When I left the newspaper industry, a local business owner told me a secret.
His confession? This fellow citizen knew how to read the local newspaper’s website for free.
For more than 130 years, The Enid News & Eagle has been a for-profit business. In the 21st century, that means the news publication charges subscribers for home delivery and only subscribers have full digital access. In other words, the content is not free.
Before the internet, newspaper profit margins were high. The News & Eagle once boasted a circulation north of 25,000. It took money to pay trained journalists to produce verified, well-sourced news. That hasn’t changed.
Print advertising subsidized home delivery of its content far and wide.
With the internet, the industry undervalued its online content. Websites were launched, but nobody knew how emerging technology would affect newspapers.
Our news is free to read,
But not free to produce.
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When I worked at the University of Oklahoma’s student newspaper in the early 1990s, it didn’t have a website. In that pre-Google era, printed news content was black and white and read all over, as the riddle goes. But that content was exclusive.
My last newspaper editor gig was with The News & Eagle in my hometown working with a veteran news staff under Publisher Jeff Funk. Digital content coordinator Violet Hassler led our website strategy and monitored analytics hourly, weekly and monthly. Her husband, Kevin Hassler, also worked as the newsroom’s associate editor.
Kevin liked to say you have to pay for milk at the grocery store. They don’t give it away, and we shouldn’t give our content away.
The local citizen reading the paper for free certainly wouldn’t want people ripping off his business. But people don’t understand why they have to pay for news. And many don’t trust the media, particularly the national kind. Unfortunately, inaccurate reports and bias have eroded trust.
How did we get here?
Traditional media once served as a trusted gatekeeper and arbiter of truth. But the internet explosion and proliferation of misinformation and half-truths have complicated that mission, particularly with breaking news feeding the 24-hour news cycle.
We have good data and bad data, and overwhelmed folks don’t know the difference. So they can’t differentiate between documented facts when they are presented objectively and subjective fragments served as the gospel truth.
People don’t know the difference between fact and opinion because a lot of cable news is served with a strong point of view. This became obvious when I talked to local leadership groups to distinguish facts you can reference versus subjective judgments or analysis. Newspaper readers may not agree with editorials, but they are clearly marked as such on the opinion page and not masquerading as fact.
In a complicated world, it’s much easier to watch entertainment branded as news to validate your worldview and vilify the opposition. Politics as sport. What you want to believe is right, and nonbelievers are all wrong.
Meanwhile, rage merchants on social media are profiting from this polarization. Big Tech can’t get a handle on it.
Where do we go from here?
I left the for-profit news business to run the nonprofit Oklahoma Media Center that supports and strengthens local news. The nonpartisan collaborative includes more than 30 news outlets statewide.
With the for-profit news model struggling, there’s been a proliferation of nonprofit news. But that’s just a tax status. Nonprofit newsrooms still need sponsorships, donations, subscriptions or foundation support to pay staff to produce journalism.
‘We all pay the cost when the information’s lost’
OMC’s latest project is funded by a Kirkpatrick Foundation grant. That paid for a Schoolhouse Rock!-inspired cartoon with a song designed to bolster trust and support for local newsrooms. Based on polling and academic research, Free Press Isn’t Free was written Oklahoma musician Mike Hosty. With animation from Mechanism Digital, it was designed as an homage to the vintage educational cartoon series.
OMC is now giving stipends to newsrooms to publish the video on their websites and social media. According to our academic study, a whopping 77 percent of participants cited Facebook as their primary source of local news and information.
This local news literacy campaign provides education on journalism’s role in facilitating an informed citizenry and demonstrates the value of local news. The song lyrics explain the patriotic importance of the free press remaining independent from government rule.
So even if you refuse to pay for news, it is not free. It takes money to produce documented, verified news that is fair-minded and ethical.
And we all pay the cost when the information’s lost, as Hosty’s song says. So you get what you pay for, right?
(Editor’s note: This commentary was originally published by Oklahoma Voice. Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.)
