The Less, the Better

One of the possible ways to improve journalism is to reduce the number of news organizations and collect the limited resources to produce better news.

The lack of resources is one of the main reasons for poor quality journalism. Seeking profit makes the owners of the news media cut cost; cutting cost makes the news organization become under-funded and under-staffed. Many news organizations can not afford to hire good journalists; journalists are busily working on using quick and easy stories to fill the newspaper space or TV airtime, instead of producing high quality news. Some newspapers publish stories without any editor even reading them in entirety. If the situation continues, the news media will further lose their respect and attraction for the public.

A possible solution is to reduce the number of news organizations, especially the small and local newspapers and TV stations, and concentrate the financial and staff resources to do better journalism. So many TV stations and newspapers report the same events and interview the same persons again and again. It is very common to see several local stations repeat the same traffic accident in their evening news. The low quality of news and the repeatability not only waste audiences’ time but also waste the society’s resources at large. Yes, we need more than one news organization in a certain region, so the media can compete with each other. But generally speaking, for a medium size city, two or three news organizations are sufficient. Theoretically, if ten small news organizations were consolidated into two organizations, each of them would have five times more money and staffers to work on the same amount of newspaper space or TV airtime. We can expect that, under that circumstance, the quality of report would be greatly improved. I hope that the media completion or a new model of news business can help merge the low quality small organizations into relatively big and better media.