Want to Save Journalism? Change Who Owns It

[Editor’s note: This is adapted from ‘Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public,’ a new book by Richard Johnson and Peter MacLeod. Join Johnson and Tyee editor Jen St. Denis for a conversation about revitalizing Canadian democracy at the downtown Vancouver Public Library at 7 p.m. on April 15. Details here.]

News media in the democratic world today is a bewildering paradox. Never have we had so much access to information and sources of news, yet our trust in news media, journalism, and the authenticity of the profession itself have never been lower.

In Canada, the “trust score” given news media by English speakers dropped from 55 in 2016 to 37 in 2024, according to a study by Reuters. That tells us something about how people view journalists, but it also might say a lot about how citizens feel about each other, and whether we feel connected to decision-making about where our society is headed.

Apparently trust levels aren’t tied to political convictions. A recent study of trust in news media in Germany suggested that “generalized social trust among [readers and audiences] was positively associated with their trust in news media, while no relation emerged between their political attitudes and level of media trust.”

The authors reviewed decades’ worth of earlier studies and tested their hypotheses over time. They found that, regardless of political affiliation or left-right lean, the best predictor of trust in news media was trust in each other. Social trust includes faith in the institutions of democracy itself — fair elections, accountable representatives, an independent judiciary, and more.

Another study similarly found that the more social we are and the stronger our social ties — in other words, the more we engage in social dialogue with friends and members of our communities — the more likely we are to trust news media.

The German study also found that public trust in journalism, as a profession, predicted broader news media trust: audiences tend to trust journalists if those audiences believe their values are represented in the work of journalism.

However, the public also tends to view journalists as part of an elite social class, given their proximity to power and their control over the interpretation of current events. The increasing detachment between journalists and the public may be further exacerbated by other modern trends in the profession. More than ever, a career in journalism is accessible mainly to people with university or even post-graduate degrees who come from a higher socio-economic background and who represent a narrower slice of the political spectrum.

And as we’ve seen in the contemporary blend of journalism, blogging, commentary and more, many journalists have come to view their role through a lens of social justice in addition to reporting and truth-telling.

All of which means the work of journalism in the modern age is the true impossible task — to represent the values of audiences fairly; hold political power to account (while recognizing that journalism itself is a form of political power); provide accurate information to the public amongst the incessant noise of media personalities, social media influencers, and widespread misinformation; contribute to social trust (to ensure the public trusts you); and have a successful business model.

How Norway is saving journalism

The troubling decline of trustworthy, local and independent news media over the past few decades — especially in America but also in Canada and all over the democratic world — is unassailable proof that the free market alone cannot conjure a solution to the problem of ill-informed publics. In the face of market failure, governments and citizens must come together to construct alternatives for the sake of public good.

In countries like Norway, that’s been happening for some time. Since 1969, the Norwegian government has provided subsidies to local and community newspapers to help ensure their survival in the new age of advertising and corporate media control over a few large national newspapers and media groups. Today there are more than 220 local newspapers serving communities in a country of barely five and a half million people, notwithstanding that the majority of the news-reading public gravitates to the handful of corporate-owned national outlets. State support for strong news media doesn’t stop at local papers — any privately owned or non-profit news organization may apply for government subsidies to help ensure a healthy diversity of perspectives among news outlets, with a focus on innovation and digital media literacy.

“The overall objective,” according to Nordicom, the Centre for Nordic Media Research at the University of Gothenburg, “is to contribute to strengthening democracy and freedom of expression.” The independent Norwegian Media Authority, a state agency created in 2005 by an act of government, arbitrates the media transparency laws of the country. The authority guards the public against undue media consolidation or bias, ensures transparency of ownership and structure, and advises government and the public on threats posed by foreign actors, social media, media concentration and harmful content.

Perhaps the authority’s most important function is to promote media diversity and literacy, and for that it administers government subsidies for local and educational news media as well as grants for media research, innovation and continuing education — all of which are allocated under the country’s Media Subsidies Act.

