Linux and Truth In The News

A new model for the news business

Linux resembles truth in the news business: Linux is open-source and free, but the cloud business depends on it. There’s no money in truth, but the news business depends on it.

Journalism today lacks a plumb line. It’s business model is broken.

When I was a carpenter, I learned to build to a plumb line, a weight suspended vertically at the end of a string, a ridiculously simple yet exact instrument for finding the precise direction of gravity. I’ve built one or two story houses using only a bubble level, but never anything taller because a tall structure that doesn’t hew to a plumb line from top to bottom is drug by gravity in the direction it leans, and, like everything out-of-balance, it will eventually fail.

I’m not a journalist. I wasn’t on my high school newspaper, never took a journalism class; my PhD. advisor, Herrlee Creel, cautioned me to be a scholar, not a journalist; he curled his upper lip when he said “journalist.” Later, I discovered that Professor Creel’s father was a renowned labor reporter.

But here I am, in the 21^st century fretting over journalist ethics. My father-in-law, whom I respected and talked with for hours, called himself a “grab your hat and get the story reporter.” He had a designated barstool at Seattle’s Dog House Bar. His son, my brother-in-law, was a journalist too, an overseas correspondent for the old UPI, reporting from Europe and the Middle East. My mother-in-law told me that father and son nearly came to blows when discussing each other’s biases.

I bring up this personal history because journalism pains me these days and, as designer and developer of networked computer applications, the cloud, my work caused some of the pain.

Journalists take ethics seriously. Recently, a friend sent me a link to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. I read it with great interest. These people have thought through their ethics carefully and spelled out detailed rules for their profession.

The New York Times ethical handbook says it well:

“The Times treats its readers as fairly and openly as possible. In print and online, we tell our readers the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it. It is our policy to correct our errors, large and small, as soon as we become aware of them.”

The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and most other news sources have similar statements.

Newspaper ethics in the U.S. are relatively new: in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newspapers often represented political parties or candidates without any commitment to free speech, truth, or anything else but partisanship. Read Jen Just’s Substack Politics and Press in Gilded Age Chicago for a look at the politics of newspapers of the past.

Yet. Yet. Yet. I read every day, almost every hour, that news sources are ethically failing. Some of this is old-fashioned “shoot the messenger” bad temper. No matter how truthful the presentation, partisans will lash out when a reporter presents their candidate as a doddering old man who doesn’t know what day it is and can’t get facts straight.

Hyper-partisanship is not the salient point: we’ve gone online. In the twentieth century, Americans read newspapers, listened to the radio, and watched local and network news on television to follow events and entertainment. No longer. Now, unless it’s in person and in the flesh, our information and entertainment comes through a computer network connection.

The network connects everyone and everything.

The spot of land on the planet most distant from my desk is in the subantarctic Kerguelen Islands. To physically visit these antipodes, you must sail for 20 days on a research ship. But if anyone there cared to, through the cloud network, they could read this Substack within seconds of its publication.

You don’t have to be a Marxist economic determinist to agree that the ubiquitous computer cloud has deeply changed journalism.

Twenty-five years ago, when online advertising was new, network application developers like me knew online advertising would revolutionize the advertising economy, but we certainly didn’t anticipate what it has done to journalism.

Print advertising is a grenade toss, not sharp shooting. Choosing to advertise diamond jewelry and luxury watches in the New Yorker and hemorrhoid ointment and three wheel bicycles in tho Readers Digest was about as selective as print advertising got. Guessing, not strategy.

Online advertising, on the other hand, tracks exactly who clicks on ads and often who buys. Advertising executives for car manufacturers get a list of every car ad a buyer clicked on prior to a sale. They choose ads and platforms based on which ads appear most often on that list. The information is present and they use it.

Online content that does not garner clicks does not generate revenue. In the newspaper business office, civic reporting means nothing unless it brings in clicks and sales. Subscriptions offset the power of clicks, but few folks today are willing to pay for news.

In theory, news business and editorial offices are separated by an impenetrable wall. But today, that wall is only a gauze scrim. Reputable news sources try to maintain separation but businesses that don’t generate revenue close, no matter how reputable they are.

When the clicks don’t roll in news platforms close. Generate stakeholder revenue or die is an axiom of 21^st century business. Ask Milton Friedman.

The result: journalists are under relentless pressure to lock in eyeballs that generate clicks. Ethics statements are plumb lines for balanced news reporting, but ethical journalists who don’t get clicks eventually lose their jobs and can’t pay their mortgage. Holding a journalist to an ethical standard is asking a parent to deprive their children.

The big names in the news business coast on their reputation as unbiased sources, but the pressure for clicks is inexorable. The entire news system is out of plumb. Who’s surprised that journalists are losing respect as honest critics and truth tellers?

When a structure is out-of-plumb, inexperienced builders try to fix it by shoring it up and pushing it back straight, but each push weakens the entire structure. Experienced carpenters correct the foundation and rebuild.

The news business needs a new business plan.

Look at the software industry. They have an analogous problem. No one can sell software or hardware without basic software utilities— operating systems like Windows or Linux, web server software like Apache, and dozens of other unglamorous but essential utilities— but building this software is costly and risky. There is no money in it, but software can’t make money without it. Microsoft tries to make Windows glamorous, but who ran out to buy Windows 11 who wasn’t forced to?

Linux resembles truth in the news business: Linux is open-source and free, but the entire cloud business is built on it. There’s no money in truth, but the news business depends on it.

Look at the software foundations like the Apache Software Foundation or the Linux Foundation. These non-profit corporations are the sources of the most used and mission critical software in computing. The big for-profit tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, IBM, even Apple and Microsoft, rely on Apache and Linux software. Smaller and less well-known companies equally rely on the foundations.

For-profit executives are on the foundation boards and contribute to foundation funding because they depend on foundation software. If the for-profits did not rely on the foundation, they would have to waste billions, if not trillions, on re-inventing the wheels that make their profitable products work because they could not allow themselves to be dependent on a hostile competitor.

The success of the software foundations shows that segments of an industry can be isolated from profits.

Consider a cluster of news foundations. Some regional, some national, and some international, supported by for-profit news outlets like our current New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, LA Times, etc. Think of journalists working for the foundations, not the outlets and for-profit outlets packaging and distributing the output of the news foundations.

Such an arrangement would be quite different from the news reporting systems we have today, but it would put journalistic ethics in a safe zone where they ought to be. Impractical? Look at the tech industry and the cloud. Is it in danger of going broke?

Massive business changes don’t materialize overnight, but I believe there are too many talented people in journalism to let respect for truth fail from a flawed business model.