Online media and the Changing of the Guard

With the nearly inevitable descent of newsprint media to ever lower levels of importance, the question is, what's next in print — i.e., written word — journalism?

I speculated the other day that the Arizona Guardian, begun by four reporters with 80 years of journalistic experience between them who were laid off from the East Valley Tribune, is one of the many new journalistic forms we're likely to see — sites with a limited focus and a few dedicated reporters who may be able to support themselves on advertisements, and maybe subscriptions.

The national model is probably Talking Points Memo. It began as a blog by Josh Marshall. He developed a loyal following. He would occasionally ask us to send money to help him stay solvent or launch new ventures, and many of us did. (Sometimes, on the first day of his fund drive, he'd write and ask us to please stop sending money, he's gotten all he needs. When was the last time you heard that?)

Gradually, advertising covered his expenses, and he expanded. Now he has a staff of fine young and not-so-young writer/reporters who go out and do all those things reporters do to get stories. Marshall and the staff also rely on their readership to send in local news tips from all over the nation. TPM, the home blog, is still very active, but it's now spun off into a number of companion sites with specific beats.

The site has become a popular place for important progressive scholars and authors to carry on discussions among themselves and with the readership. You can read roundtables with some of the best minds around, exclusive to the blog. And they get terrific interviews. Today there's a video interview with Barney Frank.

The reason I'm writing this is because TPM just began a new DC blog, TMPDC, with two or maybe three full time writers covering the Capitol beat. One of them is Matt Cooper, who is in his 40s and covered the capitol for Time and Newsweek. I expect to see some of the best political reporting anywhere coming from this site, rivaling or besting what we get from the NY Times and the Washington Post.

All Marshall has to do to remain solvent is pay his reporters, as well as the techies and designers who keep the site up and running, and rent a bit of office space. No worries about printing presses and newspaper delivery and all that incredibly expensive infrastructure. In terms of overhead, he has a huge advantage. And with more and more people depending on him for news and analysis (TPM is the home page on my browser), his advertising revenues increase without his spending another penny.

Marshall, by the way, wrote awhile back that he's doing fine financially, bringing in about what he might get as a top flight reporter. Maybe now he's actually making serious money, I don't know. But his obviously interest is in creating an online media outlet with weight and value. He's already there, and I expect him to go further.

If anything I've seen points the way for the future of print journalism, it's the TPM model.