This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

The economic collapse of journalism in America is hard to exaggerate. Between 2004 and the end of 2019, about 2,100 newspapers—one in four—closed, according to a University of North Carolina study. While several hundred digital-only news sites sprung up during that period, they were far too few and small to fill the growing void. And that was before the pandemic decimated news outlets even further.

The vibrancy of cable news networks and a few national publications—some, such as The Washington Post and The Atlantic, owned by billionaires—masks the broader catastrophe. The damage ranges from the shutting-down of quality national magazines like Governing and Pacific Standard to large layoffs at online outlets like BuzzFeed and VICE. But the greatest shrinkage is happening at the local level, among large metropolitan dailies, neighborhood and small-town weeklies, and outlets that have long covered Black, Hispanic, and other minority and ethnic communities. As of last year, two-thirds of counties in America lacked a local daily newspaper. Half had only one newspaper, often just a weekly. And more than 200—mostly poor, rural counties—had none at all. Those news outlets that remain are often what are referred to as ghost papers, with few staff and little local reporting. (Local TV news has declined far less, but tends to cover stories that newspapers originate, and with less depth.)

It is equally hard to exaggerate how destructive this decline has been to the fabric and functioning of American democracy. One study found that in communities where newspapers close and there are no reporters keeping an eye on the decisions of local officials, municipal government wages, deficits, and borrowing costs rise. Local news outlets tend to be far more trusted by readers on both sides of the political aisle than national publications. When they disappear, citizens turn to national news sources, often partisan ones, or rely on social media for information. The result is more party-line voting and small-town residents mobilizing against mythical antifa infiltrations. Indeed, as this magazine has reported, the rise of authoritarian politics in America correlates to an alarming degree with the waning of local news.

The decline of the journalism business is not being driven by a lack of interest in the news, which is robust, but by the collapse of the advertising-based model that has traditionally paid for news gathering. The problem began two decades ago, when papers started losing classified ads to digital sites like Craigslist and eBay. To compete, print outlets built extensive web operations to tap the growing digital advertising market—only to see that market cornered by two monopolistic tech platforms. By 2018, Google and Facebook were sucking up 58 percent of all digital advertising revenues at the national level, and 77 percent in local markets, according to The Wall Street Journal.

While the problem of journalism’s economic decline, and its eroding effects on democracy, has been well documented, surprisingly little work has been done to sleuth out practical solutions—especially by journalists, who, one would think, would have a strong professional incentive to do so. (Half of all newspaper jobs have disappeared since 2008, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, about the same rate of decline as in textile manufacturing.) Journalists, however, are understandably hesitant to consider fixes that might involve the use of government resources or power when it’s their job to hold the government accountable. 

The Washington Monthly is not so reluctant. In this issue, we identify and describe several ways government can be used to reinvigorate the economics of journalism without jeopardizing editorial independence—just as the Founding Fathers did when they created a postal system that subsidized the spread of newspapers in the first century of U.S. history. Steven Waldman makes the case that today, every American should receive a refundable tax credit for a local news subscription, membership, or donation to build a new era of what he calls “civic news.” Phillip Longman argues that journalism’s advertising-based business model can be revived using a combination of tougher privacy and anti-discrimination laws and a return to traditional standards of antitrust enforcement. 

These policy changes would not only recharge traditional news enterprises, they would also supercharge and protect the kinds of innovative new models we profile in this package. Anne Kim shows how journalists of color are diversifying media by forming their own outlets. Matt Connolly reports on promising early experiments with cooperatively owned business models for digital news media. And Grace Gedye investigates efforts by firms like Spotify to corner the podcasting market, one of the few product lines that bring in growing advertising dollars for independent media outlets. 

Any hope of reinforcing our wobbly democracy will require a free and energetic press. But for that to happen, all of us, including members of the fourth estate, will need to get over our reluctance to consider carefully using the power of democratic government to solve the press’s plight.

The Washington Monthly would like to thank Knight Foundation for sponsoring this special issue.

The post Introduction: Can Journalism Be Saved? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Francis Wick’s family has been running local newspapers since 1926, when his grandfather Milton and his grand-uncle James took over the Niles Daily Times in Niles, Ohio. These second-generation Norwegian immigrants, and their children, gradually grew the company, and it now includes more than 25 small-circulation newspapers in 11 states. Although Wick Communications is not even among the top 25 newspaper chains, these publications are important in their communities. A typical homepage for the website of Wick-run Wenatchee World, in central Washington State, includes headlines like “Two More Fatalities from COVID-19 Reported in Chelan and Douglas Counties” and “Former Health Administrator Emails Reveal Infighting over Pandemic Response.” There are no big TV stations or metro dailies that provide this kind of coverage. If these newspapers went away, places like Wenatchee would become news deserts.

Even before COVID-19 hit, the Wick papers were seeing rapidly declining advertising revenue. It was clear to 39-year-old Francis, now the CEO, that they had to move rapidly to build up their digital subscriptions. But when the pandemic arrived, the floor fell out. Before the Paycheck Protection Program gave their company a few months of breathing room, the entire chain (like many others) was in danger of becoming insolvent. Wick fears that as PPP expires, and local economies struggle, the papers will continue to be in a dire situation. 

Their plight reflects a larger crisis. Journalism—the only profession mentioned in the Bill of Rights—is in a perilous state. Since 2004, the number of newspaper reporters has dropped by more than 60 percent. Some 200 counties and 1,800 communities have no local news source at all. Thousands of others have so-called ghost newspapers, which contain barely any local reporting. One study found that only 17 percent of the articles in local newspapers were about local matters. And that was all before COVID-19. 

Wick is still optimistic that chains like his can figure out permanent, sustainable models, but it will take time, so the government would need to help. He figures that the revenue of local news primarily comes from readers and advertisers, and wonders if there is a way to help newspapers through those primary stakeholders. This past April, he wrote to his local member of Congress, Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, suggesting a few ideas. First, provide a $250 tax credit with which Americans would buy newspaper subscriptions. Residents would become better informed, and news organizations would get more revenue, but only if they convinced people it’s worthwhile to subscribe.

Second, he proposed a $5,000 tax credit to help small businesses buy advertising in local media during the COVID-19 crisis, and a $2,500 credit after the pandemic passed. It was a clever twofer: Businesses would get needed economic assistance, and news organizations would get more income. 

Finally, he suggested a tax credit to news organizations that employ local journalists. 

Kirkpatrick’s office took a quick interest. Her staff tinkered with the jobs tax credit to make it more palatable to Republicans, and then recruited a Republican coauthor, Dan Newhouse of Washington State. They added a provision urged by the Rebuild Local News coalition, which I lead, allowing residents to use the tax credit to make a donation to local nonprofit news organizations, too.

The result, after a few months of work, is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, the single best approach to media policy in decades. As of this past Labor Day, an amazingly broad collection of representatives had signed on as cosponsors, including ultra-progressives like Bobby Rush and far-right conservatives like Louie Gohmert.

It is now possible to imagine a government strategy that would save local news without endangering editorial freedom. That’s crucial, because we are entering into a “third epoch” of local journalism, and the choices we make now—including about public policy—will determine what local news looks like for decades. The first period was what historians have called the era of the partisan press. During this time, which lasted from the nation’s founding years to roughly the Civil War, local newspapers relied on support from political parties and government for much of their revenue. This was followed by the era of commercial journalism, running into the early years of the 21st century, a time when local papers prospered from advertising and government support became less important. That era is over. 

While the situation is dire—for the local news sector and the democracy that depends on it—it also presents an opportunity. A new, better model for local journalism is developing. It consists of reconceived commercial news organizations, a much larger nonprofit news sector, and a greater role for small and large philanthropic donors. These new “ecosystems” could be better than what we’ve had for much of American history. 

But the federal government will need to play a key supporting role, as it did before. And it can, especially if we focus on putting financial power in the hands of individual citizens—just as Francis Wick suggested. In so doing, we may ensure that the third epoch of local journalism is the era of civic news.

The normal response when a vital industry is in free fall is for the government to help—as has happened repeatedly in the energy, auto, airline, finance, mortgage, and agricultural sectors. But journalists have not been clamoring for government intervention. This is due to a deep-seated, and quite reasonable, belief that it would be self-destructive for reporters to take money from the public institutions they hold accountable. 

The truth, however, is that for most of U.S. history, the government did support the press. The Founding Fathers, for instance, decided that publishers should get lower postal rates to mail their papers. This was quite a commitment by the government: Newspapers constituted 45 percent of the items mailed but covered only eight percent of the Postal Service’s costs. But the system worked. Though he forgot to mention the postal subsidy, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “of all countries on earth, it is in America that one finds both the most associations and the most newspapers.”

On the other hand, the first business model for local news was ultimately built on partisanship. Newspapers aspired to propagandize and mobilize supporters of the early political parties. Subtlety, fairness, or accuracy were not primary goals. The Gazette of the United States, a Federalist paper, offered this analysis during the 1800 election: “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT . . . [OR] JEFFERSON AND NO GOD.” 

In 1850, more than 80 percent of the newspapers were aligned with a party, which directly and indirectly provided the bulk of their revenue. The party in power would provide lucrative government printing contracts to loyal newspapers and pay them to publish legal notices. Wealthy party donors kicked in funds. Editors were often hired to taxpayer-supported jobs as county clerks, or held positions on state or local party committees. 

In recent years, experts have complained that when the internet arrived the original sin was that news publishers didn’t charge for content. It turns out that this sin wasn’t all that original: In the partisan era, readers often didn’t pay for “content” either. One North Carolina editor in 1832 estimated that only 10 percent of his 600 subscribers paid. Papers persisted, nonetheless, because of subsidies from the parties and the government. 

After the Civil War, the partisan model faded away, replaced by what historians call the commercial era of journalism. During this grand epoch, which lasted all the way to the end of the 20th century, the biggest revenue source for local news was advertising (including, sometimes, government advertising). There were several causes for the shift to this model. Rising literacy rates led to greater demand for newspapers. Improvements in the technology of printing made it less expensive to pull off large press runs. Political parties became more professionalized and less reliant on newspapers as their primary mobilization vehicle. Urbanization made it cheaper to distribute high-circulation newspapers.

Most important, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, manufacturers needed to peddle consumer goods far and wide. Community newspapers were flooded with local advertisements—including from those newfangled consumer amusement parks called department stores—as well as from national companies marketing their products to new towns. By the turn of the 20th century, as best we can tell, most local newspapers got more money from advertising than from reader subscription fees. And since publishers earned more if they had more readers, they became less partisan. Why alienate half your potential audience? 

There were many flaws in this model—most especially that advertisers often expected the news pages to promote their businesses, and certainly to avoid criticizing them. Some literally bribed reporters. “Any concern of average size and importance would do well to pay a good newspaper a few dollars a week to look after their interests,” advised an article in the magazine Printers’ Ink in 1894. The newspaper industry sometimes took up campaigns that harmed their own readers but helped advertisers, as when publishers in the Progressive Era opposed efforts to regulate dangerous patent medicines. (My favorite old ad depicts two children playing in the yard next to the headline “COCAINE Toothache Drops—Instantaneous Cure.”) 

But this model also contributed to the growth of American society and democracy. Newspapers broadened the definition of news to include coverage of business, labor, crime, courts, accidents, arts, culture, life milestones, and community affairs. While a typical metropolitan newspaper in 1832 devoted 50 to 70 percent of their space to politics, in 1897 that proportion dropped to between 19 and 42 percent, according to the historian Gerald Baldasty. They hired more professional, full-time reporters to find out things. In 1860, The New York Herald had seven reporters and editors; by 1890, they had 100, plus freelancers and special correspondents. Journalists of that era invented a new and controversial technique: the interview. Most importantly, the rise of muckrakers showed that journalism could hold powerful people and institutions accountable. 

By the 20th century, the trade became a profession, with more journalists aspiring toward “objectivity.” While this notion was never universally accepted, local newspapers decided that it was better for business, and the community, to be relatively fair minded and neutral in their depiction of facts. After World War II, local news continued to evolve. As the historian Michael Schudson and the former managing editor of The Washington Post, Len Downie, wrote in 2011,

The civil rights movement taught journalists in what had been overwhelmingly white and male newsrooms about minority communities that they hadn’t covered well or at all. The women’s movement successfully asserted that “the personal is political” and ushered in such topics as sexuality, gender equity, birth control, abortion, childhood, and parenthood. Environmentalists helped to make scientific and medical questions part of everyday news reporting.

There remained huge blind spots. For instance, many newspapers in white-majority towns gave short shrift to Black communities. But in some of those cases, a vibrant system of ethnic newspapers—supported mostly by advertising—filled the gaps.

By the end of the 20th century, the business model of local journalism had entered its most ironic stage. As TV and radio audiences grew, fewer Americans turned to newspapers. Eventually, most communities could support only one newspaper, which was terrible—unless you happened to own that surviving paper. These monopoly papers grew quite profitable and often invested some of the surplus into hiring more reporters. 

Then came the internet. The big problem was not that news organizations lost readers to the internet but rather that they lost advertisers. At first, companies flocked to the lower costs and better targeting of niche sites like Craigslist, Monster.com, and Cars.com. Then search engines and social platforms became the dominant players. Facebook and Google now control 70 percent of local digital advertising, leaving less and less for newspapers and other content creators to live on. The result was stunning: From 2008 to 2018, newspaper revenue dropped from $37.8 billion to $14.3 billion. As a result, the number of newspaper employees fell from 71,000 in 2008 to roughly 35,000 today. While some publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have prospered by appealing to an increasingly national or global audience, local news organizations rarely have that option. Most of the people who care about last night’s meeting of the Sahuarita, Arizona, school board live in Sahuarita, Arizona. Ethnic newspapers, many of which have not pushed digital transformation aggressively, are in a particularly precarious state.

Local journalism has become what economists call a public good, meaning that it provides a civically essential service and yet businesses cannot make money providing it. Therefore, the core problem—insufficient funding for local, labor-intensive reporting—will not likely be solved through mere commercial innovation. 

Indeed, much of the recent economic “innovation” that has happened in for-profit local journalism has made matters worse. Increasingly, struggling local publications have become attractive targets for rapacious private equity firms and hedge funds. By 2018, some 1,102 newspapers—representing more than half of daily newspaper circulation—were owned or controlled by a handful of hedge funds, according to studies by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These owners limit new spending—including on strategies that would grow digital subscriptions—lay off thousands of reporters to cut costs, and then feast on the temporary profits. 

Alden Global Capital, one of the largest owners of newspapers, provides a case in point. In 2017, Alden’s Digital First Media had a 17 percent operating margin, and a profit of $160 million. In Colorado, the profit margin for Alden’s papers was $36 million, generated in part through massive layoffs. In 2013, the Denver Post received the Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news reporting for their coverage of the Aurora mass shooting. Since then, it has laid off more than 50 of the people who helped the Post win the award. 

This kind of behavior has wreaked havoc all across America. From 2004 to 2018, some 1,749 weeklies and 62 U.S. dailies closed as a result of mergers, according to UNC data. Consolidation is likely to accelerate because of the coronavirus pandemic, leaving local news systems even less competent, less inclusive, and less diverse. The second period of journalism—the era of commercialized journalism—is coming to a sad end. 

What will be the next epoch? The U.S. could see the rise of a “tribal press.” This would be a bit like the partisan press of the early 19th century, except that instead of government and political parties subsidizing local papers it would be ideological groups, political action committees, or individuals. There’s already movement in this direction. A recent study by the Duke University journalism department found more than 400 “hyper-partisan” websites masquerading as objective local news sites. Some are financed by progressives; more are backed by conservative groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; some do not disclose their financial backers. Such a model would have the advantages of the partisan press (a clear source of revenue) but—going out on a limb here—would be bad for democracy. The toxic dysfunction of national politics and cable TV could be replicated on a local level. We’d get more polarization and less concern with truth. 

It’s also possible that communities end up replacing local newspapers with nothing. National media would fill the void. People would get plenty of news about the nation, less about their town and their neighbors. What local information—and misinformation—they did get about their schools, hospitals, and the workings of city hall would come from government press releases, their friends, and social media. This would likely lead to more corruption, less civic engagement, more paranoia, and greater paralysis on the local level.

