BBC License Fee Controversy and Pocantico Declaration Blur Profit, Non-Profit Lines
Important Details: Take two reports, one issued in the U.S. and one in the U.K. within the last month, and you can see the fundamental foment within the news trade. That foment continues to blur the lines between profit-based and non-profit-based journalism.
On June 16, the British government issued Digital Britain, a wide-ranging plan for accelerating and funding digital communications in the U.K. Within that report, the plan calls for tapping a previously untouchable fund — the government television licence fee that supplies the BBC with $3.6 billion a year to sustain its worldwide activities. The idea: tap 3.5% — or 130 million pounds — annually, both to help pay for universal broadband, and for the creation of three regional broadcast news pilots, one each in England, Wales and Scotland. The howls from the BBC have increased, as a war of words has broken out between Ben Bradshaw, the new culture secretary, and BBC top officials.
Why the pilot funding? ITC, the commercial TV giant, has said that the economics of the business no longer justify its regional news operations.
In the U.S., 20 non-profit, news organizations have issued the Pocantico Declaration, announcing a new Investigative News Network.
“Some newspapers are doing good works, the Washington Post, the Tribune, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, but even at those, the pressure is on,” says Chuck Lewis, one of the organizers of the late June conference at the Pocantico conference center, outside New York City. “Most of those [smaller newspapers] aren’t doing. There’s a sense of loss,” says Lewis, founder of the 20-year-old Center for Public Integrity and a veteran investigative journalist.
Among the other key organizers is Brant Houston, former head of the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) group,; Robert Rosenthal, former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and now director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Bill Buzenberg, a public radio veteran, who now directs the Center for Public Integrity.
The 20 news organizations represented at the conference range from top national and regional investigative organizations to city start-ups (Saint Louis Beacon, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego) to newspapers (Sacramento Bee) to public broadcasting (NPR, WNET) to the phenomenon of the year, Huffington Post. Already, numerous other non-profit journalism start-ups have inquired about joining.
The group is now deep into its organizational phase, deciding membership guidelines and first-rank goals. Among the options: 1) focusing on sustainability of these new efforts, helping with everything from health insurance to business development to technical support; 2) creating a destination/syndication business that will give greater focus and monetization to members’ work.
Implications: 2009 is the year in which the news gap has been exposed. While it has hard for readers and community members to put their finger on what they are missing, the sense of loss is palpable. As we’ve noted before, foundations are now strategizing their role in the future of journalism (see Insights, Foundations Move to Fill News Gap, June 9, 2009), and so, apparently, is the British government.
These are dicey, mixed-up times, as for-profit newspaper and broadcast companies struggle to find profitability and non-profit models both proliferate and take on a new urgency. Inevitably, we’re entering a world that will be forever changed. For the incumbents, the advent of new news organizations, funded however and by whomever, means new competitors. It also means, though, new relationships to be built.
Co-opetition, of course, is the way of the web. It may time for the former monopolies, whether in big cities or in the BBC’s case, country-wide, to think about how to engage and work with new entities, as partners, collaborators, news providers and distributors. New relationships need to be worked out, because we have the sense simply ignoring the newbies isn’t going to work.