Sustaining a free press: Jack Myers' mission

While media pundits argue over whether micropayments, subscriptions or the user will save the news media from the economic downturn, a new campaign is offering support to publishers investing in alternative business models.

The Campaign for a Sustainable Free Press, set up by Myers Publishing, aims to help media companies, which are innovating to survive.

"The campaign objectives are simple: identify and amplify those companies and initiatives that are developing, testing and implementing alternative economic models that support a free and independent media industry at all levels, from network television to local newspapers," Jack Myers, campaign founder and head of Myers Publishing, told Journalism.co.uk in an email interview.

As part of the campaign, free advertising in Myers' publications and grants are being offered to initiatives which are working on alternative business models. Meanwhile, Myers himself is offering advice on the importance of a free press and a commercially stable media to business, trade associations, and at conferences.

The publisher is a veteran of media campaigning: he launched the National Media Advisory Board in the mid-1990s for children's television and funded Television Programming partners, a group of global advertisers tasked with testing new economic models for programming on network television in the US.

Myers is putting his own publishing assets behind the cause, he says - which as yet remains unrepresented by any industry-wide initiative, he adds.

"The economic models that have well served the media business globally for nearly eight decades are less relevant today and will be irrelevant in the near future. Bankruptcies, consolidation and disintegration are on the near term horizon," says Myers.

"If the advertising and media business collapse economically, the financial support for a free press collapses with it. Yet, most media and advertising companies remain locked in traditional business paradigms and there is no organised industry initiative focused on communicating the threat to our business."

Without the funds to cover their day-to-day activities, news operations are unable to invest in innovation when it comes to online business models and innovation, he says.

Furthermore, digital and technology-based solutions to the media's economic problems proposed by the technology community have been too readily backed by investors without legitimate business models behind them, adds Myers.

"The assumption that advertising will grow sufficiently to support these advances was misplaced and ill-conceived, and the impact of new technologies on the media industry as a whole was never analysed accurately."

The campaign is calling on other organisations to offer their support to not only maintain, but sustain the future of a free press - without which, he adds, the foundations of society are threatened.

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