That’s why we need to work, collectively and consciously, toward ushering in an era of civic news.

In this system, local news will look quite different. For starters, the nonprofit sector will have to provide much more coverage than it has in the past. Thankfully, it appears up to the challenge. Over the past decade, more than 300 nonprofit local news websites have sprung up, bearing names like VTDigger, Oklahoma Watch, Arkansas Nonprofit News Network, East Lansing Info, and the Texas Tribune. Many are doing fantastic local reporting. Philanthropic sources have increased funding to these groups, and last year a new organization called the American Journalism Project was created to help enlarge their number and viability. New national nonprofit organizations have also come forward to help with local news. Chalkbeat provides high-quality education reporting in eight cities. The Solutions Journalism Network provides training and financial support for journalism aimed at solving important problems. 

Finally, public radio stations have significantly beefed up their coverage of local issues. They have the potential to play a critical role because they already have proven business models—local memberships and philanthropy—as well as preexisting audiences. Some have wisely teamed up with some of these first-generation, nonprofit digital websites. 

Nonprofits can help existing print outlets, too. This June, Report for America, the organization I cofounded and run, placed 226 reporters into 163 local newsrooms around the country, about half of which are long-standing papers. We require that newsrooms raise a portion of the salary for reporters from the community, forcing them to develop philanthropic operations that many never had before. In the past year, the program helped stimulate 7,800 donations to local RFA partner news organizations. It helps educate local donors that, without local journalism, communities won’t make progress on health care, education, or political reform.

Some owners have charted an innovative new approach. In recent years, the owners of The Salt Lake Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer donated their newspapers to nonprofit organizations. The Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) was donated to one in 2003. These outlets have maintained much better coverage and have a better path to sustainability than most commercial papers. 

There’s plenty more that the philanthropic sector must do. Although donors have increased their commitment to journalism from $123 million in 2009 to $370 million in 2018, newspaper revenue has dropped more than $23 billion. Despite that big number, the gap is manageable. If we added a reporter to follow each municipal government in the country, it would cost about $1 billion. By contrast, individuals, foundations, and corporations gave $450 billion to charitable causes in 2019, including $13 billion just to the top 20 elite (and mostly well-endowed) colleges and universities. 

But so far there is no evidence that donors are interested in investing this kind of money into the unsexy world of local journalism. As a result, nonprofit operations are rarely financially secure. In 2019, only one-third of the 300 local nonprofits had taken in at least $1 million in revenue, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. 

So, an era of civic news would also need to include commercial newspapers that refocused on serving their communities. Sometimes a local benevolent billionaire reclaims a newspaper from one of the chains. Thanks to purchases by the rich, The Boston Globe, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Berkshire Eagle, and the Los Angeles Times have all been investing more in journalism than their chain-based peers. These publications have more runway to make the kinds of decisions that will help them in the long run—for instance, generating more of their revenue through digital subscriptions, rather than advertising, and eventually phasing down print publications. And even if they don’t get all the way into the black, the benefactor covers the gap, in effect offering accountability reporting to the community as a philanthropic donation. 

Others are experimenting with new corporate structures that maintain private ownership but increase the odds of community investment. The Philadelphia Inquirer became a public-benefit corporation (which was then acquired by a nonprofit). With a public-benefit corporation, investors can still invest and make a boatload down the road, but the company must commit to both making money and serving the community. This makes it easier for news organizations to fund-raise, and, should they ever be up for sale or go bankrupt, it becomes easier for community civic leaders to organize an acquisition.

But both increased philanthropy and a revitalized commercial press would rely heavily on the wealthy, which could lead to coverage that ignores lower-income communities. Anyway, even if Laurene Powell Jobs woke up and decided to solve this problem by herself (which she could, by the way), it’s hard to get excited about democracy’s fate depending entirely on the fancies of a few billionaires. 

For civic news to thrive, local journalism will need help from another group—the one implicitly summoned by Francis Wick: taxpayers.

What determines whether government involvement makes journalism worse or better? The postal subsidy of the 18th and 19th centuries worked because it was content neutral. These subsidies, which continued well into the 20th century, were formulaic, based on distance, not merit. It didn’t involve the presidentially appointed postmaster general reviewing grant applications. It lowered the postal fees for all newspapers, both scurrilous Jeffersonian rags and fulminating Federalist newspapers alike. 

Government support in the civic news era would need to be similarly impartial. The tax credit system established by the Local Journalism Sustainability Act would be. Rather than government officials sitting around a table or in a Zoom meeting deciding who got what, the choices would be made by Americans themselves—but with their preferences amplified. This would unleash a virtuous market dynamic. Local news organizations would need to convince residents that they are worthy of donations or subscriptions. Newspapers that continued to disinvest in reporting would become vulnerable to competition by other organizations. Ghost newspapers would ultimately lose out to living newsrooms. 

There would be some difficult policy questions, including what outlets qualified as local. The journalism world would need to mobilize to create a set of standards. And no matter how rigorous those standards were, some of this money would inevitably still end up with dubious publications. That’s how the postal subsidy worked, and how the deduction for charitable giving currently works. You decide which charity to support and the government subsidizes your choice, regardless of whether you’re helping the Red Cross or the First Church of Snake Handling. But just as Jefferson tolerated subsidies for Federalist lowlifes—for the greater good—we’d accept some bad edge cases to help build a system of subsidies that is robust and broadly accepted by the public.

While the Local Journalism Sustainability Act forms the core of a smart strategy, it is not sufficient. It currently provides a regular tax credit, but that needs to be a refundable tax credit, so that people who pay little or nothing in taxes can benefit. If made refundable and used by the same proportion of people as checked off the federal campaign finance credit, it would pump $5.5 billion into local media each year. 

The Rebuild Local News coalition recently proposed several other critical governmental changes that would help usher in an era of civic news. Congress should pass a set of tax incentives for chains or hedge funds that donate newspapers to nonprofit groups, replanting them in communities. The Justice Department should adopt a new approach to antitrust law that would block or slow down certain mergers. The government already has the authority to block mergers that undermine “localism,” the idea of media created by and for communities. The philanthropic sector should also create a new national nonprofit organization to help transition struggling newspapers into community nonprofits and public-benefit corporations. In some cases, the new fund would help with the logistics of the change—tax filings, legal bills, bankruptcy filings. In other cases, it would acquire newspapers for little money, or accept them as donated assets, and then hand  them over to local groups. Finally, it would provide expertise and operating capital to help newly reconstituted news organizations succeed.

Congress should also ensure that more government advertising spending goes to local media. The federal government already spends about $1 billion to advertise for the military, the census, and other purposes. Much of it goes to social media or national TV networks. Requiring them to put half of these advertisements through local media would pump $500 million into local news economies. 

Finally, Congress should help the local nonprofit sector increase the number of local newsrooms. There’s precedent for this in the construction of the public broadcasting system. Before 1967, there were 292 public radio stations—a number strikingly similar to the number of local nonprofit news organizations today. These stations had great energy and talent, but little money, with many run out of universities. Congress then passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Now there are more than 900 public radio stations and 356 public TV stations, including powerhouses that produce some of the best content out there. But while some of our favorite Ken Burns series feature Corporation for Public Broadcasting logos, the majority of CPB funding goes out to local stations, by formula—not for specific content, but for general operating support. In this vein, the government could help supersize the NewsMatch program, which has been set up by a range of foundations. In 2019, NewsMatch provided $3.37 million to news organizations that had raised money for themselves. It is popular, but the small war chest meant that newsrooms could get no more than $20,000 each. Imagine if they could earn $200,000 instead.

The government is, of course, perfectly capable of making matters worse. For instance, some have suggested creating a large fund inside the Department of Commerce or another government agency to dispense grants for local newsrooms. One needs to look no further than Voice of America or Stars and Stripes to see how a president might punish news outlets that don’t tow the line. But NewsMatch amplifies the choices of supporters rather than making the first judgments. This, plus a simplification of the IRS rules governing non-profit news
organizations, would transform the local news landscape.

Our rough estimates are that this package could triple the number of local reporters, while costing the federal government a few billion dollars in lost tax revenue and some direct expenditures. The price tag would be about the same scale as the tax deduction for business meals and entertainment. 

There you have it—a public policy strategy that could save local news but do it in a way that is future—and First Amendment—friendly. If there came a day when the nonprofits were clearly better than the for-profits, people could shift from subscribing to newspapers to donating to nonprofits—or vice versa. It would keep political appointees from being able to use these funds to manipulate local media. Best of all, it would reward and amplify efforts that treat local reporting as a public good. This era of civic news would become not so much a way to fill the gaps created by the collapse of the previous models, but a way to build a far better system of local news than we have ever had before.

The post The Coming Era of “Civic News” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism.Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

Back in the 2000s, influential “thought leaders,” as they had come to be known, peddled the idea that the world no longer needed news organizations. In TED Talks and best-selling books like Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky proclaimed that a critical mass of the world’s citizens would rise up from watching TV on their sofas and become hyper-collaborating, hyper-informed news producers on something called “social media.” Shirky and many other techno-prophets in those days predicted—coining a number of new terms in the process—that these “web denizens” would replace the established press by “crowdsourcing” in “frictionless,” “peer-to-peer” networks that would overthrow ignorance and tyranny across the globe. As proof of concept, they pointed to the putative role that social media platforms like Facebook were playing in the Arab Spring and democracy movements around the world.

This vision might seem laughable in hindsight, but it was not entirely wrong. During the flowering of Web 2.0, interactive digital technology enabled what became the blogosphere, a place where ordinary citizens, if they had the talent and energy, could find and collaborate with diverse audiences. These bloggers made important contributions to the nation’s well-being, like documenting the many failures of the George W. Bush administration that elite media outlets were underplaying or getting wrong. Today, the elevation of racial justice issues largely results from ordinary citizens, not professional journalists, documenting instances of police brutality with their cell phones and social media accounts. 

But these are the exceptions. On the whole, the idea that the raging hive minds of social media networks could replace or even reduce the need for an institutionalized free press seems ludicrous. Maybe Facebook could have evolved in ways that had the net effect of checking atavism and advancing the values of the Enlightenment through the wisdom of crowds. But it didn’t. Facebook instead became a corporate giant that used hate speech, conspiracy theories, and fake news to algorithmically generate engagement by users and then micro-target them with ads. Rather than a flourishing of democracy or an age of reason, this has led to pathologies ranging from the subversion of elections by actual and aspiring authoritarians, both here and abroad, to genocidal flash mobs in Myanmar and Ethiopia. 

Shirky, however, was right that the established press would suffer serious damage, even if he missed the major reason why. As Google and Facebook emerged as giant monopolies, they used their domination over advertising markets to steal away the resources required to sustain the kind of diverse and independent press we have never needed as badly as we do today. 

Historically, Americans have relied on advertising to pay for the high cost of producing quality reporting and editing, particularly in realms like local and public service journalism, on which a functioning democracy depends. Advertisers seeking to reach a particular market segment would place ads in a publication—or in particular sections of a publication, such as the business or style pages—that were read by their target audience. The revenues publishers earned from these ads in turn paid for the production of all kinds of journalism that benefited civic discourse and knowledge, but for which the average American was not prepared to pay a lot of money out of pocket. In this sense, advertising has long been the primary way our democracy has financed the free speech it needs. 

But now this model has been largely displaced by behavioral advertising. If you have ever googled “hotels near Disney World” and found yourself chased around the internet for weeks afterward by ads for central Florida attractions, you know what behavioral advertising is. It’s the practice of targeting individual consumers with individualized messages based on what surveillance of their online behavior reveals about their individual needs and preferences. Before, these hotels would have to pay publications to advertise their services. Now, they pay Google instead.

Believing this behavioral advertising model to be inherently more efficient and effective, many people who are concerned about journalism have resigned themselves to a world in which the press must rely on other means of support, from greater use of paywalls to government subsidies to charitable contributions from philanthropies and high-net-worth individuals. These alternative models, unfortunately, have big drawbacks. Paywalls can make quality journalism too expensive. Subsidies and donations can make journalists too dependent on handouts from the powerful people and institutions they need to cover without fear or favor.

But fortunately, this resignation rests on a dubious premise. Today’s behavioral advertising markets are not intrinsically more efficient even from an advertiser’s point of view. Google and Facebook subject advertisers to monopolistic, needlessly high pricing and predatory business practices, and a growing body of evidence shows that it doesn’t even work very well in generating sales. Nor does behavioral advertising reflect the inevitable march of social progress. It’s based ultimately on corporate spying into your personal life and on pervasive new and old forms of discrimination that are deep threats to civil liberties, self-governance, and democratic institutions. 

None of this is inevitable. Behavioral advertising has come about only because the government failed to apply policies that Americans used successfully in the past to manage competition in communications networks, like telegraphs and telephones as well as broadcast radio and television. These policies included long-standing laws and regulations that prohibited owners of essential communications infrastructure from engaging in lines of business that would put them in competition with their own suppliers and customers; that forbade them from engaging in price and other forms of discrimination; and that strictly limited their ability to monetize other people’s personal data. 

Applying the same principles to today’s digital media markets will greatly restore the ability of advertising to support quality journalism while benefiting the public interest in many other important ways. It won’t solve all the financial challenges. But by using smart competition policy to break the dominance of platform monopolies, particularly Google and Facebook, over media markets, we will do far more to save a free press, in America and around the world, than any other single course we might take. 

Many journalists have issues with the role that advertising has long played in their profession. That’s not without reason. Plenty of us have worked for publications where reporters and editors must fight fierce battles with the “business side” over whether and how to bend editorial direction in favor of advertisers. 

In the 1970s, at rich and powerful news organizations like, say, The New York Times, CBS News, or Time magazine, reporters and editors generally had the upper hand in such struggles because there were so many businesses lined up to buy ads. If you wrote for the elite print media in those days, at worst you might have to produce some copy about luxury products for the new Style section, or compete for space with other journalists who did. 

But if you have ever worked for financially weaker publications, you know that the pressure to bend story selection and story lines to please advertisers can be deeply demoralizing. When I began my career as a staff writer for the struggling New Jersey Monthly magazine in the late 1970s, we were able to do award-winning investigative journalism and deep dives into politics and public policy. But to pay the bills we increasingly had to do service journalism that we could sell upscale ads against, like reviews of the Garden State’s Top 10 Golf Courses and directories of its celebrity dentists. And, of course, we would never do a harsh review or exposé of any major advertiser. 

It’s no longer just small outlets that have come under advertising stress. In recent years, such tensions have gotten worse for most publications, including elite ones. The pressure is especially evident on websites, where publishers, desperate to replace falling ad revenue, sometimes turn to pop-ups and pseudo-journalistic “native” ads that readers hate and that can destroy a publication’s brand. 

Notice, however, that what is driving these tensions is not too much ad revenue but too little. If there were more potential advertisers, or if advertisers were willing to pay more, compromising on content wouldn’t be necessary. For all its inherent problems, journalism financed by a healthy, diverse advertising market has a lot going for it.

That’s especially true when you compare it to the alternatives. Consider, for example, the early days of American journalism, where advertising played a very limited role. Until the mid-19th century, newspapers depended instead primarily on political parties and government printing contracts controlled by politicians to pay their bills. This business model resulted in a rabidly partisan press that may have stirred up political engagement with salacious stories about the sex lives of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. But it did little to develop the independent reporting and public education needed by a self-governing people. 

That began to change only as publishers raised more revenues from advertising. This new business model not only allowed for greater political independence; it also had the benefit of democratizing access to nonpartisan journalism by dramatically lowering paywalls. Typical newspapers went from costing six cents to just a penny. This new “penny press” produced lots of sensationalist journalism. But it also for the first time allowed some publications to come to market with balanced in-depth reporting at a price readers could afford. One of the most successful penny papers was the New-York Daily Times, which would change its name to The New York Times in 1857. 

Advertising also allowed for a flourishing of journalism dedicated to advancing social justice. Frederick Douglass financed his crusading newspaper, The North Star, by publishing ads for products ranging from fashionable boots to “hydropathic water cures.” William Lloyd Garrison kept the lights on at The Liberator by running ads for ladies’ “Champooing and Hair Dyeing” and for the “Boston Trecothic Calisthenic Academy and Gymnasium.” A few decades later, advertising for women’s designer clothes as well as Washington, D.C., gift shops paid for the advocacy journalism of The Suffragist, an essential part of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. 

