It's an ambitious title and an ambitious project: 'The Reconstruction of American journalism.' But then its authors - Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie - lack neither ambition nor pedigree.
As one half of the author team, Michael Schudson told the audience to the latest Reuters Institute Lecture that US journalism is in real trouble. So much so, Schudson/Downie argue, that the core function of journalism in democracy - investigative reporting on matters of public policy - is fast disappearing.
And that crisis requires ... nothing less than the reconstruction of US journalism.
OK ... but why does this matter to us here in the UK? Well, I give you Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, the global financial crisis ... Curiously, though, it doesn't matter to us here in the UK for the reason we often assume: that the crisis that is US journalism will be replicated over here.
If one thing sang out from Michael Schudson's lecture, it was the special - parochial, even - nature of US journalism's problems. You cannot read across from Baltimore to Bristol - and you shouldn't try.
The differences are many. US journalism has always been more diffuse; there's never been the equivalent of Fleet Street. Its big city papers like the Globe in Boston, the Sun in Baltimore etc, etc haven't traditionally seen themselves as local or regional papers on a lower level of the news hierarchy.
Big city papers' ambitions have always been national and international - as likely to break Washington or Wall Street stories as the Post or Journal. And, as businesses, they became accustomed to huge profitability.
Cover price plus display advertising produced double-digit returns. But, as Michael Schudson reminded his audience, for all its claims as an agent of the constitution the newspaper business in the US was an extension of the trucking business. Only 14% of US investment in newspapers went into paying for journalism.
And of that 14%, only a small fraction went into original and investigative journalism that held power to account. Though once the finances went bad, it was that small fraction that was the first to go.
Free content (goodbye cover price) and the growth of the personal web (hello targeted marketing, goodbye display advertising) squeezed those healthy profits smaller than investors with other options were prepared to bear.
Maybe as many as 200 papers closed or went online only in the US last year - among them, Big City big names such as the 145-year-old Seattle Post Intelligencer (online) and the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News (closed).
More important, as Schudson/Downie chronicle, is the loss of somewhere around 20,000 paid journalism jobs - and the retreat of the remaining 40,000 to quick turnaround wire rewrites and footfall-generating celeb news. Overseas bureaux close and lengthy investigations become harder and harder to sell to corporate accountants.
Schudson/Downie acknowledge the contribution of new start-ups and ventures, like ProPublica, dedicated to accountability journalism which involves any or all of collaboration, philanthropy and academic resource. But, as Schudson/Downie point out, the number of people employed on these ventures is a fraction of the number of paid journalism jobs lost ... and few are making real money.
Schudson/Downie's answer? Government subsidy. Taxpayers' cash to subsidise that democratically vital subset of journalism that holds power to account.
Tried. Successful in some places; a disaster in others. And entirely 100% anathematic to the American way ... as another of the speakers, Princeton Professor Paul Starr, argued.
Inevitably, Schudson/Downie argue, from convincing cases in Europe (Scandinavia and of course the UK - if you class the licence fee/grant in aid as a government subsidy) while avoiding difficult cases in Africa and Asia, that state-subsidised journalism can exist in a free society.
Of course it can. And does. But with three important pre-conditions - two of which they accept; the third they prefer not to contemplate.
State subsidy coexists with a free society where subsidy is at arms length and where there is a well-developed notion of 'the public' that is separate from 'the state'. Where 'the public interest' isn't always or even usually coterminous with 'the state's interest'.
The third pre-condition is the three-way contract - state, broadcaster, people. It's in this contract that values such as impartiality, the public interest and accountability are defined. Without such a contract, the 'subsidised' news organisation's independence of both power and popular sentiment is always in question.
Schudson/Downie don't envisage that kind of contract, preferring instead to use taxpayers' cash to 'seed' newsrooms across the US with two or three sponsored investigators tasked with flying the accountability flag on voters' behalf.
Reconstruction?
