But I think that the current newspapers, although they talk civic responsibility, do not seem to be turning themselves into nonprofit business models very quickly, which is what I think it’s going to take. So I think, essentially, to get the right mix of both publicly subsidized—not just in terms of money but also publicly supported in terms of time—journalistic organizations is really going to take a catastrophe. Because I don’t trust the current generation of newspapers to actually mean what they say when they talk about civic mission, because none of them are saying, “We were in a hurry to get out from under this for-profit model that’s preventing us from living up to that civic function.” All they’re really saying is, “If we’re saying ‘civic function’ often enough, somebody ought to throw us a bailout,” which, you know, is no different from what GM is doing, which might be what I did if I were a CEO of a newspaper. But, it’s not, I think, an argument that needs to be taken seriously, because the self-dealing is so evident.

RJ: That’s pretty interesting. I like that kind of interpretation of it; it’s something that I haven’t heard.

CS: Is that right?

RJ: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense that these are businesses coming up with reasons to try and get the public behind them without actually shifting to a non-profit model. That’s pretty interesting.

CS: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I’ve been having this conversation about what happens to newspapers since 1993, when I met a guy named Gordy Thompson, who may still work at the Times. He did text stuff for the Times, he did Internet stuff for the Times. The people who were part of that conversation are all sitting around stunned that, somehow, in 2008, newspapers have decided that the Internet is going to be a pretty big deal. I feel like I got into the conversation late, because Brad Templeton founded ClariNet in ’88, which is the first really clear, visible, counter-newspaper journalistic model launched in a practical way. And it’s literally twenty years since ClariNet came out. And it wasn’t—I was talking to a friend of mine, a very smart reporter, who said, in 2005, “It was only this year that I realized that we’re in a dying industry.” And I just stared at her, like how could that possibly happen? And she said, “When the dot-com flame out happened, instead of newspapers saying, ‘Huh, we just bought ourselves eighteen months. Right, let’s restructure,’ they all said, ‘Oh good, we were afraid we were going to have to change there for a while.’” But now we see the Internet isn’t actually going to change anything.

And then we spent the next three years not talking about [newspapers’] civic function, but talking about how profitable they were. I think, in fact, 2005 may have been the most profitable year in the Times’s history. The people now complaining about civic function, you could not find one of them in 2005 who was talking about anything but financial upside for the newspaper industry. So they’ve discovered civic function—and this is why I don’t trust them—they’ve discovered civic function awfully late to be taken seriously. Except, again, for NPR. People who talk about civic function and have built non-profit business models really mean it. People who talk about civic function as a way of shaking loose some nickels from somebody or other who will sponsor them, you know, whatever. That’s just self-dealing.

There is one other thing that I think is kind of interesting: Jeff Jarvis has been spending a lot of time blaming the newspapers themselves, and blaming news organizations in general. But especially blaming newspapers. And I thought he was being a little harsh. And I then I saw—I don’t know if you saw the Associated Press International thing, where they invited a bunch of CEOs of news organizations to a “summit.” Looking at that stuff, looking at, essentially, the conversation on the business side that newspapers are having with themselves—it made me realize something about the weakness of these institutions in the era of the Web that I had not understood before. Which is that the Chinese wall, right, the idea of advertisements as separate from the journalists, was successful enough and widespread enough and essentially honored in speech, if not always in action… that was a serious enough barrier that it actually kept the journalists themselves from thinking through their own business model. A lot of working journalists, and especially print journalists, are in the position of being sort of kept women. They don’t really understand where the money comes from but, you know, their particular sugar daddy seems pretty flush, so they just never gave it much thought. And then one day the market crashes and they suddenly discover, “Wait a minute, we were a business? And our revenues had to exceed our expenses every year? Why wasn’t I informed?”

And I think one of the reasons that journalists, in particular, are so stunned by this is not that they just didn’t happen to think about the previous business model, right? Like, why is it that the guy sitting in Mosul in a flak jacket is being subsidized by Bonwit Teller? You wouldn’t make this up from scratch, it just doesn’t make much sense. But, that’s just how the industry’s grown up. But they never thought those thoughts, because not only did they not have to, they were kind of encouraged not to. And so, I think at least part of the disorientation now isn’t just discovering the business model of print journalism today as a bad fit for the environment. It’s discovering that print journalism doesn’t survive without a business model at all. And that’s the legacy of the Chinese wall.