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This interview is part of the Future of Journalism interview series.
This is an interview by OurBlook with journalism Prof. Charlotte Grimes , who holds the Knight Chair in Political Reporting at the Newhouse School, Syracuse University.
 What do you think of the idea being bandied about that governments as a last resort should bail out failing newspapers?
CG: Like most journalists, I'm extremely squeamish about the thought of government doing anything with or to newspapers. My instinct is to say: Not on your life! But . that said, newspapers need some life support these days ... or at least we need life support for the kind of journalism that mostly comes from newspapers. And historically, we have had some limited government support for newspapers.
For example, the Postal Act of 1792 created the U.S. Post Office AND gave favorable postage rates to newspapers, because the founders realized that a fragile democracy needed the free flow of news to survive. And the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 exempted newspapers from anti-trust laws so that they could share some business resources ... such as ad departments ... and keep competitive newsrooms operating in the same town. Many people now think the Joint Operating Agreements of the preservation act were a failure. But they did probably did allow some cities to have two newspapers ... and two competing newsrooms ... longer than the pure market would allow, given that markets seem to always prefer a monopoly. And for a third example, we have National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System as examples of direct government support, in tax money, for journalism. I'm not wild about how vulnerable that makes them to government pressure. That really aggravates my squeamishness. On the other hand, the government frequently tries to bring the non-tax-supported press to heel too. I'm only half-joking in saying that one thing government could do to support the press would be to stop trying to subpoena reporters' to reveal their sources and draining their news organizations of money in the legal fights.
I can't support nor even realistically predict a direct government bailout of newspapers in the same sense we mean it about the auto industry or the financial industry. Billions of tax dollars given to struggling or bankrupt newspapers? Not. Going. To. Happen. About the only people the public loves to hate more than Congress, auto and Wall Street executives would be newspaper people or journalists of any type.
Still, in addition to not subpoenaing reporters for sources, government MIGHT .. and I stress the MIGHT ... be able to do some things like tax breaks for newspapers as they adapt to the digital revolution, tax breaks for start-ups of new news organizations ... online or in print ... or tax breaks for the wonderful brave souls willing to buy a going-out-of-business newspaper and willing to have it fulfill its purpose of giving people what they need to know to stay free and self-governing. After all, we have sometimes given tax breaks to encourage "green" technology and energy-efficient homes. Why not a tax break for the organizations that commit real journalism ... the kind that holds the powerful accountable, gives us knowledge about what our government has doing, challenges us to think about our society's problems and gives us independent, impartial, multi-faceted, verifiable facts on which to base our decisions?
In the event governments decide to do it, should they attach conditions as is being done for other bailout loans and grants or should it be a blank check?
CG: Nope. Couldn't do that. There's that wonderful thing called the First Amendment. No strings. Ever. That's always been a problem, frankly, for the broadcast part of the press. Since their delivery medium has been the "public airwaves," that's how the government has been able to put a few (even if seldom jerked) strings on TV and radio to operate in "the public interest."
The fear of conditions, of course, is what makes journalists so squeamish about any help from the government. It's the old saying of "Whoever pays the piper calls the tune." And journalists don't want to be dancing any steps to the government's tune.
Philanthropic groups also are being mentioned as a possible savior for newspapers. What do you think of that as a possibility?
CG: Philanthropic groups are certainly going to have to part of the salvation of newspapers ... or at least their kind of journalism. I should stress that I'm not intensely concerned about the delivery system of journalism. News print? Great. Pixels on a computer screen? Great. Text headlines on a cell phone? Great. Carrier pigeon? Great. It's the PURPOSE, not the platform, that matters. And the purpose, as the wonderful book called "The Elements of Journalism" puts it, is to give people the knowledge to be free and self-governing.
Newspapers ... and independent, impartial, verifiable journalism ... are going to have to find many new revenue streams. "Membership" fees like NPR or National Geographic to pay for reporting is among the options. Many people say we can't charge for news online. I don't think that's necessarily true. The few experiments in it have had mixed results, with special cases in success and in the failures. The Wall Street Journal gets cited for its specialized audience who can write off its online subscriptions. The New York Times didn't do well trying to charge for its columnists. But why would people pay for more opinion when so much online and in the blogosphere is opinion for free? Facts, on the other hand, are extremely valuable and expensive for news organizations to get. Those facts might be worth more online than more opinion. Most of the "pay-for-news" arguments get dismissed too easily, I think. For example, critics say Itunes works to get people to pay for a download of a song because they can keep the song forever. Well, you keep the knowledge from a news story forever, too. You don't need to keep re-reading the Washington Post's powerful Walter Reed series to value the knowledge you gained from it ... or to value the results: better care for veterans.
And I'm not willing to give up hope yet on the wealthy eccentrics out there who might be willing to become the next generation of "press barons" ... the next generations of Hearsts, Scripps and Pulitzers. After all, an Hungarian immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer bought a bankrupt St. Louis newspaper at a sheriff's auction in 1878 ... and out of that came the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which reported the Teapot Dome scandal and remade much of St. Louis with its crusading journalism. Oh, yeah, he also endowed the Pulitzer Prizes. Some very good newspapers will be available for those new press barons. If nothing else, buy the name. Hire the laid-off staff. And raise hell again ... in print or online. Take less profit than Wall Street's faceless investors will take. Invent new ways to make money out of the news business.
I have faith in the next generation of dreamers.
Focusing on where you teach and live ... Syracuse, N.Y. ... do you think the newspaper there will survive? If it doesn't, will there be a loss to the community?
CG: Our newspaper, The Post-Standard, is owned by Advance Publications. That's the Newhouse family corporation. It's a monopoly newspaper here, as are most newspapers across the country. It's doing what most are doing ... some buyouts of staff, much experimentation online. I don't know its business details so I can't say anything reliable about its survival. But if we lose it, we lose the best and only real watchdog we have on government and the powerful. That would terrify me.
You have many years of experience in journalism and teaching it. From your experience and vantage point, is there anything newspapers can do that they're not doing to improve their chances of surviving?
CG: Well, it's not exactly a brilliant business strategy to (a) give away valuable news for free online and/or (b) allow the aggregators like Google to steal your expensive hard work of reporting and/or (c) cut the reporting, shrink pages, give a smaller, thinner print product ... and charge more for it. Duh.
I think newspapers have to play to their strengths: Deeper, faster and more thorough reporting ... especially by trained professionals who know how to track down hard-to-get information and how to verify facts. Vivid and engaging writing that makes complex topics understandable and even interesting. Kick-ass investigations that hold the powerful accountable and bring about civic and business changes for the better. Creative use of the Web's ability to display information from databases, such as maps of, say, toxic waste dumps in a neighborhood or home foreclosures.
I'm not convinced that video and audio ... "multimedia" ... are going to be newspapers' salvation. They're fine to have, as supplements to written stories with good graphics, powerful photos and useful database information. But video and audio take real time ... five minutes of video is five minutes ... and people can scan text so much faster. We'll always want to see the spectacular video or some special moment captured in sound. But if that would save newspapers online, then TV Web sites would be thriving ... and they're not.
So bottom line: Journalism is what we need to save. And we need to teach people to value it. We need "news literacy" courses, such as Howard Schneider is creating at Stony Brook University and which we will be doing at Syracuse University, too. Journalism is taken too much for granted.
Before joining Syracuse, Prof. Grimes was a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a professor at Princeton and Hampton universities, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, and director of the Washington internship program for the Scripps Howard Foundation. She lived on a boat in D.C. for 12 years and in a Winnebago motorhome for three years.
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