To save the free press, newsgathering must be reclaimed as a public trust

This piece is part of our Civic Media Series. Read the Civic Media Magazine and explore pieces from the series here.

Public trust: “It is created to promote public welfare and not for the needs of any single individual.” — Black’s Law Dictionary, 2nd Edition

For nearly a quarter century, the commercial press has been caught in an accelerating tailspin: Newsroom revenue is down 80%, the number of daily-newsroom reporters has fallen by nearly 60% and over 2,000 counties lack a daily newspaper. At the same time, trust in news media has fallen from 72% in 1976 to 31% today.

Newsrooms have responded to this crisis by leaning into market-oriented solutions or private philanthropy. They have consolidated and attached themselves to corporate owners; they have chased trends in the digital attention economy; and they have turned into non-profits that require the patronage of the wealthy and the engagement of affluent audiences. Nevertheless, journalism’s financial tailspin continues to accelerate, and thousands of newsroom jobs continue to be lost every year. 

As independent, community-based newsrooms disappeared from much of America, democracy has suffered. As a country, we need professional truth-seekers who make power legible and produce a common base of widely-accepted information that enables every local community to self-govern. Without strong independent news gatherers at the top of information supply chains, we are left with fractured, post-truth information ecosystems that leave the public vulnerable to attack from organized private power.

As a country, we can no longer afford to leave news production up to market forces or private philanthropy. Instead, we must reclaim the American tradition of newsgathering as a public trust. Below are three guiding principles for this reorientation. 

Public trusts must be publicly funded

Whether it is our national forests, subway systems, or the fire department, we as a country accept that certain public trusts need to be publicly funded. Just as we don’t expect the fire department to profit from every house it saves, we need to stop expecting that community members will privately fund the newsrooms that protect their communities. 

Publicly funding news production is extremely cheap for a rich country like the United States. As a country, we spend about $3 per person funding public media now, whereas 15 of our peer countries spend an average of $70 per person. We could publicly fund a thriving free press with $10 billion a year or roughly 0.1 percent of the federal budget. That is nothing for a country with a $27 trillion economy and a $7 trillion annual budget.

Public funding does not mean the elimination of private, for-profit journalism. Instead, publicly funding newsrooms in every county would create a base layer that enables the private press to better function.

This is not a new idea. In inflation-adjusted terms, our founders spent tens of billions of dollars to construct a postal system to deliver newspapers. Throughout the 20th century, we created the infrastructure for news to be sent over the public airwaves and facilitated the creation of over 1,000 public media stations.

Public trusts must be protected from politicians, corporations, and the ultra-wealthy

Many newsrooms have resisted public funding, believing that removing themselves from the market would subordinate them to governments. This problem is not unique to journalism. Political influence is an extremely serious concern for any public trust, therefore journalism funding must be fully insulated from politicians. Public financing must be allocated on an indefinite or multi-decade basis, based on simple statutes that leave no room for misinterpretation. No politician or public official should have any discretion in deciding what outlets receive funding. 

At the same time, newsrooms must be protected from private power. Publicly funded newsrooms should be required to be independent of any corporate or philanthropic owners; they should be independent of corporate financing and advertising; their boards of directors should look like the communities that they serve; and their employees should live throughout the community. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its foreign equivalents already impose many of these requirements upon publicly funded newsrooms.

Public trusts must be protected by and accountable to the public 

Instead of control by politicians, corporations, or the ultra-wealthy, publicly funded newsrooms should be embedded within the public. Newsrooms should be intentionally designed to gather the news that the public needs. These features will also enable the public to protect press independence from encroachment by governments and private citizens.

Once funding has been allocated to local communities, citizens themselves should decide what outlets get funding. We could do this by assigning public news subscriptions to the outlets, which has been proposed in Washington D.C. and Seattle. This way, news outlets are incentivized to serve community members first and every community member equally. 

Alternatively, funding and governance of public newsrooms can be done through periodic citizen assemblies — randomly selected, quasi-representative samples of the public which have been used elsewhere to decide public policy issues big and small, from constitutional amendments to the use of discretionary dollars in a city neighborhood. These can be empaneled every few years to decide which local outlets deserve public funding and provide feedback to newsrooms on the informational needs of the community. 

Lastly, we could double down on our existing public media stations and simply entrust each of them with greater funding in exchange for reforms that will more thoroughly embed them within the communities that they serve. Most importantly, stations’ governing boards should be required to reflect the economic and geographic diversity of the communities that they serve. 

The death of professional news production is not destiny. It could be reversed by a single act of Congress that could fit on an index card: 0.1% of all federal spending shall be reserved for news production, distributed based on the population of each local community, solely by members of the public.

Still, those who wish to reclaim journalism as a public trust do not need to wait for Congress to act. We can seek stable, long-term public funding for journalism through ballot initiatives or from local and state governments. We can insist that this funding be distributed by members of the public. We must accept that there is no new business model and no philanthropist who will save our free press. We, as the public, must do that work ourselves.  

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Michael Swerdlow is the author of The Public’s Media, a report that calls for stable public funding and community representation in public news media. He is a former researcher at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, has assisted with various federal antitrust investigations, and advised policymakers on antitrust reform at the state and federal level.

This piece was edited by Bettina Chang. Copy edits by James Salanga. Fact-checking by Bashirah Mack.