Advertising also paid for the kind of muckraking journalism that revealed the abuses of corporate monopolies like Standard Oil and corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall. To finance the exposés of pioneering investigative journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, the publisher of McClure’s Magazine sold ad space to other corporations, hawking, for example, the Gillespie-Eden Corporation’s “Supreme Achievement in Electric Washing Machines” and the La Creole brand of dandruff shampoo.

Later, advertising for products like stereos and sporty cars in publications like Esquire and Rolling Stone financed the new journalism of the 1960s by such dissident writers as Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese. In those revolutionary times, classified personals financed the growth of counterculture publications like the Village Voice, the Berkeley Barb, and many other free underground city papers. Ads by book publishers sustained niche political magazines ranging from the National Review to Dissent, Ramparts, and the Washington Monthly. 

The symbiotic relationship between advertising and journalism evolved after the rise of television. By the 1960s, advertisers of broad national brands like Coca-Cola found it increasingly more efficient and effective to advertise on national television networks that could reach tens of millions of consumers at a time. The trend broke the backs of once-thriving mass-audience magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Life by the early 1970s and made it increasingly hard for newspapers to compete for national accounts as well. 

But advertisers still needed a way to target ads for products, like Adidas jogging shoes and Cuisinart food processors, that most people watching Gunsmoke or the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite would never buy. This reality created a vast opportunity for new forms of advertising-supported journalism that appealed to narrower market segments, particularly as the American public became more and more diverse in its tastes and unequal in its income after the 1970s. 

In this era, advertising financed a golden age of specialty publications, ranging from high-quality trade publications like American Banker and Regardie’s to award-winning state and city magazines like the Texas Monthly and Washingtonian. The need for advertisers to more efficiently reach niche audiences also breathed new life into journals specializing in politics and public policy like National Journal and Governing. And it led to myriad publications focused on the emerging feminist, environmental, and gay rights moments like Ms., Mother Earth News, and The Advocate. Finally, it led to new editorial products ranging from Runner’s World to Creative Computing. 

Beginning in the 1980s, the endurance of this model was tested by economic and regulatory shifts. Lax enforcement of antitrust and other competition policies allowed Walmart, for example, to use predatory business practices to close down local retailers. This meant that local newspapers, as well as local television and radio stations, found fewer and fewer businesses they could sell ads to. Meanwhile, large corporate mergers eventually destroyed the advertising base for many business publications. Newspapers in this era also faced declining revenues from classified ads, including to rival print products like Autotrader. 

But despite these ominous trends, the strong symbiotic relationship between advertising and journalism continued. Surviving city papers became prime real estate for surviving local advertisers. Companies still paid, and reporting thrived.

At first, the internet was a boon for news outlets. Online advertising services, collectively known as “ad tech,” helped increase the flow of ad income for many existing and new editorial products. For example, in 1995 Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman rolled out a new company called DoubleClick. Based on software they had developed in O’Connor’s basement, DoubleClick enabled both large and small internet publishers to host internet display ads in standardized formats while also allowing ad buyers to measure instantly how well their pitches were working. DoubleClick did collect data on customers’ online behavior, but it did not use it for targeting ads. As such, this and similar ad tech did not erode the financing of journalism, because it still required that businesses seek out the specific websites they thought prospective customers would visit. There was no micro-targeting, and no behavioral advertising. Editorial content remained the chief means of reaching targeted audiences. It simply became easier for publications to sell online ad space.

Similarly, a few years later Google developed a product called AdSense that marketers could use to automatically place ads on websites that matched the advertisement’s content. So, for example, AdSense would find a website containing lots of content about sports and automatically place pop-up ads for products like sports memorabilia and sports tickets, giving the website’s owners revenue they otherwise would not have had. This was helpful for small or new publications and for websites in particular. 

The unfolding of ad tech remained a net positive for the financing of journalism throughout the mid-2000s. A competitive ad tech marketplace for display advertising allowed many bloggers, such as Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo, as well as innumerable “mommy bloggers,” to earn at least a modest living from ad revenues. We saw a wave of new digital publications in this era, including the Daily Dish in 2000, Gawker in 2002, Pajamas Media in 2004, and the Huffington Post in 2005. Finally, many legacy publications, including the Washington Monthly, got a second wind by creating digital editions and their own blogs, selling display ads against this content on the ad tech exchanges. But soon, the growing monopoly power of Google and Facebook over advertising market changes destroyed all that. 

Let’s start with Google. In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. At the time, Google told Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that it would not combine the increasing amounts of personal data it was collecting through Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Mail with information gained from DoubleClick about which consumers visited which digital publications and viewed what ads. But Google went back on this promise and meanwhile purchased more ad tech software companies, acquiring an even greater share of the advertising market, including ads on mobile devices. Moreover, it collected even more personal data from newer products like Google-owned “smart home” devices and the Google-owned Android operating systems found in most of the world’s cell phones. 

All this gave Google an unprecedented advantage in the battle to attract advertising dollars. No newspapers or magazines, nor even the largest publishing, broadcasting, telco, or cable companies, can ever know as much about its own customers as Google does. Believing that Google’s unprecedented power of surveillance would allow them to boost sales with micro-targeted ads, advertisers fled from contracting with publications to contracting with Google. 

But Google wanted to push its advantage even further. In addition to acquiring DoubleClick, it rolled up ownership of other companies that control the servers most publishers use to list the ad space they want to sell, as well as the servers most advertisers use to list the ad space they want to buy. Google now controls the very exchanges where these ads are bought and sold and prices are set. Indeed, according to a recent study by the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Google now holds a dominant position—as high as 90 percent—in every layer of the ad tech market. 

One result of this roll-up is that advertisers can never know if they have paid a real, fair market price for their display ads. No one except Google can know, because all ad data is locked in black boxes that Google controls. This means that advertisers also have to commit substantial time and money to verifying where Google has actually placed their ads and how the ads are performing. That’s no small worry, since, as one study in 2017 found, more than half of all dollars spent on display advertising is spent for ads that were placed on fraudulent websites, or for ads that wound up being unviewable because of faulty servers. 

Google’s control of ad tech drives down publisher profits in other ways. Google doesn’t just literally own and control advertising markets; it also sells advertising space for its own properties on those markets. So, for example, while publishers are trying to sell ad space on Google-controlled ad tech markets, Google is competing against them on the same exchanges as it tries to unload ad space on properties it owns, like YouTube. Only Google knows whether an ad it places for a client on YouTube is more effective than an ad it places for a client on some third-party website. 

Google’s only peer in its powers of surveillance—and therefore the online advertising business—is Facebook, which tracks users across the various platforms it controls (including such giants as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Whats-App), as well as across the wider open web. Facebook’s business model is different than Google’s in that it only sells ad space on its own platforms. But its immense knowledge of users’ personal behaviors combined with a lot of predatory business practices have further shunted ad revenue away from newspapers and magazines. 

Now, Google and Facebook operate effectively as a duopoly in digital advertising. Precise market share data is hard to come by, but according to the recent CMA report, 80 percent of all expenditures on search-and-display advertising collected in the UK during 2019 went to just those two companies. As the CMA report also notes, Google and Facebook’s share of total digital advertising revenue is significantly greater than the share of time that internet users actually spend on their platforms, implying that they are charging monopoly prices for the eyeballs they actually deliver.  

This duopoly not only siphons off resources needed to sustain quality journalism, it also enables new frontiers in discrimination, as Google and Facebook gobble up petabytes of personal data and use it to let advertisers offer different deals to different people based on what their purloined personal data suggests is their ability and willingness to pay. It’s unclear exactly how effective this is for advertisers. But producers of mere journalism just can’t compete with the ill-gotten advantage. 

Adding to the imbalance of power is the fact that if publishers complain that Google is consuming the revenue they need to create content, they have to worry that Google will retaliate by making their content disappear in search results or erase it from other platforms Google controls. Similarly, publishers who dare to cross Mark Zuckerberg have to worry that Facebook will stop referring its users to their editorial content. Publishers depend on referrals from Google and Facebook for about 75 percent of their traffic.

While this duopoly has devastated digital media (and individual privacy), it may seem like a step up for advertisers, who can better reach their audiences. But as it turns out, this system has been bad for them, too. In a recent book entitled Subprime Attention Crisis, the former Google employee Tim Hwang makes the case that between fraud and overhype of Big Data, behavioral advertising delivers so little actual value to advertisers that it is akin to the overpriced mortgage-backed securities market that blew up in 2007 when investors at last realized that it was built on sand. If you find that you keep getting served ads for products you bought last week or last month, you might well see how this could be true. 

So we have a system that benefits nobody except Google and Facebook, and that is especially bad for journalists and democracy. The duopoly’s power over a free press comes from every angle. It’s now to the point that more and more media outlets can only stay in business by depending on handouts from third parties, like governments, foundations, and high-income individuals. And the largest source of this charity? Grants handed out by Google and Facebook’s marketing departments, which the corporations use to silence critics (see “Beggars and Choosers”). 

What can be done? This crisis does not result from iron laws of economics or technological progress but from failures of public policy in three broad areas. All three of these can be fixed. 

The first failure is weak antitrust enforcement. Though Google did pioneering work in search engines two decades ago, most of its market power today comes not from devising better products but from acquiring actual and emerging competitors across an ever-increasing swath of the economy. These include big household names like YouTube and Waze, but also all kinds of more obscure firms, like DoubleClick, that provide key technologies and control of market choke points. Similarly, Facebook’s power results largely from anti-competitive roll-ups, most notably of WhatsApp and Instagram. Together Facebook and Google bought more than 150 companies just between 2013 and 2018. 

Many, if not most, of these deals violate the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, which prohibits mergers that may lead to even “incipient” monopolies. Many of these deals also violate the Clayton Act’s prohibitions on mergers that concentrate corporate power across different layers in markets, as when Google makes acquisitions to become simultaneously a digital publisher, a digital advertising agency, a data broker, a mapping company, a private post office, and the owner of the ad market and communications infrastructure. Prosecutors can use these statutes to roll back Google’s power. 

They can also use the Sherman Antitrust Act to build cases wherever the platforms use exclusionary conduct to acquire or maintain monopoly power. No new legislation is needed to make these cases, though Congress may want to pass some statutes to clarify for activist conservative judges and timid regulators just what these long-standing antitrust laws actually mean. Fortunately, even key Congressional Republicans have recently agreed that we need stricter antitrust enforcement. And the Department of Justice, along with attorneys general from eleven Red States, have recently filed a major antitrust suit, based on the Sherman Act, that targets Google’s monopolization of search engine advertising.

We are not limited to antitrust actions, however. The next policy lever would entail transforming Google and Facebook into what they really should be: utilities. Web browsing and social media are, today, basic parts of how we connect and learn about the world, and there is a long tradition in American life of prohibiting owners of essential communications infrastructure from engaging in vertical integration, discrimination, and self-dealing. Imagine if we had allowed Bell Systems, the onetime telephone monopoly, to listen in on every conversation and to use the personal information it gleaned to allow corporations, politicians, and foreign governments to send “personalized” advertising messages and deals to different individuals. Imagine that by so doing it had monopolized the advertising industry and destroyed the business model for most of the free press. Imagine, finally, that Bell had also started using its wires to push out its own editorial content while other publishers had to rely on those same wires to get their products before the public. 

Of course, that didn’t happen. Even though AT&T sought in the 1970s to become an electronic publisher, Americans used utility regulation to knock it back every time it tried to be anything but a neutral information platform. Similar principles of “net neutrality” have long governed the way we regulate other networked industries, including railroads and, for a time during the Obama administration, the internet service providers who control the hardware on which the internet itself runs. By classifying Facebook and Google as utilities, we can make net neutrality apply to them as well. 

Among other virtues, this would remove the ongoing controversy over whether the owners of such digital platforms should be allowed to censor or discriminate against people they don’t like; they would not be allowed to play the role of censor, but nor would they be allowed to be in the business of publishing. Finally, applying traditional utility regulation to these platforms would mean that they would have to spin off any properties that put them in the position of competing against their own customers, such as data brokerage and advertising. Similar policies were recently recommended in a majority staff report by the House antitrust subcommittee after an 18-month investigation into abuses by Google, Facebook, and other digital platform monopolies. 

The final big policy lever should have broad appeal even for people who don’t care much about the future of journalism: new federal privacy laws that ban companies from buying and selling personal data. Johnny Ryan, a colleague of mine at the Open Markets Institute and a privacy advocate with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, describes privacy law as “Big Tech’s kryptonite.” A study he conducted found that Google’s ad tech infrastructure sends personal health data about individuals without their consent to 969 different companies engaged in behavioral advertising. Ryan and others are currently petitioning European data regulators to use the European Union’s privacy laws to crack down on Google’s ad tech business. If the U.S. similarly strengthened privacy laws and used them to prohibit the trading of personal data for advertising purposes, it would destroy the business model for surveillance capitalism that is enfeebling American journalism and with it our democracy. 

Enacting these reforms will, of course, involve titanic political struggles, but no more than was required to bust up the monopoly power of Standard Oil and other predatory trusts back in the Progressive Era. The largest challenge will be doing the necessary public education before Google and Facebook gain control of virtually the entire information environment. We must win this war, and we can, but we don’t have a lot of time to lose.

The post Starving the News appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism.Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

You may have heard that Big Tech has damaged journalism. Google and Facebook siphon off ad dollars needed to finance independent reporting while also inserting themselves as profit-maximizing middlemen between news organizations and news consumers. By now, many news organizations see no way forward except to depend on charitable donations from corporations and philanthropies. 

What you may not know, though, is that Google and Facebook are becoming the two largest sources of such donations to for-profit and nonprofit journalism in the United States. 

Prior to the conclusion of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Google and Facebook’s financial contributions to American media organizations were modest. This changed in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Facebook received deep public scrutiny over its role as a vector for foreign interference that had benefited Trump. As the “techlash” spread, Google also began facing heat for its anticompetitive practices, its misuse of user data, and its discriminatory search results. 

Soon after, big promises of financial support for journalism came from both Google and Facebook. By 2018, these two corporations were already among the largest funders of journalism in the world. Since then, they have gone on to promise a total of $700 million in funding for journalism, not counting other “undisclosed” funds and in-kind contributions. 

Just who is receiving exactly how much from Google and Facebook remains hard to establish, however. Both corporations distribute most of these funds through their marketing and public relations budgets rather than through charitable foundations, which makes the flow of money as much of a black box as any search or newsfeed algorithms. Even the flows to nonprofit media entities do not necessarily become public record, because since 2018 the Internal Revenue Service has no longer required nonprofits to disclose their donors. Investigative journalists who want to follow the money need to rely on intensive gumshoe reporting of the kind few publications can afford anymore, thanks in large measure to the predations of Google and Facebook. 

But at least in broad outline, much of the money flow can be established from other sources. In 2018, Google announced the Google News Initiative. Launched in New York, the GNI promised $300 million in support for journalism to be distributed across the globe over three years, although the emphasis appeared to be on local news in the United States. Facebook, meanwhile, pledged an undisclosed portion of a pot of $14 million to the City University of New York’s News Integrity Initiative in 2018 with the goal of fighting misinformation. In 2019, Facebook upped the ante with a $300 million pledge over three years, matching Google’s promised giving.

Facebook has provided a bit more detail about specific grants. In 2019, it gave 46 grants of between $5,000 and $25,000 to small, local news organizations through the Facebook Journalism Project, which were administered by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Of Facebook’s funding, only $36 million was specified, and went to recipients like the Pulitzer Center ($5 mil), the American Journalism Project ($1 mil), and Report for America ($2 mil), among others.

Facebook also gains influence over the press (while also scoring public relations points) by financing fact-checking initiatives. In 2019, Facebook’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program was the largest source of revenue for the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, making up roughly 43 percent of the members’ total revenue. According to the investigative journalist Judd Legum, most fact-checking organizations don’t disclose the amounts they are receiving from Facebook, but two that have are LeadStories, which received $359,000 in 2019, and FactCheck.org, which received $229,600. These are trivial amounts to Facebook, and they pay for only a trivial amount of fact-checking—especially when compared to the unmet need for correcting false and fake news created by Facebook itself. But they are comparatively large sums to many of the fact-checking organizations receiving the money. Google also finances fact-checking organizations (many of the same ones as Facebook), but is even vaguer than Facebook about the amount it gives and to whom.

