As countries, cities and states reopen after the closures brought on by the Coronavirus, the big questions remain as businesses and people struggle to rebuild their lives and their economies to make it through the summer. These are challenging times ahead, to be sure.
As a member of the media, in my role as a writer and blogger, one thing that has always bothered me throughout this entire shutdown period are the comments about "The media this" or "The media that." Like it is the media's fault that this entire virus happened in the first place and affected everything we hold dear. It is so easy for our president to call everything "Fake News" and blame the media for his own failures to respond or saying they have overblown the numbers and covered up the facts. Finding someone to blame for everything seems to be something we human beings love to do on a daily basis. Hearing people use such terminology really hurts, especially when it is family and friends doing it.
As a member of the Media, I lament the future of news in this country that is faced with all the talking heads on cable networks that are designed to tear down or build up specific parties and candidates with little or no balance at all.
Even the late great Charles Dickens, who churned out copy for 19th century daily London rags, like Morning Chronicle before he went super long form, would have struggled to keep up with the best and the worst of times hitting America's (and the world's) newsrooms in the earth-shattering year of 2020.
On the upside, the public's craving for accurate, real-time information about the Coronavirus - what is open or closed, how to stay safe, or how quickly the global pandemic is spreading - has sent Internet traffic to news Websites skyrocketing to once unthinkable levels. After several years when New York Times was becoming Home Depot with its digital subscriptions while local papers were becoming your dying Main Street hardware store, people now desperately need news about their hometown. Many local sites say online readership has more than doubled.
What could go wrong?
A lot.
Even as most newsrooms push for a new business model around digital subscriptions, the old model - heavily dependent on advertising - had helped keep journalism in the United States barely afloat ... until now. With nearly half the nation on near-total lockdown for the entire month of April and the rest reeling, most of the businesses that buy ads in local papers, especially in smaller towns or for youth-oriented alternative weeklies - like restaurants, night clubs or boutiques - have been closed and have had nothing to advertise. Scores of layoffs have happened and are yet to come.
Consider New Orleans, where the struggle of journalism to survive near the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, where a perfect storm of lots of news (from climate change in our lowest lying state and a swatch of chemical plants called "Cancer Alley" to a tradition of crooked government) and poverty - with fewer folks than average having digital access - had roiled the market. But with the city, on a per capita basis, rivaling New York as a Coronavirus epicenter, things really hit the fan. A lot like the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, which I wrote about for a brief period of time, and have mentioned in past posts.
Recently, Advocate, the news organization that survived to cover much of southern Louisiana, facing vanishing ad revenue, furloughed a tenth of its workforce and the rest ended up working four days a week. That happened as Louisiana's hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed with new cases.
Yet, some journalists might envy the New Orleans scribes - having lost their jobs entirely or, in a couple of cases, seen their publications shut down completely. Some venerable alternative-weeklies like St. Louis' award-winning Riverfront Times are already shells of their recent selves. The virus has proved an insidious weapon against any business model for modern newsrooms.
Even the huge increase in Web traffic has been somewhat negated by some advertisers demanding their digital ads not run next to stories about Coronavirus, even though there is little other news. Most newsrooms have seen upticks in digital subscribers - even after many news organizations moved Coronavirus stories in front of the paywall that is meant to drive subscriptions - but so far it is not enough to offset the ad-loss tsunami.
This has all been a plot twist in the wider war for the future of journalism that escalated when President Donald Trump was elected on a media-bashing platform in 2016. But even as the 45th President of the United States attacked "fake news" and called journalists "enemies of the people," while news organizations like Washington Post argued back that "democracy dies in darkness," to many everyday readers this was often an abstract kind of cold war. Not anymore. The Coronavirus made it clear that access to accurate information can be a matter of life and death.
That is particularly true because Trump has increasingly tried to dominate the flow of information about the Coronavirus, through lengthy, daily televised briefings and weekly town halls on Fox News and the president's pesky Twitter feed. But sometimes Trump's "facts" are flat-out wrong and much of the rest can be self-serving propaganda. Rigorous independent journalists are the only real fact checkers.
Yet our deeply divided nation cannot agree on a common set of facts about the Coronavirus.
In a time of creeping authoritarianism, the economic collapse of much of the news media will make this problem worse. And many of the smaller towns will lose any reality-based counterbalance. That is on top of the general erosion of civic life and connectedness these communities will feel without local media.
What is to be done? The formula that many news organizations have been refining to stay afloat in the 2020s - in part because of ad dollars that were already disappearing before the pandemic - will struggle to survive. The uptick in digital subscriptions - the core of that survival strategy - could become a downtick if the recession lingers.
That brings us to the bailer-outer of last resort: Washington. The idea of government support for journalism has long been a nonstarter for folks in the business, including me, for an obvious reason: the fear that any taxpayer dollars, doled out through the good graces of politicians, might cause journalists to pull their punches when writing about those politicians. And that was a concern long before the bill-signer at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. was a thin-skinned shouter of "fake news."
But the bizarre dichotomy of the current crisis has, at least in my opinion, dramatically changed the moral calculus. Craig Aaron, CEO of the media advocacy group "Free Press", argued in Columbia Journalism Review that a government bailout to the tune of $5 billion would increase funding for public radio and television in underserved areas, support local newsroom jobs for the duration of the health crisis and related slowdown and support innovative news-gathering projects. This agenda could be supported going forward by a small tax on the kind of targeted digital ads that made Google and Facebook wealthy while decimating local news.
It is important to have local reporters telling us what is really going on during all this. I urge those who are still collecting a paycheck and loading up on news about where to buy milk or whether a loved one needs a Covid-19 test, to consider supporting local news outlets and Public Broadcasting stations and not just two or three national brands.
The Coronavirus crisis has revealed America's badly-frayed safety net, from underfunded hospitals to underpaid workers in the food supply chain. Journalists providing accurate, real-time information are a critical part of that web. America should not try to find out if we can live without it.
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