Quick Read
How to pay for News
Forget taxing Google and Facebook. Too big, too powerful.
Fact: Every person reading the news online accesses by a monthly fee paid to an ISP. So add a tax or fee to their bill. Just for news, not entertainment, but big enough to ensure the journalists who make news and the editors who vet the stories can earn a good living.
It’s that simple.
How to structure
Do not pay for shareholders, administrators or others who add cost but not value. In today’s world collaboration can occur online, journalists do not need an office, except perhaps workspace in the three major cities. Provide hotspotting offices paid by the fund, not a private enterprise.
Allow journalists/editors to form groups but each gets paid by their productivity.
How to decide who gets paid
- Journalists register to be paid. Traditional journalists are not hard to qualify. New types need more attention. Journalist signs up for the type of news they cover.
- Weight factor: DIfferent types of news get different factors. A weight of 1.5X would get 1.5 times the base rate. This is intended to not reward click bait, and to ensure that news groups with low audiences but valuable services do not get crowded out; for example, an art critic
- Pay by submissions: Productivity is rewarded. Submissions are weighted as well, to encourage both breaking news (fast but not deep) as well as research pieces that could take months.
- Pay by clicks: Who is reading the stories? How long did they stay (the read time and the stay time should match). Because this is tracked, it provides a much more accurate picture than ratings.
- Pay by feedback: Allow readers to rate stories to give reporters incentive to write better articles.
Checks & Balances: How to get it right
- Establish an independent review board who hears challenges to the weighting system, to who is approved and at what rate.
- Select volunteer commentators, similar to the system used at https://slashdot.org to make ongoing submissions and ratings
- Place the system under the purview of the Ministry of Media and Communications
Imagine if Warner Brothers announced it was closing Parliament because it no longer was providing an acceptable rate of return. Absurd, of course, because Parliament belongs to the people. So how has it happened that Warner Brothers can own the fourth estate and decide to close it? Something has gone terribly wrong with our democratic system, and fixing it requires a full understanding of what went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it.
Proposal: News Fund
The people need the news in order to understand that which the public and private sectors do not want them to know. For this reason, it should be the people, not advertisers, who pay for the news.
The best funding model was developed in the UK in the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1904 that assessed a license fee on every radio owner. Only now, it’s easier. 95% of Kiwis pay fees to an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Adding a license fee to the bill is as easy as GST, which is on all bills. The license fee can be extra, or (if the politicians can overrule the Treasury), why not allocate the GST collected on the ISP bill to be directed to the News Fund?
Let us debate how to fund the News Fund. Watch this space.
Proposal: Fund News
Collecting the funds is easy. How to fairly distribute them to ensure a fully-informed public is harder.
The basic principle is simple. The 4th Estate is shorthand for straight news, not views. In principle, newsmakers do not overlay their own ideology, opinions or bias, as they dig out and present the story. In real life, especially in the era of big-biz news, this is not the case.
The answer is to have a strong set of statements that sets out who the news serves (all the people), that it is expected to be just the news, not the views, and a strong set of checks and balances to keep everyone honest.
Then set up a funding mechanism that accepts the realty of how people work in the Internet Era.
Let’s start with some basic principles:
Stop spending other people’s money
Passing a law taxing Google or Facebook to fund the 4th Estate is wrong. The people fund education to ensure a literate population, even if they don’t have kids. The people fund police to ensure a safe nation, even if they live in a crime-free place. Funding of the news is in the same class of public good. The people should fund it, not the advertisers.
Not all media is the 4th Estate:
The News Fund is to fund news, not views. The newsmakers exist to inform the people, to connect the dots, to give context but not opinion.
If you want to tax the advertisers, that’s fine, but set up a “Views Fund”. There is always a need for opinions, editorials and bias, provided the reader knows they are reading views not news.
The Age of Internet really is different
Big corporations were necessary in an earlier era. But did you ever notice who owns the Internet? No one owns it, no one controls it, even as Facebook, Google and others try. This is the new model, where the News Fund pays the newsmakers, not shareholders and layers of corporate management who are no longer necessary in the age of Internet
Let’s debate ideas:
Why not have Parliament tag all GST collected from ISPs to the News Fund?