Further, the Norwegian Media Authority publishes media literacy guides distributed to all residents, such as “Stop, think, check: How to expose fake news and misinformation,” in collaboration with media outlets and fact-checking services, complete with plain-language information posters for public spaces and institutions.

Meanwhile, Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK — the rough equivalent of the CBC, BBC or PBS/NPR — enjoys the highest degree of trust (and audience share) among news media in the country and receives 94 per cent of its budget from the government to insulate it from the pressures of market competition.

A 2024 report published by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University found that among 47 countries surveyed, Norwegians are most likely to be willing to pay for their news — a strong indicator of trust and value: 40 per cent of Norwegians believe the value of trustworthy news is worth paying for, compared with just 22 per cent of Americans. Just 15 per cent of Canadians pay anything for online news.

Alongside Norway’s state subsidies and community investment, there are a handful of corporate broadcasters and publishers that succeed in the marketplace, in part because of how they align their business models with public regulations and incentives to provide good journalism. Norway habitually sits atop the World Press Freedom Index published annually by Reporters Without Borders.

“On the whole,” noted the 2024 RSF report about Norway, “society and the state encourage independent journalism and the exchange of ideas.” When it comes to creating the conditions for a free press that supports a truly informed public, Norway has made media trust a national project. But it’s not the only model to emulate.

How the Guardian cracked the code

The ownership of the press will never not be contentious. Broadcasters, publishers, digital platforms, and soon AI-generated news media must draw on resources ultimately provided by people — whether those resources are money, laws, or attention spans. Journalism serves a public good, but it requires capital to provide its service. Democracy needs a free press, but its citizens and institutions have to pay a price for it. For some, the price is consumer culture and the deregulation of industries to unearth greater profit. For others, the price is taxpayer-funded incentives for responsible business practices and regulatory frameworks that encourage a flourishing public realm.

Notwithstanding a unique example like Norway’s ability to have it both ways, the common ground between these two views is their contention that the public has a role to play — one passive, the other active. And the kind of democracy we end up with in the future will be a reflection of how radically and innovatively our society can activate informed publics.

One way to help is through the concept of a media trust — a form of collaborative ownership that tilts control of news media towards the people it ultimately serves rather than the chaotic free market. The premise behind a media trust is that journalism is too important to be directed by an elite class of investors. Furthermore, publics are not passive consumers of information but active participants in a community that includes the very media organizations that help make them informed.

In 1936, John Russell Scott, the publisher of the Manchester Guardian, established the industry’s first significant media trust — the Scott Trust. The Guardian had long been a Scott family enterprise, rooted in and serving the working class of the 19th century industrial era in England. The Great Depression threatened the economic viability of both the newspaper and its community of readers alike, and in short succession J.R. Scott also endured the deaths of his father and brother, both eminent editors-in-chief of the paper. As the sole remaining family shareholder, facing the pressures of financing a media enterprise, J.R. Scott relinquished his shares to a board of trustees comprising seven of the company’s editors and executives.

“The core purpose of the Scott Trust,” in the words of a 2007 U.K. parliamentary investigation of threats to the country’s free press, was “to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation [that remains] faithful to its liberal tradition.” The Scott Trust was bound by its founders to uphold a set of values that reflected the community of readers even as it remained a profit-seeking business with national and later global ambitions.

The idea for the trust was born of necessity, but it inadvertently created a model that others might emulate. Unfortunately it largely hasn’t, and that same U.K. parliamentary report ruefully concluded that, given the rise of corporate media in the 21st century, “it is unlikely that another newspaper will ever choose to recreate the Scott Trust model.”

Not quite so. For over a century, the Tampa Bay Times has been associated with the Poynter family, first through Indiana publisher Paul Poynter, who purchased the paper in 1912, and then through his son Nelson, who was the paper’s general manager and editor for almost four decades. In 1978, an elderly Nelson converted his ownership of the business into a non-profit trust structure that today is known as the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which also runs the journalism non-profit Politifact.

