Jacob Weisberg, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Slate Group, New York spoke to IPI’s Nayana Jayarajan about the ongoing transformation within the news industry.

Click player to hear the interview.

INTERVIEW:

IPI: Is the growth of online media a challenge or an opportunity for broadcast news?

Jacob Weisberg: I think it is a challenge economically, I think it’s an opportunity editorially, I think for the most part broadcast to generalize has not been terribly imaginative or adapted very well. I think there have been some appealing innovations in podcasting but in video much of what I think they’ve done is essentially television on a small screen.

IPI: There seems to be an article every day about the death of the newspaper. Several publications have shut down or re-structured to meet a growing crisis. Do you see this as more of a natural turnover within an industry, a response to the overall financial crisis, or a revolution?

JW: I think the financial crisis has accelerated the underlying trend, but I think it is very much driven by changing consumer habits and the anachronism of printing a newspaper on dead trees. I think the problem…first of all the business problem is secondary to the civic problem. The real problem is losing the support structure for independent large-scale newsgathering operations and the question is whether internet news models can provide a substitute for that or if the large news organizations can adapt in such a way so that they will still be able to support their newsrooms even as they’re losing revenue on the print side.

IPI: Do you think subscription-based news on the internet will ever be financially viable, or would you rely rather on an advertising-based model? Can the news industry eventually be sustained entirely by revenue from online operations, and what changes do you foresee before that becomes possible?

JW: I am very skeptical of the subscription-based model for most publications but I am in favor of all forms of experimentation because I think we have to find out what works and as you say my view is that successful news organizations tend to be hybrids of one kind or another and tend not to be simple for profit models or to have revenue from only one source.

IPI: Do you think the word ‘journalist’ needs to be broadened/redefined in light of the growth of online media, blogs and citizen journalism? And how do you think ‘freedom of the media’ needs to be re-evaluated in light of this change?

JW: Well, those are big and interesting questions and I think the biggest effect of new media has been to break down the barriers to entry to journalism and to make journalism less of a profession and to return it to its origins as a trade or a craft and I think that may be all to the good but I think that the important thing is that the standards remain the same. And I’m thinking of the standards of truth, accuracy, care, integrity. None of that changes and those remain the core of the definition of a journalist.

I guess I at the moment am less worried about the threat to press freedom and more worried about the threat to press independence, because the issue of independence is very tied up with economic models. You can have a free press that still is not a very healthy or robust press and speaking as someone from the US I feel very strongly the American contribution to the development of the media is not just freedom of press but the idea of press independence and I think that’s what is most at risk at the moment.

IPI: Is that a risk you see arising out of a growing reliance on advertising?

JW: I’m more worried that the advertising won’t provide enough revenue to support the news organization. I don’t think advertising per se is compromising. I think it’s a question of a news organization retaining its integrity and ensuring that advertising doesn’t influence the editorial content and that depends on the integrity of both the publishers and the editors.

IPI: Can the law and the state continue to try to protect the rights of the news industry, given that the definition of the media is now so fluid, or do you think we should rely on the internet to eventually make censorship impossible?

JW: Well, not exclusively. I mean the internet is a wonderful force for tearing down walls and censorship, in countries where it’s tried, China for example, is of mixed effectiveness but if you think of China as an example it is possible for people who are sophisticated about the internet to get around China’s great firewall, but it’s also true that most people in China don’t bother and don’t go looking for what they don’t know exists so in a way incomplete censorship can be very effective and I think it’s a central issue even with the internet.

IPI: What changes do you think the media industry needs to make within itself, to take advantage of the online revolution and not be overtaken by it? And what do you see as the role of an organization like IPI within that change?

JW: On the first point I think the most important point is to recognize that the internet is a different medium. It’s not just a distribution model and the content has to be suited to evolve to be suited to the medium and people who move from print to online often miss the ways in which it is different and I think news organizations as a whole, miss what is different and as a result don’t end up doing anything very successful or innovative online.

In terms of press freedom I think independent organizations like (IPI)… are in the forefront of the fight for free and independent media around the world and I think their work is no less essential because the internet gives more and more people the opportunity to function as journalists, it creates new candidates for repression in countries where the media isn’t free and to have both external support from the profession and internal organizations that advocate press freedom as an element of civil society I think is more crucial than ever.

IPI: ‘Google is the new newsstand’. Would you agree with that, or do you think news aggregation services should provide some compensation to news sources for the links they use?

JW: Well, that’s an interesting question. What many aggregators do is less aggregation than what I would call filtering. They’re presenting the news through a lens, whether it’s a topic or an ideological viewpoint, or a sensibility and when they do that they are adding something valuable but they’re also doing something that is useful to the originator of the report other things being equal because they’re sending traffic against which advertising can be sold. So if you take the Huffington Post as an example, they’re both hurting and helping the New York Times. Hurting because they are absorbing traffic that might otherwise go to a news organization rather than an aggregator, on the other hand they are sending traffic that might otherwise not go. And I think that issue is being fought out right now and I think news organizations are a little schizophrenic about what they think and what they want because as their business deteriorates they see any force of change as hostile and one-way, and yet they don’t want to cut off sources of traffic on the web. So I think the most important thing is for there to be standards about fair use which essentially says how much of someone’s article you can quote and how much you can legitimately paraphrase or summarize. The definition of Fair Use under American copyright law is not strict. It’s subject to interpretation and as I understand the guidelines, they come down roughly in the right place but there are people who are pushing the boundaries on what is acceptable and what they can get away with.

IPI: Is international coverage threatened by this economic shift? Do you think there will be a growth in the emphasis on local coverage to provide information about the ‘rest of the world?’

JW: I don’t see that as a replacement because I think national cultures need their own guides to the rest of the world and while people who are deeply engaged will find local sources of information, most people won’t. And the truth is that if American news organizations didn’t have correspondents in Iraq, Iraq would be very marginally covered in the American media. So I don’t think it’s an adequate replacement, and I think international coverage is one of the key areas that is threatened by the declining economic model because it tends to be very expensive, as you say.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, a unit of the Washington Post Co. devoted to developing Web-based publications. He joined Slate shortly after its founding in 1996 as chief political correspondent. He succeeded Michael Kinsley to become Slate’s second editor from 2002 until 2008, when he handed the job over to David Plotz. Before joining Slate, Weisberg wrote about politics for magazines, including the New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book, “The Bush Tragedy”, was a New York Times bestseller in 2008. He is the co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of “In an Uncertain World” (2003).