The way to save news is not to create monopolistic monocultures
"Why, a funder asked me recently, do two intermediaries this funder saw as offering duplicative services both still exist? Because you—and your funder colleagues—let them, I said." But consolidation is a dangerous road.
In his latest post, Dick Tofel talks about a need for consolidation in organizations that support newsrooms (and, in fact, in newsrooms themselves).
“Devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior service. And in circumstances where competing services are roughly equivalent, mere duplication can also be inefficient—and, as noted above, may place an administrative burden on already over-stressed client newsrooms. Time is one of the scarcest resources of all.”
I’m worried.
This isn’t a criticism of Dick Tofel: he calls out the benefits of competition and the difficulty of determining winners in a market. But I do think there are two more things to consider.
The first is that I don’t believe any intermediary service designed for newsrooms is optimal. That’s not a criticism of them, either: every service has room to grow. Any time you remove competition from a market and hand it to a single privately-owned player (nationalized services are another thing entirely), the offerings stagnate because the driver to improve has gone away. Just ask anyone who remembers the web’s Internet Explorer wilderness years before Firefox disrupted them and forced widespread standardization.
The second, and probably most important, is that funders are a narrow group of people with a narrow set of perspectives. Unless they’ve done the work to be representative and inclusive in their work and culture, they may miss how one service serves a community better than another and erroneously mark them as duplicative. Or to put it another way, if there is any consolidation in any American market, I don’t trust that organizations run by women and people of color won’t be the ones to lose out.
This isn’t anyone’s intention, but reducing competition at any level — funders, intermediaries, newsrooms, distributors — has the potential to create monopolies that become gatekeepers for vulnerable communities who need more support, not less. I don’t think that’s what the moment we’re living through needs. We need more ideas, more approaches, more funding, more communities served, and more diversity. The people who want to shut down an effective, independent press want to create a monoculture. The way to combat that is not to create another one.
