Bad NewsSeptember/October 2019 209
exists no replicable business model
that works for local news, which has
diminished the accountability o state
and metropolitan government. What
do seem to be working are a variety o
nonpro¿t and hybrid models that ¿ll
speci¿c gaps in coverage, including
ProPublica (investigative reporting),
the Marshall Project (criminal justice),
and The Texas Tribune (state govern-
ment and politics). What the most
innovative journalistic organizations seem
to have in common is some form o
subsidy combined with an ability to
think like for-pro¿t businesses even i
they really are not. Every news organi-
zation must ¿nd its survivable niche,
which is why the next generation o
editors will have to be not only moral
philosophers but also entrepreneurs.∂Baquet. This provoked the showdown
that led to her ¿ring.
A TOUGH BUSINESS
Given the continuing Çux in media,
editors are best advised not to get any
employer’s logo tattooed on their bodies.
BuzzFeed and Vice, which were both
booming amid a digital news bubble
when Abramson began writing her book
several years ago, are now Çagging. As
Vice’s investors have sobered up,
BuzzFeed has sought philanthropic
investment and announced plans to cut
15 percent o its work force; meanwhile,
one o the company’s founders and its
¤¢, Jonah Peretti, has proposed merging
with a number o competing digital
media outlets.
The Post and the Times, both in
decline a few years ago, have returned
to health, i not the stable pro¿tability
o previous decades. In 2013, Amazon’s
founder, Je Bezos, purchased the Post,
and in the years since, he has reversed
the shrinkage o its journalistic foot-
print and now says that the paper is
pro¿table again. The Times repaid Slim
and has regained stability on the backs
o more than four million subscribers.
Several other leading legacy publications,
including The Atlantic, The New Yorker,
and Mother Jones, appear to have moved
from jeopardy to viability. Trump’s
noxious verbal assaults on news organi-
zations have had the perverse eect o
making audiences more willing to pay
for journalism, even as those comments
have contributed to greater peril for
journalists facing less constrained
autocrats elsewhere.
It’s far too soon to say that the
economic crisis o journalism has passed,
let alone the crisis o truth. There still