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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll talk with Whitney Museum Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul about the exhibit Harold Cohen, AARON. It's about a historic invention in the world of art, making AI, Artificial Intelligence. We'll also speak with author Bianca Bosker about how she embedded herself in New York's art scene to discover what makes art "good", who profits, and why it seems to have its own language. NPR's Andrew Bernstein joins us to catch us up on all the many civil and criminal cases facing former President Donald Trump.

That is our plan. Let's get this started with the many trials and tribulations facing the media industry.

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Alison Stewart: Here is a line from a recent Hollywood reporter piece that is accurate and chilling for those who work in news and those who want quality journalism. "The media sector is facing a crisis unlike anything seen since the 2008 financial mess, with layoffs and cost-cutting at every turn. Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Business Insider, Pitchfork, and the Wall Street Journal are just a few of the outlets that announced layoffs in recent weeks. A once hopeful online news outlet, The Messenger, abruptly shut down a few days ago. The Los Angeles Times owner signaled that 115 newsroom positions would go. Those layoffs come with an additional layer of intrigue.

There have been public accusations that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the LA Times for $500 million in 2018, has allegedly tried to exercise influence over the paper's editorial arm, as has his daughter. He's not the only billionaire to buy a journalism outlet. Time Magazine, the central publication of Time Inc., was bought by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff in 2018 for $190 million. In late January Time, laid off around 30 staffers. Jeff Bezos spent $250 million to acquire the Washington Post in 2013. Last fall, the post eliminated 240 jobs. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Bezos now wants the post to be profitable.

Deep-pocketed people who like profits may want to invest in journalism, but at what cost to those who report and write, and perhaps more critically, the cost to the reading public and to our democracy?" Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University, and he writes about media. He joins us to discuss all of it. Hi, Jay. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jay Rosen: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. What are your thoughts about the layoffs in the news media? What does that mean to you? News consumers, how is your relationship with the news changed? Are you reading more sources, fewer, relying more on social media, or less? What are you feeling about the legacy papers like the New York Times and Washington Post versus online outlets like Politico? Do you find yourself seeking counter-programming? Do you have news fatigue? Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You may call in and join us on air. You also can text that number. Our social media is available as well @allofitwnyc.

Again, the number to call or text, 212-433-9692, 212433-WNYC. Jay, why is the media faltering now as opposed to 2008, like that quote in the Hollywood Reporter said?

Jay Rosen: Well, there's a wealth of reasons all converging at the same time. Probably the most important one is that digital advertising has been taken over by the big platform companies, and less and less dollars are available there for media properties to gain a revenue stream. That's part of it. Another part of it is that news sites have lost direct connection to many of their users, readers, listeners, which is taken over by the platforms, and they are struggling to create programs like podcasts and newsletters that come directly to users and are directly valued by them. That's another problem.

As you said in your lead-in, many of the very rich people who have supported news media are discovering that it's harder than they thought, and that's a problem. There's increased mistrust of the news media as well as a kind of exhaustion with the news and following the news. There's a worldwide trend, actually, to news exhaustion where people just give up on it and feel it's too hard to figure out what's going on or just too depressing. That's become a problem as well. All of these things are happening at once, and we no longer have the belief that a rich person's going to solve it or that Silicon Valley will come forward with startup money that can bloom into a strong mind product.

Nobody believes that anymore. All those things together are happening, and that's one of the reasons people are getting laid off.

Alison Stewart: When and why did the rich guy come to the rescue narrative begin?

Jay Rosen: Oh, it's quite old. It's happened so many times over the years. A lot of people who've made a lot of money somehow believe that the reason it's so hard to get new sites profitable is that they just haven't had proper discipline from people who really know business. Once they get involved, like the LA Times owner, they see that it's a lot more complicated than that and it's a really difficult business. Media, in the larger sense, is a difficult business, but news media is even more so, and so this illusion sets in after a certain period of time, and that's happened in the case of the LA Times, it seems, and it could be happening to others.

At the same time, sometimes there are rich people who are members of a community, like the guy who owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Glen Taylor, who really invests in that city because they love that place, and they don't necessarily want to own a newspaper anywhere else. It's Minneapolis that they want to help improve. That relationship tends to go a little bit differently than rich companies buying up dying assets, which is happening to many other newspapers around the country.

Alison Stewart: I want to circle back to the Los Angeles Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong. Are there other cases where the person who bought a journalism outlet allegedly didn't honor the firewall between commerce and journalism?

