Mark Wilson/Getty Images Fourth Estate The State of New Jersey Wants to Subsidize News. Uh-oh. State-funded reporting won’t save journalism. It’s bound to make it worse.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Unless you live in a bomb shelter and have canceled your cable TV and internet services, you’ve heard that the newspaper business has run aground. Advertising revenue is down 67 percent since 2005, and as panicked publishers shutter newspapers, reduce the number of days they publish, lay off journalists and cut local coverage to balance their books, the likelihood that great swaths of the country will become “news deserts,” devoid of accountability reports on government and corporations, has grown.

The state of New Jersey thinks it’s found the secret to making the desert bloom: A $5 million subsidy for a university-led consortium that will dispense grants for local news coverage. “Never before has a state taken the lead to address the growing crisis in local news,” said Mike Rispoli of the Free Press Action Fund, the advocacy group that advanced the consortium idea. “Trustworthy local journalism is the lifeblood of democracy; it allows people to participate meaningfully in decisions regarding local elections, public schools and policy decisions.”


If you think $5 million won’t go very far in a state the size, and with the corruption problems, of New Jersey, you’re right. The original Free Press Action Fund pitch was for $100 million, which was then whittled down to $20 million before it reached its current size. The project also seems barnacled with bureaucracy. According to NJBiz, a staff of four will be hired to oversee the non-profit program while taking direction from a 13-member board of directors chosen by the governor, the legislature, five participating universities and others. Grants will go only to organizations that collaborate with one of the universities, or community, media and technology organizations affiliated with the consortium.

With so many hands stirring the pot, how good will the consortium soup be? FiveThirtyEight ranks New Jersey as one of the most corrupt states in the country despite having the most vigilant anti-corruption laws, so the state obviously needs watchdogging. But what confidence should we have that the state will happily fund investigations into its own malfeasance? Worse yet, given the state’s shaky moral compass, what are the chances the journalism initiative won’t match the corruption found in other state projects? Even if the consortium stays clean, won’t it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they’re too compromised to lead. If “trustworthy” news is the objective, a government consortium can’t be the solution.





The fact that the consortium’s ruling body is top-heavy with government leaders and employees should give us pause. How can a nonprofit news organization directed by people in the government even pretend to be independent? Will it be able to criticize the governor? The Legislature? Might all hell break loose if it slags Rutgers? Fans of analogy might ask what sort of confidence we would have in a nonprofit news consortium overseen by the presidents of General Motors, Facebook, Exxon Mobil, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs and the leaders of The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

I’m sure the trustees from the College of New Jersey, Montclair State University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rowan University and Rutgers University to be assigned to the nonprofit consortium will be bright, well-intentioned people, but if they have plans to prevent the sort of donor-driven corruption I worry about, I’ve yet to hear about it. My objections to state-sponsored and —directed news have nothing to do with a guild-based desire to protect my own turf from competition. My objections are more practical. Again, I offer an analogy to cut through the thicket: Appointing professors to direct news gathering makes about as much sense as assigning reporters to run universities.

We can blame the rise of “news deserts” of changes in advertising markets and newspaper publisher short-sightedness. But readers deserve reproach, too. In a world where demand creates supply, they’ve exerted little pressure for the sort of news the consortium wants to promote. You can lead a customer to high-quality journalism, but you can’t always get him to read.

******

Send millions in grants to [email protected]. My email alerts are nonprofit, my Twitter feed is for-profit, and my RSS feed operates as a fascistic public-private partnership.

