News worth paying for

In the latest kick in the teeth to a struggling newspaper industry, the New York Daily News cut half of its newsroom staff Monday. The paper was sold to Tronc Inc. last year for $1, with the owner of the Chicago Tribune assuming the paper’s liabilities and debt.

The cuts included Editor-in-Chief Jim Rich, who hinted at the layoffs in an early morning tweet Monday: “If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.” He also updated his Twitter bio: “Just a guy sitting at home watching journalism being choked into extinction.”

The newspaper has won 11 Pulitzer Prizes, including one last year for its work with ProPublica on the abuse of eviction rules in New York City.

The newspaper industry’s two-decade-old financial slump just keeps getting worse. Cable and network TV news are profitable and becoming more so, but newspapers, which provide most of our society’s original reporting on public affairs, are in crisis. More than a third of the country’s largest papers experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. U.S. daily newspaper circulation, print and digital combined, fell 11 percent to 31 million in 2017—in 2000, weekday subscriptions totaled 55.8 million.

Newspaper advertising revenue is down by two-thirds, to around $38 billion, in the last decade. Most of those dollars went to the likes of Google and Facebook, and news sites’ online advertising recovers only a tiny fraction. Forced to compete for audience attention with those internet giants—never mind Netflix, online games, Snapchat, mommy blogs, and cat videos—journalists are coming up short.

Still, journalists tend to overblow the threat to democracy posed by their industry’s financial woes. There will always be a demand for news because people have a God-given need for information about the world around them. If today’s media institutions cannot find a way to finance their operations, others eventually will.

And new ways of doing and paying for journalism are already appearing. The internet makes viable a pay-for-content approach. News organizations’ experiments with paywalls in the 2000s usually ended badly, but public attitudes are shifting, perhaps as a result of entertainment services like Netflix and Spotify. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal all began charging for content or tightened their paywalls in the last few years—if it works for them, many others will follow.

The success of some start-ups, such as The Athletic for sports coverage, The Information for tech reporting, and The Daily Wire for conservative politics, suggests large opportunities await journalists able to produce distinctive and high-quality specialized or local news. General news organizations that rely heavily on donations, from WORLD to NPR, have found large audiences and stability.

The question now is which journalists will produce news worth paying for.

Greta Gerwig Associated Press/Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision

Thoroughly modern Marches

Director Greta Gerwig is working on an adaptation of Little Women that will focus on the young adulthood of the four March sisters. In the critically acclaimed Lady Bird, Gerwig captured how family and friends influence a young woman as she comes of age. But can she give Louisa May Alcott’s classic the right treatment in the era of modern feminism?

Culture’s definition of what it means to be a woman has changed drastically since Little Women came out in 1869. Alcott’s classic elevated the status of women not by forcing them to act or think like men, but by showing the importance to society of their roles as mothers, wives, caretakers, and teachers. (That’s why the neighbor boy Laurie, who has every material advantage but no mother, seeks out and binds himself to the March women.)

Gerwig has lined up a stellar cast, including Lady Bird’s Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Emma Stone as Meg, and Meryl Streep as the wealthy and austere Aunt March. Robin Swicord, who wrote and co-produced a big-screen version of Little Women in 1994, is spearheading the project and said she has faith in Gerwig to bring the novel to life.

“Greta has another take, and 25 years from now another writer will come up with another fresh way into the book,” Swicord told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s the beauty of Little Women. It’s not going anywhere.” —Lynde Langdon

Greta Gerwig Associated Press/Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision

Offender, predator, or both?

A Pennsylvania board recommended the state classify Bill Cosby as a sexually violent predator, which would mandate he attend counseling and require police to post warning flyers in his neighborhood when he is freed. A judge must decide whether to accept the recommendations of the Pennsylvania Sexual Offenders Assessment Board. A jury convicted the 81-year-old actor and comedian of aggravated indecent assault in April. He faces up to 10 years in prison when sentenced Sept. 24. Cosby has denied any wrongdoing, and his representatives said he will appeal. State law already requires Cosby to register as a sex offender, but the predator classification requires more intense treatment, as well as more extensive notification once a person is released from prison. —L.L.

Caught on tape

A Georgia state lawmaker is resigning after falling for a prank by provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen. In a new series for Showtime called Who Is America? Cohen tries to trick everyone from small town residents to Washington politicians into exposing their biases or at least embarrassing themselves on camera. Jason Spencer of Woodbine, Ga., thought he was making a video to frighten Islamic terrorists when he agreed to shout racial slurs and expose his backside on camera. After the episode aired Sunday, Spencer originally said he would finish out his term, which ends in November, but he announced his resignation later in the week. The lawmaker already lost his bid for reelection in a May primary. —L.L.