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Foreign.
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Hello and welcome to the Ghosting the News episode of Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. It's a heavy media edition this week because not only do we have the three normal journalists who are always on this show, that is myself, Felix Amnavaxios. We have Emily Peck of HuffPost.
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C
Hello.
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B
We have Anna Shymansky of Breaking Views.
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D
Hello.
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B
And we don't just have a journalist special guest. We have a meta journalist special guest. We have Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post. Welcome.
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A
Thank you.
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B
You write a must read media column for the Washington Post and then in your spare time you write books, books for Columbia Global Reports. This is your opportunity. Plug your book.
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A
Ah, well, I, I've written a book about the decline of local news and what it means for our democracy. And it's called, just as this episode of Slate Money is called Ghosting the Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy. So, yes, you know, my publication date was very recently and check it out. It's a brief and breezy read.
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B
It is a brief and breezy read. I can recommend it. And we are going to be covering a lot of what you cover in that book in this episode. We're going to talk about the decline of local newspapers. We're going to talk a little bit about these hedge funds who are buying them up. We're going to talk about democracy, we're going to talk about bias in news reporting. I believe, Emily Peck, that we are going to get dragged in a little bit into the debate about the discourse. And Barry Weiss, if you, if you can believe it, we are going to talk about unions, we are going to talk about whether news should be publicly funded. We have so much going on and I, I promised myself that this wouldn't just be a media navel gazing show, but it does seem to have turned into a media naval gazing show. There's lots of media on this show. For all of you media nerds, I hope you enjoy it. It's all coming up on Slate Money. Margaret, you have this amazing book. Congratulations on its publication.
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A
Thank you.
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B
It is like many of the Columbia Global Reports books. We've had a few of the authors on this show. We love them because they are short.
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A
Yes. Yes, it is. It packs a punch, I hope. In a, in 105 printed pages, it's described as novella length. So that might give you an idea.
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B
How long is a novella?
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A
Well, 105, I guess.
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B
In words.
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A
In words. Oh, 35,000 words.
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B
I asked this not just because I'm rambling Although I do ramble in unedited conversations. I asked this because 35,000 words, I think, is roughly the number of words that you would find in terms of editorial content in the daily newspaper.
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A
I don't know.
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B
It's about. I'm so I'm just going orders of magnitude. It's in that range. Daily newspaper has about 35,000 words. And, you know, you can buy it at any newsstand for, what, like a couple bucks, something like this? You can buy Margaret Sullivan's amazing book at any good local bookstore for 1599. But that kind of explains one of the problems with local news, right, which is that it's really hard to persuade lots of people to pay actual money for 35,000 words of content, even though it's an enormous amount of work to put all of that together.
- [03:54]
A
Yeah. Well, this sort of. The whole problem with the decline of local news, which is what my book is about, and the book is. Is pitched shamelessly at millennials and those younger because the title of it is Ghosting the News. You know, so I try to put a sort of dating word in there. At any rate, it's about the abrupt, or not so abrupt abandonment of the news by traditional media, not because they wanted to, but because the business model disintegrated over a number of years. And it took a particular fall in just recent months during the COVID pandemic, because, as you know, it kind of kicked the legs out from under the economy and certainly from under whatever advertising was supporting these places. So it's been a really tough time, which makes the book more timely, but also even more tragic.
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B
You're really concentrating on the newspapers here. Like, when you say local news, you do cover the TV stations and the radio stations, but, like, the heart of it is newspapers.
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A
Yes, but I mean, I certainly treat with TV stations, radio, and particularly with the new nonprofit digital sites. Not all of them are nonprofit, but a lot of them are nonprofit. The sort of prototypical one would be the Texas Tribune in Austin, which has recently sort of joined forces with ProPublica, which is kind of like the most famous of these digital investigative sites. And that's a huge part of the. Of the media ecosystem these days. But if you get into cities and towns of a more moderate. Of a moderate size, the newspaper has been very, very important and used to have a newsroom of maybe 300 people where you could send somebody out to every meeting. And now they're down to, you know, 40 people, some of whom are editors and producers, and 10 of them are Reporters, and you can't actually cover the area anymore. And that's the problem.
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D
And maybe we could also take a step back and kind of explain, so why is local news so important?
