John Oliver recently aired an excellent piece on the decline of local journalism, and how this is negatively impacting the ability to keep our local government institutions in check. The primary driver of this problem has been the expectation by the public that they no longer have to pay for news, and can get it for free online. Before, we would subscribe to the physical newspaper, and read the ads from the local businesses who paid to place them in the paper. In the early days of the internet, no one seemed to be thinking about how to keep people paying for this content online, probably because they didn’t see the danger and did’t realize that you would be creating generations to come who think writing comes out of the sky and drops onto their screens.
I have personally made it my mission to pay for the news content that I regularly read. This includes Slate Plus, New York Magazine, the NYTimes, the Guardian, and more (including a lifetime membership to DailyKos). But the one outlet that is missing is my local paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution. This is not for want of trying: I kept getting the physical paper long after is ceased to be readable. They started outsourcing the coverage to the wire services, and local news became press releases that were reprinted verbatim as “news.” There were the occasional outstanding pieces (the Atlanta school scandal was one), but this was the exception to the rule. For the most part the level of reporting dropped off a cliff, and the writing became execrable. Finally I gave up.
Eventually, I started to use the AJC.com, the main website for the paper. I started, and then stopped. It’s terrible. Take a look at it and see if you can navigate it—it’s impossible. And there is no real news. I decided that this was deliberate, to get you to use their subscriber-only content at MyAJC.com. It definitely looks better, and it does give you access to Jay Bookman. But the content is still awful! And their coverage of the “Gold Dome” (shorthand for the state legislature) is negligible, probably because it doesn’t get as many clicks as murder, and definitely not from people who are not affected by Georgia politics. I kept it up for six months and then finally threw in the towel.
Now, you could say this is a chicken/egg argument: if I don’t pay, the content will be bad, and then I won’t want to read it, so I won’t pay. But the AJC has been on a downhill slide for sometime, and I blame only one outfit: the Cox family. The AJC is owned by Cox Enterprises, a company with $18 billion in revenue, and is 99% owned by the Cox family. Ann Cox Chambers is one of them, the richest person in Georgia, worth upwards of $16 billion; other family members are equally flush. Why aren’t they putting money into this the way Jeff Bezos is at the Washington Post? Yes, I know he is worth $66 billion or so, but once you get over a certain amount it’s still a lot of money that you have floating around. Poach some great reporters; invest in true investigative reporting; design a readable website. It will take awhile to change 20 years of people thinking writing is free, but if you give people great content, they will pay to read it. I know because I do!