A New Role for Public Broadcasting?

By any number of standards, American journalism is in trouble. The Pew Research Center's Journalism Project has reported that the newspaper industry has lost over half of its advertising revenue since 2006 — dropping from $50 billion to $22 billion. As a result, newsgathering capacity has declined. The American Society of News Editors reports that, between 2003 and 2012, staffing in newsrooms fell by fully 16,000, even as newspapers cut back their publication schedules and mounted paywalls for their online versions. Many others have ceased publishing altogether. Local television news, although highly-profitable, is not picking up the resulting slack: The Pew project has found that traffic, weather, and sports comprise 40% of the typical local newscast, while a mere 3% is devoted to government and politics.