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A
So, you know, I think for two major reasons, and one of the reasons that a lot of people kind of can think of is to restrain corruption in public officials if they know that somebody is watching, or if someone can look at a budget and say, hmm, that looks pretty weird to me, I think I'll file a Freedom of Information request and dig down into it and hold this public official accountable and if necessary, shame and embarrass him on the website or in our pages. So that's sort of the watchdog role. But the other part that's I think, really important, but not maybe as well acknowledged or understood, is its role in kind of being the village square for a community, the place where people manage to get us a similar set of facts. They might disagree about what to do with those facts, but, you know, where they can see about a new restaurant, see the review of a concert, find out, you know, read a feature story, read an obituary, all these things that kind of knit the community together is a role that, that the media plays, certainly. But in localities, it's been traditionally the newspaper and now much, much less. So. And I will just say, I know we're not on the numbers round yet, but from 2004 to 2019, more than 2,000 newspapers in the United States went out of business, closed their doors.
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B
A lot of them were weak and talking about. But some were daily talking about numbers. Okay, so just give, like, yeah, put that in perspective. 2000 is. I wouldn't have guessed that there were 2000 newspapers, but how many newspapers are there?
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There are, I think, around 7,000 left.
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B
So.
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So, you know, the base was something like 9 or 10,000 in 2004. Now it's much less. And actually, that only takes us up to 2019. And as I just said, 2020 has been a horrible year for newspapers. Now, these could also be alternative papers. They could be weeklies. You know, they're not all the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for example.
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B
The other number that really jumped out at me from your book was, know, apropos the local corruption and whatnot, that local governments have significantly, immeasurably lower borrowing costs if there is a local newspaper just because the governments can get up to fewer shenanigans.
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A
Exactly. And now this thing is not. What I'm going to say next is not a number. But it's really interesting to know that people become much less civically engaged. When there's. In a news desert, a place where there's not much local news, they don't vote as much. And when they do vote, they vote in a very polarized way. Like, they don't cross the aisle. They're kind of over here or over there. I'm sorry, I'm talking too much, but the subject excites me. What can I say?
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C
No, you're supposed to be talking a lot.
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A
Okay, good, good, good.
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C
I just wanted to say, I mean, the. The subtitle of your book is Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy. And I think felt like it was really illuminating to me to just read about how important local news is to informing voters and its civic role. I heard John Thornton, who's the investor in the Texas Tribune, talking about, like, Americans have, like, four needs that they're getting met from media. One is like, your needs as a consumer. One is your needs as a worker, your needs as an audience member, like entertainment. And then the fourth prong is needs as a voter.
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D
And.
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C
And like, the first three are getting met pretty well still through media. Like, we talked last week about the streaming wars and like, all the places you can watch stuff. But like, that fourth need, the needs of voters is really. The decline in local news is really doing a huge disservice to everyone. And you have that powerful example I was hoping you could talk about, about Chris Collins in Western New York and what happened there. I think it was really fascinating.
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A
Okay, so Chris Collins was the first congressman to endorse Donald Trump. Big Trump advocate and fan and supporter. You know, his congressional district was, and I'm using the past tense because Chris Collins was indicted on insider trading charges, was, you know, went through the whole judicial process and was sentenced to prison not too long ago. But after he was arrested and indicted, but before he came to trial, he had to stand for reelection. And my former colleague in Buffalo, where I was The Editor for 12 years, is the Washington correspondent. He broke a big piece of the Chris Collins insider trading story. And so the people who were tuned into the Buffalo News and other, you know, parts of the urban core were pretty affected by this news. And they, you know, the district is really heavily red, it's heavily Republican, but it ended up that Collins did win reelection, but by a whisker, he won by less than half of 1%. And the places that were stalwart supporters of his in, you know, during. In the election were places that were not unserved, but less served by local news. Places where Newspapers had gone out of business. There are some small but, you know, good websites in these areas, in these more rural areas, but there isn't as much local news. And those were the places where the guy who ran against Collins, this guy named Nate McMurray, told me that he would go out to these rural districts and people in some cases weren't even aware that their own congressman had been indicted. And he said that they were getting their news, you know, largely, not entirely, but largely from sort of, you know, their Facebook pages, talk radio, gossip, as he put it. And, you know, he drew a strong connection between the much more informed reader and maybe this was self serving on his part, the much more informed reader who voted for him, the less informed reader, as he saw it, who. Who stayed within party lines and voted for Collins. So I don't think you could say it is a powerful example. It's not a black and white example, but I think one of the counties that's affected has been termed a news desert by the University of North Carolina, which has studied this. And in New York State it's pretty rare to have a news desert, but Orleans county, which is in this district, is one of them, despite the fact that it has something called Orleans Hub, which has pointed itself out to me in recent days as we're here. But, you know, I think there's a tie here and it does speak to what you're talking about that citizens have this need to know what's going on and what. And sometimes it's hard to know. You know, it's like you don't know what you don't know. Sometimes it's like if there isn't local news out there and being presented to you in a way that's really visible, you know, it's possible you wouldn't know that your own congressman had been indicted.
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B
And that's the big national politics. The one thing which I feel is super important when it comes to local news is just picking between local candidates. Should really have nothing to do with what party they are. Fiorello laguardia, the famous mayor of New York, said there's no Republican or Democratic way of taking out the trash mayors and local officials run on very local issues. And those local issues just are basically entirely orthogonal to national left right things. The mayor neither wants nor needs to have an opinion about foreign policy. It's like this is something where you, you vote for an individual based on who that individual is, what their character is, how they're going to interact with the people in the community. And the amazingly Powerful way of getting that across is through the local media. And in the absence of reliable local media, people wind up using this very, very unhelpful heuristic in order to determine who they want to vote for, which is just, are they a Republican or are they a Democrat? And it's just a really silly way of voting for local officials.
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A
That's right. And I think that is largely what happened in this particular case. And it's an interesting. It's a cautionary tale. So as these places go out of business or shrink, become ghost newspapers that still exist but have much less staff, I think, unfortunately, we're going to see a lot more of this. And, you know, people will be relying on sources of information that are not only less accurate, I would say, but also less trusted. People do say they hate and mistrust the national media, but they actually have significantly more trust in local media of all sorts. Right.
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D
But I guess one of the things I wonder is, you know, people say they love local media and they want local news, but they're not necessarily willing to pay pay for it. And I also kind of wonder how much of this also has to do with the fact that for so many years, newspapers kind of underpriced their product and subscribers were subsidized by advertisers. And obviously now that's not the case. So it makes people kind of even less apt to want to pay the real price of what it costs to produce this.
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A
Yeah, that's very true. And absolutely. And so for the longest time, it was like advertising was sort of two thirds of the revenue stream, and. And subscriptions or purchases of the paper were about one third. But as advertising has dwindled. Let's take the New York Times. The New York Times. Now much more of their revenue is coming from the reader in one form or another, mostly as digital subscriptions. And then to add to that, the other thing that happened was as newspapers made this very clumsy transition to the Internet, there was this whole discussion about, oh, you know, should we charge for the website? Should we have a paywall? Should we actually ask people to subscribe so they can read the website? And the answer for a long time was no, we should not. Which did not make any sense because people were saying, oh, well, I don't actually have to subscribe to the paper and pay. I can just go on the website and read the same stuff. So now we have paywalls, but we've trained people to think that it should be free. I would say, overall, you haven't been a Lot of great decisions.
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C
That was my question to you. Was this. Com, was the decline of newspapers completely inevitable or did they kind of like cock it up?
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I mean, some of it was, was foisted upon them. I mean, you can't sort of, you can't argue with the Internet. You can't say that, for example, that, you know, classified advertising was a big source of revenue. And then Craigslist came along. You know, that is hard to fight against. But could these organizations have been a lot more nimble in taking advantage of the strengths of the Internet and figuring out how smartly to, you know, get some money out of it? Yeah, definitely. A lot more. There was a smugness, I think, and a complacency that came from long, long period of time where, you know, the profit margins were like 30%, literally 30, 35%. And so it was sort of like it didn't require a whole lot of financial acumen to make money at newspapering for a long time.
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B
I want to get to the news of the Week, which is the big takeover out of bankruptcy of a massive newspaper chain called McClatchy by a hedge fund called Chatham. There are two big evil hedgehounds in your book. Chatham is one of them. The other one is called Alden, which is even eviler if that's a word. Alden Capital is the, is the owner that everyone, everybody in news media loves to hate. And I have to admit that I don't understand how this works. Like hedge funds, people who famously want to make enormous amounts of money and you know, spend a little bit amount of money and then get back 10 or 20 times what they put in that kind of thing and newspapers and notoriously dreadful investments. So how is it that these hedge funds are managing to outbid all of the do gooders and buy these, these properties and wind up putting together these, these empires of like low quality journalism. How do they manage to do that? How did they make money doing that?
- [19:00]
A
Well, I think I can answer that. They make money by strip mining. So what they, you know, a lot of these smaller papers are still profitable or still capable of being profitable at this point. A lot of them, by the way, are in big. Historically they've been in the same big impressive building for a long time. So the hedge fund or its management comes in and says, well, you know, that was then and this is now and we're actually going to sell your wonderful old building for, for a lot of money because it's in a prime location. And by the way, we're going to trim your staff to the bone and continue to take the advertising and subscription money that's left, all with an eye to sort of next quarter's balance sheet, not with an eye to sustaining journalism into the next decade. So it's very short, shortsighted and it's sort of off. It's got a bit of a fire sale aspect to it.
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D
Do you think there actually is any intention to create a new model that could work? Or do you think this is just funds that understand, look, this industry is dying. There's still some value there. I'm going to take that value. It's going to die anyway.
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A
The latter. They talk some. Some of them kind of talk a good game about we're, you know, we're very interested in the future of journalism. But, you know, if you're interested in the future of journalism, you will not be cutting the newsroom staff to the bone because that's where the journalism gets done, after all. So I think you've got it nailed with your second choice there.
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B
Yeah, I think the idea was a sort of economies of scale model. Right. If you own a huge number of newspapers, then, I don't know, they can all run the same crossword or something. But the fact is that there isn't a lot of economy of scale, that someone in North Carolina really is not interested in the local news from Wisconsin. And, and so you do need the local reporters. And if you fire them, you get what? We have this question here from someone who lived in a lot of small towns in different states, and most people are incredibly critical of the paper. It's almost a local pastime to make fun of the paper and the errors and the typos. Presumably all of these errors and typos are a function of the underinvestment.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right now I'm out at my family's cottage in western New York, which is on Lake Erie, and I get, you know, as soon as I get here, I subscribe to the Buffalo News, which I was the editor of for 12 years. And I will say that it's still. It's still a very good product. It is not full of typos and errors. It just isn't. You know, they still do a good job. They were owned by Warren Buffett until last year and, you know, managed to keep their staff up. Now they're owned by a big chain called Lee Enterprises. I mean, you can't really make a sweeping statement about all of these papers. Some are better than others, some are very good, some are very bad. And, you know, where their quality has gone down to the point where there's typos and errors. You know, that's absolute death knell for these places. Because at some point, even the most loyal, well intentioned person is going to say, you know what? I think I'll just watch cable news.
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D
So then is the answer that you just need Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos, you just kind of need your somewhat benevolent billionaire?
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B
Well, it was Warren Buffett, Right?
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A
Warren Buffett just sold off all his faces.
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C
He was not benevolent.
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A
You know, Buffett who, Buffett was a, you know, Buffett was a very good owner of the Buffalo News, but never, never in the sense of philanthropy. He didn't need us to make, you know, 30% profit margins, but, but he did not want to subsidize. And, you know, I would say that's true even of Patrick Soon Shung in Los Angeles, who bought the LA Times. You know, and to some extent, I think probably of Jeff Bezos, who, when he bought the Washington Post for $250 million only, you know, he said that what he wanted to do for the Post was to give it Runway. So, so he wanted to give it the time and the space and the money to figure out the new model, which I think we have done. But the Post is not a local newspaper. It's a national newspaper.
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B
Although it was kind of drifting in that direction before Bezos bought it.
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A
Absolutely. And it was doing well.
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B
I'm very, very happy that you're at the Washington Post. You're doing amazing stuff there. But we do have a question. I'm gonna drag you back to your former job as New York public New York Times public editor. And, and so just place yourself in, in that chair for, for one minute and give us the official wait.
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A
I'm having some sort of physical reaction to that, but okay. My blood pressure has just jolted up, but okay.
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B
Did you, I, I need to ask you, when you were the New York Times public editor, with how many, how many New York Times slacks were you on? Were you in the newsroom slack? Were you in the opinion slack?
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A
I, I, it was pre slack. I mean, I left there in.
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B
You were pre slack.
