Walter Isaacson is a good man to have at your side in the 19th century, but something of an economic dead weight in the present. In Time magazine’s cover story, “How to Save Your Newspaper,” Isaacson advances the wrong old argument as he doles out some free advice for rescuing the imperiled craft of journalism. (I call it free advice because I read it on the web for free, but I must confess that my wife bought me a copy of the magazine first for $4.95.) His advice is (1) worth every penny I paid for it and (2) virtually guarantees the death of the newspaper industry if anyone pays serious attention to it.
Time’s former managing editor, now head of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson essentially argues that people should pay for content on the web even though they have shown they won’t. I hate to break the bad news, but people should do a lot of things that they don’t.
Time calls Isaacson’s idea “A Modest Proposal.” I call it a merely wishful one. Either way, Isaacson starts off by anchoring his analysis in the less-than-up-to-the-minute ideas of Henry Luce, who co-founded Time in 1923 and died in 1967 (sadly, without muttering “Rosebud” on his deathbed). It was well before the creation of the personal computer, let alone the web.
Isaacson recalls that Luce “disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue… because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers.” This is very quaint, but not very relevant. It’s also misleading and, ultimately, untrue.
If Luce were alive today, I could ask him what he thinks of the underground free weeklies that sprang up beginning in the 1960s and '70s. Many (like this one and this one) still thrive today, attracting advertisers by serving a large readership very well. I also might ask what he thinks of TV news—the free, ad-supported source from which most people receive their news. I also might point out that big, mainstream newspapers have been beholden to advertisers for many years. If this were not so, they wouldn’t be in so much trouble as advertising dwindles and Isaacson wouldn't be trying to save them. Yet, despite their dependence on ad revenue, quite a few newspapers continue to produce great journalism; continue to serve their readers.
Good journalism is not so much about who pays the bills, Mr. Isaacson, as it is about the journalists. As the former president of Chicago magazine, I was pretty damn dependent on Marshall Field's (subsumed under the Macy's name in 2006) for ad revenue. But I also could argue successfully to the department store chain’s CEO that if I wrote what he dictated and my editorial content wasn’t credible, then his 144 ad pages in Chicago wouldn’t be very credible, either. But I digress.
As we have written here at postadvertising before (here and here and...), all traditional media may sooner or later be headed either for a new business model or the ash heap of history. One thing is certain: Proposing that readers act the way we wish they would is not helpful. Instead, since we can't do without journalism, we need a real, workable solution. Story Worldwide's modest proposal is that we actually execute a new business model. I’ll detail that model in a future post.