Those who control information tend to wield an outsized portion of power.

The prolific 20th century author, Tom Clancy, probably said it best.

“The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.”

Yet, despite vast technological moves assumed to have democratized the dissemination of information, challenges to healthy democracy, to necessary civil discourse have never been greater. There is no doubt information moves more freely, through fewer gatekeepers, today than it did a decade ago, but those advancements also brought unforeseen manipulation that has drained public trust.

Turns out ease of access also meant ease of manipulation.

Average consumers of information struggle to vet the information that sways public opinion, particularly through social media platforms that have become ubiquitous in modern life. Meanwhile, the power over that flow of information has been consolidated to a small number of tech companies whose motives and values aren’t always clear. Worse, their relatively hands-off approach to information that appears on platforms allowed the proliferation of vast misinformation and disinformation.

Three key areas of our information infrastructure must improve to ensure the health of our civic discourse: accountability, cost and ownership.

Platform accountability:

Law-norms

The erosion of public trust in the information disseminated and consumed through modern platforms was swift and pronounced. Platform owners and operators — although they likely couldn’t have predicted the adverse uses for their technologies — must be held to account for how their tech is employed for nefarious deeds.

This is a difficult balance, because abrasive laws and norms likely would stifle innovation. 

A combination of legal reforms to allow platforms to be exposed to at least some liability for what is published on their platforms — similar to structures in place governing publishers — seems not only appropriate, but necessary at this juncture. The threat of potential litigation likely would compel more active and careful self-regulation by platform operators — a move that likely would trigger more robust efforts to verify content and ensure user accountability.

Further, the continued erosion of public trust in material published on social platforms already has begun a shift toward user distrust. Some platforms have launched efforts to counter the loss of trust in content published through their sites, but there likely will be a continued slide/revelations of manipulation before social norms build enough momentum to force more accountability.

Code-market

There is a substantial financial opportunity for a disruptor to enter the social platform/information dissemination space as existing operators continue to take hits in accountability scandals. Glancing efforts have been made to install bottom-up accountability by verifying users’ identity. A new platform (or innovation on an existing one) that verifies the identity of every user, disallowing manipulation of discourse through disinformation by bots and anonymous users and therefore generating credibility for the information published would have far-reaching positive social impacts. There are scenarios where the removal of anonymity could be damaging (namely in countries where governments or entities would retaliate against individuals who publish information that challenges authority) but there also are plenty of platforms that already address that type of threat.

Information cost

Norms-market-code

Social norms already are shifting in favor of financially supporting news gathering and information dissemination mechanisms, but there still are far too many news and information consumers in the U.S. who do not pay a share of the costs of collecting, vetting and disseminating that information. 

It is likely within the next few years many of the nation’s most prolific and trusted news organizations — if they haven’t already done so — will place paywalls in front of their articles in an effort to generate enough revenue to support their news gathering efforts. 

The shift will have a number of positive net effects on the sustainability of credible, professional information gathering and dissemination organizations. Prices for access and mechanisms for obtaining subscriptions no doubt will evolve as more readers become accustomed to viewing such information as carrying inherent value.

This evolution does, however, pose one substantial drawback. There likely will become a time when the cost of access to information will make it a luxury, therefore, diminishing its positive impacts on society.

In a paywalled digital world, there is no equivalent to bygone eras when several people could read a single copy of a purchased newspaper.

Ownership

Legal-code

For some time aggregation and unauthorized republication of copyrighted materials, particularly via social media platforms, has been a problem. The practice has allowed some platforms to siphon revenue away from original sources, creating a disincentive for investment in labor-intensive information gathering ventures.

A combination of revisions to copyright laws to address this modern problem and code innovations that could track and verify the ownership of materials seems like a viable solution. Similar to cartographers’ techniques of marking maps they create to protect their investment of expertise and time, a code solution could install simple tracking measures to ensure those using such information help foot the bill for its creation.

Norms

In addition to legal and code efforts, a campaign similar to ones undertaken by the music and film industries to call out information misappropriation likely would have important effects. Equating reading clearly aggregated articles to theft the same way the aforementioned industries did with digital piracy could help shift public opinions and diminish patronage to those who make their living appropriating, not producing valuable information.