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A
Well, it's not that long. It's not ancient history. I left there in mid-2016. But if Slack was happening, then it, I wasn't on any of it. And I, and it would have been com. I think it would have been pretty inappropriate for me to, I don't think the public editor would be on slack and inside, but I, I did, you know, maybe this sounds retro now, but I would get calls from inside the newsroom from, like, someone would go into a. Literally, someone would go into a conference room so their call couldn't be traced. And they would say, you know, you should know about this thing that's happening. And so it would be like a hot tip from inside the building.
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C
That sounds so amazing.
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A
I even sent. I've never, I don't know that I've told this story before, but I, I even once. I always had a great assistant. You know, the assistants at the New York Times are like, they could run the place. They're like 25, but they're highly accomplished people. Could run the place or will probably someday. And at one point, I sent my assistant out to a street corner to pick up a bag of material that someone had wanted, you know, someone inside the paper wanted me to have because they thought it was important for me to know about something that was happening.
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B
Full on dead letter, like spycraft, Deep Throat stuff.
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A
This is amazing.
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B
So the big scandal at the New York Times this week is of course, the Slack bullying, or alleged slack bullying of Bari Weiss, who left in the blaze of, I don't know what you would call it. Public resignation letter. What's your opinion of Bari Weiss and her resignation? And Emily, maybe you can give us the quick TLDR view of this for the very, very smart people who are listening to this who have no idea what I'm talking about.
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C
Right. I was just gonna say you should mention that Bari Weiss was an editor on the editorial side of the New York Times who commissioned mostly commissioned and edited pieces from contributors and occasionally wrote her own pieces and was all often a target of controversy and Twitter trolling for her views, which she would describe as centrist, but especially on Israel, people objected to a lot of the things she said. And she also, I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, coined the term intellectual dark web for certain academics with Jordan Peterson. Yeah, I mean, basically, I think are like misogynist trolls, but whatever. She called them the intellectual dark web. So that's who she is. She resigned this week and wrote this big letter and said that she was being bullied by her colleagues at the time. Someone had put an ax next to her name on Slack, which does sound bad, but I don't know. That's what happened. And the usual Twitter fuss ensued.
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A
Right. Well, it strikes me as like another example of something that if it happened anywhere else, no one would care one bit. But because it happens at the New York Times, it. It's elevated into this kind of, you know, extremely important, like, almost Armageddon like, situation when I. This is a little bit of an offshoot, but for quite a while when I was at the Times, I would get a lot of complaints from readers about the Middle east coverage. You know, you're being far too. The papers being far too pro Israel or why are you paying attention to the Palestinians at all? You know, it was very, very volatile on both sides, and I didn't want to write about it because I knew it was like a complete. You could just never, ever possibly get anywhere with it or win. But. But I did talk with one editor at the Times about this, and he said that people had the idea. A lot of people have the idea that if they could just fix the Middle east coverage at the New York Times in the way that they wanted it fixed, there would be peace in the Middle East. And so I think that there's a little bit of that syndrome going on here where anything that happens at the Times gets elevated into this kind of, you know, insane thing. You know, I. I mean, of course, it's terrible if. If someone was being bullied. I don't know that she was. She says she was. Axes are not nice. So. But I do. You know, this is all part of this larger discussion about who gets a platform and who gets to talk and which voices are being magnified and which voices are being silenced. And I don't know, it seems to me that if you're an editor and a columnist at the New York Times, and she resigned, she wasn't forced to resign. She had a pretty nice way to get her point of view out there. And so I also think that the idea that somehow centrism is not represented on the New York Times editorial page is simply not the case. I mean, it really. The editorial page, whether op EDS or editorially, kind of runs the gamut from center left to center right. So I don't think there's a big problem there. And I guess I would say, too, that. I guess I think that it's all part of this whole thing about the discourse, who gets to talk, who's being canceled. And Bari Weiss, I believe, canceled herself. So I'm not sure that qualifies. So those are some random points.
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C
One question I had is, like, today there was an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that was about how people who make, like, $400,000 a year should be very scared right now because their taxes could go up. And it had, like, an illustration of, like, pigs in a house, clutching Bags of money. And those were the good guys. And then I was just thinking how like the Wall Street Journal's editorial page is so bad, but there's never any of these dust ups like you see at the Times. Is it just because people have higher expectations for the time?