Facebook and Google also provide ample funding to journalists’ professional associations. According to the Tech Transparency Project, a foundation-supported research group, Google gave the Center for Investigative Reporting 26 grants and Investigative Reporters and Editors 23 grants. The Society for Professional Journalists received $1 million between 2013 and 2017 to support the training of more than 21,000 journalists at over 550 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The Online News Association also reports receiving money from both Google and Facebook, though it does not disclose how much or where exactly it goes. Google and Facebook also sponsor internships, fellowships, and scholarships for journalists, while also underwriting major journalism convenings, including the International Journalism Festival, which meets each spring in Perugia, Italy. Dave Cohn, a former board member of the Online News Association, notes that the conference itself would likely not be able to exist without support from Google and Facebook.

Journalists routinely pounce on similar conflicts of interest when they occur in government or science or in virtually any other institution, and for good reason. When we need critical reporting about Big Tech more than ever, we should all be concerned that Facebook and Google are funding the news.  

The post How Facebook and Google Buy Off the Press appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

In 1968, a report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—better known as the Kerner Commission—excoriated the national press for its role in the racial unrest that rocked America in the summer of 1967. 

“The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world,” the commission wrote. “The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed.” Instead, the commission found, American coverage was rife with “the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.” 

Especially appalling, the commission found, was the dearth of Black journalists in U.S. newsrooms. Fewer than 5 percent of newsroom staff were Black; fewer than 1 percent were editors. “The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes,” the commission concluded. 

More than 50 years later, after another summer of protest and racial reckoning, too much of what the commission wrote is still true. While there’s no definitive data on the percentage of U.S. newsroom staff today who are Black, research suggests that it’s less than 8 percent—still far too low. Overall, newsrooms are only about half as diverse as the U.S. workforce as a whole. 

Controversies over insensitive and racist coverage have embroiled major legacy and digital outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Refinery29, and the Ringer. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, a story about the impacts of unrest on city infrastructure headlined “Buildings Matter Too” led to a staff walkout, a public apology, and the resignation of a top editor. At The New York Times, an op-ed by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for military intervention to quell protests led to another high-level editor’s ouster. Many of the paper’s own reporters took to Twitter to declare that the op-ed “puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

At the same time, energy and interest in a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive media has never been more intense. Nor has the need for it been greater. What has changed is who is leading the way. Champions of media diversity have stopped waiting for the establishment to fix itself. Instead, a new crop of reformers is staging its own insurgency, working outside traditional media and often in spite of it. “I don’t know that we can integrate fairly at this point,” Angela Ford, founder of the Black media start-up Obsidian Collection, says. “It’s time for the world to hear the Black voice from a Black filter.” 

The result is a small but already flourishing ecosystem of nonprofits, philanthropic efforts, and media start-ups led largely by people of color. New outlets are serving overlooked communities, experimenting with ways to engage audiences and giving journalists of color a platform for their voice. Media upstart PushBlack, for instance, covers topics like voting rights and criminal justice reform and Black history. Sahan Journal, launched in 2019 by a Somali American reporter, focuses exclusively on the concerns of Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities. Both of these outlets have the financial backing of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (REJ Fund), an ambitious project recently launched by the Ford Foundation and other partners to grow and sustain an emerging sector in equitable media. 

These outlets are critical sources of information for minority communities. But minorities are not the only audience. Billboard magazine, for instance, reported that the singer Mariah Carey urged all of her listeners to follow PushBlack. Sahan Journal won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a piece on drug overdoses among Minnesota’s East African community. “White audiences are seeing our content and learning,” says Tracie Powell, a former journalist and independent publisher who is now a program officer at Borealis Philanthropy, which works on racial justice in media. “They’re plugged into Black Twitter; they’re seeing content on Facebook and Instagram. They are being exposed and being educated.”

Emerging outlets like these, Powell told me, are not just powerful advocates for communities too long ignored by white-led press, but also catalysts for broader reform. Their goal is to challenge traditional media, to compete against it, and, ultimately, to transform an industry that has been far too reluctant to change. 

Journalists of color are justifiably frustrated by traditional media’s lackluster attempts at diversity. There have been umpteen minority fellowships, internships, and splashy awards created by big-city newsrooms. (I got my first clips via a minority high school journalism workshop sponsored by my hometown paper, The Kansas City Star.) But the pace of change has been glacial; diversity efforts have been inauthentic; and journalists of color must still contend with tokenism, stigma, and bias, as well as systemic barriers to entry and promotion. Paul Delaney, who cofounded the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2017 that when he started the NABJ, “we felt empowered, on a righteous mission to lead America in the right direction, to egg it on to finally live up to its promise and principles. We were so naively optimistic back then.”

Here’s one basic problem with the industry: We don’t actually know the share of journalists in U.S. newsrooms who are people of color. According to the News Leaders Association’s 2019 Diversity Survey, people of color make up 21.9 percent of the salaried newsroom workforce and 18.8 percent of newsroom managers. (The U.S. population, by contrast, is 40 percent minority.) However, just 23 percent of U.S. newsrooms participated in the survey, up from only 17 percent the year before. 

“As journalists, we put pressure on every industry there is to show us the numbers, give us the information,” Dorothy Tucker, the NABJ’s current president, told me. “Yet we won’t do it. It makes you question whether there is a problem with the numbers.”

Certainly, other white-collar professions face equal or greater problems with diversity. Just 10 percent of lawyers are Black or Hispanic, according to the American Bar Association. Big Tech is also notoriously monolithic. The press, however, has a particular obligation to the public because of its power to shape opinions and events. It has an obligation to employ a workforce that reflects the communities it purports to serve, which makes its failure to do so all the more galling. 

Why is it failing so badly? For aspiring journalists of color, perhaps the biggest obstacles are the lack of connections and capital. Minority journalists often have a harder time plugging into the clubby networks of (typically white, typically male) editors looking for talent. “The journos of color and women aren’t networking with white dudes doing the hiring because it isn’t in their DNA,” Shani Hilton, now deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote in a 2014 Medium piece. “Call it the Twice as Hard Half as Good Paradox: Many of us are so busy working twice as hard and hoping to get noticed that we don’t do the networking that seems like bullshit but is actually a key part of career advancement,” she wrote.

Many young people of color also can’t afford the luxury of an unpaid internship or the underpaid life of a freelancer, often prerequisites for scraping together enough bylines to land a full-time job. In a 2015 analysis for the Columbia Journalism Review, Alex Williams found that while 66 percent of white journalism graduates found jobs in print or broadcasting in 2013, the placement rate for minority graduates was only 49 percent. Part of the problem, Williams surmised, was that minority students were less likely to have worked for their campus newspapers or to have had unpaid internships. 

“If you’re Black or brown and you grew up in a low-income working-class community, you’re starting from behind compared to a middle-class white person who can rely on generational wealth while they pursue their passion career,” says Manny Ramos, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who described his own start in journalism as “extremely difficult.” “At one point, I had an internship at a local paper, I worked full-time, and I went to school full-time,” he told me. “I had no life and was barely sleeping. A lot of people can’t do that.”

For journalists of color who do make it through the door, the challenges continue. Minority journalists are often seen, not heard, their advice ignored. The result is another frustration: missed stories and unbalanced coverage that too often depends on stereotypes and assumptions—and leads to the kinds of controversies that beset big newsrooms over this past summer. 

Promotion and influence are the next big hurdles. Diversity efforts often end at the entry level, with little thought to retention and advancement. “They bring this person in and give them the ‘Black spot.’ Unfortunately, too often, they don’t do much more than that,” the NABJ’s Tucker said. This is one reason why upper management in media is even less diverse than the rank and file. For instance, just 8.2 percent of radio news directors are people of color, according to a 2019 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association. Just 5.5 percent of TV news directors are Black—down from 6.4 percent in 2018.

Sadly, things aren’t likely to get better. Many newsrooms, financially strapped even before the pandemic, now see diversity as an unaffordable luxury. The NABJ said that as many as half of its members surveyed have been furloughed or laid off. “If it was hard to get diversity, inclusion, and representation before, it’s that much harder now because people are getting laid off, the industry is shrinking, and there’s a panicked focus on profit,” says Jessica Clark, founder of the media strategy firm Dot Connector Studio and a consultant to the Ford Foundation. 

This bleak landscape in traditional media is why a growing number of journalists, social entrepreneurs, and philanthropists are embracing a different vision of diversity in media, and a different means to achieve it. They’re tired of fighting for a place at the table, and then fighting for the kind of coverage they’d like to see. For these reformers, diversity goes beyond the integration of big-city newsrooms. Rather, it’s about multiplying the number of voices so that disparate communities are better equipped with news and information relevant to them. Instead of writing about their communities for primarily white audiences, they’re writing for these communities as active members. 

“Let’s be honest,” Borealis Philanthropy’s Powell said. “We have been begging, pleading, crying, yelling at the top of our lungs for news organizations to reflect the communities they say they serve. And those organizations made it very, very clear that they are not serving the Black and brown people in their communities . . . At what point do you say, let’s stop? At what point do you try something different?” 

Among the journalists who broke from the establishment to blaze their own trail is Sahan Journal founder Mukhtar Ibrahim, whose editors at Minnesota Public Radio and the Minneapolis Star Tribune discouraged him from pursuing stories about the area’s immigrants. “I worked hard to open pathways to communities that were invisible to mainstream reporters,” he wrote in The Investigative Reporters and Editors Journal. “I realized, however, that editors and reporters were not committed to forging new relationships with these communities.” Ibrahim launched Sahan Journal in August 2019. 

The journal is part of a larger boom in nonprofit publishing, much of it driven by journalists and social entrepreneurs who put diversity, equity, and inclusion at the heart of their mission. The Institute for Nonprofit News reports that its membership is approaching 300, double what it was three years ago. Many of these new outlets are aimed at serving diverse populations, which is why the universe of nonprofit news is decidedly more inclusive than traditional, for-profit media. According to the INN’s 2020 Diversity Index, roughly one in three nonprofit news employees is a person of color, as is one in five executives. “These younger organizations are diverse from the get-go,” the INN’s executive director, Sue Cross, told me. 

These outlets’ strategies are also as diverse as their staffs. PushBlack, which reaches nine million readers exclusively through text messages and social media, runs campaigns on voter education and criminal justice reform in addition to its stories on Black news and history. MLK50 is a Tennessee-based investigative news organization founded in 2017 by the veteran reporter Wendi Thomas. In 2019, Thomas partnered with ProPublica on a series that led to the forgiveness of $11.9 million in hospital debts owed by low-income patients of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis. 

Nonprofits are also still working to desegregate traditional newsrooms. The NABJ, for instance, hopes to turn up the pressure on pipelines for retention and promotion so that more journalists of color populate the ranks of top management, as well as the highest echelons of investigative and political reporters. At the entry level, Report for America trains and places emerging journalists in local newsrooms to cover underreported issues and communities. This year, it placed 226 reporters in 47 states, in a variety of outlets ranging from big-city newsrooms to digital-only start-ups. The organization also pays half of reporters’ salaries, enabling outlets to get coverage they otherwise couldn’t afford. “I like to think that I’m good enough to get hired,” says Obed Manuel, a Report for America corps member placed with The Dallas Morning News. “But I do believe that without the funding, I’m not sure the newspaper was looking to bring in another Hispanic issues reporter.” Manuel has since been hired full-time. 

The emerging diversity ecosystem also has its share of for-profit outlets experimenting with new models for generating revenue. The Chicago-based Obsidian Collection, for instance, aims to launch a stock photo service composed exclusively of images licensed from Black legacy newspapers and photographers. The founder, Angela Ford, is currently working to digitize nine million images from the archives of Black newspapers across the country, including such storied outlets as her hometown’s Chicago Defender. She’s also working on a separate portal for Black photojournalists to upload and sell their work. “When we protest, when we celebrate, we want those images through the eyes of Black photo-journalists available to Black media,” she said. “This gives photojournalists a revenue stream and the Black media access to images in a timely manner they can afford.” 

Despite the flurry of innovation, however, many new outlets are still financially fragile. A Borealis survey of 114 outlets led by and for people of color found that nearly four in five organizations have staffs of five or fewer and that one-third have experienced layoffs. Just 39 percent of outlets reported revenues of more than $100,000 (though one-fifth also declined to answer). 

To preserve the progress made so far, the Ford Foundation, along with the Democracy Fund, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and other partners, launched the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund in September 2019 with $6.1 million in initial commitments. Administered by Borealis, the fund distributed $2.3 million to 16 outlets in April 2020 led by and serving communities of color. It hopes to grow to $30 million over the next three years, according to cofounder Farai Chideya, a program officer at the Ford Foundation. The grantees include PushBlack, Sahan Journal, and MLK50; Black legacy outlets such as The New York Amsterdam News and The Atlanta Voice; organizations such as Buffalo’s Fire, which serves tribal communities in the Northern Great Plains; La Noticia, a Spanish-language outlet based in North Carolina; and WURD Radio, Pennsylvania’s only Black-owned commercial talk radio station. Many of these are helping keep local news alive in places where regional newspapers have collapsed.

One purpose of the REJ Fund is to help fix an imbalance in philanthropic funding for media initiatives led by people of color. According to a report by Chideya for the Ford Foundation, media outlets serving diverse communities received just 8 percent of journalism philanthropy funding granted between 2013 and 2017. 

Given how much has already been achieved by outlets operating on a shoestring, the potential impact at scale could be transformative. “What I believe in this moment is that the field is being remade,” said the INN’s Sue Cross. “It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t dissipate.”

Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded its report with a call to action, urging that “the painful process of readjustment that is required of the American news media must begin now.” What’s demanded, the commission continued, is “fair and courageous journalism—commitment and coverage that are worthy of one of the crucial domestic stories in America’s history.” Traditional media outlets have so far failed to live up to that charge, but the new wave of media reformers—led by and for people of color—could be the ones who make a truly equitable media a reality.

The post Reporters of Color Are Declaring Independence appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

The Daily is perhaps the most successful news product at the country’s most successful newspaper. Each weekday morning, a new episode of the New York Times podcast appears on millions of phones. Host Michael Barbaro, a former Times politics reporter, might talk one day to the White House correspondent Maggie Haberman about the latest Trump palace intrigue, and the next to a reporter in the Moscow bureau about unrest in Belarus. The show is a wildly successful experiment that attracts a much larger audience than the front page of the print newspaper each day and brings in major ad revenue from the likes of BMW, Chanel, and Fidelity Insurance. At a time when the financial viability of the news industry is very much in doubt, The Daily is an encouraging counterexample. 

The Times is at the forefront of a broader podcasting boom. Ad revenue for podcasts increased by nearly 50 percent last year, according to an estimate from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and is projected to top $800 million this year. Regional newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Texas Tribune, and the Des Moines Register have gotten into podcasting, as have many online magazines and public radio stations. Slate now makes about half of its revenue from its podcasts. Vox Media expanded from a handful of shows in 2017 to more than 200 shows in 2020. Revenue from podcasting is expected to double this year. “We went from it being a hobby, to a strategy, to a big pillar of the company,” says Marty Moe, president of Vox Media Studios.

Podcasting is also a sector where it’s relatively easy for new and independent voices to break in. The former radio reporter Amy Westervelt founded her own network, Critical Frequency, in 2017. Just two years later, it won AdWeek’s annual award for best podcast network of the year. Podcasting also provides space for in-depth reporting, something that has become increasingly difficult to fund in other media. Long investigative reports on technical subjects can be turned into explanatory miniseries, as BuzzFeed did in September with an exposé on big banks’ role in financing terror and drug operations. Challenging topics, like school segregation, can be excavated through compelling storytelling, as with Nice White Parents, a New York Times podcast tracing the history of one Brooklyn school. “The space for high-quality content, and quality journalism, has been contracting for economic reasons for many years now,” says Jacob Weisberg, CEO of Pushkin Industries, a podcast production company he started after years as the editor in chief of the Slate Group. “I see podcasts very much as a place to enlarge that space.” 

