By Steven T. Jones
Reactions by many mainstream media journalists to the formation of the Bay Area News Project – a nonprofit news operation supported by KQED, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, California Newspaper Guild, financier Warren Hellman, and possibly The New York Times – have been hostile, petty, dismissive, self-serving, and misleading.
It’s no wonder the public has turned away from big newspapers and is clamoring for media reform. Rather than focusing on the public benefits of more journalism, mainstream media journalists seem to have adopted the media consolidation mindset of their corporate masters.
A central theme of the criticism has been wariness of competition. The SF Appeal today reports on a memo to San Francisco Chronicle staff written by Metro Editor Audrey Cooper in which she vows “to smash whomever is naive enough to poke their noses in our market.”
Friday’s Chronicle story on the news, which was buried back in the business section and written by James Temple, frets, “some believe it could also threaten the remaining local news industry.” That trope was also sounded in an East Bay Express blog post by Robert Gammon (formerly of the Oakland Tribune, which is part of the anti-competitive MediaNews empire) entitled “UC Berkeley Threatens Bay Area Journalism.”
Yet there’s a rather obvious central flaw to their arguments: the nonprofit project won’t be competing for advertising revenue, so it won’t force “Bay Area news organizations to make further cuts to stay competitive,” as Gammon claims. Journalists competing to do better and better work is the kind of healthy competition that benefits everyone and shouldn’t cost anyone their jobs.