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A
No, I bet anything. I bet anything there are these dust ups. It's just no one cares about them. You know, there's probably all sorts of. I bet there's all kinds of drama happening within the opinion pages of the New York Times and the opinion staff. It's just that, you know, people don't, for whatever reason, people find what happens at the Times extremely fascinating that there.
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B
Is this bizarre thing that there is only one op ed page that anyone cares about.
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C
Yeah, that's so amazing.
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B
I've never quite worked out why that's the case. I want to grab a few of the questions that people are asking here. Este Van Ersdael came in early on. We want to get to this one and saying, are the hedge funds the only buyers who can afford to take on the chains debt? And I love this question because I get to nerd out and Anna and I get to nerd out about capital stacks and bankruptcy. In the case of Chatham buying McClatchy, Chatham was the largest debt holder and they refused to just wipe out the debt. They basically converted that debt to equity and so they took it over. And so it was much cheaper for them to take it over than it would have been for anyone else. So in that sense the debt does come into play. McClatchy was in bankruptcy. The question which I have for Margaret is one of the great things about capitalism is that we do have this wonderful process called chapter 11 where you get to wipe out a huge number of debts and start afresh and build anew. Have you seen any local news organization really take advantage of chapter 11 or is it more the case that you had things which were historically profitable, that the owners would dividend out lots of profits for themselves and then when they stopped being profitable they just gave up and there haven't been a huge amount of debts? Is this something that the bankruptcy process can conceivably help with?
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A
I mean, I think conceivably that chapter 11 should be able to help with this. But. But as you suggest, I don't think there's been much of an example of it. It's astonishing to me that still that the reason McClatchy got into so much trouble probably is that they bought the Knight Ritter chain at the top. The worst possible time you could Buy a big newspaper chain 2006, at the very top of the market, paid $4 billion for a chain that was much bigger than it, than it itself was, and then took on $2 billion in debt. And so, you know, that has crippled it. And then of course, 2008 came along and the whole thing fell off a cliff. So, you know, there's nothing about those economics that can work.
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D
One of the other issues I know with McClatchy was their pension liabilities.
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A
Yeah.
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D
And this is one issue you do have with papers that have been around for a long time as well, is that back in the day you have a unionized labor force, you can offer these types of pensions and now they've just essentially become unsustainable.
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A
Yep, that's absolutely right.
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B
I really did want to ask the union question because this is like Slate Money, I think is fair to say has historically been a really sort of pro union shop. We think unions are good in most countries, in most industries. Whenever I talk to anyone in the news industry who's in management, they within about 55 seconds start complaining about the unions. You mentioned the unions in your book without a great deal of love. Is there any way in which the unions have been remotely helpful or can be helpful, or are they an obstacle to making local news work?
- [34:26]
A
I think they actually have been helpful because they've helped keep some of the journalists employed and being treated reasonably well so that they stay in the profession. So at this time when their ownership has become so brutal, I think that the unions have been, have been extremely important and overall positive, at least the Newspaper Guild, I mean, I've been on every side of this thing. I've been a member of the Newspaper Guild, I've negotiated against the Newspaper Guild, you know, and then, you know, I'm sort of removed from the whole thing now because I write about it. But you know, I think they serve a very good purpose. And you know, I don't, I don't think they can be blamed for holding back success, financial success in, in these companies. I really don't.
- [35:15]
B
We got a question from Peter David folk asking about the online only news organizations which are coming up in many places to try and prepare, provide an alternative. You mentioned one in western New York, which I've already forgotten what it was called.
- [35:28]
A
Yeah, Investigative Post.
- [35:32]
B
You, you do cover this in your book, but like your thesis, I think, correct me if I'm wrong here is they do very good work, but it in no way can replace the kind of societal functions that all of these local newspapers did. Is that fair? And are any of these local online places unionized?
- [35:55]
A
Yes, some of them are. Some of them are beginning to be. I think they, I would add, I would tweak what you just said a little bit. I think they do very good work. Some of them are excellent. It is difficult to make them scale. When you've had a newspaper in basically every small, you know, small city, every region, even small towns, and they've started to go out of business, the likelihood that you're going to have a philanthropically or member supported, you know, nonprofit news organization that's going to sort of fill the gap is very unlikely. You know, capitalism scales well, and this particular thing, you know, doesn't. It doesn't. But I think they are probably the most hopeful thing that we've seen come along. And, and you know, if there's a solution to this local news problem, the, the digital only and particularly the nonprofits are going to be a huge part of the solution.
