Journalism at a Crossroads: Richard Tofel on Funding, Integrity & the Future

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Today's guest is Richard Toffol, the founding general manager and former president of ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit newsroom. A pioneer in investigative journalism, Richard has shaped how the public gets the truth in the digital age. He's also an instructor at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and he now leads Gallatin Advisory, a journalism consultancy. Hey, Dick, thanks so much for joining us. I really wanted to talk to you because of your background working in both nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms. I really want to focus on the problem of the business model for news media, because I, I'm going to assume you'll agree with me that America needs really strong news right now. We need to know where to find truth and accuracy and who we can trust. But everything actually comes back down to the business model. And I wanted to ask you basically, you know, I guess it's been a couple decades now that we've been talking about how the business model of news is broken. And we need to find a way to fix it. So my big question is, why haven't we figured this out yet?

Yeah. So first of all, thanks so much for having me. I think the reason we haven't completely figured out the answer is because it's a hard problem. And also because there are multiple answers. So there's been some real progress on paywalls and on both on how they work, how they best work, on readers' willingness to pay. I think there's also been some real progress in the nonprofit space, but it is, there are clearly still gaps and I'm afraid they're going to remain gaps. I don't think we're going to come to a solution that'll bring us back to the year 2000. You know, so it, but overall it's a complicated problem.

Yeah.

Can you give some of our listeners and viewers a little history for the younger millennials and Gen Zs? You know, when we talk about the broken business model, I don't know if they're really clear on how things used to happen.

Well, so the first thing I think to remember, which surprises people, is that the best year in the history of the American newspaper business was the year 2000. It was much later than people think. So it was after the dawn of the consumer internet, which was roughly 1995, but, and obviously it was in a boom economic year, but after about 2005 is really when the business model broke. And I think the key event there is the advent of consumer broadband. And with that, The business model, especially for newspapers, which were really the core of the news business in this country, at least in terms of original reporting, are really broken. Unfortunately, the news, the finances of the newspaper business have declined essentially every quarter since 2005.

I go back in newspapers to, well, I guess what you'd call the golden age now. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s when, you know, you lived on advertising. Corporations would take full-page ads. Everybody had expense accounts. You know, journalists didn't have to produce content every day, let alone multiple times a day. You can work on investigative reports that took a long time, things of that sort. That's dramatically changed, but do you see Either in the funding that nonprofit organizations that do news are getting, or with the paywall, paywall strategies that they're using? Are they ever going to be able to make the kind of money they used to make?

Well, I don't think they're going to make probably the kind of money they used to make. I mean, we were talking about 30-plus percent profit margins, and that's not usual for most businesses. And it's not necessary to sustain businesses over the long run. So I don't think you're going to go back to 30% profit margins, which was, which was a result of most local newspapers essentially being monopolies in their markets. As I, as I said, I do think paywalls are a sustainable business model. And I think the through line on what makes them work. Where they do work is very high quality content in very high quantity. And that you see that in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times. You also see it in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, all of which are succeeding with paywalls. And then in the nonprofit space, You know, what you need is again, original content, probably in almost every case, not enough of it to float a paywall, but enough of it to get readers to step up both in large numbers of small contributions and small numbers of large contributions. And that's been the essence of the successes that we've seen there.

The idea of the paywall, what bothers me with that approach is if you can't afford a subscription, you know, I can go on the internet for basically for free and surf around and come across a lot of misinformation, or I could come across a lot of opinions that people have on Facebook. I don't necessarily know what's true or false. And if I can't afford a subscription to pay to get past that paywall, For the quality journalism, how am I ever going to know what's really going on?

Right. So a couple of things. First of all, ever thus, right? Newspapers liked to pretend in the glory days that they reached everybody. There were huge communities they weren't even trying to reach. And I think that this is something that people have, have realized. Only later. And it's been one of the problems of the news business that there were huge parts of the country that the newspaper industry pretty much ignored. What we call underrepresented communities. But, you know, while that's a term on the left, I think it applies to a lot of people who have ended up on the right as well. And so I hope people can hear that without thinking of it in political terms. So that, that is a problem with paywalls, but it was a problem in the old model as well. I think there's a second problem with paywalls that we can talk about, which is that I think it makes news organizations dependent economically on their readers and thus not actually as independent as they used to be. There was a diversification of advertisers. And readers were a smaller piece of the pie. And so editors were much more truly independent. I think they are still quite independent of advertisers, but I think interestingly, they've become less independent of the mass of their readers, less able to go against the predilections and predispositions of their readers. And that's a real issue. What is there for people who can't afford to pay? First of all, there has always been, and there continues to be, the broadcast media that are largely derivative of the original reporting that's in newspapers and online news organizations. And that was true in the old days as well. And then there are nonprofits that almost without exception. Operate on a free model.