To me, it was the most absurd statement a digital leader for a top newspaper company could make — worse, I wouldn’t know until much later that the trajectory I helped set my smaller news organization on wasn’t much better.

“You simply can’t put the cat back in the bag,” he said, referring to his contention that there was no hope of reversing the newspaper industry’s practice of providing free articles online. He contended the future of newspapers — especially the local ones that do most of the heavy lifting in the U.S. when it comes to holding state and local governments accountable — was in rounding up as many clicks each month as possible.

My response: “We don’t have much of an option, we must put the cat back in the bag or we won’t have local journalism.”

I, having a few months earlier helped launch a new paywalled website at the small daily newspaper where I worked, bristled at his plan to focus his staff on what essentially was click bait. I contended readers would see the value in supporting their local newspaper by subscribing online, giving them access to both the racy crime articles AND the less entertaining, but more important coverage of how their elected representatives were steering their government.

They didn’t.

The problem is, neither of us was entirely correct. It was 2008 or 2009 and online news consumers were shocked by the notion of paying for their news online. They were conditioned, mostly by flippant practices of newspapers at the outset of online news, to consider digital journalism as nearly value less. Worse, we at the newspaper did little to explain the economics of local news to our readers and we proceeded to set a price for the online subscription that aimed to protect our print subscriptions, not to grow our digital audience. The backlash was awful and drove many to stop consuming local news as part of their daily routine — the exact opposite direction from where civic-minded local newspapers want to go. The fact is, we were nearly a decade early (payment systems were clumsy, prices were too high, only one national outlet charged for content at the time, and we failed to communicate the value of what we were doing).

Unfortunately, the digital business model that larger chain and many others adopted was fatally flawed. It relied upon digital advertising, mostly from national services, that today barely pay enough to cover the electricity bill at most local newspapers. The second hit for those organizations struck when the practice of aggregation proliferated. Those factors combined to drive many local newspapers out of business or at least to such low staffing levels as to render them ineffective. In some places, the shift created opportunity for new digital outlets to thrive. But the result for most has been the creation of vast local news deserts. 

In hind sight the outcomes all were predictable.

So what’s the real problem here? Certainly not that one business model may be driven into extinction by a newer, more technologically advanced one. 

No, the real problem is the lack of local journalism occurring in communities across the United States. Nobody is asking what the city plans to do about lead contamination in its water supply. Or what the state will do about PFAS groundwater contamination left behind at airports and military installations. In the worst cases nobody even knows those issues exist until its too late. 

Our solution didn’t work, neither did that of others who took a different path. And we likely weren’t the best positioned to provide solutions, nor were we asking and answering the right questions. We were far more concerned with how to ensure the survival of our news business model.

So the question is how do we make local journalism affordable, accessible and sustainable?

Since the outset of my journalism career — a roller coaster ride that began nearly in concert with the first iPod landing on store shelves in October 2001 — I have lived life with one foot stuck in analog reality and the other planted in a digital future.

Journalism, particularly the newspaper kind, is steeped in tradition. We follow tried-and-true reporting and ethical standards, believe in the importance of an engaged free press to democracy and often (at least in the newsroom) focus more on our service to society than on fiscal models. And that’s where technology has taken its toll.

I spent the past decade and a half working in newsrooms packed with talented journalists who produce a timeless work product, but continually fall victim to outdated and clumsy delivery methods.

The fact is, the newspaper industry took a similar, albeit much more severe, drubbing from digital advancement than the music industry. Much of that beating was the result of institutional inertia multiplied by flailing into misguided attempts to catch a train that already chugged away from the station. Those missteps, a number of continued self-defeating new practices born from ill-conceived technologies and ongoing failure to create user-centric delivery of our industry’s most important product, triggered a 50 percent drop in newsroom employment during the past 15 years. That means half as many people are asking the questions that ensure a healthy democracy and educated electorate.

In the early days of my career, the basics — did I catch a typo or rewrite a headline — kept me awake at night. Today, I find myself staring toward a darkened ceiling at 4 a.m. wondering if we will find the technology that will ensure the future of journalism before there is nothing left to save.