- [36:54]
C
When you talk about solutions, I was thinking about how journalism is this. Basically it, it's, it's a private industry, but it serves an immense public good. And there are a bunch of industries like this, right? There's like health care, maybe you could argue that like the aerospace industry is, is one such industry. Anyway, those kinds of industries, you would think would get lots of support from the federal government, state government, and local government. I mean, what are the chances of this? Is there a way to make that work? Because it kind of seems like that's a real, that's a scalable thing to do. Like small businesses in little small towns in the middle of America would, are surviving a lot of the times because the Small Business Administration steps in and gives these places loans. Like we've already, like, we're already at a federal level, like helping these little places a lot in that regard. So why not do this with journalism too?
- [37:50]
A
Yeah, well, I guess it's something that's being discussed more and more now. The reason that it's never gotten much traction in the past is that news organizations and journalists have really not wanted to ever advocate for federal funding because they felt like it would diminish and cut into their independence. If your funding is being supplied by the very people that you're covering critically, wouldn't that encourage you to pull your punches? So there's that kind of push and pull. But we're desperate now and maybe it's time to look at it more seriously and to try to build some safeguards to it so that it could, it could work.
- [38:34]
B
I have to jump in here and say that the Voice of America, which has been a very successful independent news organization with a lot of built in safeguards, has now just managed like Trump has managed to come in and just dismantle all of those safeguards in what, a matter of like a couple of months, something like that. Like right now is exactly the time that this solution seems to not work.
- [38:57]
A
Right? Yeah, no, I mean, that's true, but then I guess you can look at, you know, the BBC or, you know, I mean, moving outside the realm of, of journalism for a second. You know, libraries, you know, these are that they get government funding, but, you know, we don't expect local politicians to be telling us what books can be on the shelves. But just wait, it may get worse.
- [39:22]
D
It's.
- [39:23]
A
We seem to be heading in that direction, so.
- [39:25]
C
Or you could think about academia. I mean, researchers and universities get tons of money from the federal government and I hope are doing good work and not being independent.
- [39:36]
D
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's possible, but I do think there's definitely some real danger there. I mean, I think there's a reason, because I think the thing is, when people talk about government funding, I do often think it's with this idea of an ideal government. And we've clearly seen that we very often do not have an ideal government. So you would need to create a system that in any situation, including the one we're currently in, would work. And I'm not entirely sure how you do that.
- [40:02]
C
Bring back local journalism.
- [40:03]
A
It's true. I mean, the other thing that worries me about that is that when you start thinking about, oh, how are we going to arrange for government to be kept out of this process and let's make sure we do it right, that is a long, time consuming process that's full of bureaucracy. And meanwhile, like every week, these organizations, you know, lots of outlets are going out of business. So by the time it gets figured out, it may be too late. And that worries me.
- [40:30]
B
Yeah, I think this was a solution which did work at the Voice of America. It did work at the BBC. And I think in both of those cases it has started to fail. You know, those of us who've been paying attention to the BBC chart to know that that is on extremely rocky ground right now and probably won't survive. We should get this numbers round in here because I know that we all have numbers. Emily, do you want to start?
- [40:56]
C
Yeah, wait, I wrote this down. My number has letters in it. B, C, L, Q, X, Y.
- [41:01]
B
Wait, is this about, Is this about Twitter?
- [41:03]
C
D Y G I R s q t z q 2 n 0 yr f 2 y n no 2 y 93 p 83 kkfjhx0wlh yes, Felix, this is.
- [41:18]
B
Will you double my money? I want you to double my money, Emily. Will you do that for me?
- [41:22]
C
Yes. We are taping, it is Wednesday, and right before we were taping the Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, the Square app, who else do we know? Bill Gates were hacked. And they all displayed a message.
- [41:37]
B
Kanye west, you name it.
- [41:39]
C
And they all displayed a message with.
- [41:41]
B
This bitcoin, Benjamin Netanyahu, weirdly, with a.
- [41:44]
C
Bitcoin address, saying, if you, if you send me what, a thousand dollars in bitcoin, I'll send you back $2,000. And people send money. It was, I mean, people sent money. So anyway, as of, as of this taping, we don't know kind of like what happened, if this was like a regular hack or Twitter was compromised.