Treasury won’t like it, and they act like all general revenue belongs to them, was the first response. The idea of tagging GST will upset civil servants who feel the people’s money is their money. Never-the-less, we, the people, should have that conversation with our elected representatives who should not be cowed by the unelected civil servants.
The advantage is that it is easy to quantify: the sum total of GST collected by ISPs. It also is not a “new” tax whereas adding a license fee to the ISP charge is, and may attract backlash in the political arena.
One question to be determined is the actual cost of the News Fund. The Fund is proposed to emulate the Internet which no one owns, no one controls. Rather it is a series of protocols that work together in the same way biological organisms work. If this system is proposed for the operation of the News Fund, the budget will not include corporate overhead, command-and-control systems and all the other encumbrances that bloat budgets. Someone will have to determine the cost of funding the 4th Estate
An “oath of allegiance to the 4th Estate:
This was a throw-away line in a conversation that sparked this web site. But on reflection, it’s worth talking about. In NZ, one takes an oath of allegiance to the King, the natural person who represents the enduring Crown. In the US, the oath is to the Constitution. In the French regime before the revolution, the First Estate was the clergy who took an oath to the Church and to God.
The 4th Estate is a part of the democratic system. It is an idea, an attitude as much as it a collection of people. There are certain ideas that most people, regardless of their ideological alignment tend to agree upon, and if well stated, the 4th Estate is likely to be one of these. Objectors will raise issues outside the principle of the 4th Estate, usually the what-about citations of someone claiming to be a newsmaker but evidence shows they really are a viewspeaker.
So, here is a challenge. Let’s accept for the moment the News Fund exists to fund, protect and preserve the integrity of the 4th Estate. Define what 4th Estate means.
What does the Age of Internet mean?
Every major shift in technology finds a lag. Newspapers are giving way to laptops at breakfast. Car radios are giving way to Bluetooth streaming of Spotify. The print and broadcast media know their days are numbered, but they are holding on until their paymasters shut them down.
But the transition is more than just moving newspapers to digital media. It is an opportunity to examine the institutions themselves. Why do we need a huge organisation that gets bought and sold, often by overseas corporations, to deliver the job of the 4th Estate?
Below, an idea for a different structure is mooted. The core concept is to preserve the human capital – the exceptionally talented professionals with lifetimes of experience in the job of newsmaking – and to provide a generational career path to bring in young talent to learn the ropes and continue the role of protecting democracy. It’s based on the idea that we look at how the industry works with all the tools of technology of 2024.
COVID lockdowns opened the eyes of mainstream industry that the 20th century model of employees reporting to work in a large, corporate-owned office building is obsolete. The Age of the Internet came of age with the lockdowns (how ironic).
Qualifications Group
QUALIFICATIONS GROUP: This group does not give out money, but decides who should be in the pool. Who are the newsmakers. A newsmaker is a professional who makes the news. Of course this includes the journalist collecting the story, the writer or presenter, as well as the editors, producers and everyone else who has a hand in a story. But who else is in the pool?
The first element in qualifications is to establish a clear set of principles as to why the news exists and who it serves. This must be timeless, thus for example, a statement about Te Tiriti o Waitangi would not be appropriate because it inherently involves an opinion where the leader of the ACT Party and the co-leader of the Green Party vehemently disagree. Funded news exists to inform the people and let them make up their own mind, not to persuade them.
Once this is done, then begin with the known professionals either in active employment now, or in an associated area (like PR) because they were victims of job cuts. Most will probably be in the pool, except for those known to mask their views as news. Don’t automatically exclude the latter, but have a dialogue first. Some do it because bias passes for normal in our corporatised news era, If given the opportunity to become newsmakers rather than viewspeakers, to coin a word, they may agree to take the oath of allegiance to the 4th Estate.
This “oath of allegiance” is said somewhat tongue in cheek, although there is a kernel of truth in it. Not allegiance to journalism, but to the obligation to the people to inform in an unbiased way.
Allocation Group
ALLOCATIONS GROUP: This group provides annual funding (one year in advance, to enable planning) to news makers who are in the pool.
The easy way to fund is a bad idea. With broadband, every click is counted and how long the eyeballs stay on the story. Do you pay by click/minute? No. Bad Idea. It may be a good start, but it tends to rig the game in favour of the 800 pound gorillas in the jungle.
