By Guest Contributor Carla Norton
Carla Norton has written two books of nonfiction, Disturbed Ground and the New York Times bestseller Perfect Victim. Her work has appeared in various publications, including California Lawyer, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times. She worked as an editor for the Japanese edition of Reader’s Digest and as a special sections editor for the San Jose Mercury News.
The Rocky Mountain News is folding. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a host of others are struggling to avoid the same fate. Thanks to the internet, newspaper readership is in decline while journalists have never reached such wide audiences, a sad irony.
Some debate whether we even need the Fourth Estate, whether “citizen journalists” could not fill the void. Read comments posted in response to any article and you have your answer. (This is not snobbish. You can also do your own plumbing or cut your own hair. But without watchdog journalists, the country would suffer more than just a bad hair day.)
Freedom of the press is the cornerstone of democracy for a reason. Let’s just agree that healthy newspapers are essential and move on to the deeper question: How can we keep journalists employed?
There are grumblings about billing readers, but the plans floated sound cumbersome, and might hurt readership more than help it.
Is the obvious answer taboo?
Just as advertisers pay for newsprint, so should they pay for screen time. And not just with the ads embedded in online news.
Consider: Yahoo! and Google and other such companies benefit directly from journalists’ content. We readers have it emailed, homepaged, linked and bookmarked. “My Yahoo!” gives access to articles written by journalists employed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, and a wide selection of other sources.
Many of us mainly go to our homepages to read the local news. Confess, fellow news junkies, you do it daily, and for long periods of time.
Who benefits? The host site and the advertisers that catch your attention (and then coax you to print coupons and mapquest addresses).
Psst! Yahoo! Google! Pass it on!
Can they actually calculate how much they benefit from journalists’ content? Sure, they do it constantly. Just as Amazon.com “recognizes” you and knows which books to suggest, websites everywhere collect so-called “click-stream data.” This technology follows where you surf and how long you stay there. It’s so widespread it’s invisible, like air.
What the host sites collect in revenue should be shared proportionally with the news sources that supply content. (Curious about revenue? Check this out.
Until then, readers must help support their favorite newspapers. The obvious thing is to subscribe, but there’s more you can do.
That’s right: Go ahead, click on an ad.