But podcasting’s bright future is under increasing threat. The medium stands in danger of being rolled up by monopolistic tech platforms that could come to own and control the marketplace itself. With that power, they could suck away much of the value created by talented podcasters, just as Amazon stole away the income of even many best-selling authors after it came to own and control most of the digital infrastructure on which e-books are sold. 

The most immediate incursion from Big Tech is Spotify, the music-streaming giant, which has already made aggressive moves to install itself as the new podcast gatekeeper. It has acquired several production companies and cut exclusive deals with top podcasters, like Joe Rogan, requiring that they remove their shows from all other platforms. But behind Spotify loom even more powerful actors. Its forays appear to have piqued the attention of Amazon and Google, and possibly even Apple, which has long functioned as a passive, benevolent monopolist over podcast distribution.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with market platforms. The trouble arises when marketplaces come under the control of monopolists who are accustomed to running platforms to their own advantage, at the expense of everyone else who relies on them. The recent House antitrust subcommittee report on tech monopolies illustrates what this can look like. The investigation found evidence that Amazon exploits the data it gathers on third-party sellers who use its online market to undercut those very merchants; that Google put a thumb on the scale to feature its own products, like Chrome and Google Shopping, over competitors even when its engineers knew those offerings wouldn’t naturally rise to the top of a Google search; and that Apple uses its control over the iPhone app market to unfairly tax, bully, and play favorites with third-party app developers.

These monopolistic tendencies have already wreaked havoc on other creative industries, forcing onerous terms on musicians, app developers, and book authors, as well as stealing revenue from newspapers and magazines. The same fate could befall podcasting, to the detriment of journalists and, by extension, democracy. But it isn’t too late. As the House report makes clear, the government waited until the damage was already done to start investigating the anticompetitive practices of tech monopolies. Podcasting offers policy makers a chance to atone for their sins—by using public policy to keep podcasting from being devoured before it’s too late.

Steve Jobs introduced the wider world to podcasts at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2005. (The term is a mashup of iPod and broadcast.) Slate was one of the earliest media companies to experiment with it. They started by simply reading articles into a microphone. They tried something they called “voicemail blogs.” “It was very much about figuring out a new medium,” Weisberg, the former Slate executive, told me. “There wasn’t a clear revenue model, but the people who were making them at Slate loved making them, and the audience loved them, so they kept expanding.”

Thankfully, it was relatively easy for Slate, and other podcasters, to get their product out. Podcasts relied on “Really Simple Syndication,” or RSS feeds, a standardized, open web format for pushing out updates to any website. The format made it easy for listeners to subscribe to podcasts and automatically get new episodes, using any number of apps set up to receive RSS feeds. For the most part, however, people didn’t listen on any number of apps. They listened on iTunes, and, later, Apple’s podcasting app, which was preinstalled on iPhones. Apple let podcast hosts put their shows on the app for free. By default, Apple became something like a benevolent old-fashioned bookstore owner, not charging anyone for product placement, demanding onerous terms of services, or competing against independent authors with its own products. Weisberg describes the company’s hands-off approach as “a real gift” to the podcasting world. 

It took time, but thanks to its widespread accessibility—and a few blockbuster shows, most notably the 2014 sensation Serial—podcasting took off. In 2015, less than half of Americans were familiar with podcasts, and only 17 percent listened monthly, according to a survey from Edison Research. By early 2020, three-quarters of Americans were familiar with podcasts, 37 percent listened monthly, and 25 percent had listened to one in the last week. Most impressive is the amount of time listeners spent. Out of those who listened in the last week, the average time spent listening to podcasts is more than six and a half hours per week.

All that ear time has opened up enormous opportunities for ads. Businesses have capitalized. Podcast listeners hear their favorite hosts shill for products for a few minutes each episode: a subscription toothbrush service, stamps you can print out at home, software for getting an email newsletter started. Ads delivered by hosts are the primary way many successful podcasts bring in money. Done well, they don’t feel all that intrusive—it’s just more stuff from the person you chose to listen to. “Hosts are able to leverage the personal connection that they have with the audience,” says Dan Check, CEO of Slate, which makes the listener more receptive and the ad more effective. 

So effective, in fact, that companies are willing to pay more per 1,000 listeners (the “cost per mille,” or CPM in industry argot) for an ad on a top podcast than the going rate for a Super Bowl ad in recent years. While the advertising industry has been rocked by tighter budgets during COVID-19, brands are projected to increase their spending on podcast ads in this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s data. 

For the most part, that money has been going to podcasters themselves. Advertisers make deals with podcasters directly or go through one of several podcast ad firms that match brands to shows. Lots of podcasts bring in additional revenue by putting out extended episodes on Patreon, or letting subscribers pay for an ad-free feed. This has all grown without giant tech companies consolidating the market and taking huge cuts of the revenue. 

But that’s starting to change.

To understand what could happen to the podcasting industry, it helps to understand what happened to early Hollywood. 

In the 1940s, a handful of studios controlled nearly every part of the moviemaking process, from the theaters in which the films were shown to the actors, who had to sign exclusive deals with one studio. Under studio contracts, actors’ lives were minutely controlled. Actresses were prevented from getting married or having children, for example, if it conflicted with their image as a sex symbol. 

The Supreme Court put this setup to an end. In a landmark 1948 decision, United States v. Paramount Pictures, the Court ruled that Hollywood movie studios could no longer also own movie theaters, because that put them in the position of favoring their own films over those of independent moviemakers. The decision ultimately meant that actors, screenwriters, directors, and other creative talent could sell their services across a much broader open market and were no longer effectively indentured to one of the era’s studios. It also meant the viewing public had a much broader choice of films showing at their local theater. 

But now, Spotify looks like it’s trying to become today’s version of pre-1948 Paramount.

The first clue came in 2018, when Spotify struck a deal with the actress and comedian Amy Schumer to create an original podcast for the platform, and then netted an exclusive deal with the rapper and podcaster Joe Budden. The exclusive deal was a major change in the terms of the game. Traditionally, all podcasts had been free to listen to, with some ads, on all podcast platforms. But for the duration of his contract, Budden, who had established his popular hip-hop culture podcast across several platforms, would be forbidden from airing his show on any other podcasting platform.

A spate of exclusive deals followed. Spotify made agreements with Vice News, Kim Kardashian West, and Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. Perhaps most notably, the company netted Joe Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters in the country. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is paying him more than $100 million to bring his show to Spotify, and to remove it from all other platforms by the end of 2020. 

The second sign of vertical integration came in February 2019, when Spotify acquired two podcast companies: Gimlet Media, a premier company behind the popular shows Reply All and Homecoming, and Anchor, a software company with tools for people to make their own podcasts. “Gimlet and Anchor will position us to become the leading platform for podcast creators around the world and the leading producer of podcasts,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote after the deals closed. “These acquisitions will meaningfully accelerate our path to becoming the world’s leading audio platform.” The company then went on to acquire Parcast, a podcast production company focused on making true crime podcasts, and the Ringer, a popular sports website and podcast network, home to Bill Simmons’s titular podcast. 

This means that Spotify is no longer just a platform for listeners to find podcasts and for podcasters to find an audience. It’s also a podcast production company that competes for listeners against the other podcasts on its own platform—like the old movie studios that owned the theaters that rival movie producers depended on. This seriously disadvantages independent podcast production companies, like Amy Westervelt’s Critical Frequency, which must compete with Spotify-backed productions that can command far greater resources and potentially get insider perks, like additional promotion on the platform or more detailed audience data than is available to other content creators. Similarly, Anchor’s tools could be integrated directly into Spotify’s app—a massive advantage other podcast tool companies can’t match. (The platform has already tested an in-app “create podcast” button that took users to Anchor’s tools.) 

As a platform, Spotify also has at least two major advantages when cutting deals with advertisers, which could threaten the setup that has so far worked pretty well for podcast hosts. First, it could, in the future, offer brands a larger audience for their ads than any other podcasting firm alone could deliver, with the option to, say, advertise across their thousands of sports shows. This might draw advertisers away from other podcasting firms. Spotify is already netting far bigger customers than individual podcasters typically could. Omnicom, a large digital marketing agency, has signed up to buy $20 million worth of podcasting ads on Spotify. 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it has changed up podcast delivery technology in a way that will give its ads an edge. Traditionally, the RSS format made podcasting more resistant to surveillance-based micro-targeted ads—you can’t do much spying on someone when they’re listening to a downloaded file, and that was the information podcasters had to work with. But as a mobile app Spotify has a lot more granular information to offer advertisers—like precise location, the time when users are listening, and even whether someone’s phone is in their hand or in their pocket. Streaming also allows the company to dynamically insert ads into podcasts as they are playing, something that most podcast firms, which have to pre-bake ads into podcasts to comport with RSS-based platforms, cannot do. Finally, as a platform, Spotify can also bring to bear user data, like the demographic information people input to set up an account, or the preferences and habits revealed by their music listening, that podcast firms generally don’t have access to. 

These enhanced advertising capabilities are a major part of Spotify’s sales pitch. In January 2020, the company announced its new “Streaming Ad Insertion” technology, which will take information about listeners, like their age, gender, location, and type of device, and use it to target ads at them, inserted in real time as they stream their podcast. In June, the Verge reported that Spotify has made this technology available for 100 Spotify shows. It’s still early days; the company has hinted that it will expand the technology’s use further.

Spotify’s more sophisticated ad targeting abilities, and its power to program ad placement within podcasts, mirror the trend that eroded the business model for print journalism. Print publications used to be important gateways to specific audiences—Runner’s World, for example, was a place Nike knew it could reach potential buyers. That remained true in the early days of the internet, when advertisers bought banner space directly from publishers. But the rise of micro-targeting over the past decade allowed brands to aim their ads to a certain audience no matter what website or app they’re looking at. Runner’s World, in other words, is no longer the most important gateway to Nike’s audience. 

Instead, the gateway became the two companies that provide the most detailed data on individuals. The first is Google, which tracks users across its sprawling empire of map, email, search, video (YouTube), and other properties. The second is Facebook, whose monopoly over social networking gives it an unrivaled trove of granular and intimate data about its users. The two companies’ data advantage, built up largely through acquisitions of competitors, has allowed them to dominate the business of digital advertising and to redirect to themselves the ad money that once funded media outlets. Google now controls 90 percent of the market for publisher-side ad servers, and takes an estimated 40 percent cut of ad sales that use its services, according to an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Market Authority. The two companies combined took in 88 percent of the growth in digital advertising dollars between 2018 and 2019. (See Phillip Longman’s “Starving the News“) 

Targeted advertising could do the same to podcasts. Some in the podcasting business are already worried that it will. “Let’s look at the web, the best and most recent example of a mass-market, highly diverse, mature, fully analytics-capable medium,” Marco Arment, creator of the popular podcasting app Overcast, remarked in a Columbia Journalism Review article after hearing about new podcasting ad tracking software. “How did that turn out for all sides involved? Is web publishing a healthy business while minimizing consumer/privacy abuse?” It was, of course, a rhetorical question.

Spotify may have gotten an early start on taking over the podcast market, but it’s facing competition from some fearsome rivals.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon Music was branching into podcast distribution, letting podcasters add their feeds to the platform, and has plans to put out exclusive podcasts of its own, including one with DJ Khaled. It is also fashioning Audible, its audiobook platform, into a podcast network, with dozens of original, exclusive shows that exist behind a $7.95 monthly paywall. 

Amazon has advantages Spotify doesn’t. Its Echo speaker leads the smart-speaker market. Anytime someone asks Alexa to play a podcast, it automatically plays from Amazon Music (if it’s available there). The company could parlay its dominance of smart speakers into gatekeeping power in podcasting. The opportunities for synergy—or, perhaps, for self-dealing—are immense. Someone listening to a podcast via Amazon Music on their Echo device could hear an ad for a product made by Amazon and sold on Amazon. With a few words to Alexa, they could buy it. In that interaction, Amazon would have created the podcast, the platform the podcast is played on, the software that summons the podcast, the hardware the podcast is played on, the product advertised, and the market on which the product is sold. 

Google has also begun expanding into the podcast market. When you search for a podcast on Google, several small panels embedded high up in the search results direct you to episodes on Google Podcasts. That product has less than 2  percent of the market, according to figures from the podcast hosting platform Libsyn. (Solid market share figures are hard to come by, but Libsyn publishes the share of downloads each platform gets, across all listeners to the thousands of podcasts it hosts.) And yet Google’s search engine often features it above more popular apps, like Spotify and Stitcher. Google has several other levers it could pull to expand its app’s reach. Google’s Android operating system runs on roughly 45 percent of phones in the United States. Google runs the app store those phones use, Google Play, and has its own line of smart speakers, Google Home. The company is adept at using these platforms to create what the House antitrust report called “interlocking monopolies,” using dominance in sector A to give its own products an advantage in sector B. Ultimately, Google’s biggest advantage lies in its data. As podcast advertising shifts to a real-time micro-targeting model, personal data will be the coin of the realm, and no company in the world knows as much about as many individuals as Google. 

Don’t forget Apple, which commands more than 60 percent of U.S. podcast listeners, according to Libsyn’s figures. Apple’s success has less to do with beating its competition in design and user experience and more to do with the fact that it comes pre-installed on all iPhones, a level of convenience that Spotify and other podcast apps can’t compete with. The open question is whether the company will do much with its power. Apple has built its brand in part around privacy, so it may not get into the invasive business of advertising. But between hiring Jake Shapiro, the founder of a premier podcast distribution nonprofit, to lead creative partnerships at Apple Podcasts, and its recent acquisition of Scout FM, a company that algorithmically curates custom podcast playlists, there are signals that Apple may finally be stepping up its efforts. Like Google, it could turn any number of dials to promote its own podcast platform through superior integration with Siri, or better compatibility with Apple’s own iPhones or iOS operating system. Its competitors rely on Apple’s app store for distribution, and Apple could make any number of decisions on that platform that hurt its competition. Through its own software—from Safari to the Health app—Apple can gather substantial personal information for advertisers. If Apple vertically integrates and gets into podcast production and advertising, as Spotify has, it would be extremely well positioned to monopolize the podcasting industry. 

So what happens next?

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Spotify becomes a dominant podcast creator, advertiser, and distributor. Once people are used to finding their favorite podcasts in one place, they’re unlikely to wander. If Spotify can provide the largest audience for advertisers, and a system for granular micro-targeting based on the data it collects on those listeners, it could win a critical and self-reinforcing chunk of the podcasting pie. 

Or perhaps Amazon, Google, or Apple will surge from behind, buying or crushing Spotify en route to dominating the industry. 

Finally, we could also end up in a world where Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Apple all make aggressive efforts to own the podcasting space, and we end up with a few ginormous podcast creator-advertiser-distributor companies. That might be better than a single monopolist taking everything over—but probably not much. Right now the industry is mostly vertically separated. Some companies make podcasts, others do advertising, and still others run platforms—and there’s competition within each level. A four-way Big Tech podcasting oligopoly, however, would be more like the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s. In that world, “if you want to produce a podcast, you’re going to get to pick between one of four bosses, as opposed to being able to be your own boss and sell into an open market,” says Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert at the American Economic Liberties Project. (Stoller was one of the first to write about market consolidation in podcasting, and how it could harm the industry.) This could drive down revenue for content creators—and the publications that depend on them. Having four companies control the pipeline of audio content could also make it harder for new and independent creators to find an audience.

It’s possible that these fears will prove to be overblown. Many observers are optimistic that there will always be a route for independent podcasts, or podcasts made by small companies, to succeed. Jacob Weisberg of Pushkin and Dan Check of Slate, for example, think the fact that listeners don’t seem to mind ads read by hosts means that advertisers will continue to pay high prices to content creators, even if it means their products aren’t micro-targeted. Others hope that indie podcasters will be able bring in enough money through subscriptions, or extra paid content on Patreon, to sustain themselves if platform companies take over ad sales. At least some podcasters seemed to have learned the right lesson from the decline of digital publishing: Make your money from several different sources. 

But as the history of digital advertising shows, the worst can happen. That means policy makers must be proactive to help keep the podcast market healthy. 