Instead rate journalists and organisations by how hard they worked – is the article a patsy, or did they dig hard and long? Rate them on their political leanings… do they subject both sides to the same hard talk or give a pass to their favoured side. Build in a component that rewards budding young journalists while supporting the seasoned hacks who pass on the cultural thread that only experience can bring.
Evaluate the cheap shots: if it bleeds it leads, with the more nuanced stories that uphold the role of the 4th estate. And this brings up another distinction. The fast breaking news story is easy. Show up, record witnesses or officials, summarise it and get it online. But good news also needs those dig-deep stories that can take weeks or months even. Both need funding.
Of especial importance is the Universal Declaration on Human Rights that includes the right to work – a right not found in the NZ Bill of Rights. Cancel culture means journalists who go against the party line not only lose their job but their career. In the end, democracy loses. In the USA, the civil liberties union defended the right of people they abhorred (such as KKK members) to free speech. The News Fund must defend the free press in the same manner.
Infrastructure
In the old days, newsmakers worked in a newsroom, a television or radio station or a similar facility owned by an institution where everyone reported to work. Today that is being replaced by the laptop, the smart phone and the other portable tools of the trade that does not require the same level of overhead.
But newsmakers still need the social network. The more we digitise the more we need to humanise. This suggests a different form of organisational structure:
Shared Space: For the front-line newsmakers, have the News Fund lease shared space offices where newsmakers can not only do their solo work on their laptop, but talk with their colleagues because they are all in the same physical space. This is especially important to mix the seasoned legends in the newsmaking business who have an encyclopedic memory and have been around since forever. Provide big spaces in the major urban centres, rent free, with meeting rooms and office equipment (as well as the water cooler where the best news germinates).
Back Office Operations: Does it make sense for five news organisations having their own trucks, camera crews and microphones to attend the same news event? To see the future, look at how fibre optic is provided. One organisation – Vector – operates the hardware. Do the same with the technicians who set up the internet, the web pages, all the geek stuff necessary to get news to the people. Instead of institutions carrying their own, set up three competing backroom operators who serve the frontend newsmakers. Do three not one to keep them on their toes.
The times are a changing
The internet has turned journalism upside down. From one to many (broadcasting), we now have many to anyone anywhere, as anyone can set up a blog and publish what they want. But in that jungle of chaos, the role of the professional newsmaker, while threatened with extinction, remains as important to democracy as ever. The problem is figuring out who will pay the professionals to do their job.
When radio first came on the scene, the UK introduced receiving licences, implemented by the General Post Office (GPO) using powers within the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1904. When TV emerged, it became the TV license. It was difficult to police because the radio waves were everywhere. With broadband it’s a lot easier. Everyone subscribes and pays a monthly fee for the service. It is no more difficult to collect fees for the News Fund as it is to collect GST.
There are two options: one is to establish a percentage fee on top of the subscription. This spreads the burden more evenly, by costing a high-subscription customer more than someone scraping by who buys just enough prepaid to stay online. But why go there when there is another source?
The existing 15% GST charged on every subscription. Why not simply allocate all GST collected to the News Fund? Sure, there will be bureaucrats made very nervous about the precedent of allocating GST to a particular fund. But 15% would raise a significant amount of money, would be easy to manage, and it would be funding one of the most important legs of a democratic system.
The News Fund: Who should pay?
It’s always easier to spend other people’s money… “Google is getting rich on advertising, let’s have them pay to replace the ads in newspapers and on TV.” Sorry, that’s not how democracy works best. A US Congressman once described the founding of his pioneering wild-west town. We valued education, so we called a meeting, voted to tax ourselves to build a school and hire a teacher.” That is the finest statement of democracy. We value, we pay. In doing this, the news makers: the journalists, reporters, editors, producers and everyone who gets the news to us knows who they serve… the people and communities of our nation. All of us, not one sector. Democracy does not have one view, it has many, and it is from the public debate comes the wisdom of crowds. Fair and balanced news is easier when the paymaster are the people, note Facebook. Who should pay? You and me.
“Yes, the disruption of the Internet can be blamed for the destruction of the business model that once made journalism a thriving, well-paying enterprise, but it has also created an array of new tools for reporting. Somebody will eventually figure out how to make online newspapers profitable – I hope. David Horsey