who ever expected to get rich. Instead, publishers always exploited them to stay rich.

By relying on community funding rather than advertising, a non-profit news organization would have to deliver real service to the local population, not local business.

That would turn Benjamin Day’s model for journalism on its head. And since that model is now 176 years old, it is time we tossed it. In 2004, the newspaper industry had an operating profit of more than 20 percent. That was the year that investors of Knight-Ridder forced the sale of the 32-paper chain, which had earned 85 Pulitzer Prizes, because it pulled in a mere 19 percent in operating profits.

Last week in Washington, New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney held hearings on a new bill she sponsored, H.R. 3602, which could give local news organizations tax-exempt status. Some argue that amounts to government support of the press. But Princeton University sociologist and historian Paul Starr testified before Maloney’s Joint Economic Committee that the U.S. government recognized from its birth that you can’t have a healthy democracy without a healthy press and subsidized it with free and inexpensive postal service.

Eliminate the high cost of printing and delivering the paper. End the siphoning of profits to investors. Give news organizations the ability to operate tax-free. And maybe we can build sustainable organizations that can be the watchdogs of our government and corporate enterprises that we need.

Even as the journalism industry implodes, more young people turn up at schools like Berkeley and HSU to become journalists. We need to foster that enthusiasm, ensure they get the training they need, and direct that enthusiasm toward community service. That should be the journalist’s true mission.

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