Doug Fisher's Profile

journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience.

Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to.

An all-access subscription is the perfect solution to help older readers make the transition online.

APJ, for all-platform journalist

We have a lot of viewers on TV and the Web that are very forgiving. They don’t care if material is highly produced or not.”

The model that emerged from our anthropology study helped to frame the task ahead by splitting the news into its fundamental “atomic” pieces of Facts, Updates, Back Story, and Future Story.