David Simon: “It’s going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician”

David Simon, creator of the HBO Baltimore opus The Wire, is one of those testifying on “The Future of Journalism,” in front of John Kerry’s Senate subcommittee today. Simon was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun before being bought out in 1995. He has said, I believe, he would’ve been happy being a reporter for the rest of his life. (Lucky for the rest of us the Sun cut him loose and he got in front of HBO.) Simon has repeatedly said in interviews and essays what he says again in his opening statement to the committee:

My industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall St. and the same unfettered, free market logic that has proved disastrous for so many American industries.

He points out that his layoff and those of many others came near a time when the Sun’s parent company had a nearly 40% profit margin, in the mid 90’s, before the rise of craigslist, the internet or bloggers, and in a time of relative economic health. Newspaper companies, in other words, rather than plowing their profits into preparing for future battles, took profits and ran. And now, Simon says,

The executives and board chariman held up their profit margins and got promoted; they’re all on some golf course in Florida right now, comfortable retired and thinking about things other than journalism.

Simon and Steve Coll, current New Yorker writer and former Managing Editor at The Washington Post, both are advocating newspapers move to a non-profit model. I’ve often thought of this too, in terms of the way Harper’s operates at the behest of a charitable trust. But Harper’s is a monthly magazine with a tiny staff. Can a national or even regional newspaper several orders larger successfully work as a nonprofit? And, not to be cynical, but if you remove the profit motive, will the mere care and devotion to the ideals of journalism be enough to attract the best people into the fold?

The newspaper executives on the panel said that Amazon is demanding 70% of revenues for papers that agree to be on Kindle, and onerous rights contracts. They want an antitrust exemption so they can negotiate rights a la MLB, NFL, etc. That’s not a terrible idea, but the barrier to creating a media operation is lower than that of a pro sports league. Are the execs prepared to let small fries and bloggers come to the bargaining table with them? The protectionist model seems like a smelly one to me.

The Simon quote in the headline is one from his testimony, not the statement. It has to do with what is happening right now, as local papers are gutted and the check of public inquiry is rapidly disappearing. But the lack of oversight has been happening on all levels of reporting, from city hall to Washington, DC. The problem is, right now media profits are gone. The Times is leveraged up to its eyeballs. Any sort of change is going to take time and money to engineer, in the newsroom and boardroom. And it’s still unclear whether newspaper companies are, despite the lip service, making the investments they need to make to survive.

If only the answers were as simple as the way Simon’s Wire character, Prop Joe once described as his method of running his Baltimore drug empire: “Buy it for a dollar, sell it for two.”