Virginia Tomorrow

Not just yet. 

Let’s at least have a national debate before we bury this one.

 The cataclysmic demise is well documented.  Going forward, the question is: Is there a model that (1) acknowledges and accommodates the current reality and (2) preserves the critical role of a free and independent press? 

There might be.  There may be more than one.

 What if a national newspaper trust could purchase these faltering papers? (If there is an upside to an 83% devaluation in newspaper stocks in 2008, it is the creation of an incredible buyers’ market.) 

Sure to God, if such a structure can save swamps, farmland, old buildings, artifacts of importance, odd plant life, long-eared rodents, queer little birds, and a host of other good and worthy considerations, such a thing could be established to preserve an entity that is so very crucial to policy, to government, to Democracy, to our collective well-being, as independent newspapers are.

 Or are they? 

 I don’t know.  That question has not been answered definitively. We may not know one way or the other until they’re gone.  I do know they’ve been an important part of America’s connective fabric for three hundred years.  I know we wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights Movement, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, or known the shame of Walter Reed without them. 

 If newspapers are to survive, then retro, or old school, journalism relieved of profit pressure by trust ownership and subsidy may be one model.

How to fund such a trust?

1) A national newspaper lottery would generate significant proceeds.  Although 42 states and one or two territories conduct lotteries of some sort, there is no national lottery in the U. S.  Lotteries are a form of taxation, but as Jefferson pointed out, the fairest form of taxation in that the burden is laid “only upon the backs of the willing.”  This burden would be a worthy one.

2) A voluntary one-dollar check-off contribution on federal income tax returns would raise significant money, too-and give taxpayers a direct voice in how at least some of their money is spent.  It wouldn’t be complicated.  They could say “yes” or “no” simply by checking or not checking the box.  It’s a pity we don’t have more such direct opportunities to say “yes” or “no” with a lot of other spending.

 This idea is burdened by a lot of legitimate philosophical underbrush, but the granting of tax-exempt status and playing the role of mere pass-through collection/disbursement agent falls short of “government sponsorship.”

 A national trust would come close to vesting press ownership with that teeming miasma otherwise known as “the people”-a good thing, in my opinion.  

Is there a market-based model that would work better?  Maybe.

 The largest consumer, and beneficiary, of newspapers in the world has to be Google, which means Google, and other search engines, have the most to lose if (when) the newspaper industry collapses. 

 It is an interesting paradox:  the primary instrument of newspaper destruction has the most to lose.

 Check that-one of the instruments of destruction. 

 The industry, for years awash in cash, must blame itself, too.  To be blunt, at critical junctures it made dumb decisions-and followed those with dumber ones-initially treating the Internet with disdain, and subsequently deciding to give away its product to it. 

 What’s the strategy now?  Now they’re circling the drain, reduced to slashing the only real competitive advantage they have-their reporters, writers and editors. 

 Can Google save this industry?  It can.  It should.  It’s in Google’s best interest to do it.

 Google doesn’t pay for newspapers’ proprietary content, although it does pay the Associated Press under a contract negotiated in 2006.  When it is not cornering the telephone market, it is cooking up a scheme to digitize the world’s books, and to pay the authors for doing so and, irony of ironies, spending $7 million on print advertising to get the word out.

 Google performs approximately 235 million searches per day. If ten percent of these searches referenced newspaper print, and if Google agreed to contribute one penny (1 cent) for each of these to a national trust, or to individual newspapers, the annual contribution would exceed $85 million. If it was a nickel, we’re talking half a billion dollars.  And so on.

 Can Google afford this? I don’t know.  The company earned $5 billion last year.  I do know that it is in Google’s best interest, and our national interest, that newspapers survive.

 Barnie Day is a banker in Stuart, Virginia