Reposted from Young Philly Politics
In a world where it is getting harder to make a buck with ink and a printing press, isn’t it time we think about providing some public support for this vital resource?
Everyone who is interested in the future of our city knows how important the Inquirer and Daily News are to us. We activists complain about them—especially when they don’t cover us as we would like by reporting every single word we say every day . But we know that without them, we would not know what is going on in the city without them, and no one would know what we do, either.
The papers are not important just for the information we get from them. There is also the depth of knowledge—and evident love of the city—that makes reading long term reporters and columnists like Dave Davies, Tom Ferrick, Chris Brennan, Larry Eichel, Gar Joseph, Monica Kinney, and John Baer so valuable. And there is the energy and enterprise that reporters like Tom Fitzgerald, Mark McDonald, Michael Curie Schaffer, Marcia Gelbart, and Catherine Lucey—some of whom are new to the city—have brought to not only reporting what politicians say but getting the story behind the headlines.
Keeping our newspapers at their best is not just valuable today. Right now, in order to learn more about the city I’m reading Inquirer and Daily News stories sometimes going back as far fifteen or thirty years ago. I wonder how, with the horrible staff cutbacks, historians of the future are goig to know what happened today.
And now, our papers are trying to become even more valuable, as the Inquirer is doing in creating the Great Expectations process.
Despite the public value of our newspapers, they are under siege, caught between the pincers of alternatives sources of information on the internet, declining advertising (also do, in part, to the internet) and declining habits of newspaper readership. In Philadelphia, our newspapers have also been hurt by self-inflicted wounds such as their horrible internet site and cuts in staffing that make it more difficult for the papers to do the kind of reporting that would attract readers.
So what can we, the public, do about this? My suggestion is to give the newspapers a tax break. Right now, insurance companies and banks and a few other industries don’t pay the business privilege tax. Certainly our newspapers are more deserving of a tax break—and more needy of one as well.
I’m not sure how much this would save the Inquirer and Daily News. But we should look into this and other possible ways to support this vital public resource. However, before we make any deals, we need some promises from Brian Tierney and his fellow investors. We need to insure that any money they receive tax breaks is invested in better newspapers. So there can be no more staff reductions. And there must be some serious investment the internet operation of the papers. (It would be nice, too, if the Philadelphia newspapers would, like the New York Times, allow readers to pay a monthly fee for access to special articles and the archives. That would save those of us doing archival research a lot of money, and make the archives a better source of advertising revenue)