Daffodil Lane

So let's look at the problem in a slightly different way. What are the problems with the media? I'm going to try to be as inclusive as possible and non partisan with this discussion, so let's just use the term of bias. No matter your political persuasion the concern is always the same, that the information that you're getting from the media, from what stories they cover, to what you actually hear about the facts, is being done to further some agenda other than that of the truth. How much of this actually goes on is a subject that could very well be debated, but through a great deal of effort the traditional media has been painted as a radically partisan institution by both the right and the left. Personally I'm always disturbed how these for profit enterprises are led around by advertisers and how much those advertisers are able to change the news presented by the traditional media.

Another major problem is localization. With media consolidation the amount of local news has decreased massively, while the power of advertisers to control the news that makes it to the people has decreased at an exponential rate. Finally the death nail for the traditional media is that the cost for this overly biased and centralized media delivery is massively expensive for the end users. So unless you want their biased point of view, and have no interest in local affairs, you're basically left with no reason to bother with them. Which has steadily made them more and more dependent on the advertisers, who exercise greater and greater control over the content of the news cycle. Ultimately it will end up that all traditional media will have nothing left of value to offer the American citizens, since they've already abdicated their role as the protectors of our Democracy. Now I'm going to ignore the obvious right wing question at this point...do we need the Fourth Estate at all? If you have to ask that question then you're a fool and you shouldn't bother to read anything I'm writing here.

On the surface if you look at the political blogosphere we've already started to take over the role of the Traditional Media by providing focus on the interesting races around the country. On both the right and left people involved in campaigns have worked to push them onto the national stage and definitely onto the state stage. This is significant because it allows these campaigns to get the attention they need to give themselves a chance to win the races. Now the differences between the Right wing and Left wing becomes very obvious when you look at how they decide what races are important. On the right side of the fence they get an email from Party HQ telling them what they need to say and they immediately rush out and post on the subject. On the Left we are totally disconnected from the Party...we tend to support people based on the word of mouth endorsement of a candidate. Until finally the right people hear about it and it gets moved onto the national stage. I'm not going to pretend that it's completely egalitarian, because a Markos endorsement gets about 300,000 times as many more eyes on it and that leads to quite a few more word of mouth endorsements than say something I write, but the principal that it could actually work it's way up the ranks is quite possible and does happen is important, because it's how the news media should be working.

There should be layers of news...local, regional, statewide, nationwide and world wide. Stories should filter up from the significant lower level stories to become the basis of the higher levels of the layers. A house burning down in my neighborhood isn't important to the regional news, but if it's caused by the fact that the fire department didn't have the funds to send out a truck because of budget cuts made by the governor, well that's a statewide story and may be a national level story. And this is what the blogosphere is somewhat good at. We tend to work the opposite direction...making national stories important on the local level, but the same principal could work in reverse to build a massive news source.

So why doesn't it work now? Well first of all very few bloggers actually consider themselves journalists. We depend on the traditional media, for as much as we dislike them, to be the water carriers. We mostly view ourselves as the editorial page for the media. Of course the editorial page requires the least amount of work and is perfectly suited to the rants of most of the political types.

So the next question is this...how should it look? First of all no media outlet should be dependent on an outside source for its survival. If you are dependent on anyone, then you are compromised. The next most obvious thing is that if your goal is to make profits then you'er going to become dependent on the moods of your readers and you will be compromised by your efforts to keep your readership by telling them the things they want to hear. We see this all the time when extremist religious groups setting up boycotts to change the reporting of reality to suit their radical world view. I'm sure your asking, so if you have no advertising and no subscriptions how the hell do you pay for this exercise? Personally, I'd like to see an acknowledgement that the free media in this country is significant and that we'd see the national endowment of all media. I mean it only costs about 100 dollars a year to run a blog. If you figure it takes about 20 times the amount of money you need yearly to endow a non-profit, then you've got what 2000 dollars per locality to pay for the blog. Now mind you that's for a civilian like myself to do it...I'm sure that number could be dropped massively by creating a federal computer labs entity and run it at cost plus 10% or something like that to keep everything up to date.

