MORNING GLORY: Legacy media is learning the hard way that free beats failed news

Readers will always read, and news junkies will always find and especially read news. Reading is simply faster than broadcast, so news delivered by text is always going to have a market. That reality does not, however, guarantee any platform the loyalty of a subscriber.

“Journalism is a craft, not a profession,” the late Michael Kelly would routinely state in the blessed years when he was a weekly guest on my radio program. Kelly was the equal of any American journalist of his generation, having worked for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Atlantic. 

Michael was killed covering the American invasion of Iraq in April 2003. The point he was making was that anyone could be a “journalist,” as there is no licensing involved in American journalism as there is with professions such as medicine and law. Getting paid to “be a journalist” — that was the trick, and as the internet exploded, so did the opportunities to work in the craft.

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The craft survives and thrives in the United States unlike anywhere else in the world because of the First Amendment. The ongoing, never-ending creative destruction of capitalism (thank you for the phrase, Joseph Schumpeter) is the constant companion of every business, including journalism. Freedom of the press, as guaranteed by the Constitution, makes the rise and fall of platforms for journalism particularly robust. There is hardly any “state” media left with the demise of federal funding for National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the vast universe of media continues to expand, and the “news media” within it.

In the aftermath of the big layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been an explosion of commentary — again — about the decline and often the death of newspapers. But if you are reading this, it came to your attention via some means other than a subscription to a legacy newspaper. And there, in a sentence, is the dilemma for legacy “news,” and indeed any written product for which a reader has to pay: There is so much “free” content that it is very, very difficult for a high-overhead text product that depends on subscriptions to succeed. By “succeed,” I mean at least break even.

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For as long as I’ve been a broadcast and print journalist — and that dates to 1979, when I first was paid to write by a newspaper, and 1990, when I first broadcast over the airwaves — I’ve been a critic of legacy media in general for its liberal and then left-wing bias. I have tried to do so without dumping on former employers or colleagues. So this column is not specifically about The Washington Post, for which I wrote columns from February 2017 to October 2024.

The late Fred Hiatt, the Post’s editorial page editor, who hired me, was a splendid editor and person, as are Ruth Marcus and David Shipley, who supervised the Opinion pages in turn after Fred’s death. All three proved terrific people to work for and with, as did all of my editors at the paper.

After I left the Post, however, I also stopped subscribing to it. That’s not intended as anything other than a statement of fact. Over the past five years, I have also discontinued subscriptions to The Telegraph and the Financial Times in the U.K., as well as The New York Times and most subscription-based products that existed 20 years ago as newspapers, other than The Wall Street Journal and Cleveland.com. (The Journal is owned by Fox News Media’s sister company, News Corp.)

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The Journal has excellent reporting on every major story covered by legacy media, and Cleveland.com super-serves any fan of Cleveland’s Browns, Cavaliers and Guardians, as well as the Ohio State Buckeyes.

That second subscription to a “legacy platform” (the former Cleveland Plain Dealer) makes a key point: The sports editor for Cleveland.com, David Campbell, has done a masterful job cultivating the absolutely essential revenue driver for any formerly “regional paper” that needs a far-flung fan base to be satisfied — and indeed tied even more deeply — to its sports addictions. The podcast and text options available for a couple of bucks more, or for free with a quick ad or two, present a model to be studied by any struggling paper. 

Campbell has kept the dean of Cleveland sports analysis, Terry Pluto, working — and now podcasting — along with a dozen veteran beat reporters, while developing a new generation of journalists serving each team’s “verticals.” I assume, but do not know, that successful platforms in every sports-blessed region have done something similar — and have thereby kept many journalists outside the sports section working.

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I hold up The Journal and the sports section of Cleveland.com as models for what still works for primarily text-based products that depend upon subscription revenue but compete for readers’ eyeballs with quality non-subscription text and audio-video. 

Quality matters most of all, but niche readership super-service, particularly in areas like sports news and opinion, is a close second. In this era of abundant free information, it was inevitable that the winnowing that began with the rise of internet-based blogs — then internet-based newsletters without legacy platforms’ sunk costs — and then Substack and podcasts would take a toll on every legacy platform that owed its origins and legacy audiences to a now-extinct quasi-monopoly status and continued reliance on subscription revenue.

Writers and reporters can still get paid to write and report. Andrew Sullivan — arguably the single most influential journalist of the past 50 years because he helped bring about the institution of same-sex marriage through a sustained effort to persuade, while also pioneering the stand-alone, one-writer subscription model — is no longer alone among writer-reporter-columnists who work for themselves. Such journalists are now, in fact, legion. But they must work for their readers, or the revenue will go away.

The journals and subscription websites that have thrived or arrived in this era are best served by a commitment to both quality and the super-service of niches. Bylines have long been brands, and it is very useful to have some of those as well. The new platforms that have flourished, and the old ones that have survived, must earn subscriber support at least annually. They cannot alienate or drive readers away. It’s just the business. 

The abundance of “free and good” is deadly for the “not free, no matter how good” — and certainly for the “not free and redundant,” or worse, the “not free and just bad.” Free beats not free every time, just as quality beats slop.

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Text-only platforms remain abundant, and news delivery platforms are many and varied. The number of working journalists has probably increased since the arrival of the web. Merriam-Webster’s primary definition of a journalist is broad — “a person employed to gather, write, or report news for newspapers, magazines, radio, or television” — but not broad enough. Slash the second half off to make the definition current: Anyone employed to gather, write or report news is a journalist, even if employed directly by readers or viewers. 

In America, at least, the Golden Age of Journalism has begun: There are zero gatekeepers.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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