Okay. So are you saying that basically with today's structure, readers almost have too much power?

Well, I mean, you know, not too much. I just think that, I think one of the things you have to, as a reader, observe is that the New York Times is unlikely to discomfit the readers of the New York Times. And ditto the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and the New Yorker and the Atlantic, that if you have a sense in your head, a reality-based sense of who the readers are of those publications, just don't expect that publication to publish very much that is at, you know, strong variance with the views of their own readers. Some, yes, but not a continuing thread.

Okay. So do you think this is behind the uproar over all of the editorials that newspapers have been publishing that readers don't agree with or not publishing?

Well, I think it's, it's exactly what happened at the Washington Post a couple of times in the last 6 months, for instance.

Let's flip the coin a little bit and go to the nonprofit model of funding organizations, because you know well at ProPublica, what are the challenges with relying on funders?

Well, actually, I mean, if you're talking about institutional funders, which I would define as people who are paid to give away other people's money, usually dead people, I actually don't think that, I mean, there are challenges in getting that money, right? In attracting that money. But I think the critique that that poses some sort of challenge to the independence of journalism is not right.

Okay.

The, those funders behave very much in this sense, like advertisers used to behave. And journalists have understood for 70 or 80 years how to establish independence From their advertisers, and the better ones do, which is that they have a role, but the role is limited, and they don't control the editorial product. And if they try to, you need to push back. And that one important safeguard is diversification. So if you if you're a diversified advertising base, you can do that. And if you have a diversified funding base, you can do that. And as I say, I don't think that's a new lesson. I mean, I wrote a biography of Barney Kilgore, who was the founder of the modern Wall Street Journal, and he had a very important confrontation with General Motors in 1954 when General Motors was both the largest company in the country and the largest advertiser in the Wall Street Journal, and they got very upset about a series of stories the Journal had run and withdrew all their advertising. And Kilgore made it very clear, very publicly, that the Journal was not going to change its editorial approach in response to that. And he prevailed and eventually GM slunk back into the paper. It was a very important moment, I think, in journalism, in the country, and a lesson that, that people have understood about advertisers in quality news organizations ever since.

Was there ever pressure on ProPublica to not necessarily publish a certain way, but to prove that you were making some kind of impact with what you were publishing?

Sure. I mean, that, I mean, that's, that's the principal reason that People donate to something like ProPublica. So there's pressure to do that, I think, literally every day, every month, every year. The other kind of pressure, there were, you know, from time to time, a funder here or there who didn't like something we'd published. And we always sort of said to them what you would say to advertisers, which is, sorry you feel that way. You know, hope on balance that it still makes sense to you. To support this. And if it doesn't, that's okay.

I would imagine those smaller newspapers, you know, the small weeklies and that sort of thing, don't have the latitude to tell people, you know, if you don't like it, don't fund us.

You know, I, you know, I, I have to say, I, I don't agree with that. Right. You, you have to have the latitude to tell people that. I mean, to me, you know, this gets beyond journalism, but one of the big problems in our society right this moment, in my view, Is we're discovering how many people apparently regard money as the single most important value that they have. It's not mine. It's not the highest value of most journalists I know, and it shouldn't be. There are things in— I, we all need money to live. I understand that, but we, most of us don't need as much money as we might want. And you don't have to have an enormous amount of money. And so things, some things are more important than that. And journalistic independence is one of them.

When you, when you look around the media landscape, are there any newer news outlets that you think are, are doing it well?

Oh, I think there are lots of new news outlets that are doing it well. And I think, you know, the most interesting thing that's going on right now is there are lots of these new creators that are doing it well, almost individually. So I actually think that it's almost certainly the case that the best journalism being done today is the best journalism there's ever been. I think if you look at the prize-winning journalism every year, that the prize-winning journalism gets better and better. It has access to more, the use of a wider use of media to deeper use of data to all sorts of ways to source information that didn't used to exist. And, and to ways to distribute it and bring it to readers and viewers and listeners in ways that you couldn't before. So, so I actually think that we have a business model problem, but I don't think we have a journalism problem by any means. As I say, I think the best journalism being done today is the best journalism there has ever been.

Okay. Any ideas on how to bridge that gap? Hmm.

Yeah. I mean, you know, as I say, paywalls is one, nonprofits is another. And some of these creators, I think, are showing us yet a third, which are, you know, very small, very lightweight, either individual operators or small organizations that can take advantage of the very low barriers to entry and operate At a considerable level of quality at quite limited expense.

