The Public Press on Marin community radio

Bit by bit, the Public Press project is getting noticed.

I just got off the air from an hourlong interview with Jonathan Rowe, host of the talk show "America Offline" on KWMR, the community radio station in West Marin County.

 Rowe, a former reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, has a keen understanding of the problems facing the newspaper industry in the Bay Area and beyond, and was particularly interested in discussing alternative business models and noncommercial precedents for newspapers. We talked about the Guardian in the U.K. and the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, each of which has a slightly different twist on nonprofit ownership. With all, the advantage is the same: Profits, which in a privately owned (or "publicly traded") company, are not syphoned off each year, but instead returned to the company to improve the journalistic product.

And it was a pleasant surprise to hear Rowe ask me about PM, an audacious (and now obscure) New York newspaper experiment from 1940 to 1948. For most of that time the paper, whose mission was to crusade against fascism in Europe, racism in the South and faulty consumer products and services, took absolutely no advertising. If you want to read more about it, read Paul Milkman's definitive account, "PM: A New Deal in Journalism." Milkman is an adviser to the Public Press and has loaned some original copies of PM for reproduction.

Combine the nonprofit approach with freedom from the advertising that PM achieved and you get a truly "noncommercial" news organization. At least, that is the goal.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, "America Offline" isn't archived on the Web. I'll see if I can get a copy from the station.

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On a related note, Public Press volunteer Louise Yarnall, a longtime journalist and now education researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, blogged a few days ago at LA Observed about the cutbacks at MediaNews newspapers throughout California, and the devastating effects that process is having on the culture of journalism.

She writes: "Unfortunately, my experience in the journalism business tells me that they've not seen the worst yet. The level of delusion and ego that informs the corporate newsroom culture, from top to bottom, is almost programmed for utter self-destruction of the most spectacular kind. Corporations will not save this business, and neither will the old style of newsroom macho. Only the spirit of community can."