Next you need an editor for every paper and this could be some sort of telecommuting side job so it probably won't be that hard to find someone to do the job. Something low like $5,000 a year or so to pay them to make sure that the paper has decent stories. That would require your endowment to bounce up to $102,000 per locality.

Then you would need actual freelance reporters and photographers. I would guess that they would be paid by the story/photo/video clip instead of an actual salary. I can't imagine a local newspaper having more than 5 to 10 stories a week, but let's assume 20 to be safe and assume that they are paid somewhere between $50 to $250 a story. Now things like Obituaries, local events, editorials and Wedding announcements as a group are considered a single story each because they don't actually require a large amount of research, while as the same time will make up a massive part of a local newspaper. So let's assume the worst, that we need 20 stories at $250 for 52 weeks at year. So you'd need somewhere between a million to 5 million in the bank to afford a year. With the more realistic 10 stories a week, would drop that to half a million to 2.5 million in the bank, or the starter paper would be 5 paid stories a week for a quarter of a million to one an quarter million to fund. Now you might think, there is no justification for something like this in my town, but if you take the low end of $352,000 for each locality, that's really not a massive amount of money and it's completely free to you the citizen.

The larger ones would of course take massively larger amounts of money, but since they are non-profit organizations, you can take donations to help expand the endowment for each locality giving them a tax break for their troubles and you can allow anyone to write up a story and get paid for it. So if the eye witness to an event wants to do the reporting and the story is good enough then they can get paid for it. It changes the way that news is looked at in a locality. Once you have this system set up the higher level organizations require more money because they have to do more work. They get the advantage of having feeds into all these local entities to draw from and the local people are encouraged to raise the bar, because when their stories get kicked up a level they will get a higher level of pay and recognition. Most cities would be considered to be a regional level of this system.

All this solves several problems. Wikipedia has a Wikinews project that has had moderate levels of success, but the reality is that without some sort of pay there is very little in the way of motivation to go the extra mile to provide better journalism. Secondly the notion of endowment is critical because it removes the paper from the pandering route, which will increase quality and decrease the drive to create filler. Also by having a definite funding source, the feast or famine mentality of journalism will be removed from journalism. Is half a million too much money for a town to pay. Well maybe, but all of the values except for the cost of the blog are completely flexible. I have a strong feeling the more money that is paid the better the quality will be. Also by expanding the opportunity to contribute beyond the usual suspects you definitely change the dynamic of the medium. I can see an editor who suddenly starts getting stories about an event and having to pick and choose which is the best one to post or even having a combination of people's stories being combined together and all of them getting a portion of the money for the story because they have contributed to making it better. I also think that they would gain more access to both sides of a story and be able to create more hybrid stories of he said/she said accounts of the same events. I think it would definitely make the media a better source of information.

There still will be troubles. Bad editors allowing bad stories through and destroying the process. I don't have an easy answer for that off the top of my head. I would hope that there would be some transparency inside the reporting pool so that it could be fixed. Ultimately this is where the system could have the most trouble, much like it has today. You need some way to remove a bad editor by some means, but at the same time you need to be able to protect an editor when what's being allowed is for the greater good. So it's not like it could be an elected position, because it would quickly turn partisan. And since locals are always particularly cliquish, the only real solution is that you can't be editor for the locality that you live or have lived in. In a perfect world that editor would know nothing about the reporters involved, but would instead look at only the stories involved. I still don't know of a good way to ensure the proper process to remove a bad editor.

As we've seen in Washington even the most detailed methods of avoiding corruption can easily be circumvented by a radial cadre of people who want to destroy the system. My instinct is some sort of hybrid lifetime appointment for a municipality. They can get a ballot initiative to remove an editor during a regular election cycle. In the event of an editor being removed, dying or retiring the municipality would then be given access to a database of qualified applicants from across the country and appoint a new one for life. That seems the most straight forward, but the removal option should require at least 50% approval of the last election's total participants just to get on the ballot. I mean these are small towns that should be easy to get, and at the higher levels I can see backing that requirement down to 35% or lower. The point is that there needs to be a legitimate outcry to justify something like this happening to make sure that it isn't being abused for some political end.

OK, I think I've talked this poor subject to death now. I'm sure I missed some aspects because it's a massive problem, but I think this is the path to solving the problems.