Saving Journalism: A Vision for the Post-Covid World

"Dozens of plans to help save journalism have emerged since the Covid-19 pandemic decimated media outlets around the world."

This report surveys some of the initiatives that have emerged, or that have been accelerated, to help save journalism since the COVID-19 pandemic devastated many media outlets around the world. It evaluates where they currently stand, assesses the likelihood of success, and profiles the key players. The purpose is to share these initiatives so that countries can learn from one another about how to support quality news and information.

The report explains how, even as the need for clear reliable and accurate information has increased, media across the globe have been negatively impacted by COVID-19: Journalists have been laid off or their salaries cut, print editions have been suspended, and shrinking revenue (particularly advertising revenue) has crippled newsrooms, forcing many to close completely. The urgency of the financial troubles hitting journalism in 2020 has led organisations around the world to come up with creative solutions. The report shares some of these initiatives, using a taxonomy suggested by media funder Nishant Lalwani from the Luminate Foundation. He saw a number of proposals come across his desk in 2020 and divides efforts to help journalism during the COVID-19 pandemic into four categories: more private funding; public subsidies; new business models; and a tax on the tech platforms.

1. More Private Funding
Initiatives discussed here include attempts to galvanise increased funding from foundations, development aid, philanthropy, and venture capital. For example, as soon as the epidemic hit, a number of foundations stepped up grant-making to help media outlets. One initiative was the Independent Emergency News Relief Coordination, which involved getting donors to coordinate and scale up their giving. It was initiated by the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which seeks to help government and foundations join forces to support public interest media. A number of small organisations and foundations that set up emergency funds around the world are also mentioned, such as a grant that the Open Society Foundation South Africa gave to the South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF), which partnered with the Social Justice Initiative to create a Media Relief Fund supporting journalists who lost their jobs in 2020.

The report also highlights a proposal by Steve Waldman, a former senior advisor to the chair of the Federal Communications Commission and a co-founder of Report for America, to transform the United States (US)' roughly 6,700 privately owned newspapers into more community-grounded and financially independent institutions. He suggests the creation of a nonprofit "replanting fund" that would identify candidate newspapers and reorganise their corporate structures to make them both financially independent and more responsive to community needs. Another initiative discussed is the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund (JERF) established by the Google News Initiative (GNI) in April 2020. Although its goal is to promote a healthy media ecosystem for start-ups, it established an emergency fund that gives out relatively small grants for niche media outlets around the world to help them cope with COVID-19.

2. Public Subsidy Efforts
The report highlights some government efforts to help outlets and freelancers during the COVID-19 crisis. For example, Australia created a US$40 million Public Interest News Gathering Fund to help maintain public interest journalism in regional areas, while Norway allocated around US$3.2 million to media outlets that lost income from advertising due to the virus. In Ecuador, two universities (San Francisco de Quito and Equator Technological University) and two media outlets (El Universo and Código Vidrio) teamed up to win a grant from the US government to counteract dis- and misinformation related to the pandemic.

The report makes the point that along with the funds has come an understanding that the industry needs ambitious solutions to the massive problem of funding. For example, in the US, there is renewed interest in government support for media with groups looking at policies used in countries such as France, Canada, and Norway that already support quality journalism. Other longer-term solutions include those by Steve Waldman and others who are promoting a media voucher system similar to France's 2009 initiative to give newspaper subscriptions to high school students, and are assisting with the design of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. It is suggested that funding for local journalism could come from a number of sources, including taxes on internet advertising, media mergers, or airwave license allocation (also known as spectrum auctions).

3. New Business Models
In Southern Africa, Ntibinyane Ntibinyane from Botswana's INK Centre for Investigative Journalism and Dumisani Muleya, a Zimbabwean reporter and editor with The NewsHawks, put together a proposal for funding that could be used to help independent newspapers in the region to transition to digital and build their sustainability beyond the pandemic. The project includes plans to lobby local government officials for broader government support of local media.

4. Getting Big Tech to Pay for News
In the midst of the pandemic, Australia's competition authority has made an effort to get Google and Facebook to pay for news. Part of what is considered novel about this approach is that the government is using competition law instead of copyright law, which has not worked in Europe because Google refused to pay. Australia's new legislation - the Mandatory News Media Bargaining Code - would force Google and Facebook to pay for news. The report explains this legislation and assesses the potential outcomes of this effort.

In conclusion, the report makes the point that there are two key, parallel routes forward. "One is to provide the help necessary to keep news outlets alive during what are undoubtedly the toughest financial times they've ever seen. The other is to lay the groundwork for a transition to a more sustainable local-news ecosystem - whether the news organizations themselves are existing outlets that have evolved or new ones designed more fully to represent the communities they cover."