Let's have you switch chairs for a moment and think like a news consumer, because if you log on or even if you're streaming, there's so many more voices out there now. It's very confusing to people. How do they pick and choose what they listen to or what they watch or read? And again, What should they believe? So how do you navigate today's landscape?

Yeah, well, the first thing is people are different, right? I mean, people have wildly variant interests. And one of the things we observe as we go through life is that no 2 humans are the same. And if we all observe and believe that no 2 humans are the same, then we shouldn't be shocked that people have different and therefore wildly variant interests. So what you ought to seek out and what you ought to, you know, find is gonna depend very much on, on what you're interested in. Are you interested as, you know, particularly in news of your community? Are you interested in news of the world? Are you interested in particular subjects? More than others? What are your leisure interests? What are your work-related interests? What are your family-related interests? At what stage of life are you in all sorts of different ways? So, you know, the— and there is not going to be one answer. There are going to be answers for all those things. I think the kinds of through lines you have are you need to find sources you trust. You should interrogate what you're consuming against your experience of the wider world. If people tell you things that turn out not to be true, you should probably move away from them. If people being flawed, which again, and I think in our life experience, everyone is, If people tell you they never make mistakes, they're lying to you. If people tell you, don't show you their mistakes, they're hiding them. I mean, certain basic things that I think people know as they navigate their human relationships, they ought to apply to their news relationships as well.

A lot of the criticism of news media today Is that it's behind the divide of the country, that it's been polarizing and divisive. Do you see it that way?

Well, the country is, the country is surely divided, and I think there's some pretty deep reasons for that. I don't, excuse me, I don't actually think the news media is a principal cause of it. I think it is. much more of a reflection of it. To me, the deepest causes of it are probably the widening inequality over the last 40 years and a lot of unresolved stuff about groups of people who were once excluded And who we have far from reached steady state about including. So I think those are, I think those are the 2 big issues and they are also clearly related to each other. I think those are the 2 big issues that are dividing the country. And I think the news media, like everything else, is a reflection of that.

Okay. And now we're able to hear these divisive, divisive voices much better because of the internet and allowing people to go online.

You know, there's some truth to that. I think it's also true that some of our institutions have ultimately let us down, especially as a result Of the widening inequality. I mean, that would be my, my view, and that some of our institutions under these stresses have pretty much broken, and that, that is a sign. That's what's leading to a lot of the, the elevation of the more divisive, more hateful voices.

Okay. Now, I know the course you teach at Harvard. I want to bring up the fact that people have long been saying if, if there's just one major event that happens that can unite people, people thought that COVID and the pandemic would be that one great thing that would finally get people to kind of forget all the divisiveness and come together and agree. But yet we found the opposite. There was a lot of conspiracy theories and disbelief and misinformation surrounding COVID. How do you get past all of that? I mean, when you teach your course, what is it you talk about when it comes to issues like that?

Well, I mean, the first thing, let me just say, the first thing is the course is a, is for principally students of public health, some medical students, some public policy students, a few undergraduates from time to time. About how to communicate with the press, how to engage with the press, particularly about public health. So public health is a field where before 5 years ago, there was not a lot of call very widely for engaging with the press. There was not a felt need for understanding how to do that. And so the course is designed to remedy that and So mostly we talk about simply how the press works, how to understand the press if you're not in the press, which of course most people aren't. And most people, almost everyone in public health is not. So, so that's the first thing. It's not exactly what the course is about. It clearly touches on this. My, my view about COVID is COVID went I think very poorly in many ways in this country, some of which we saw at the time, some of which we see more clearly in retrospect and are still learning to see. I will tell you that my own view is that the first problem was an enormous failure of leadership. This was A problem about which there were a lot of people who knew a lot, and there was an attempt to sort of bull through that. Think of it as principally a political problem, which it was not, or as a business problem, which it was in some measure, but not principally. And then as it went on, there was another problem. And, and, and I do think this is an issue. People in positions of expertise, people in public health who forgot that when it comes to political decisions in a democracy, the people who should make those decisions our politicians. So to sum up, first the politicians tried to ignore the scientific parts, and then later some of the scientists tried to ignore the political parts. And both of those were, I think, terribly mistaken perspectives that have left us with a lot That needs cleaning up. And I think one of the things that's very disappointing, and I've written about this, is how little interest there has been anywhere in the country in revisiting this in a serious way and trying to tote up what went wrong and why with an eye to making sure we don't make these mistakes again. I think we are pretty much running as fast as we can in the direction of making certainly the first set of mistakes, the political, the politician mistakes again. If, well, let me put it this way. If there were another pandemic tomorrow, which there could be shortly, I don't think there will like, I don't think it's likely, but it's certainly possible. The political system and the government is at least as unprepared as they were 5 years ago, which is shocking. And the government is being systematically stripped of, right now, stripped of its ability to prepare again, which I find astonishing. I think the scientific community has learned a little about the mistakes it made, but I think it too has not really taken on board understanding what the limits of its own purview ought to be over what are ultimately political questions.