Since 1974, the Irish Times, based in Dublin, has been owned by a trust similarly bequeathed from a family ownership structure. More recently, publications funded and operated along the spectrum of a trust model include ProPublica, the Salt Lake Tribune, and the Centre for Investigative Reporting in the U.S.; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the U.K.; and the Narwhal News Society and the Local TO in Canada.

Similarly in Europe, new digital journalism platforms such as De Correspondent (Netherlands), Mediapart (France), Apache (Belgium), and Zetland (Denmark) have been established over the past few years on co-operative trust models, including private-public partnerships and crowdfunding.

Beyond billionaires and bots

In practice, a media trust shields a publisher and its community of readers from the whims of billionaire owners and shareholders who are invested in the success of the business rather than the impact of the journalism. “The underlying purpose of these sorts of trusts,” according to author Gavin Ellis, “is to preserve quality journalism, which is expensive to do.”

A media researcher and former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, Ellis examined the newspaper industry’s tortuous transition from print to digital and the disruptions across the industry in his book Trust Ownership and the Future of News. Without a fundamental reimagining of ownership structure in news organizations, he argued, newspapers and other print media will always be owned by market interests that may conflict with journalism.

To be sure, media companies that are controlled by trusts still have to navigate the shifting sands of the marketplace, where reader engagement, diversified platforms, changing technology and the disappearing medium of print itself all bring pressure on an organization to succeed.

The difference is, trusts are not required to return a profit to shareholders or a wealthy private family, nor do they face as much risk of being taken over by investors with competing interests. “That’s the key to the whole idea,” Ellis told Australia’s ABC Radio National. Profits remain within the control of the trust, while losses can be endured without the sort of market pressures that can threaten journalism.

Meanwhile, trust models can catalyze innovation by removing some of the market risk. By 2010 the Guardian had already built the second-largest readership of any online English newspaper in the world, after the New York Times. The trust model played a significant role in the company’s ability to thrive in the digital era by shoring up new investments in podcasts, newsletters and other platforms; developing a global audience through a focus on investigative reporting on the climate crisis, the rise of autocracy and extremist movements within democratic societies, and other transnational issues; and adopting alternative revenue models.

The Guardian website has defied market expectations and revenue trends by continuing to offer most of its content for free, without a subscription paywall, while encouraging readers to pay what they can for the news they deserve — as of 2024, more than a million readers were “supporters” who paid, and a third of them were Americans.

Over the past five years, the revenue generated from reader donations has outstripped that from advertising and philanthropy, a remarkable achievement given the landscape. Today, the Scott Trust has built up its own investment fund to ensure the financial security of the news organization while doubling down on its commitment to the core practice of journalism in the age of democratic peril, and in recent years the Guardian Media Group has posted record revenues driven by these bold investments despite posting net losses which might otherwise make profit-hungry billionaires blanch. “The news environment isn’t diminishing, it’s burgeoning,” said Ellis. The Guardian is showing the way.

While trust models of media ownership are not a “magic bullet,” as Ellis cautioned, they are better regarded as an emerging and worthy successor to the billionaire and market investor model.

One of the overriding risks to democratic societies today is the concentration, consolidation and co-opting of the free press by special interests, especially those of billionaires and corporations whose aims are a far cry from the public good.

Another risk is the loss of connection between quality journalism and younger generations of the public raised in the context of social media and digital platforms.

Building back trust in the media will require, perhaps poetically, more media trusts — so that a free and vigorous press truly worthy of modern democracy emerges from the decay of the past half century.

This article is part of The Tyee’s reader-funded Reality Check project exposing and explaining the rise of digital disinformation. The project’s expert collaborators include the writers Richard Johnson and Peter MacLeod, co-authors of ‘Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public.’ Join Johnson and Tyee editor Jen St. Denis at the Vancouver Public Library for a free event on April 15. Both Johnson and MacLeod research and create public engagement through their company MASS LBP.