With news funding models under pressure in early 2009, John Honderich, the former publisher of The Toronto Star, set out five possible ways of keeping quality investigative journalism paid for. His framing question was “Whither serious print journalism?”, and among the ideas he weighed was the plan by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy to pay for newspaper subscriptions for every 18-year-old.
The response here accepted that the piece was carefully argued, but singled out one assumption underneath it: that the task is saving a media format, the newspaper, rather than saving a kind of journalism. Newspapers have been the vehicle for powerful investigative reporting, but a form of journalism is not the same thing as a format for delivering it, and there is no reason to assume print is the only or even the best vehicle for that work. The newspaper is a delivery vehicle for news; for a younger generation, that delivery vehicle is the internet.
A comment left under Honderich’s article was quoted to make the generational point: a well-educated, well-read son who takes in many different news sources but will not read a hardcopy newspaper, because for that generation it all arrives over the net.
The argument closed by asking that tired arguments about journalism tied to a means of distribution be dropped. Who pays for investigative reporting is still an open question; separating it from the question of newsprint is now the ordinary way to start.