Bruce Austin on the Future of Journalism

Comments on the government bailout issue by Bruce Austin, professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology:

The government "subsidy" for broadcasters stretches much farther back than the introduction of Public Broadcasting; we note the governmental allocation of publicly owned broadcast frequencies to commercial interests for a revenue stream that empties only into a commercial pond.

The application of public broadcasting's method(s) of financial support to that of the printed daily newspaper or, for that matter, printed magazines (published at varying intervals) seems misplaced. It is a "solution" for a single dimension to someone's (newspaper publishers) narrowly defined problem (an economic/revenue problem).

To date, newspapers have, for either the strangest or most inexplicable reason, chosen to either downplay or ignore their strengths: reporting and writing. Newspapers have a virtual monopoly on those two attributes. "Aggregating," and its tedious synonyms, is not reporting nor is it writing; it's cutting and pasting.

Teachers criticize their students when all the student does is string together quotations from various sources (each appropriately cited, of course) for the course assignment. The teacher justifiably does so because there is nothing original being presented by the student. (Oh, yes, the "creative" construction of other people's efforts. Term papers and research papers are rarely assigned for judgment on the criterion of creativity.)

Newspaper publishers might begin to resolve their current economic woes by answering this question: how can we best exploit the monopoly we already possess for our own economic benefit? If publishers wanted to be generous, they could reword the question: how can we best exploit the monopoly we already possess for our own economic benefit while simultaneously satisfying the news interest of citizens?