WikiLeaks has recently announced the creation of a new organisation called the Freedom of the Press Foundation . The following excerpt from the press release gives a quick description of the new initiative:

This newborn institution, I think, has the potential to consolidate deep transformations in the way global journalism operates, transformations that have been slowly cooking since the early days of the World Wide Web. This is why I think that it is necessary to elaborate on how journalism has been shaken and transformed over the past decades.

By understanding the greater context of the crisis of journalism, and the crisis of newspapers in particular, it will be possible to understand this new entity, its role in global affairs and our relationship with it as global citizens. This story, I must warn, takes a necessary detour that might initially seem strange, a detour into the economics of classified ads. It will pay off though, so please bear with me.

Natural migration

The decline of newspapers in the West has been the topic of extensive academic research and public debate since the late 90s, when the internet boomed in mass adoption. The generally accepted version is that this crisis of newspapers is simply that advertising budgets were diluted in the vast waters of the internet. However, newspapers continue to attract large corporate advertising deals and generate cash flow that is at least sufficient enough to produce print and online versions of most major newspapers at a profit.

While changes in media consumption meant less time spent reading newspapers, marginal declines in corporate advertising were met with proportional budget (that is, staff) cuts. All things being equal, this would mean an equally marginal decline in coverage and overall content quality, but not a fundamental crisis of the journalism profession.

The real upset brought by the new communication technology of the internet was the disruption it brought to the dynamics of classified advertising.

The intrinsic characteristics of the internet as a medium, its ability to instantly distribute highly searchable information, without space restrictions and at near-zero cost, made it so superior to print for this purpose that the migration of classifieds to the web was inevitable. It was a good thing too, because the newspaper was really a costly middleman somehow profiting from exchanges between individuals.

The manager of the classifieds section in a US newspaper once remarked , were "news which we are fortunate to be paid to print". Indeed, each classified ad is a microscopic bit of journalism in the sense that it reports on an event of the life of the city: there is a two bedroom apartment for sale, an accounting position is available, there is a mature woman looking for a serious relationship.

What allowed the newspaper to charge these unsuspecting reporters was the high cost of the printing presses and the logistics of distribution, an insurmountable economic barrier that made potential encounters for exchange between citizens only possible through the newspaper. To find each other, they had to pay.

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The crisis of global journalism and the Freedom of the Press Foundation