Jay Rosen: Sure. That happens constantly. People who own the newspaper, used to be a paper, often say that they're going to protect this, and they're going to be sure of that. Often, the reason that people want to own news properties in the first place is to have influence. You can expect them to try and exercise that influence. It would be great if we had rich owners who were generous with their money and who stayed completely outside the news cycle and didn't interfere at all, but it rarely happens.

Alison Stewart: What part of this conversation is about the search for a sustainable business model in journalism?

Jay Rosen: I teach my students that every form of public service journalism, including WNYC, is subsidized by something, and every subsidy system has strengths and weaknesses, and problems with it, and advantages as well. Subsidy systems come in to power and go out of power, and they expire because the world changes, technology changes, markets change. There's no real perfect answer to that question. Even a very rich person who owned your newspaper and said wonderful things about freedom of the press can turn and can exercise a different kind of influence.

It is a standing problem that we have to keep solving. We don't solve it once and get a secure answer. We have to keep solving it. Right now, it's a particularly difficult time for every subsidy system known to humankind in the provision of news.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU. We're discussing tough times for news and media. Listeners, we're taking your calls and your texts. What are your thoughts on the layoffs in the news media? What does it mean to you as a news consumer? How has your relationship with the news changed? Are you reading more sources, fewer, relying more or less on social media? What are your feelings about legacy outlets versus online outlets. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC is our number to call in and join us on air or to text us. Social media is available as well @allofitwnyc. Jay, let's take a few calls. Let's talk to Robin calling in from Queens. Hello, Robin.

Robin: Hi. After COVID, I looked closely at how I received information and not going down the rabbit hole of social media. I actually take my granddaughter to the library because I learned how to read by reading an actual newspaper, The New York Times. I take her to the library to show her research tools that you can use besides your phone to find information. I think the young people of today are missing that wonderful resource of a newspaper and actually reading different ones from different cities to get an opinion on people around the country.

Alison Stewart: Robin, she sounds like she's lucky to have you in her life. Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Jay from Bergen County, New Jersey. Hello, Jay.

Jay: Hi. Thank you for putting me on. I kind of agree with Mr. Rosen. I think the mainstream media sources have lost their credibility, and it's just for myself, I don't watch mainstream media, I don't read mainstream newspapers. I get my sources of information about the world online. It's just very frustrating when we can't, and maybe it's a reflection of our politics. Maybe we're just too polarized, but we can't seem to agree on basic facts. When I turn on the TV and listen to a news source or read a newspaper, it all sounds like advocacy. It sounds like hack journalism, somebody is trying to sell me something. It seems like a new source has to adopt a particular perspective that I don't necessarily share.

What happened to good old-fashioned, just the facts and presented it in a more sterile way instead of just advocacy? I think the mainstream news sources have lost their credibility. At least for me, they have, and it's very, very frustrating.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Jay: I think maybe journalism should have, like other professions, an ethical code with some bite to make sure that it's not spin and they're sticking with the facts. Maybe that would help. I don't know.

Alison Stewart: Jay, I'm going to dive in here because you brought up so many good points. Thank you for calling in, call back again. That's interesting [chuckles] what Jay was saying, Jay Rosen, the idea of an ethical code. I thought there was an ethical code. That's what I learned back in the day-

Jay Rosen: Of course, there is.

Alison Stewart: -but I'm old.

[laughter]

Jay Rosen: Society of Professional Journalists has a very well-known ethical code, and what's on it is also very well known. I think the complaint was maybe that people aren't following it as closely as they should be. I think it's important to add here that while there's frustration with both sides, and we often complain about how partisan everything is, and how we can't agree on what reality is. Those conditions didn't come into journalism from nowhere. Some of that, not all, but some of that is a direct result of a political method that MAGA and the new right-wing that we have been witnessing the birth of so often came up with as a political tool.

Steve Bannon is famous for saying, "The Democrats are not the real problem. The opposition is the media and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with crap." Very well-known quote of his. What he means is, you can overwhelm the information system by just putting a lot of junk on it, and repeating yourself, and finding new ways to say what you've been saying. Some of it may be true, a lot of it isn't true. The art of not just distracting people, but overwhelming them with too much information, most of which is junk, some of which might be true. That's a political method for discrediting bad news and motivating people to only listen to news that reinforces their point of view.

That's a political tactic. When we complain about the two parties can't agree on anything and partisanship is so bad, we should keep in mind that this is a strategy.

Alison Stewart: It brings me back to the beginning of our conversation. Part of having a robust newsroom, having a robust press is the ability to have enough people, enough resources to handle the onslaught in theory. With all of these cuts, you can imagine a small newsroom or a local newsroom not being able to handle all of this.

Jay Rosen: Yes, but the cost of creating crap is so low compared to the difficulty of fact-checking all that crap that you can never get ahead.

Alison Stewart: We are discussing tough times for news and media with Jay Rosen, journalism professor from NYU. We are taking your calls as well. Let's talk to Peter on line 5 who is calling in from Brooklyn. Good afternoon, Peter.

Peter: Hi there. I'm 71 years old, and I get my news totally digitally, but not from the Facebooks of the world. I haven't touched newsprint in years, but what I do is I subscribe through the paywall for The New York Times and The Washington Post. I feel like I really want to support having the right staff to do quality journalism. At least I'll do it at least through those two outlets. The question is, does that financial model work if a lot more people did what I'm doing? Do we really need rich folks to buy our way out of this or if we were a more responsible subscriber base, at least at some percentage, does the model start to work? What does the financial shape of this thing tell you?

Alison Stewart: Jay, are you in a position to answer that?

Jay Rosen: Yes. Right now, there's maybe three or four national newsrooms that can be supported, mainly, not entirely, but mainly through subscription revenue, which would be The New York Times, most famously, Wall Street Journal, maybe The Financial Times. That's about it. It's not that the idea of readers funding the journalism they value is new or poorly understood, it's that there are so many other ways to get news that are free, which would include, for example, npr.org and all of public radio. There are so many different ways to get news for free.

The cost of reporting, real stories, fact-checking, getting the actual truth out, open to complexity, the cost of doing that doesn't fall. The number of markets in which you can staff a very strong newsroom and draw the revenue to support it from the subscribers is just limited and it's very difficult. Even if you've got everybody willing to subscribe in some markets, it still wouldn't be enough to fund the newsroom. That's why I said earlier that their subsidy systems, they're all sometimes useful, often they don't work. They need to be reinvented, and we can never find the perfect solution to this problem and right now, we're just having a bad time in that.

Alison Stewart: Our phone lines are full. People are interested in this conversation with Jay Rosen, journalism professor from NYU. We are talking about tough times for the news and media. We'll take more of your calls and have more with Jay Rosen after a very quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU. We're discussing the tough times right now for news and media. This is an interesting text we got, Jay. It says, "The New York Times and Washington Post should not have info on social media so that people have to go to The New York Times or Washington Post website for real news." How has social media interrupted the news industry's connection with its readers?

Jay Rosen: Well, for a lot of people, the way that you get going as a start of the day and orient yourself and learn about what's on the agenda and what's likely to happen is through social media, and you sometimes patronize news sites, but if you do so, it's through finding a link or a lead from social media. The primary relationship people have with new information is mediated through platform companies like Facebook, sometimes what used to be called Twitter, but there are lots of other alternatives. It's like the internet is what informs you, and occasionally you check in on real newsrooms.

That's a very different reality than the pre-internet days when it was actually very difficult and expensive to deliver news to people, whether it was broadcast or print. Now we are living in an age of information abundance in which just by clicking a button, you can deliver news to somebody, and in a sense, journalists are in competition with every other way of spending time on the internet. That is part of the background to this current business model crisis.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jack from Yonkers. Hi, Jack. Thanks for calling in.

Jack: Hi, how are you? Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to make two quick points. I'm actually a professor of design at a university in New York City, and I teach a magazine design class. I talk about the impact of print and digital in our society, and one of the stories I always tell my students right away is if you think about the Taylor Swift Time Magazine cover, the morning that came out, and the editor-in-chief, let's say, went on a Today show, and they're holding up the cover, are they holding up their laptop, showing the website, or are they holding up the actual print magazine?

The reason I bring that up is because there's something very powerful for brands and media about that, the permanence of print. It's not refreshed every 30 seconds or every 15 seconds, and it becomes more of a piece of a relic of our human experience, so therein lies the power of print. Also, the other thing I wanted to say is, you look at the Grammy Awards the other night, every single one of those artists is in there very fortunate because their ability to make money for a record company, and if you look at media vehicles, their ability to make money is just becoming more and more challenging just because there's just way too many sources right now.

