The aberration of 20th-century journalism

“High-quality, high-cost, and crucially high-impact journalism is a cultural form worthy of our support and protection and not a commercial product in search of a business model.”

One of the only glimmers of hope in an otherwise dismal year has been the surge of new subscriptions and donations to media organizations, both big for-profits (The New York Times, The Washington Post) and smaller nonprofits (Mother Jones, ProPublica). It may have been the prospect of four or more years under Trump that has finally convinced some people that journalism is something worth paying for. I hope, though, that in 2017 we go a step further and acknowledge that high-quality, high-cost, and crucially high-impact journalism is a cultural form worthy of our support and protection and not a commercial product in search of a business model.

gabriel-snyderDuring the great aberration of the 20th century, it was easy to confuse the two because so many media companies were able to subsidize their journalism with adjacent businesses, primarily advertising. (It’s worth noting that in the 21st century, the ad industry, whether it’s tied to journalism or not, is in as much disarray as the news business.) Attempts to find a new money-making activity with which to pair journalism have created new industries (content marketing, for one) but have had limited success in creating journalism operations that can sustain their mission. Cost centers rarely win resource disputes against revenue generators.

The post-election boom of subscriptions and contributions will lead the publications that haven’t already tried asking readers for support to do so, and I hope they find success. But it will not be enough to restore the robust daily local coverage and the thousands of journalists who once monitored statehouses, planning commissions, and police departments — to name just one vast swath of journalism that’s already been lost. In the decade between 2004 and 2014, newspapers saw $30 billion of print ad revenue disappear while their online advertising only increased by $2 billion. To make up that $28 billion difference, every single one of America’s 126 million U.S. households would need to shell out $222 every year for digital subscriptions to news organizations. To put that into perspective, Netflix, which offers a historically much easier to sell product — movies and TV shows — has an annual revenue per subscriber of about $100.

When a society places a higher value on a cultural form than what it can fetch on the open market, the traditional way to keep it vibrant and strong is through government and/or philanthropical support. There’s little hope of a Trump presidency funding a BBC-like national journalism operation — indeed it might be frightening if he did — so I hope wealthy individuals, private foundations, and other major donors come to understand that, not unlike opera and modern art, for journalism to have a chance to maintain its place in our shared civic life, it must be supported by those who value it the most and have the best opportunity to make a difference.

Gabriel Snyder is a former top editor at The New Republic, The Atlantic Wire, Newsweek, and Gawker.

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Trushar Barot   API or die

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

An Xiao Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Carrie Brown-Smith   We won’t do enough

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides