Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop. If you can imagine a situation that absurd, then you are ready to partake in the Future of Context panel that I’ll be part of at the South by Southwest festival in Austin next week.

Here are some of my ideas, questions and puzzlers in advance of that event. I am posting them today in hopes of generating a discussion I can use to improve my performance in Austin. (It’s already happening, see the comments.)

1. Why are we serving people the news without the background narrative necessary to make sense of the news? I first became interested in this problem after listening to The Giant Pool of Money, the awesomely effective one-hour This American Life episode that finally explained to me what the mortgage banking crisis was, how it happened and why it implicated… well, just about everyone. I was grateful, because up to that moment I had absorbed many hundreds of reports about “subprime lenders in trouble” but had not understood a single one of them.

It wasn’t that these reports were uninformative. Rather, I was not informable because I lacked the necessary background knowledge to grasp what was being sent to me as news. On the other hand there was no easy way for me to get that background and make myself informable because the way our news system works, it’s like the updates to the program arrive whether you have the program installed or not! Which is rather messed up. But what do we do about it? The first thing I did is write my 2008 post, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. So if you want to help me out, start there.

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The New York Times and NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute announced yesterday that they will collaborate on a news site serving the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It will be called The Local: East Village, and it will appear on the nytimes.com. The site will be edited and produced at NYU.

In this post, I will explain what we’re up to and why we’re doing it. I don’t speak for the editors of the Times, but I have been discussing the East Village project with them for over a year and I have some sense of what brought them to this collaboration. And it is a collaboration: NYU will produce the site; the Times will publish it. The Times will provide the online platform and strong editorial guidance; NYU will try to bring the East Village community to that platform and innovate on it.

Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiative for the Times, said the project was made possible by shared values, a single set of standards, the most important of which is “increasing the volume and scope of quality journalism about issues that matter.”

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This is a post about a single line in a recent article in the New York Times: Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right.

Before I get to the line that interested me, I need to acknowledge that the investigation the Times undertook for this article is wholly admirable and exactly what we need professional journalists to be doing. Reporter David Barstow spent five months—five months!—reporting and researching the Tea Party phenomenon.

He went to their events. He talked to hundreds of people drawn into the movement. He watched what happens at their rallies and the smaller meetings where movement politics is transacted. He made himself fully literate, learning the differences between the Tea Party and the Patriot movements, reading the authors who have infuenced Tea Party activists, getting to know local leaders and regional differences, building up a complex and layered portrait of a political cohort that doesn’t fit into party politics as normally understood.

This is original reporting at a very high level of commitment to public service; it is expensive, difficult, and increasingly rare in a news business suffering under economic collapse.

So I want to make it absolutely clear that I treasure this kind of journalism and indeed devoured Barstow’s report when it came online. (Although I wish it had been twice as long.) And I have no problem with his decision to confine himself to description of the Tea Party movement, rather than evaluating its goodness or badness. The first task is to understand, and that is why we need reporters willing to go out there and witness the phenomenon, interview the participants, pore over the texts and struggle with their account until they feel they have it right.

“A narrative of impending tyranny.”

As Barstow said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, “If you spend enough time talking to people in the movement, eventually you hear enough of the same kinds of ideas, the same kinds of concerns, and you begin to recognize what the ideology is, what the paradigm is that they’re operating in.” The key words are spend enough time and begin to recognize.

Now to the part that puzzles me:

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters — from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny…That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story. The New York Times has done a lot of reporting about the Obama Administration, but it has been silent on the collapse of basic freedoms lurking just around the corner. Barstow commented on the sentence that disturbed me in his interview with CJR:

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

As a matter of reported fact

Now we can predict, with a reasonable degree of confidence, what the reply would be from the reporter, his editors (who are equally involved here, as the Times is a very editor-driven newspaper) and his peers in the press. The reply is the reply that is given by the common sense of pro journalism as it is practiced in the United States. “This was a news story, an attempt to report what’s happening out there, as accurately and fairly as possible. Which is not the place for the author’s opinion.” Or: “I was trying to describe the Tea Party movement, and to understand it, which is hard enough; I’ll let others judge what to make of it.”

Sounds good, right? But this distinction, between fact and opinion, description and assessment, is not what my question is about. It may appear to be responsive, but it really isn’t. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but… as a matter of reported fact, is the United States actually on the verge of tyranny? That is my question. Would an honest depiction of the American political scene by the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times lend support to the “impending tyranny” narrative that Barstow observed as a unifying theme in the Tea Party movement?