Fortunately, there are clear ways for the government to step in. The FTC, and other regulators, could take the stance that platforms, once they provide an essential infrastructure, must stick to being platforms—they can’t branch out into advertising or podcast creation, where they might have an unfair advantage. Regulators could also create rules to ensure that podcast creators don’t have to take bad deals in order to gain access to distribution platforms. In the past, the federal government created such rules for media. In the 1970s, for example, the Federal Communications Commission issued rules preventing the big three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, from sucking profits away from independent TV producers.  

Those rules were eventually relaxed, as antitrust enforcement generally fell apart. The past couple of years, however, have seen the beginnings of an antitrust renaissance. As Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have crept into every corner of our lives, advocates and policy makers have rediscovered competition policy as an important bulwark against corporate monopolies. The Department of Justice, the FTC, dozens of state attorneys general, and European Union regulators each have had investigations into one or more of these companies in 2020. On October 6, the House subcommittee released a report finding that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook used their platforms to gain an upper hand in new markets. The Democrats on the committee, who authored the report, gave Congress concrete recommendations, including a ban on letting certain dominant platforms compete in adjacent lines of business. 

But the point of antitrust law is not only to reel in monopolies once they’ve crushed their competitors and taken over industries. It’s also to prevent harmful consolidation from happening in the first place. Policy makers should apply the thinking from their report to the podcasting industry before the situation becomes worse. They should enforce structural separation within the industry, so the platforms that provide essential infrastructure can’t branch out into content creation or advertising within podcasts. 

They must do this now. Podcasts are one of the few promising ways for media outlets to reach new audiences, develop new journalistic formats, and bring in new revenue for valuable reporting that is otherwise underfunded and underappreciated. But the drumbeat of platform monopolization is getting louder. Regulators need to listen up.

The post Big Tech Comes for Podcasts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

Dominic Moore-Dunson never expected to own a journalism outlet.

Moore-Dunson, a dancer and choreographer living in Akron, Ohio, doesn’t exactly have the background of a newspaper baron. So it was a surprise when Chris Horne, publisher of the local arts and culture magazine The Devil Strip, texted to ask if he had time to meet up and talk about a new business model.

While Moore-Dunson has lived in Akron since he was five years old, he only met Horne recently—they took part in the same national arts fellowship program, one year apart. “He knew I was someone with a passion for the intersection of arts and culture, community, and entrepreneurship,” Moore-Dunson told me recently. “I was just a friend who was interested in what he was doing. So I said sure, I’ll entertain a conversation.”

Horne, along with the Devil Strip editor in chief, Rosalie Murphy, and its director of membership, Jessica Goldbourn, sat down with Moore-Dunson at the Mustard Seed, a local café attached to an organic grocery store. There they pitched him on joining the publication’s first board of directors and becoming one of its first co-owners—a distinction he would share, they explained, with anyone in Akron willing to pay at least $1 a month.

“Hearing them describe what they were after—I felt in that moment like they were trying to make sure people are at the center of what The Devil Strip is,” he said. “And the reality is that if people are at the center, they will make sure whatever you’re doing is sustainable and stays alive because they love it and they’re a part of it.”

 The Devil Strip—named after Akron’s unique term for the stretch of grass between the sidewalk and the road—is now owned by Moore-Dunson and more than 600 others living in and around Akron, including the employees who work for it. The publication’s community-minded model means that readers can find coverage of local elections and COVID-19 resources alongside the local music reviews and restaurant openings that are most arts and culture publications’ bread and butter.

It’s a model that was partly inspired by a trend of co-op microbreweries that started cropping up around the U.S. in the 2000s, allowing drinkers to own shares and even help decide which beers make it to market. “I like the parallels between craft beer and the thoughtful craft news that we’re trying to do,” Horne said. “It’s directly responsive to the wants and needs of our community.”

The Devil Strip was founded in 2014 but became a multi-stakeholder co-op a year ago after struggling to make ends meet on advertising revenue alone. It works like this: Anyone with an Ohio address can buy a share of the company, entitling them to vote for the magazine’s board of directors, which is made up of co-owners like them. Employees and contributors can also become owners, and one seat on the board is reserved for someone who works at the magazine. There’s no paywall, but community co-owners will eventually see perks like live events, meet-ups, and access to staff that can shape how Akron is covered.

Community ownership has intrinsic value beyond voting for a board or pitching stories to editors. “The thing about co-ownership as a Black person is that saying the words ‘Black person’ and ‘ownership’ in the same sentence is a big deal, always,” Moore-Dunson said. “The history of our country is such that ownership is not something we gain often. It’s something that’s taken away from us.”

He estimated that nearly half of the current board of The Devil Strip is Black, which has already made a difference in the way different parts of Akron are covered. The city is 30 percent Black, and the magazine has made a point to find stories and contributors in neighborhoods that don’t often get coverage.

Horne thinks The Devil Strip can grow to having 1,000 co-owners by the end of the year. He said it would take between 2,500 and 3,000 co-owners to make the magazine—which employs 12 staff members, nine of them full-time—fully sustainable without a need for any other revenue. With advertising and journalism grants included, they’re as financially secure as a community news organization could hope to be during a pandemic.

The magazine’s business model may be the first of its kind in the United States, but co-ops aren’t a new concept. Farmer-owned dairy co-ops have been around for more than a century, and electrical co-ops have powered much of the country stretching back to the New Deal. Food co-ops have outgrown their hippie image, and credit unions are a widespread and viable alternative to big banks.

While people tend to think of journalism as a civic necessity, it’s just as susceptible to corporate ransacking as any of those other industries. As classifieds went digital and tech monopolies like Google and Facebook gobbled up advertising and readership, America’s local newspapers closed and consolidated. A University of North Carolina study found that the U.S. has lost more than 2,100 newspapers in the past 15 years, leaving 200 counties without local coverage. Of the daily papers still around, more than half could be owned by financial institutions like hedge funds and private equity firms by next year. These firms tend to follow a playbook of drastically laying off staff and scaling back coverage in order to reap short-term profits, leaving behind a paper that’s a ghost of its former self.

Co-ops can offer a space free of corporate ownership while providing sustainable services that philanthropies cannot. That’s why journalists at The Devil Strip are well aware that they are part of a tiny but growing national experiment in cooperative ownership of local journalism. What if the country’s vast local news deserts were filled by newspapers—sustainable, salary-paying newspapers—owned not by hedge funds or distant philanthropists but by readers and reporters themselves? What if those newspapers could provide even better coverage than the ones they replaced?

With its redwood forests, coastal cliffs, vineyards, and storied history of marijuana farming, Mendocino County, California, doesn’t share much with Akron. It’s 63 times larger, but with less than half the population. But the two will soon have at least one thing in common—cooperative local news coverage.

Mendocino County is covered by multiple newspapers that have roots dating back to the 19th century. By the 21st century, however, most of those local papers were shrinking thanks to decisions made by their new owner, Alden Global Capital. Kate Maxwell and Adrian Fernandez Baumann were reporters at one of those papers, and the consolidations and cuts inspired them to start a new publication with a different business model.

“We met at a paper that was being decimated by a hedge fund,” Maxwell, now the publisher of the Mendocino Voice, an online newspaper, told me. She and Baumann, now the editor in chief, founded the Voice in 2016 and soon decided it should become a multi-stakeholder co-op. While it was easier and quicker to launch as a company funded by memberships, they’re deep in the (multiyear) process of turning those members into co-owners and developing the rules for employee ownership as well. 

The new model has shaped their coverage of Mendocino’s biggest story this year—the largest fire in California history, literally burning in their readers’ backyards. “There are people that live close enough that their eyewitness vantage point and photographs have really strengthened our reporting and informed how we approach fact-checking things on the ground and being open to what people’s questions are,” Maxwell said. “There’s a discrepancy between calling the public information officer who may be someplace an hour away and hearing what people are seeing close by.”

Baumann said their desire to report for people rather than about people is why the transition to a co-op makes sense. He pointed to 2018, when the Voice was covering the previous largest fire in California history. That one was started when a rancher drove a metal stake into the ground to plug a wasp nest. The stake sparked when he hammered it, igniting dry grass nearby and leading to a massive blaze that ended up burning more than 400,000 acres.

“From the get-go I knew that I could have found that guy and done an interview with him,” Baumann said. “But we never pursued it. Some people in the area knew who it was, and people were already making death threats against him.”

A year later, the state’s fire agency released the results of their investigation into the fire’s cause. It kept the man responsible anonymous—he was found to have done nothing wrong—but then The New York Times looked into the matter, naming and interviewing him for a front-page story. 

“It’s extracting anecdotes and stories from communities without asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” Baumann said. “It might have damaged the community. But it would have gotten us a lot of clicks.”

Baumann and Maxwell see community ownership as a way to entrench those values in the way the Voice is run. Their past newspaper jobs in the county serve as warnings about what can go wrong when the owners are distant from their readers and employees. 

Before marijuana was legalized in California, it was the primary economy in Mendocino County. Cannabis was cultivated in huge amounts, and thousands of people from around the world would flock to the region every year for pot tourism. But due to the underground nature of marijuana farming, the traditional papers would only cover it as crime rather than as a massive local industry. “What you read in the newspaper was a willful distortion of what was actually happening in the community,” Baumann said. “There were all these obfuscations that would take place. It was this open secret that nobody in the press could talk about.”

Like at The Devil Strip, employee ownership is also an important part of the Voice’s co-op model. Employees will be able to vote on the editor in chief, and community co-owners will be able to fill a public editor role. “It’s something that we think really embodies our mission as a local news organization,” said Maxwell, “but also is an important economic model that we think is valuable for local news and could be valuable in other parts of the country.”

The Colorado Sun is another employee-owned online publication considering transitioning into a multi-stakeholder co-op. Like Maxwell and Baumann, Sun editor Larry Ryckman and the rest of the founders were working at a newspaper owned by Alden Global Capital—in this case The Denver Post, which had cut its staff from more than 300 journalists a decade ago to about 100 by 2018. Told to lay off another third of the newsroom, Ryckman and nine of his colleagues quit instead to found an outlet they could own themselves. “We decided to go that way because no one is trying to make a gazillion dollars,” Ryckman said. “We wanted to be equal partners in this.”

Like the other co-ops, the Sun doesn’t have a paywall but allows readers to buy memberships that give them access to premium newsletters and a preview of an opinion column for the next day. And while no one’s making a gazillion dollars, no one earns less than they did while they were still at the Post. They got off the ground with a grant from the former media start-up Civil, but now have nearly 12,000 paying members. Ryckman expects the Sun to be sustainable by the end of the year.

They’ve now hired three additional staff, two in the newsroom and one on the business side. New hires don’t automatically get ownership stakes, but Ryckman envisions reporters being able to work their way there, like making partner at a law firm. “We would like all of our journalists to be owners of the Colorado Sun at some point,” he said. “We very much want to remain masters of our own destiny.”

The Sun helped inspire perhaps the most high-profile employee-owned company in media right now—Defector, made up of staff who resigned in protest from the sports site Deadspin after rebelling against its private equity owners over, among other things, a directive to stop covering political and cultural topics that were only tangentially related to sports.

“It’s a little bit scary to own it ourselves, because if something goes wrong there’s no one to blame but ourselves,” Defector columnist Drew Magary told me. “But we were hoping to continue to do our jobs so that some faceless, nameless dipshit upstairs can’t suddenly disapprove of what we’re doing.”

Before launching Defector, the team looked into crowdfunding options like Patreon and Substack, but they were hesitant to commit to a tech platform that was outside their control. Any writers who lived through the boom and bust of Facebook traffic should be wary of putting all their eggs into one tech company’s basket, even if they co-own those eggs. They settled on a membership model like the Sun’s, with subscribers able to comment, receive newsletters, and eventually get other perks based on how much they pay. (Full disclosure: I subscribed to Defector months before writing this article.)

“We wanted to look and feel very much our own,” Magary said. “We wanted a website you want to go to, one that feels like home.”

Ryckman echoed that benefit: When you rely on readers for direct revenue, you have to serve them relevant ads and a high-quality user experience. Autoplaying videos, ads that track your every move, and cluttered websites that make it hard to read the actual news don’t have to come hand in hand with opening your (virtual) paper.

As the Colorado Sun grows, its 10 owners are facing a decision about where they want their business model to go from here. They’ve discussed becoming a multi-stakeholder co-op like The Devil Strip and the Mendocino Voice, keeping their own stakes and turning all their members into co-owners as well. Another option is going nonprofit, following in the footsteps of statewide digital publications like the Texas Tribune and MinnPost as well as national organizations like ProPublica and NPR. 

The nonprofit model has been called the future of civic journalism, but it may not work for outlets like the Sun. The combination of grants, donations, and reader memberships has been a successful one for a range of publications, including local newspapers like the Tampa Bay Times and The Salt Lake Tribune. Community co-ops and advocates, however, see large swaths of the country that nonprofits can’t cover.

“I think the old way of looking at things was that you’re either for-profit, hedge fund owned, or you’re completely pure and nonprofit, and there’s nothing in between,” Ryckman said. “I’m a huge admirer of what [the founders] Evan Smith and John Thornton did at the Texas Tribune. But Colorado is not Texas, and we do not have access to the same kind of philanthropy. Colorado’s philanthropic community isn’t able to support a Texas Tribune.”

That competition for grants and donations is even tougher in smaller locales like Akron or Mendocino County. “Communities like ours aren’t necessarily full of foundations or wealthy philanthropists,” Maxwell said. “I think communities that don’t have a lot of existing economic resources can use this co-op model.”

A local news co-op can work financially, but getting it started is the hardest part. It’s no coincidence that the precious few U.S. examples operated for a few years before transitioning.

Tom Stites believes that’s where the Banyan Project comes in. Stites held editing positions at The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Kansas City Times before setting out to combat the local newspaper crash. He and his partners were looking for a new business model that was digital first, self-sustaining, and easy to replicate. After research and deliberation, he said, supporting co-ops was the “obvious, obvious thing to do.”

“Readers should experience journalism relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust,” Stites told me. “This was the only business model we came up with that well and truly fit.”

The Banyan Project is a nonprofit that will provide a web platform, mentorship, and community for local news co-ops that agree to meet a set of basic journalistic standards. Stites hopes co-ops that join can help and learn from one another as part of a Banyan network.

Stites wants to launch 20 news co-ops over three years, but the project is still fund-raising to get off the ground. He’s been in touch with the Mendocino Voice staffers, though, who in turn have spoken with The Devil Strip as they work through their co-op transition. The co-op community is a small one, but everyone involved knows the importance of working together to find a model that can work anywhere.

That’s partly because good news co-ops can have more than just a local impact. As we have explained in this magazine, a local news vacuum can end up being filled by Facebook posts, email forwards, and other sources of tall tales seemingly designed to frighten those without a reliable source of information. (See Paul Glastris, “Did the Fall of Local News Bring Us Authoritarianism in Washington?” in our July/August 2018 issue.) Nearby wildfires morph into a government conspiracy to burn down homes; peaceful protests become a front for busloads of violent anarchists looking to raze Main Street. “The lack of newspapers not only means that your local civic health is shot,” Stites said. “It also takes away the barrier to the really toxic stuff.”

For all the lack of trust in media, it’s hard to find a more credible source than the one you and your neighbors own. That’s the final part of the pitch The Devil Strip makes to potential co-owners: Not only are you buying a say in how your local paper is run, you’re also buying a stake in the civic health of your city and your country. “You have to be reliant on the people,” Moore-Dunson said. “If you’re a co-owner of The Devil Strip, we need you to be a part of the call to action.”

The post Own a Newspaper for $1 per Month appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This story is part of a package exploring how to rescue and revitalize journalism. Read the rest of the pieces here. And, if you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider making a donation—we’re a nonprofit media organization and rely on the support of our readers.

Americans often complain that reading the news during the Trump era is exhausting. They should try covering it. 

In the past, the White House press office would announce to reporters covering the president that “the lid is on,” which meant there was no more major news coming and they were done for the day. Not anymore. Under Trump, there is no lid. The president famously delights in announcing policy changes and making newsworthy statements—typically grotesque, mendacious ones—via Twitter at all hours. That means White House correspondents and their editors are always, for practical purposes, in work mode. 