Just thinking about that right now, it all comes down to profits and money. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Jack. Thank you so much for calling in with your perspective and your real-world experience. Let's talk to Steve, who has pulled over on the side of Route 80 to talk to us. Hi, Steve. Thanks for pulling over.

Sean: Good afternoon. First correction, my name is Sean. I don't know how that got lost.

Alison Stewart: Oh, sorry, Sean.

Sean: [chuckles] It's only a flesh wound. I've had worse. [laughter] At any rate, a cascade of thoughts, if I may, and I'm just going to share them in a short monologue and look forward to conversing about them. Firstly, when we look backward at the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, Ted Turner turning a profit for the first quarter that he did so with CNN, and then we add in all of the digital media and we compound it with the shortening of the American attention span, both with a little bit of Alvin Toffler and also with the failure to pay our people a living wage, it's no surprise that we're here.

The real question is, how do we get back? How do we get back and say, "Okay, you're a trillionaire? Guess what? Your platform now requires you to do impartial news." We also need to legally require that a source says, "I am news. I am impartial. I am the facts. I am opinion," in their description of who they are, so when you press the button, you know whether you're getting the truth or whether you're getting some fool running their mouth.

Alison Stewart: Sean, thank you for calling in. I don't think we're going to go back to monoculture. When he talks about the early days of CNN, I think that horse is out of the barn. Something else that Sean wanted to mention, and we bunch of texts about it, Jay, is the role of the fairness doctrine in all of this.

Jay Rosen: This is a complicated thing. It's probably not the right medium to talk about it. There was, at one time, something called the Fairness Doctrine, which people in the broadcast industry believed, and to some degree, it was true that they had to tell both sides, or they had to be open to telling both sides of controversial subjects, and a lot of people believed that somehow the demise of that philosophy led to the problems that we're talking about today. I don't think that's accurate history. I think if you like both sides journalism and see no problems with it and think that hearing what this group of people says and then hearing what that group of people says is a good way to get solid information, then maybe you would've loved the the Fairness Doctrine.

In any event, we very rarely pass legislation these days even to fund the government, so the idea that we're going to return to the days of the fairness doctrine and pass legislation that would cement that seems very farfetched to me, but a lot of people think it was some sort of turning point in this story, and I don't really buy that.

Alison Stewart: I want to touch on something else that Sean talked about, news versus opinion. There's been a lot of conversation about opinion pages. The New York Times recently under scrutiny for some of the choices made, whether it's Pamela Paul's op-ed about detransitioning, or Senator Tom Cotton's Peace in 2022 calling for the military to get involved with Black Lives Matter protests. Meanwhile, James Bennett, the op-ed editor who lost his job over the Cotton story op-ed wrote this 16,000-word essay in The Economist that said, "The Times problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut down debate altogether."

What are your thoughts on what's happening with The Times op-ed page?

Jay Rosen: It's important to say at the outset that opinion is very popular on digital news sites, including The New York Times. It is there because it's a very reliable generator of traffic, and as you might imagine, the most traffic is generated by the most controversial things or the things that set people off. That's certainly the case with The New York Times' opinion pages, even though they try to be solemn and serious, and informational at the same time. The truth is also that a lot of people are alienated by information or argument that contradicts what they already believe, and this is a problem, but it's also a strategy.

Then that you can generate traffic and, to some degree, revenue by pissing people off, and by being contrarian and by saying this thing you believe actually is wrong, and this is itself a style of journalism, the contrarian style that gets people mad, but it also creates engagement and then engagement can sometimes be turned into revenue. It's another one of these complex puzzles that's preventing us from getting in the quality journalism that we really need.

Alison Stewart: It brings us right back to the top of our conversation about layoffs and finances within the industry. I had asked this question to our audience, and I'm going to ask it to you as well, why do the layoffs in the media, why does that have meaning in the average person's life?

Jay Rosen: It has meaning only because things may be happening in our world that we don't understand, but they are understandable if we have good enough journalism when we patronize it. Getting your bearings, figuring out where things are going, making sure that your family is safe, as in the case of the pandemic, that is what's at stake. People who are are rich and run empires will always have good information available to them, good quality news available to them because they can pay a lot of money for it. What we're discussing here is a darker question, which is, will the public have a source of good information to figure out what's going on and to get its bearings? That, today, unfortunately, Alison, is an open question.

Alison Stewart: Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU. Jay, thank you so much for spending time with us and taking our listeners' calls. Very much appreciate it.

Jay Rosen: My pleasure.

 

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