A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

found that consumers still care about such traditional journalism values as accuracy,
fairness and independence.
“The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience
problem or a credibility problem,” the report concluded. “It is a revenue problem—the
decoupling…of advertising from news.” 27
values.
This paper shares Pew’s focus on revenue, guided by considerations of audience and
Audience is important not simply because of its relevance to revenue but because of
its linkage to journalism’s civic imperative: equipping as many people as possible with
the news and information that fuels healthy democratic life.
Values play several roles. There’s public value in the economic sense of public good. 28
There’s the civic value that news brings to community members who need independently
reported facts. And there are journalism values—accuracy, fairness, transparency—that
differentiate quality news from unverified rumor and guesswork.
“News organizations today are experiencing a continuing crisis of value destruction
and if they are to sustain themselves, they must find ways to create new value to replace
that which is being destroyed,” media economist Robert G. Picard maintained in a 2006
essay. “If they do not do so, they risk their demise. That prospect has serious
implications not only for news organizations but for society as a whole.” 29
The pace of innovation has gained momentum since then, but has not closed the
value gap. The real issue, of course, is not keeping the News & Observer or any other
news organization afloat in the storm. The challenge is finding ways to support the
gathering of the news that people need—and its presentation on whatever platforms
they prefer.
‘All I have to do is make it a business’
In communities around the country, big chunks of journalism’s old world order are
giving way to smaller, energetic upstarts of every size and shape. “There’s something
fundamentally important about being supported by the community you’re covering,”
said Mary Morgan, who runs a two‐person Web site focused on local government in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Morgan’s community became the largest American city without a
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