RM

The basic problem is that the giant internet companies — especially Facebook and Google — are taking away the advertising money that would’ve traditionally gone to some newspaper or journalism-producing entity. But Facebook and Google aren’t using this money to invest in more journalists or news reporting.

Why did this happen? The reason has to do with the end of anonymity, the surveillance ability. Initially when the internet came along, most newspapers and television stations thought, “Well, we’ll go online, and we’ll just simply do what we’ve always done online. People will buy ads on the New York Times website because people will come to our website to read New York Times articles and they’ll look at the ads, just like they did with our print edition. We might not make quite as much money on our online ads, but our costs will go way down because we don’t have to print up copies and distribute them. So it’ll be a wash, and we can still be a lucrative company doing commercial journalism.” The same can be said for the Washington Post or any other news medium.

This looked like the transition, say, in the year 2000, that we would slowly be seeing. It wasn’t clear we would lose commercial journalism. But what happened with the surveillance model is that no one buys ads on a website. You don’t go to the New York Times and say, “Hey, I want to buy an ad,” and hope and pray my target audience comes and looks at your website and sees my ad. Instead, you go to Google or Facebook or AOL, and you say, “Hey, I want to reach every American male in this income group between the age of 30 and 34 who might be interested in buying a new car in the next three months,” and AOL will locate every one of those men, wherever they are online, and your ad will appear on whatever website they go to, usually straight away. They will find them.

That means the content producers, in this case the news media, don’t get a cut anymore. Those advertising dollars used to subsidize most of their work. Now, if they do get an ad on your site, they get much less for it, and they only get it for those users who are in the target audience of the person placing the ad, not everyone who goes to their site. If you and I were to go to the same site, we’d get different ads, probably, working for different products. The amount of money that the actual website gets is infinitesimal compared to what it would be if they got the whole amount, like in the good old days.

The commercial model’s gone, which is why journalism’s dying, why there are very few working journalists left. No rational capitalist is investing in journalism because of its profit potential. To the extent they invest, it tends usually be some hedge-fund douchebags buying dying media and stripping them for parts, or some billionaire like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post or Sheldon Adelson buying the Las Vegas Review-Journal , always at fire-sale prices. The point of the exercise in these instances is to use the newspaper to shape the broader political narrative to the owner’s liking, with very few other voices in opposition. That is hardly a promising development for an open society.

It used to be twenty-five years ago that if there was a major news story, you’d have reporters from the Baltimore Sun , the Chicago Tribune , the LA Times , the Atlanta News covering the story, whatever it might be, in national or international politics. Today, it’s the New York Times and the Washington Post — more or less, that’s it — who are paid reporters. A generation ago state capitals and city halls were covered with reporters from different media; today the newsrooms in these buildings look like ghost towns. There’s hardly anyone in the game. The game is pretty much over.

It is elementary democratic theory that a self-governing society cannot exist without a credible independent news media. That point should be shouted from the mountaintops because it is the reality we are entering. This has two immediate consequences worth mentioning. First, we see an increasing problem with a younger generation that is more sympathetic to progressive values and socialist politics than any in my lifetime, but which is woefully uninformed and uneducated on basics of how the nation and world function economically and politically. Second, without a credible journalism that people can use as a basis for understanding and debate, it opens the door wide for a rejection of any news one does not like as “fake news.” This is Trump’s strategy, and it would have been absurd twenty-five years ago. Now it finds a population that has no reason to respect news media any more than Trump does.