Do you see any trepidation from the scientific community and your students in particular with the emphasis on experts being derided? The whole kind of cancel culture idea is, I think we've seen a lot of leaders who've pushed back and said, I'm not going to step forward because I don't want the abuse.

Well, I mean, there's, there is some of that, but, you know, public life has always come with slings and arrows. I mean, you know, ever thus, you know, Adams and Jefferson both had a very rough time. And I mean, they did. Right. And so I don't think that part, that last part is new. It's always required a thicker skin than many people have to engage in the public arena. I do think that the devaluing of expertise and the celebration of ignorance is a serious problem. And that the country flirts with disaster to the extent that it engages in that. I mean, I wrote about this recently, you know, during the president's speech recently to the joint session of Congress, he made a crack about how he had defunded a grant to Lesotho and then said, you know, which no one has ever heard of. So here's the thing. Lesotho, I looked it up. It's a country of 2 million people. That is to say, it is bigger than Phoenix or Philadelphia.

Okay.

It has been a member of the United Nations for more than 60 years. To brag about, you know, and I know most people don't know where it is and maybe you haven't even heard of it, but you know, if someone bragged about the fact that they had never heard of Phoenix or Philadelphia, we would think they were an idiot. You don't brag about that. You may not know, but you don't go around going, I've never heard of Philadelphia. Isn't that amusing? People would say to you, that's just stupid. And celebrating ignorance is stupid.

How does the news media play into fixing this problem?

I think the best we can do is to report the facts independently, honestly, thoroughly, which means also the ones that may not jibe with our predilections.

Okay.

And then increasingly transparently. I think that's really important.

Okay.

Show your work. Admit when you make mistakes. Admit when things are, turn out to be different than you thought they were. I mean, a good example here, for instance, I think going back to your COVID point is the question of the lab leak theory. The lab leak theory was much too quickly and widely dismissed 5 years ago. Most people that I know Including most experts that I talk to, would say at this point that we don't really know for sure what the origin of COVID was, but that it is quite possible. And many would say maybe even slightly likely that it was the result of a lab leak. And, you know, that is, ought to be another lesson in humility. For everyone who 5 years ago took people's word for the fact that that was not possible when it clearly was possible.

Okay. I know another issue that just popped into my head while you were talking that is stymieing the news media, which is when you rely on a particular expert because, and they're an expert because of the job they're in. But they're not necessarily credible. What do you do? I know there's a lot of—

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, I know there's a lot of discussion about this, particularly inside the Beltway these days of, you know, do we still go, do we cover White House press conferences when, you know, your spokesperson isn't necessarily giving you facts, they're talking about spin. Or, you know, they just deride a reporter when they ask a serious question.

So the first thing I would say is if people, reporters and readers and listeners and viewers should behave more like we do in our regular lives. If someone lies to you, you don't trust them again, right? If they lie to you repeatedly, You don't even ask them again, right? Because what's the point of asking them a question when you have an experience that they lie all the time and you just, you, you stop talking to them. Or if for some reason you can't stop talking to them, you stop asking them questions when you can and you stop believing them and you, you just don't spend a lot of time on them, right? We should behave more like that in the press. If somebody lies to the press, You probably shouldn't really go ask them a question again unless you absolutely have to. You certainly shouldn't put them on live television or radio again, ever, right? Lying is a, is an abnormal human behavior, right? It happens frequently, but we've all agreed as a basic principle of our society that it weakens all of our relationships.

Yeah.

Lying Telling the truth is good. Lying is bad. And, you know, that is literally in the Bible and way before that. So if people lie to you, you know, try to pay as little attention to them as you can. And I think we're not as disciplined about that as we should be. Conversely, spend more time with people who tell you the truth. Also, if you're dealing with a matter that's complicated, try to be talking to multiple people.

So we started the conversation talking about the money issue and we kind of morphed into credibility and integrity along the way. So can those 2 things work together?

I think, I think there's a natural relationship between them, right? Ultimately, People are going to spend more time and more money with people and things and institutions and sources they trust. So I, I actually think there's a naturally reinforcing element to it.

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Thank you.