If News Is So Important, Why Can't It Make Money? with Historic Media Executive Norman Pearlstine

Americans have long had a conflicted attitude about political news. On the one hand, most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, see the press as an essential watchdog on government. This is not a new idea: The founders of the country singled out the press for protection from government interference for just that reason. At the same time,  sizable majorities of Republicans and independents today--and a good many Democrats besides--have little to no trust in professional media to report the news accurately. And audiences and advertisers are not willing to spend enough money to support it.

Evaporating trust. Collapsing business models. Along with an ever more obvious need for an independent press. These are the existential contradictions facing journalism today, a topic that we come back to continually here on In Reality. 

However, we’ve never had a chance to discuss them with Norman Pearlstine, one of the most significant figures in institutional journalism of the past 50 years. Norm has crowned the editorial masthead at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Time Inc. with its hundreds of magazine titles and, most recently, the Los Angeles Times. He has been in the room where journalism happened.  Norm recently joined Eric as a guest speaker at his University of Chicago course on the Future of Media. This evening’s class was called, Where We Are and How We Got Here.

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Alliance for Trust in Media
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