SF Public Press
In the San Francisco Bay area The Public Press made its appearance this week. So far only a website, but according to the masthead it has plans for print, radio and TV as well. And as for print, ‘free ‘ is the most obvious option.
The Public Press is a ‘non-commercial’ news service for the Bay Area, one of the few areas in the USA where many free weeklies and dailies are published. In SF alone there are three dailies: the Examiner, the Daily News and the Daily Star; but also surrounding areas like Berkeley, San Mateo, and Palo Alto have free dailies.
Quoting from their website: “The idea is to put journalism first - operating as a nonprofit organization that prioritizes public service over commerce. One idea is to eliminate advertising altogether, creating a robustly independent specialized vehicle for serious news.”
The last idea is somewhat curious, particularly when it comes to print. Readers in general like ads, they give information, and generate income. And as for commercial influence, that of course depends more on the attitude of the journalists and management than on the efforts by advertisers to influence the news agenda or how things are covered.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Thanks for the blog post, Piet. As you correctly perceived from our Web site, we’ve only just begun to organize locally in the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary purpose of this exercise is to imagine a “noncommercial” newspaper, similar to the concept behind American public broadcasters, but different in two regards. First, it would receive no government funding. Second, it would, unlike a public television station or radio station, be able to earn income — from sales and subscriptions, just like most newspapers today. Without ads, this would pay for only part of the newspaper’s operations, even though we envision production-side cost savings. Philanthropic support, from local membership “pledges” to major foundations, would be required to supplement the sales revenue. But without a huge endowment, which is extremely unlikely to materialize, there’s no way to make this product free.
There would be no point to this exercise if we were going to produce local news by dedicating the same level of resources available to the newsrooms at the free dailies. We believe (and will be testing this belief with research in the coming months) that if there is a product that provides high-quality in-depth news that is credible and trustworthy, local residents would be willing to pay for it. This assumption definitely cuts against the grain in the company of most of the free dailies profiled on this site.