It’s been like this for four years. Four years of being corralled into cages at Trump rallies—and, if you’re a recognizable TV correspondent, protected by network-provided bodyguards. Four years of having the president call your work “fake” and having 40 percent of Americans believe him. Four years of hate-filled comments from readers on the right and charges of spineless complicity from those on the left. Four years of writing long, complicated, hard-to-report stories about lying, corruption, and catastrophe that get a few hours of news cycle attention before being eclipsed by more lying, corruption, and catastrophe. 

In the final months of the presidential campaign, however, the dynamic seems to have changed. Whereas four years ago, Trump was manipulating the media into doing his bidding—with cable networks covering nearly all his campaign appearances live and unfiltered and major newspapers hyperventilating over Hillary’s emails—now it’s the news media forcing Trump to react. 

On July 28, the Axios reporter Jonathan Swan used the simple expedient of knowledgeable follow-up questions to provoke the president, on air, to be both honest and tellingly dismissive about the COVID-19 death toll by saying “It is what it is.” Roughly one month later, The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg reported that in 2018 Trump had disparaged U.S. soldiers killed in action and buried in French cemeteries as “losers” and “suckers.” 

Those stories, and the White House’s pushback, were still ricocheting around the internet a week later when The Washington Post published excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book Rage in which Trump admitted, in a taped interview, that he knew the coronavirus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” while he was telling the American people the opposite. Trump responded by comparing his lies to Churchill projecting “calmness” during the Blitz. 

Soon after, The Atlantic’s Bart Gellman reported on plans by the Trump campaign to avoid conceding defeat in the election—including convincing GOP-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors should late-counted mail-in ballots start going Biden’s way. Then, on September 27, The New York Times released its investigation of Trump’s tax records, which it had managed to obtain. They showed that the president paid only $750 in taxes in 2016. 

The White House was still trying to contain that bombshell when, on the evening of October 1, Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg broke the news that one of Trump’s closest aides, Hope Hicks, had tested positive for COVID-19. In the hours of pandemonium that followed, Trump admitted that he and the first lady had also tested positive, and Bloomberg further reported that senior administration officials had tried to keep Hicks’s illness quiet. Within days, the rest of the press had pieced together a timeline revealing that an earlier Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett attended by dozens of GOP notables was, in the words of Anthony Fauci, a “superspreader event.” 

Will any of this coverage move what seems to be a locked-in electorate? We’ll find out soon enough. Still, you have to hand it to the much-maligned mainstream press. When future historians write the story of the 2020 elections, it will be a source not only of information, but also of inspiration. 

You might suspect that a “but” is coming. And you’re right. It’s not, however, the standard complaint that journalists indulge in “both-sides-ism” or portray Trump’s lying, racism, and authoritarianism euphemistically. They’ve actually gotten much better at that. Rather, the greatest current sin of the big national papers and networks is their failure to fight against the unprecedented economic collapse of the media as a whole. As I note in the introduction to our special package in this issue, one in four newspapers in America has closed since 2004, with most of the loss concentrated at the local level. This decline, which has accelerated since the pandemic, is as big a long-term threat to democracy as anything Trump is doing now. Indeed, it may even explain why he got elected in the first place. 

The big media outlets cover the collapse of local journalism as if it’s some kind of tragic natural disaster, like an earthquake. It is not. It is a consequence of policy choices made or not made in Washington. As such, it is a solvable problem. In this issue we lay out a number of specific solutions. They won’t happen, however, unless the major news media report on and indeed advocate for such solutions—using the power they’ve shown they have for a righteous cause they are uniquely positioned to champion.

The post Two and a Half Cheers for the Mainstream Press appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Traditionally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court is viewed as a disaster. “Dear Democrats: FDR’s court-packing scheme was a ‘humiliating’ defeat,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019. Citing “New Deal history,” two law professors argued in The Atlantic that “a titanic contest over the Supreme Court hardly seems worth it.” In National Review, Charles Cooke dismissed talk of expansion as “silly” by citing Roosevelt’s doomed efforts. “Back in 1937,” he wrote, “when the country was less divided than it is now, FDR was more popular than a President Biden would be, and voters cared less about the Supreme Court, court-packing was met with a definitive ‘no.’ ” The message to Democrats is simple: Don’t even bother.

These assessments are correct in a literal sense. Faced with a Supreme Court that aggressively overturned significant portions of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed legislation to expand its size. The bill never received a vote. The number of justices remained at nine.

But shortly after Roosevelt introduced his proposal, the Court stopped overturning the administration’s programs. The shift was widely seen as related to the president’s frontal attack on the judiciary—“the switch in time that saved nine,” as one contemporary humorist put it. The most important swing justice, Owen Roberts, eventually suggested as much. Speaking before Congress in 1954, Roberts said that FDR’s plan placed “tremendous strain and threat to the existing Court of which I was fully conscious.”

Throughout modern U.S. history, the Supreme Court has proved susceptible to outside pressure. FDR’s proposal is just one of many successful institutional attacks. In the mid-1950s, the liberal Warren Court backed away from protecting victims of McCarthyism because a popular Senate bill threatened to strip the Court’s powers. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, conservative politicians flooded Congress with legislation to stop the Court from ruling on racial integration. The justices retreated from enforcing busing regulations.

For Democrats worried about being railroaded by a 6–3 conservative bench, these conflicts should be instructive. In none of these instances did Congress or the president truly enact laws that changed the Court. In each of them, the Court changed anyway. These attacks can exact costs, as FDR discovered; his particularly aggressive push weakened his power within Congress. But they also have clear payoffs. Threats to expand, strip, or otherwise limit the Court—done with credibility—can influence judicial behavior.

“Historically, I think we have found that the Court gets the message,” Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University who studies the politics of the judiciary, told me. “When conservatives are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a little more conservative. When liberals are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a little more liberal.”

If Joe Biden takes office in January, he will confront a landscape not unlike the one FDR faced in 1937. Biden, like Roosevelt, will grapple with an economic downturn of historic dimensions. He’ll have won promising to enact a variety of sizable spending and welfare programs. In interviews, Biden has explicitly cited the Roosevelt presidency as a template.

But, much like FDR, Biden will have to contend with a Supreme Court stacked with six conservatives. For Roosevelt, these six men were perhaps his most powerful enemies. With large majorities in both the House and Senate, the president moved transformative economic legislation—from minimum wages to maximum hours—with remarkable ease, only to have it struck down by justices who didn’t abide by the bromide of not “legislating from the bench.” These activist rulings infuriated Roosevelt, who in 1935 declared that the Court was creating a “ ‘no-man’s-land’ where no government—state or federal—can function.” They also stirred up popular sentiment. Much like today, the Supreme Court hung over the 1936 presidential election.

FDR won that election with more than 60 percent of the vote. Emboldened, he decided to confront the Court. Within weeks of his inauguration, Roosevelt announced an initiative to add six justices to the body. The Supreme Court was furious. Privately, Chief Justice Charles Hughes remarked that the bill would “destroy the Court as
an institution.”

At first, the public was closely divided over Roosevelt’s plan, as was Congress. Republicans, southern conservatives, and some liberals came out against the idea. But Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who was promised a seat on the expanded bench, backed the president. After a fireside chat on March 8, so did a large plurality of Americans. “We cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present,” Roosevelt said.

As FDR spoke, the Court was preparing to rule on perhaps the biggest case of his tenure, National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. The decision would determine the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, landmark New Deal legislation that made it significantly easier to join and form a union. Legal observers widely expected that the act, like its predecessors, would fall. So did the president.

Instead, in mid-April, the Court upheld it in a 5–4 decision, with Hughes and Roberts in the majority. Almost immediately afterward, public support for adding justices dipped. Then, at the end of May, the Court upheld the creation of Social Security, again in a surprise 5–4 ruling. The plan grew even more unpopular. In a May 25 cartoon in the Rochester Times-Union, Roosevelt’s “Supreme Court Packing Case” was depicted as a large crate, collapsing as the Court’s various liberal decisions, each representing an underlying plank, toppled beneath it. By the end of July, FDR’s proposal was dead.

There’s a vigorous academic debate about the extent to which the Court’s pivot had to do with pressure from Roosevelt versus organic jurisprudential development. There’s no doubt that the Court’s constitutional doctrine was already evolving in ways that made siding with the president easier. The Court that had struck down child labor laws and FDR’s National Recovery Act was evolving into a body more deferential to Congress. But it’s hard to see how the swing justices couldn’t have been touched by Roosevelt’s attacks and the resulting public discourse. As The New Yorker sarcastically wrote in 1937, the only way the Supreme Court could not have been impacted was if its then-new building, completed in 1935, “has a soundproof room, to which the Justices retire to change their minds.”

Does that mean that if Democrats win in November, they could be equally effective by threatening to expand the size of the bench? There are reasons to be skeptical. If he wins, Biden will not enter the White House backed by more than 500 electoral votes. If Democrats control 52 Senate seats come 2021, they will consider it a roaring success. In 1937, the party held more than 70. (It’s also unclear if the Roberts Court will aggressively strike down Biden legislation.)

But some of the differences between Roosevelt’s era and today’s could actually work to the advantage of modern Democrats. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party was a sprawling entity, featuring both New Deal liberals and the southern right. The latter were some of the most tenacious opponents of court expansion. They included, for
example, former Texas Congressman John Nance Garner—Roosevelt’s own vice president.

Today, the Democratic Party is far more unified. The southern conservative constituencies that once fought Roosevelt now almost all vote Republican. Unlike FDR’s vice president, Kamala Harris won’t go AWOL. She expressed openness to expanding the size of the Supreme Court during the Democratic primaries, well before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg led Biden to soften his opposition. 

FDR was not the first person to intimidate the Supreme Court. In the Progressive Era, major politicians put forth all kinds of proposals to curb the power of a judiciary they viewed as in thrall to big businesses, from allowing voters to override Supreme Court decisions to making it easier to recall justices. None passed, but scholars believe that the clamor may have kept the Court from making it impossible for reformers to reshape economic power. They’re not alone in that assessment. “I may not know much about law,” President Theodore Roosevelt remarked in 1905, “but I do know that one can put the fear of God in judges.”

In the latter half of the 20th century, politicians toyed with more targeted attacks. According to Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over all cases “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” Conservative congressmen and senators seized on this language to propose bills that would “strip” the Court of its right to rule on racial integration. These bills, for the most part, went nowhere. But, much like FDR’s court-expansion attempt, they still made a difference. During the tenure of Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1986, the justices kept careful track of “jurisdiction-stripping” legislation, circulating them to one another whenever they came up. Burger himself kept a file of all these proposals as they moved through Congress. In both the 1970s and 1980s, the Court retreated from many attempts to force integration, even as it gave a yellow light to affirmative action.

Part of that change, no doubt, stems from personnel; the Burger Court had more conservative membership than the Warren Court that preceded it. But academics argue that congressional pressure also had a clear role. In a memo to eight of the Court’s justices, for example, one law clerk noted that a major busing case had attracted great political and congressional controversy. He recommended that the judges deny a petition to hear it. They followed his advice.

“The clerk is writing for eight of the nine justices,” said Tom Clark, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of The Limits of Judicial Independence. “[It] tells me that the clerk was aware the justices would want to know that.”

It’s unclear exactly why John Roberts decided in 2012 to uphold the Affordable Care Act, but it’s entirely possible that his vote was one of institutional deference: He didn’t want to nullify a sitting president’s greatest accomplishment. And so far, under Donald Trump, Roberts has sided with liberals on a number of surprising occasions, including an abortion case. Perhaps that’s to keep the Court from being dragged into the country’s partisan slugfest. Perhaps, and relatedly, it’s because of Democrats’ heated rhetoric about the need to bend the judiciary.

“I think he takes those threats seriously,” Princeton’s Whittington said.

But once Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed (her nomination is pending as of this writing), Roberts will no longer be the Court’s swing justice. That title will instead likely belong to either Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh. Both were elevated to their jobs by a conservative judicial movement increasingly incensed that the Supreme Court won’t tack further right, even though Republicans have appointed 12 of the last 16 justices. Barrett clerked for Antonin Scalia. With such a rock-solid conservative majority, this bench will be more hostile to liberal policies than the one that came before. Can we really expect it to show any restraint?

The behavior of some leading jurists suggests that the answer is no. In a speech before Notre Dame Law School (where Barrett used to teach), Attorney General Bill Barr summarized much of the legal right’s thinking in astonishingly blunt terms. “Militant secularists,” he warned, “seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.” He cited as evidence a now-struck-down Affordable Care Act provision requiring that employers cover contraception.

On the other hand, many of the justices who fought Roosevelt’s New Deal had similarly apocalyptic visions. The sweeping programs FDR thought necessary for the economy were, to them, a tyrannical violation of the Constitution. Dissenting from a case that upheld Congress’s power to heavily regulate gold, four of the era’s justices declared that the government’s actions “annihilate its own obligations” and destroy “the very rights” the Constitution was supposed to protect. That passion didn’t stop two justices from bowing to popular reality. As Justice Owen Roberts said after Roosevelt’s reelection, “the Court took cognizance of the popular will.”

Today’s Chief Justice Roberts is also clearly concerned with the Court’s legitimacy and does not want it to be seen as a purely partisan body. And despite their impeccably conservative credentials, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have both shown a willingness to break with orthodoxy on high-profile occasions—including, in the case of Gorsuch, a seismic expansion of LGBTQ rights.

Whether the Court can be pressured, then, may ultimately come down to just how much muscle Democrats are willing to employ. To truly constrain the Court, the party must, of course, win both the presidency and the Senate. But winning is not enough. They must be willing to credibly threaten the Court, something that requires a bold, unified front on the judiciary. Right now, such tenacity and unity are lacking. But that may well be changing. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a procedural moderate, told reporters in late September that should Republicans fill Ginsburg’s seat, “nothing is off the table.” Biden, a former court-expansion opponent, now ducks court-expansion questions. Even Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, one of the only congressional Democrats who support overturning Roe v. Wade, told reporters he wants “to get through the election” before taking a stance.

Barrett’s confirmation is not the only thing radicalizing Democrats. Support for reining in the Supreme Court will become fevered if it actually strikes down, rather than “simply” menaces, cornerstone liberal policies. Not long after the election (and during whatever chaos comes next), the bench will hear its third challenge to the Affordable Care Act. If Democrats win the White House and Senate, and the Court still invalidates the ACA in the midst of a pandemic, the party of FDR may not be able to resist retaliatory measures. Biden famously called the act’s passage, which came while he was vice president, a “big fucking deal.” It is unlikely that he will let it go gentle into that good night.

Today’s justices, of course, know this. Like their counterparts in the 1930s, they do not exist in a soundproof room. If they nonetheless begin an aggressive assault on whatever New Deal–style social policies liberals enact—like a public health insurance option, major climate change legislation, or heavy regulations on internet giants—they will be wagering that Democrats are just full of hot air. They may well be right. The Court is generally more popular than Congress or the president, making attacks on it very risky. Even Roosevelt, operating at the peak of his powers, paid a political cost for battling the bench. Roosevelt’s plan helped save laws he had already passed. But it alienated many congressional Democrats, and his New Deal was effectively ended by the election of conservatives in 1938.

Nonetheless, modern Democrats cannot shy away from intimidation. The justices FDR confronted were almost all in their 70s; he might have been able to wait them out. Today’s conservatives are substantially younger. Barrett is 48, and if she’s confirmed and stays on the Court until Ginsburg’s age, she’ll be ruling until 2059. And as the 1970s showed, politicians don’t need to threaten the Court with expansion to get a response. Stripping legislation that limits the Court’s powers could also help Democrats send a powerful message. The party may not need to go as far as Roosevelt did to make their point.

But if they face serious defeat at the Court, they can learn from his resolve. “You’ve got to really rattle the saber,” Whittington said. “Then you get the justices to respond.”

This is an updated version of “Packing the Court Might Work. Threatening to Pack It Did,” which first appeared online on September 26, 2020. 

The post The Case for Threatening the Courts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As of seven a.m. on the morning of June 9, here’s how Georgia’s primary election, with a fancy new electronic voting system, was supposed to work. 

Across the state, with roughly half the voters voting by mail, an estimated one million voters would still arrive at their assigned polling places. After quickly confirming each voter’s photo ID, election officials would access the state’s new electronic poll (e-poll) book—synced in real time with the state’s voter registration base—to verify the voter’s registration status.

