The press must change to serve democracy

Editor's note: This is excerpted from 'The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy,' published by Penguin Random House's Crown imprint. In the lobby of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hangs a plaque with a quotation from the school's founder. 'Our Republic and its press,' it begins, 'will rise or fall together.' The quotation's author, a Hungarian-born newspaper publisher, knew something about the press — both high and low. Joseph Pulitzer was bullying, brilliant, irascible and restlessly innovative. He invented sports coverage, the comic strip, use of public documents as tools of inquiry, investigative reporting, bold headlines and newspaper illustrations. He was the most important single figure in developing the concept of journalism as a public service. With rival William Randolph Hearst, he was also a practitioner of sensationalism, hype and scandalmongering — and a leading proponent of cynical, mercenary 'yellow journalism.' At the turn of the 20th century, however, with American cities changing as immigrant urban audiences entered the middle class, Pulitzer became convinced that his adopted country needed a smarter, more accurate, and more professional press if democracy, a system threatened around the world, were to survive. Advertising His quotation dedicating the school is high-flying: 'An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.' But then comes a warning: 'A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.' The school opened in 1912, a perilous time. Monarchies were crumbling. It was unclear what system of government would replace them. The relationship between a free press and democracy was beginning to enter the minds of not just publishers, but people everywhere worried about free government. A century later modern journalism is again failing democracy; the efficacy of liberal democracy is again in doubt; and the crisis of democracy is again, in part, a crisis over the efficacy of journalism. The most common explanation for the press's failures is familiar: The industry is suffering because advertising revenue largely gravitated to a few internet companies. This disruption was made worse by deregulation under the Reagan and Clinton administrations. That legalized partisan propagandistic electronic media, which today pervade the journalism landscape. In lockstep, trust in news media fell to historic lows. This was made worse as newsrooms shrank and their product weakened. Between 2008 and 2021, four in 10 newsroom jobs vanished. Hundreds of communities became 'news deserts.' Advertising This explanation for the industry's failure isn't wrong, but it's dangerously incomplete. It describes symptoms of the crisis, not causes. The problem with this critique is this: The root of journalism's collapse is not only, or even fundamentally, economic or technological. It is intellectual. Journalism began to lose its tether to the public because in a networked age, the product it offered was inadequate and unhelpful. Thirty years after the development of the public internet, it's still offering a largely 20th century product insufficient and ill-suited in the 21st century. Blaming that failure on technology only encourages the industry to avoid making conceptual changes required to reconnect with a skeptical public. Here is journalism's deeper problem: In the 20th century, much of what made the press indispensable was not journalism but what surrounded it. You couldn't know what movie to see or how stocks performed without checking listings. You couldn't sell a bike or rent an apartment without using classifieds. Today people find that elsewhere. Journalists, meanwhile, increasingly romanticized narrower dimensions of their role. They saw their highest calling in monitoring the powerful — not helping the public live their lives, a broader, perhaps more challenging, but more valuable role. The public was a passive bystander in a dialogue between official institutions and reporters. The press could get away with this partly because its 20th century business model allowed it to. It got people's attention largely by raising alarm or featuring the bizarre and unexpected. Then it rented that attention to advertisers. In the 21st century, the press cannot survive merely by getting an audience's momentary attention and renting that out. The model has shifted. A free press can survive only by creating enough value for communities that people will recognize it, pay attention, and subsidize it — through subscriptions, membership, tax breaks, or donations. First, however, they must find it essential. Advertising What the public requires from journalism today is more complex. The bar has been raised. But how journalists conceive their work — their mission, how they define news, present it and depict society — hasn't changed sufficiently to meet that challenge. To revive itself, and fulfill its obligation to the public and democracy, journalism must focus more on helping people with their lives than merely getting their attention. It must expand its sense of purpose beyond holding the powerful accountable — a role it plays today, ironically, in a way that amplifies the powerful as much as monitors them. Journalism must become more a service and less a product. Journalists must widen their mission, redefine news and provide a more complete, less random and less alarmist account of the world. They must understand audiences better and make good on the digital promise of collaborating more than providing narrative lectures. Finally, they must both slow down and speed up — create journalism that's a blend of fast and slow. If all that seems like too much to ask, know this: A growing number of outlets, old and new, have begun charting this new path. But those experiments need tending, and for the ideas to spread, their work needs a clearer intellectual framework. If they do not spread, the implications for a free press everywhere are dire. So are prospects for reviving democracy in the 21st century. For it's becoming clear, a century after the words were uttered, that a republic and its press do indeed 'rise or fall together.'