2019-10-21_Time

74 Time October 21–28, 2019

one with deep consequences for democ-

racies, relying as they do on agreed-upon

facts. The ambient confusion has been

exploited by authoritarians, who label

critical news coverage “fake” and push

their preferred version of reality through state media, social

media or private outlets that have sold out.

News organizations are businesses too, but— crucially—

businesses based on providing what a citizen needs to know. The

core transaction of a traditional news organization is a whole-

some one, grounded in what might be called the civic impulse.

That impulse is what drives editors to argue among themselves

about what is worthy of the front page

and what stirs a reader to examine it. It’s

also what impelled the Sulzberger family

to shovel money into a newsroom after it

ceased to be lucrative.

Why didn’t this happen elsewhere?

A generation ago, family ownership of

a newspaper was regarded as what pro-

tected quality journalism from the predations of the markets

the way the First Amendment protected it from the government.

But most of the great newspaper families—the Chandlers of the

Los Angeles Times, the Bancrofts of the Wall Street Journal, the

Binghams of Louisville—did not survive even the flush times.

“It’s usually a case of family members being really unhappy or

the wrong person being put in the job with the result that the

company blows up,” says Donald Graham, whose family sold the

Washington Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013. “And

that has never been the case at the New York Times. I’m happy

to talk about A.G., I think this guy is aces.”

Executives had no real idea how many people would pay money
of their own. When subscriptions hit half a million, some won-
dered if a plateau had been reached. But as the digital product
improved, so did the numbers. And the news certainly helped.
Like ratings for cable news, subscriptions surged during the
2016 presidential contest, and soared after the result. For the
Times, the “Trump bump”—more than 300,000 new subscrip-
tions in the final quarter—would drop off in 2017. Subscriptions
since have been roughly steady and mostly robust, nearing the
halfway point on the road to 10 million.
“There is no greater media success story of the last eight
years than the Times paywall,” says Jack Shafer, the media col-
umnist for Politico.
But the breakthrough brought more
than money. It also brought a direct con-
nection with the reader, a channel by-
passing everything the Internet (and es-
pecially social media) has put in the way.
As a subscriber, you’re going somewhere
specific for news, rather than finding it
placed in front of you by an overpolitical uncle, or an algorithm
engineered to encourage outrage because outrage means more
time on the site. You have a direct line to a professional news
organization, one with biases and flaws but also something else:
responsibility for what it publishes.
Facebook and Instagram do not have the same responsibility.
Neither does YouTube or any other part of the Internet. Congress
absolved online platforms for most of what gets posted on them in
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. At the
time it passed, tech still looked like a force for unmitigated good.
What followed, of course, was a hard lesson in human nature,

^

Sulzberger found

a partner in Times

editor Baquet, left

Social media

obscures the civic

impulse at the core

of the news business

MARK PETERSON—REDUX FOR TIME