Each voter’s personalized information would be quickly transmitted onto a software-encoded activation card that would be inserted into an ATM-like machine known as a “ballot-marking device,” or BMD. Voters would mark their choices on the BMD’s oversized touch screen. An attached printer would then generate a paper record, summarizing each voter’s electoral choices. Finally, voters would hand these paper printouts back for tabulation and return the activation cards, before leaving the polls. 

Quick, secure, easy to use. And unlike old-style direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines that caused electoral controversy in Georgia and elsewhere because they didn’t print out paper ballots that can be recounted in case of close or questionable election results, the BMDs produce a paper record. All of this had been widely touted in a promotional video produced by the office of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, with a $400,000 TV ad campaign paid for with federal election funds. Federal funds also financed some of the $107 million cost of Georgia’s 30,000 new BMD machines and accessories, purchased from Dominion Voting Systems, one of the nation’s two largest voting technology vendors.

Sure, BMDs had their critics, like Marilyn Marks, the president of the Coalition for Good Governance, and Richard DeMillo, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech. Marks, DeMillo, and a few others had waged a relatively lonely battle in Georgia, arguing, often in court filings, that BMDs have software-related security risks, that the paper ballots aren’t truly verifiable, and that it would be cheaper and less risky to have Georgia voters simply mark their ballots with a pen or a number 2 pencil like voters in most of America—with a voting machine or two reserved at each polling place for people with disabilities and others who might prefer to use them. Raffensperger’s office dismissed such concerns as “remote, unfounded speculation.”

Then the voting began—and almost everything went wrong. In hundreds of polling places, especially in and around Atlanta, voters waited in long lines for up to eight hours. BMDs malfunctioned, and printers broke down. Voters’ cards were inserted wrong. The e-poll books didn’t work as advertised. Many sites hadn’t printed out their voter registration lists, or they failed to have enough backup paper ballots available. How many voters grew so frustrated that they left without voting—disenfranchisement by election screw-up—will never be known.

Raffensperger, a Republican, blamed Democratic county election officials for botching the rollout. They blamed him and suspected voter suppression. Neither Democrats nor Republicans in the state, however, called for the obvious fix: Get rid of the BMDs and just use hand-marked paper ballots for most voters in the upcoming November general elections. A lawsuit to require just that, spearheaded by Marks, was defeated in federal court. But in her ruling, the judge nonetheless emphasized that Georgia’s BMDs had “caused severe breakdowns at the polls, severely burdening voters’ exercise of the franchise.”

Georgia wasn’t the only place where BMDs failed this spring. They also did so, spectacularly, in Los Angeles and several jurisdictions in Pennsylvania. Most of these debacles were overseen by Democrats. Indeed, Pennsylvania’s Democratic secretary of state is now getting an assist from the Trump administration, the RNC, and state Republicans in her legal fight against the NAACP to require all in-person voters in Philadelphia and two other counties to use BMDs rather than hand-marked paper ballots. 

This November, 20 percent of the nation’s 200 million registered voters will be directed to cast ballots on BMDs if they go to a polling place—not just in Georgia and Pennsylvania but also in many large counties in Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas. The chances of more technical meltdowns in these places are real, but that’s not the BMD critics’ biggest concern. 

The actual nightmare scenario involves the integrity and ultimate verifiability of the vote tallies generated by the machines. Recall the BMDs’ printer-generated vote summaries (technically called “scanning ballots” under Georgia law). Voters can review them, though they’re not required to, prior to turning them in for tabulation. The summaries themselves aren’t used to determine election winners and losers; instead, there is a bar code printed on the paper summary, or, as in Georgia, a QR code. Unintelligible to the voter, these codes are read by vote-counting machines.

What guarantees the integrity of these tallies? How would voters know that the BMD software accurately recorded and translated their choices into those codes and onto the paper ballot receipts? And who or what do they trust if there are meaningful discrepancies between the codes and the paper receipts?

As Emily Levy, founder of Scrutineers, a new networking group for the election integrity movement, puts it, citizens should be asking election officials in universal-use BMD states this very pointed question: “When you are called upon to prove that these election results are correct, how is it that you think you’re going to be able to do that?” 

Let’s say the November election is close, and Donald Trump comes up short in Pennsylvania or Georgia or North Carolina, or all of them, and loses the Electoral College vote. He has already sent every possible signal that he would contest such a result as fraudulent, would refuse to concede, and would litigate (or worse) to stay in office. It would make perfect sense for him and his lawyers to seize on the ambiguities of BMDs to argue that the voting was rigged and illegitimate. And Democrats would be hard pressed to prove Trump wrong—especially since some of their own elected officials and allies have been relatively quiet about the BMDs’ shortcomings, and in some cases have even been at the forefront of pushing for the machines’ use.

Even in the wake of the Georgia primary debacle, election reform groups like Common Cause and New York University’s Brennan Center aren’t demanding that all voters get hand-marked paper ballots in November. Instead, they’re urging that even more BMDs be supplied, especially in minority districts. In Pennsylvania, the Democratic secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, is fighting an NAACP lawsuit that seeks to overturn the scandal-tainted decision of Philadelphia County to adopt universal BMD voting. (In August, the Trump campaign intervened in the case to back Boockvar, though it objected to other demands in the lawsuit, such as expanded vote by mail and early voting.)

What is the risk if the 2020 election hinges on the verifiability of millions of BMD-generated ballots marked not directly by voters, but by printers obeying the algorithms embedded deep within the machines’ proprietary software? Terms like BMDs and QR codes could end up making the 2000 constitutional crisis over Florida’s “hanging chads” look like child’s play.

In Georgia, skeptical Democrats were simply outnumbered as Republican leaders enacted legislation that required all of Georgia’s counties to adopt BMDs. Local governments didn’t even have the option to make their own choice. But in Los Angeles County, it was prominent Democratic officials, and progressive advocacy groups like Common Cause, that championed a new $300 million BMD-based system that failed so spectacularly that California has since mandated that every county mail all their active registered voters a ballot. 

There are legitimate reasons for BMDs to play some role in today’s elections. For example, in Los Angeles County, software-programmed BMDs can—if they run properly—give voters the option to view instructions and candidate information in a language other than English. BMDs also can accommodate certain disabled voters for whom the traditional paper ballot isn’t a viable option. Even after the failure of LA County’s “Voting Solutions for All People” system in March, Kathay Feng, then the executive director of California Common Cause, defended the universal use of BMDs for all voters because it reduced stigma: “We didn’t want to create a separate and unequal system that people with disabilities or language disabilities had to vote on.” Disability access also remains a key selling point touted by voting machine companies, along with some, but not all, disability rights groups.

But ballot-marking devices were originally developed as alternative “accessible” voting machines for people with disabilities, not as universal-use equipment foisted on all polling place voters. This is the BMD critics’ central complaint. “Even if computer-marked paper ballots are necessary to accommodate those who are unable to hand-mark their ballots, it is utterly irresponsible to make them the primary system for all voters,” Jennifer Cohn, a leading election integrity advocate and journalist, says. 

That’s not to mention the risks of debuting universal-use BMDs in the middle of an already fraught presidential election year, even if it were not being complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. That’s the commonsense view of Jim Dickson, the co-chair of the National Council on Independent Living’s voting rights committee, and a champion of accessible voting machines for people with disabilities. “Trying to install a new voting system for everybody during a presidential election,” he says, “is worse than changing tires on a moving car.”

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the silence and even complicity of certain Democratic elected officials—and major progressive allies—than what has happened in Pennsylvania. 

In early 2018, Governor Tom Wolf declared that all counties had to jettison their old DRE machines and replace them with ones that used voter-marked paper ballots. So far, so good. But where Wolf and his secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, went astray was in buying into what DeMillo, Cohn, and others deem the “false equivalency” at the core of this controversy. 

The nation’s foremost election equipment vendors sell both major types of voting systems—ones that revolve around paper ballots marked directly by voters, and the far more complex (and more software-dependent) BMD-based systems that also include printers. Both types are often linked to other error-prone—and, many argue, also potentially hackable—technologies such as e-poll books. (Indeed, postmortems of the Georgia and LA County problems found that e-poll book were as much at fault for long voter lines as BMDs, if not more.) 

But as with new automobiles, there’s typically a higher profit margin when vendors can sell higher-end, more complicated systems. (In Georgia, for example, the simpler ballot system, also offered by Dominion, would have cost nearly $80 million less.) And by convincing election officials to make all voters use BMDs, they could sell whole fleets of the machines. 

Central to the vendors’ strategy was convincing election officials to see BMDs as good, if not superior to, systems that relied on hand-marked paper ballots. These key players included a prominent Philadelphia-based national organization, Verified Voting, as well as the Brennan Center and Common Cause. All three groups, in a major May 2018 advisory report for election officials, emphasized, as many experts continue to do today, the importance of having a voter-marked paper ballot, whether by computer or by hand—based on the now-debunked myth that voters checked those printouts. In fact, recent research has shown that 93 percent of voters don’t catch BMD errors on the printouts, when they do occur, and the system may be especially vulnerable to hacking. 

Two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s counties eventually chose hand-marked paper ballots with scanners, though they also bought the requisite number of BMDs to comply with federal law on ensuring access to voters needing disability or language assistance. However, Democratic-led Philadelphia County, along with officials in GOP-leaning Northampton and Cumberland Counties, chose to embrace the more expensive Express-Vote XL BMD model sold by the nation’s dominant manufacturer of such equipment, Election Systems and Software.

These three outlier counties brushed aside expert and citizen objections over the XL’s cost, security, and near certainty of failures. For Philadelphia alone, the initial cost was $29 million for the 3,750 machines. (Only later was it revealed that this decision might not have been based solely on the machine’s merits; the nearly $3 million in hidden lobbying and campaign donations by the company likely contributed.)

The November 2019 debut of ExpressVote XLs in local elections vindicated critics’ concerns. Reuters later exposed that in roughly 40 percent of Philadelphia’s polling places, the machines malfunctioned. In Northampton County, according to The New York Times, the system’s multiple failures included tallying just 164 votes, out of 55,000 ballots cast, for a leading Democratic judicial candidate. 

This face-plant led the county’s bipartisan election board to unanimously approve a no-confidence motion for the new equipment. But Boockvar and the Democratic county executive insisted that Northampton stick with the technology. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remained mum at both the state and national levels. (Spokespeople for the national DNC, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, and the Georgia Democratic Party all declined to answer questions about their voting technology stances for this article.)

Richard Garella, a citizen activist who founded the nonpartisan Protect Our Vote Philly, says that after the Northampton debacle, “we were expecting major advocacy and political groups including Democrats to see the danger this posed for disaster in November 2020 and to do something about it, and we are disappointed that they didn’t.” The state Democratic Party’s tacit acceptance of BMDs was allegedly fueled, he argues, by influential Philadelphia pols, including a newly indicted city councilmember whose protégé led the election board while getting donations from Election Systems and Software.

At the national level, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is one of only a handful of Democrats who have directly taken on BMDs and the election vendors who promote their use with tactics that have included hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, trips, and lobbying, as chronicled by NPR and other outlets. Wyden is a chief cosponsor of a bill to rein in risky voting equipment while requiring a hand-marked paper ballot option for all American voters. “An election system is really only as strong as its weakest link. A single state or a handful of counties can determine the outcome of the 2020 election,” he says.

Some leading Democrats and progressive voting rights activists at the state and local levels in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have also been fighting the universal use of BMDs. But while Pennsylvania’s NAACP chapter filed a lawsuit against Boockvar’s office over the universal-use BMDs and other voting barriers, neither the state or national Democratic Party has entered the lists in support of the lawsuit. However, another major party is actively working to thwart it. The Trump campaign, the RNC, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party filed in late July a motion to intervene in support of Boockvar’s effort to insist on the use of BMDs this fall. 

“Right now, Secretary Boockvar is fighting this case alongside the Trump campaign and opposing the NAACP,” notes John Bonifaz, the president of the reform group Free Speech for People, which is coordinating several similar lawsuits around the country. 

Legal efforts in Georgia were joined this year by new pandemic-related cases in North Carolina by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and in Texas, where suits were filed in mid-July by the Texas NAACP and Mi Familia Vota. (Courts in Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina have ruled against these lawsuits in recent weeks, but the civil rights attorneys have either mounted appeals or expect to do so shortly.) Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee, clearly sees the discriminating impact of this risky voting technology. Clarke is supporting a lawsuit by the North Carolina NAACP against the rollout of the machines in the Charlotte area, noting, “It’s no coincidence that the gravest problems with outdated and hackable voting equipment are
in states with a history of suppressing the votes of people of color.” Clarke and others point to an example in Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis. Republican state legislators and their appointees are trying to force the universal use of BMDs in that predominantly Black county—where in a 2015 election 40 percent of the machine votes from predominantly black precincts weren’t counted by the county’s central tabulator.

Why are so many Democrats and their allies not vigorously opposing the proliferation of BMDs across the electoral landscape? It may be out of fear that even raising such questions might end up reducing turnout by shaking Democratic voters’ already weak confidence in our election system. BMD critics say they’ve heard this argument—usually voiced privately—but find it specious. “There is no indication that talking about election security reduces voter participation,” says Lulu Friesdat, the president of Smart Elections, another election integrity group fighting BMDs. Friesdat cites a 2018 Harris poll showing that voters were, in fact, more likely to vote if they were worried about hacking. 

There is clearly an ongoing tension between election integrity proponents focused on accurate and verifiable vote counts and the larger, more influential voting rights groups that emphasize increased turnout and pushing back on laws they view as aimed at voter suppression. 

Whatever the reason, several of the nation’s best-known election watchdog groups haven’t been barking very loudly, if at all, about the security risks and logistical dangers of BMDs. Two of these groups are Verified Voting, based in Pennsylvania, and NYU’s Brennan Center. Both have played prominent roles in helping muffle objections to the BMDs, and even have lent their credibility to the promotion and rollout of these systems in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other key states. 

Even before the disaster in Georgia, BMD critics were characterizing the Brennan Center as “missing in action.” “They’ve got a passive attitude,” Marilyn Marks says, “and just don’t consider it a priority.” She notes that Brennan chose not to support her lawsuit—or even intervene in Georgia when the state board of elections fined the Athens-Clarke County election board $5,000 a day for wanting the option to use hand-marked paper ballots instead of BMDs. 

Lawrence Norden, director of the Brennan Center’s Election Reform program, has also been mostly silent about the negative press and malfunctions of BMD-based systems in their widely read and well-respected cybersecurity reports. While Brennan has been reassuring the public that the old DRE machines generally won’t be used this fall in battleground states, when it comes to BMDs, Norden admits, “it’s not been a priority.” 

Verified Voting has perhaps done more to help kill paperless DREs than any other national organization. In early 2019, it was urging Georgia to use hand-marked paper ballots. But then, critics alleged, it gave the machines its blessing by participating in audits that were touted by Raffensperger and Dominion as proving the accuracy and validity of the BMD vote tallies. 

That characterization was derided as invalid by two of Verified Voting’s election security experts, who then resigned in late 2019 from the organization: Georgia Tech’s DeMillo and the board member Dr. Philip Stark, a Berkeley statistics professor and an elections expert. Marian Schneider, Verified Voting’s president, says of the departed critics, “We don’t agree with them that helping elected officials do a better job at election administration is inherently a bad thing.” After the resignations and the ensuing negative publicity, Verified Voting clarified last December that it was still firmly opposed to universal-use BMDs.

The situation in Georgia illustrates the risks that trouble-prone voting technology may pose for the November elections and beyond. The commonsense reforms pushed by Marilyn Marks’s group could be widely applied in some swing states before the federal lawsuit is resolved. One option would be to remove most of the BMDs, give voters the same kind of paper ballots being sent to absentee voters, and then use the scanners already on hand to tabulate them. 

Of course, printing millions of additional paper ballots in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will cost money. But surely it would be worth it. Otherwise, we face the real possibility that Trump’s lawyers will be battling Biden’s over the legitimacy of the election for weeks or months, while Trump remains in the White House, tweeting about how he won’t let Democrats and voting machine companies collude to steal the election.

A version of this piece appeared online on September 23, 2020. 

The post Donald Trump’s Favorite Voting Machines appeared first on Washington Monthly.