MORNING GLORY: Legacy media is learning the hard way that free beats are failed news

Readers will always read, and news junkies will always find and especially read news. Reading is faster than broadcasting, so news delivered through text will always have a market. That fact, however, does not guarantee any platform the loyalty of the subscriber.

“Journalism is an art, not a job,” said the late Michael Kelly in his blessed years when he was a weekly guest on my radio show. Kelly was the equal of any American journalist of his generation, having worked for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Atlantic.

Michael was killed while speaking about the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003. The point he was making was that anyone could be a “journalist,” as there is no license involved in American journalism as there is in professions such as medicine and law. Getting paid to “be a journalist” – that became the trick, and as the Internet exploded, so did the opportunities to work in this profession.

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Craft survives and thrives in the United States unlike anywhere else in the world because of the first amendment. The constant, relentless destruction of capitalism (thanks for the phrase, Joseph Schumpeter) is the constant companion of all businesses, including journalism. Freedom of the press, as guaranteed by the Constitution, makes the ups and downs of journalistic platforms particularly strong. There are no “regional” news outlets left with the demise of funding from the National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the media landscape continues to grow, and the “news” within it.

After the massive layoffs of The Washington Post, there was an explosion of commentary — again — about the decline and death of newspapers. But if you are reading this, it has come to your attention in other ways than signing up for a heritage newsletter. And there, in a sentence, there is a problem of legacy “news”, and indeed any written product that the reader has to pay for: There is too much “free” content that is very difficult, especially for a high-quality text product that depends on subscriptions to succeed. By “successful,” I mean I at least broke even.

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For a long time as a broadcast and print journalist – and that started in 1979, when I first got paid to write for a newspaper, and in 1990, when I started broadcasting – I’ve been a critic of the dying media in general for its liberal bias and I’ve been on the left. I tried to do that without abandoning previous employers or colleagues. So this column is not specific about the Washington Post, for which I wrote columns from February 2017 to October 2024.

The late Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Post, who hired me, was an editor and a wonderful person, as were Ruth Marcus and David Shipley, who presided over the Opinion pages successively after Fred’s death. All three proved to be terrific people to work with, as did all my editors at the paper.

After I left the Post, however, I unsubscribed again. That is not intended as anything other than a statement of fact. In the past five years, I’ve also unsubscribed to the UK’s Telegraph and Financial Times, as well as the New York Times and most of the subscription-based products that existed 20 years ago as newspapers, except for the Wall Street Journal and Cleveland.com. (The journal is owned by Fox News Media’s sister company, News Corp.)

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The Journal has excellent coverage of all the major news stories covered by the legacy media, and Cleveland.com is very helpful for any fan of Cleveland’s Browns, Cavaliers and Guardians, and the Ohio State Buckeyes.

That second registration in the “heritage field” (the former Cleveland Plain merchant) reveals an important point: The sports editor of Cleveland.com, David Campbell, has done an excellent job by cultivating the most important revenue driver of any previous “regional paper” that needs fans from far away to satisfy – and be more deeply tied to – its sports addicts. Podcast and text options available for a few bucks more, or for free with a quick ad or two, present a model that any struggling paper will read.

After the massive layoffs of The Washington Post, there was an explosion of commentary — again — about the decline and death of newspapers. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

Campbell kept the director of sports analysis in Cleveland, Terry Pluto, working – and now playing podcasting – along with a dozen beat reporters, while creating a new generation of reporters who work for the “verticals” of each team. I think, but I don’t know, that successful stadiums in all sports-blessed regions have done the same thing – and thus kept many journalists outside the sports section working.

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I hold up The Journal and Cleveland.com’s sports section as models of what still works for text-based products that rely heavily on subscription revenue but compete for readers’ eyeballs with the quality of non-subscription text and audio video.

Quality is paramount, but niche readership super-service, especially in areas like sports news and opinion, is a close second. In this era of a lot of free information, it was inevitable that the resignation that started with the growth of blogs based on the Internet – then newsletters based on the Internet without the costs of the legacy platform – and then Substack and podcasts took the momentum of the entire legacy platform that owes its origin and legacy audience to the now extinct state of paying income and continued independence.

Writers and journalists can still be paid for writing and reporting. Andrew Sullivan — arguably the single most influential journalist of the past 50 years because he helped bring about the institution of same-sex marriage through a sustained lobbying effort, while also pioneering the single-subscriber, single-writer model — is no longer alone among freelance writer-reporter-columnists. Such journalists are now, in fact, legion. But they have to work for their students, otherwise the income will go away.

Journals and subscription websites that have succeeded or are up and coming in this era are best served by a commitment to both quality and superior service for niches. Lines have long been products, and it’s very helpful to have some of those. New platforms that thrive, as well as old ones that survive, should receive subscriber support at least annually. They cannot segregate or expel students. It’s just business.

The abundance of “free and good” kills the “unfree, no matter how good” – and certainly of the “unfree and unnecessary,” or worse, “uncomfortable and just bad.” Free beats all the time, as quality beats go down.

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Text-only platforms are always plentiful, and news delivery platforms are many and varied. The number of working journalists has probably increased since the advent of the web. Merriam-Webster’s primary definition of journalist is broad — “a person employed to gather, write, or report news for newspapers, magazines, radio, or television” — but not broad enough. Reduce the second part to modernize the definition: Anyone who is employed to gather, write or report news is a journalist, even if they are employed directly by readers or viewers.

In America, at least, the Golden Age of Journalism has begun: There are gatekeepers.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show“Hear weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on the Salem News Channel. Hugh calls Americans home on the East Coast and lunch on the West Coast to more than 400 embassies across the country, and on every broadcast platform where SNC can be seen. He is a regular guest on Fox News Channel on the Brett news program at 6 pm. Ohio and graduation from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. of television, MSN has also written for MSN television writers and moderated Republican debate scores, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in 2015-16 Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians on and tens of thousands of Trump Republicans and Donald Bush’s 40 years in broadcasting.

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