It’s a key point, so let me state it again: Based not on a subjective assessment of the Tea Party’s viability or his opinion of its desirability but only on facts he knows about the state of politics and government since Obama’s election, is there any substantial likelihood of a tyranny replacing the American republic in the near future?

I think it’s obvious—not only to me but to Barstow and the journalist who interviewed him for CJR—that the answers are “no.” For if the answers were “yes” it would have been a huge story! No fair description of the current situation, nothing in what the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times has picked up from its reporting, would support a characterization like “impending tyranny.”

In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so— despite the fact that they must have spent over $100,000 on this one story. And whatever that thing is, it’s not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the “narrative of impending tyranny” is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.

A faltering sense of reality

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That’s what created the pattern I’ve called “regression to a phony mean.” That’s what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.

I explained the quest for innocence in a 2008 essay on campaign coverage for tomdispatch.com. (It also ran in Salon.)

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there’s an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion.

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! As it did in Barstow’s account. Now let’s speed up the picture and imagine how this interference in truth-telling happens routinely, many times a day over years and years of reporting on politics. What’s lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about. In its place is savviness, the dialect of insiders trying to persuade us that they know how things really work. Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than statements like “in politics, perception is reality.”

“For some reason, American political coverage is exempt.”

And in fact frustrated observers of political journalism have complained about this loss of the real. The latest to groan about it is George Packer in the New Yorker. He was commenting on how David Broder of the Washington Post, the dean emeritus of political reporters, had written a surreal column about Sarah Palin that nonetheless seemed entirely normal if you know the genre:

Broder wasn’t analyzing Palin’s positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesn’t seem in the least bit odd, and it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Italics mine. Packer’s point becomes clearer when he transplants this kind of reportng to Afghanistan with the sense of reality dropped out. “Imagine Karzai’s recent inaugural address as covered by a Washington journalist,” he writes:

“Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, “If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist.” Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzai’s own inner circle.

This sounds like politics the way our journalists narrate it, but as Packer notes, “A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.” Exactly. That’s the exemption Barstow was calling on when he wrote. “… running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.” Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

I leave you with a question: how the hell could this happen?

Recently I was asked to speak at a conference organized by Yale University with the title “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” This irritated me. The question should have been “who will subsidize news production?” because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something. Very rarely have users paid directly the costs of editorial production.

So here’s my list of known sources of subsidy, with examples to illustrate each. What I have left out please put in the comments and I will edit the list. If you have a link that provides an example, that would help a lot.

1. Government can subsidize, through general tax revenues. As in some Scandanavian countries. (Here’s history lesson and argument for it.)

2. Rate-payers can subsidize, a solution that has to be enforced by government. As with the BBC license fee, or proposals to require Internet Service Providers to support journalism through a surcharge.

3. Political interests can subsidize the press, as with the party press in 19th century America or labor’s willingness to fund some new media operations today.

4. Philanthropy is a possible source of subsidy, as with the rolling grants that Paul Bass secures for the New Haven Independent, or the donations that have flowed to the start-up, Texas Tribune.

5. Rich egoists will sometimes subsidize, as with Mort Zuckerman’s ownership of The Atlantic magazine from 1980 to 1999.

6. Advertisers are of course the most common subsidizers, though as Clay Shirky says, Best Buy never signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau. They just didn’t have a choice. Plus, the advertisers can now go direct to consumers and become publishers themselves.

7. Entertainment and the revenues it produces can subsidize news production, as with the early days of network television, when the news divisions lost money. Good old fashioned sensationalism also fits under this heading.

8. Soft news can subsidize the hard, as with travel and food sections that pay for other kinds of coverage. (A point suggested by Richard Gingras of Salon.)

9. Unrelated businesses are sometimes a source of subsidy, as with the Washington Post Company’s ownership of the highly profitable Stanley Kaplan company.

10. Then there’s logically–related businesses, as with Bloomberg L.P. and Thomson Reuters, both of which make big money providing data to businesses and then subsidize news production (mostly business news) from that. (More on selling data.) The Economist has its “intelligence unit,” which works in a similar way. (Hat tip, Klint Finley.) Another related business would be web services–setting up a website or social media tools–to the people formerly known as the advertisers. Here’s one example, in pdf form. A second, from knoxnews.com.

UPDATE, May 2010: Gannet announces a plan to provide consulting services to the people formerly known as the advertisers.  Meanwhile, a community news start-up, The Sacramento Press, makes $30,000 of its $86,000 in revenues by consulting with local businesses who need help being effectice online.

11. Clever spin-offs can subsidize editorial costs, as with Techdirt’s Insight Community, basically a focus group business featuring the highly informed community that gathers at Techdirt. At the level of the stand alone journalist, this becomes: “Some people who blog make money because they blog,” as against making money from the blog itself.