- [42:05]
B
But it clearly was not a regular hack.
- [42:07]
C
It sounds like a movie to me.
- [42:09]
B
High level about it.
- [42:10]
C
Like the plot of a movie. Right.
- [42:11]
B
I blame the North Koreans.
- [42:14]
C
Yeah.
- [42:14]
B
So, Margaret, what's your number?
- [42:16]
A
300 million. So I mentioned that McClatchy paid $4 billion plus 2 billion in debt when it bought the Night Raider chain. And now the sort of estimated value of the McClatchy papers in toto is 300 million. So you do the math. It's a lot less.
- [42:38]
B
My number is, is zero. And I'm going to change my number. I'm going to do a last minute switcheroo here because there's a question coming in from Laurel Helicete and saying, what does enrollment in higher education journalism programs look like nationally? And my answer to that is I don't know, but it should be zero. Like this is this. Don't go to J school, people. It's. It's like we, we've just spent an entire episode talking about how miserable this, this profession is. And it is entirely possible, as many of us know, to do incredibly good journalism without going to J school. And there are much better ways to create good journalists. This is my view. I. I'm not sure if you agree, Margaret.
- [43:22]
A
Not entirely.
- [43:25]
B
Anna, what's your number?
- [43:26]
D
My number is 12. That is the number of public hearings and testimony that established at ABS cbn, which is the largest TV network in the Philippines. That's the number of hearings that established that it had not violated any legal provisions, and yet its charter has been revoked. So it is no longer going to be able to broadcast in the Philippines. And I just. This is kind of another example. This is something I think you see often in terms when you have authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte and they want to silence the news, this is one of the ways they tend to do it, is they use these kind of little legal maneuvers. And I just think when. As we think about how kind of journalism and media, everything moves forward, I think it's just important to remember that.
- [44:12]
B
Yeah, news gets disappeared. It has been disappeared across the Philippines, across Russia, across Brazil. In Brazil, they had this very easy lever they could pull, Actually, going back to the discussion about state funding of news. There was this law which basically said that the government had to take out ads in all of the local newspapers to publish all of the banners. I don't know what the hell. Anyway, the government wound up effectively funding local newspapers in much the same way as the political races effectively fund local TV stations because they. In the United States, because they spend so much money every election cycle on campaign ads, and then because the government was in charge of that, they could just take it away. And they did. And suddenly a lot of news in Brazil just evaporated. So when you see news evaporating, sometimes it is the fault of Twitter and Facebook and Google, and sometimes it is the fault of governments, and sometimes it's hard to tell. But this one is easy. That's a depressing note to end on, isn't it, really? I'm gonna. I'm just gonna say that we should invite Margaret's cat to come in and, like, you know, come up with a slightly less depressing number. Your cat.
- [45:30]
D
We'll rearrange it. We won't end on my number in the actual podcast.
- [45:34]
C
Margaret, what's your cat's name?
- [45:36]
A
Can you see the cat?
- [45:37]
C
Sometimes?
- [45:38]
B
We saw the cat.
- [45:39]
A
Oh, really?
- [45:40]
B
It was walking back and forth.
- [45:41]
A
The cat's name is Ricochet, because when he was young, and he is no longer young, he used to bounce off the walls and. Yeah. So that he's Ricochet. But, you know, he. He feels now that that name is a little too evocative because, you know, guns, bullets, and everything. So he now wants to be known now as Rick o'. Shea.
- [46:06]
B
Good Irish name, then.
- [46:07]
A
Yeah, good Irish.
- [46:10]
B
So, on which note, Margaret Sullivan, thank you so much for coming on this show to your aging cat, Mr. Ricochet. Thank you for being in the background to the whole crew who managed to put this live show together. And I can tell you that live shows are much more work than normal shows. And live shows during a Pandemic are much more work than normal live shows. You are all amazing. Faith Smith, Jessamine, Molly and Brit, the amazing Question Wrangler. We love you. You're great. Thank you to all of you for making this happen. Thank you all the Slate plus members who were tuning in live for supporting journalism. It's an important thing. We will be back next week with a show with Lee Bukheit and Mitu Gulati, and we're going to nerd out about sovereign debt.
- [46:59]
D
It's so great.
- [47:00]
B
Awesome. They it's Anna and my dream come true. And that is coming up next week on Sleep Money.