Inequality & Media Decline
posted by Frank Pasquale
There have recently been a number of conferences on the future of journalism. I think a whole panel could focus on the following factoid, observed by Michael Massing:
Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.
In a winner takes all economy, rewards to those at the top often have little to do with the value of what they create. That’s one reason Massing thinks it’s important for some of the big winners of the digital economy to help those they displace.
December 28, 2009 at 8:34 am
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Responses (4)
Maryland Conservatarian - December 28, 2009 at 11:06 am
Let’s compromise and get rid of both Katie AND NPR.
James Grimmelmann - December 28, 2009 at 11:37 am
That’s one reason Massing thinks it’s important for some of the big winners of the digital economy to help those they displace.
Like Katie Couric?
A.J. Sutter - December 28, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Great video (“value of what they create” link, for those readers who haven’t yet clicked it). But I’m not sure Massing’s proposal is so great:
How does this get us away from market-oriented journalism? This palliates a symptom, but doesn’t address the underlying cause of the disease. I think what’s needed is not only money to help new journalistic and publishing ventures, but a departure from the profit-center ethos in the publishing business, i.e., the idea that each publication and business unit must be profitable on a stand-alone basis. Publishers used to have a notion that their profitable books, newspapers, etc. supported their socially important, money-losing ones. See, e.g., Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books, or even better, Hermann Ullstein’s The Rise and Fall of the House of Ullstein (1943). Today, profitability is deemed constitutive of social importance. Proposals like Massing’s, with its Schumpeteran vocabulary of “innovation” and “reinvention,” don’t seem to break with that view.
My guess is that the renewal of journalism and publishing lies in a non-profit, or at least privately-held, direction, and will have to start out as the proverbial small furry animals in the Age of Tyrannosaurs. The dream of being the next Google is too reptilian an animating spirit.
DCMikeRotch - January 3, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Bailout for journalists? Guess it was only a matter of time. Guess this is how lousy ideas get started…
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