12. Educational institutions–especially university-based journalism schools–can be a source of subsidy, as with the partnership between Northeastern University’s journalism program and the Boston Globe.

13. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly likely to sponsor or support journalistic work, often in partnership with traditional news producers.

14. Love is a factor. High earning spouses sometimes subsidize stand alone journalists with start-up sites. Middle-to-upper class parents subsidize college students working at newsroom internships.

15. Live events, for which there is an admission charge.  As with magazine conferences or this event: “KCRW & NPR Present ‘Planet Money – Live!’ at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.”

16. E-commerce, also known as selling stuff, sometimes works, as with Techdirt’s “Connect with Fans and give them a reason to buy” program.

17. The most passionate users (those who can afford it) will sometimes subsidize the production of news available to all users through small donations, as with public radio’s membership model in the U.S., or Firedoglake at the Libby Trial, or the community-funding platform spot.us and its garbage patch story.

18. Premium memberships: those who pay get extra benefits,  and thus help to subsidize the rest. An example of an extra benefit: fruitful interaction with highly informed journalists. (Here’s the Guardian’s version of that.)

19. Many think a future source of subsidy will be lead generation. It means providing good information to businesses on who is exceptionally likely to buy– for a fee. One company doing it now is the technology trade publisher IDG. (Hat tip, Berend Hilberts.)

20. Not common, but it is possible. A church or religious group can subsidize, as with the Christian Science Monitor. (Hat tip to Whet Moser)

21. Start a great news franchise, and license it to other news organizations, pocketing the fees.  The example here is Politifact.com, the Pulitzer-Prize winning fact checker site started by the St. Petersburg Times, which has now spread itself to six states, licensing the idea.

Subsidy ideas in development:

Scott Karp of publish2.com writes of the possibility of high value advertising that would represent a conceptual break with the whole display ad regime. If such a system existed it would be added to my list as a different type of subsidy. The idea is to create advertising of such quality and informational value to users that it enhances the value of high-end editorial production.  According to Michael Boyle in the comments, high value advertising has been working for a while at specialty sites like theheart.org for medical professionals.

Currently in development are voluntary micropayment systems, which would represent a new type of subsidy. No one knows if they’ll be successful, of course. Two to watch are Emanci-pay (“a choosing system… readers, listeners and viewers can easily choose to pay whatever they like, whenever they like, for the media goods they use”) and Kachingle (“crowdfunding sites you love.”)

Also in the concept phase is Lyn Headley’s restrospective funding model for news. “A retrospective news medium is an organization that bestows a continuing stream of awards, each with a monetary component, on the producers of the best pieces of journalism it finds, shortly after each piece is published.”

On Twitter, C.W. Anderson asks the following question: if the rumors come true, and Microsoft pays News Corp. to exit from Google search and deal exclusively with Bing, which category of subsidy would that be?  That would be #20, indexing rights. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Some notes: I do not talk about subscriptions or paywalls in this post, because those are not a subsidy system: they’re direct payment for editorial goods. We get that system.

This interview with one of the founders of the Sacramento Press demonstrates how in practice born-on-the-web news sites combine various sources of subsidy to make a go of it. Nos. 6, 10 and 15 are mentioned.

Official notices carried as ads are a less direct form of government subsidy, kind of a combination of #1 and #6. (Hat tip, John McQuaid.)

Kevin Coates in the comments says: “The BBC has a profit-making arm which among other things, commercializes rate-payer funded content in other geographic markets. Profits go back to the BBC to supplement the rate-payer funds. Similar to your #7, but revenue does not just come from entertainment (e.g, if you view the BBC news website in the US, you see ads; in the UK, you don’t.)

Here’s an interesting model: crowdsource a recurring feature and over time it adds up to a book you can sell. You can also crowdsource demand and use print-on-demand publishing.

Worth mentioning is the newsroom-as-cafe concept, which appears to be succeeding in the Czech Republic. Here, the idea is to take a business that already works–the bustling cafe–and turn it into a news gathering operation. Different.

Bonnie Bucqueroux: “So why not re-think the job of reporters and editors, transforming it into a multi-task position that combines journalism, consulting and teaching?”  Some worthy speculations relevant to this post.

Laura Lorek in the comments. “News as Art or Gifts – Newspapers get subsidized by selling photos, t-shirts, coffee mugs and commemorative issues around a special event or everyday news. This may be a small subsidy but in the age when everyone wants digital delivery, the nostaglia for printed products is a real marketplace.”