Tough Medicine for Local Journalism

It’s hard enough for local journalism, even without all the snake oil. For the past 20 years—since the dawn of the internet, and accelerating since the recession—local news publishers have seen calamitous losses in revenues and employees. All the while, they’ve been hearing promises of what could save them: a pivot to video, the iPad, and whatever tronc was. Despite that, though, the news has generally gotten much worse.

If these publishers were a chronically sick patient, they might understandably be skeptical of the metaphorical doctor. But, yet, here comes Matthew Hindman, offering the kind of bracing candor you might expect from a cold-blooded but effective doctor. While his prescriptions aren’t panaceas, they at least come free of wishes and hopes.

In his second book, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy, Hindman, who’s a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, zooms way out and way in. Zooming out, he places the development of the internet in a historical economic context, showing how the major players of today resemble major players of an earlier economic age. In particular, Hindman underscores how economies of scale are even more pronounced in industries that benefit from the network effect. Consider how the early days of the telephone were messy and local, often requiring a customer to engage with multiple companies to make a long-distance call. When AT&T consolidated local services into a large (and, notably, government-regulated) monopoly, each additional customer made the network more valuable. Hindman shines a light on how that dynamic reinforces the power of the largest players, and cripples the early argument that the internet’s power would let the little guy play in the game of ideas with the big guys (a topic that Hindman effectively tackles in his first book, succinctly named The Myth of Digital Democracy).

From there, Hindman zooms way in to show how that works—and not just day to day, but split second to split second. In an opening anecdote, he tells a story from the very, very early days of Google. Engineers were hoping to compete with its then-peers AltaVista and Yahoo!, by adding results to each search (how quaint to think of a time when a Google search received just 10 results). But as results doubled or tripled, traffic went down. The cause? The added results added less than a second to the load speed of the site. On an individual basis, that difference seems minimal. But even at “early days” Google scale, Hindman reports that researchers saw up to a 20 percent drop in traffic and lost tens of thousands of members.

Hindman then does an impressive rundown of the various, largely unseen ways that the internet giants have worked to battle that problem, mainly spending enormous sums of money to to ensure your load times are effectively instantaneous. Conversely, all of us can remember from 10 years ago (or, in some cases, just yesterday) how crappy, clogged and slow the load times are for local news organizations. Early on, that kind of difference was probably waved off inside those news organizations, as they assumed everyone had those challenges or that they didn’t matter, that difference in nanoseconds aggregated, accruing power to the largest players on the web. If you’ve got the money to be sure you’re the fastest-loading site on the web, you’ll take traffic from the slower ones. Combine that with the network effect at the macro level, and you can see how the gulf in traffic has yawned to epic proportions.

But while Hindman adds an exceptional amount of data to that conversation (including an appendix where he literally shows his math), his biggest marginal contribution is to what that gap in resources means for the future. To make that case, he first notes how that gap belies one of the early core tenets of the internet, that it was cost-free. Sure, the content might be free to the audience, but the audience wasn’t free to the content-providers. If you had more money, you got more audience. And, given how it was, and largely still is, an exchange of audience for advertising dollars, that created a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer dynamic that is the natural law of unregulated economics.

So, what to do about it? First, Hindman dons the white jacket and gives his diagnosis in stark terms, which may be hard to take for anyone who’s been watching more than a decade of layoffs and revenue losses: “The plight of newspapers is far worse than many journalists and editors realize.” Really, it’s gonna get worse?

But Hindman doesn’t leave the patient without options. At first, he does seem to take some delight, in a section called “False Solutions,” in recounting some of the snake oils and fads of the past decade or so, including the justly maligned “pivot to video.” But after that, in the same vein of zooming in and out, he focuses first on the technical aspects of how local news sites can improve their “stickiness” (the likelihood that a visitor will stay on your site rather than just come and leave; as the internet has matured, measures of stickiness and engagement have become more important than that of site visits), as that’s what the dominant sites have been able to accomplish, thus taking traffic and revenue away from smaller, less-wealthy sites.

Zooming out, he argues that net neutrality is “both indispensable and insufficient” (emphasis his). Of course, Hindman bemoans the FCC’s abandonment of net neutrality in the Trump administration. But, he goes further, joining scholars such as Tim Wu in arguing that the issue is more profound than the FCC and internet speeds—that the way regulators assess control of attention in the marketplace isn’t consistent with the original goals of antitrust law. This tough medicine is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of journalism.

That said, while Hindman is right that the outlook is grim, as measured by our current standards, I’d argue that many local news organizations are already shifting their focus as he recommends. By connecting to their audience in new ways, by using audience-listening tools such as Hearken or whereby.us, or by using their position as convenor to do events and other engagements, news organizations are working toward the fundamental shift in relationship between themselves and their readers. Rather than viewing their readers as eyeballs to be sold, they’re increasingly seeing them as full members of a community. As members of a community, they have a shared concern about media’s future as a resource for all, as much as they use that resource as a purveyor of information for their own use.

Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, uses an anecdote to make this point. A focus group of readers was asked if they would pay for the paper as a “private good,” i.e., so they could read it. Few raised their hands. The readers were then asked if they would pay for it as a “public good,” i.e., a resource not just for them, but as a way to make it available to others. The entire focus group raised their hands. That kind of relationship is currently relatively unique among news organizations. Hindmand makes a strong argument that not only should it be more common—it might be the only path to survival.