Interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel

By Jessica Newman

Crisis is also an opportunity for creativity and for the emergence of new models.    -KVH

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor-in-chief and publisher of The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine that’s been around since 1865. The Nation is based on a for-profit model, but is still largely reader-supported and relies little on advertising sales. Like most print publications, The Nation is facing challenges in its efforts to transform its model in order to keep up with a transitioning journalism industry. I talked with vanden Heuvel about her thoughts on the future of the media and what The Nation is doing to preserve quality journalism for the long run.

Jessica Newman: A lot of what we hear today about the journalism industry centers around the death of print media and journalism as a sinking ship. What’s your perspective on this, being a print publication and operating on a semi-traditional model?

Katrina vanden Heuval: Well I have to say that The Nation has never operated on the traditional model. We’re for-profit, and as someone said the other day, we’ve been a profit-seeking but not necessarily profit-attaining organization for 144 years. The model that we have had is one that I think now is ascendant in many ways, which is going to emerge because of the crisis of the corporate, more traditional model. That is reader-supported journalism. We have partners in the magazine; we have a circle of 100 supporters; and we have 30,000 Nation associates who give a small amount each month and each year above and beyond their subscription price to help us do the journalism we’ve been doing – investigative journalism, deep reporting, analysis that you don’t see in the mainstream.

JN: But you don’t see much investigative reporting these days in the newspapers that are dying every day. Does this mean journalism as we know it is dead?

KVH: The corporate model, if I can call it that, has failed. I think we’re seeing the failure of that around us as newspapers are folding. But as I said earlier, crisis is also an opportunity for creativity and for the emergence of new models. The Nation’s model is going to be one of the models. There are non-profit models. Those are possibly going to be part of our future. But I do think another model we need to look at is one that people sometimes shy away from but which is worth thinking about, which is how we use our tax and postal and regulatory policies to create a framework where we can support and sustain journalism. That would be low-profit journalism, not-for-profit journalism, public journalism, public interest journalism that is dying as the for-profit traditional model collapses. There are many people, many organizations, lots of conferences going on as people think through how we can not only sustain the newspapers – because those are really the ones that are like canaries in the coal mine that are going first – but how do you sustain quality, public interest journalism, which is vital for a democracy?

JN: What about the idea of government support for the media? How do you feel about using our tax dollars to keep journalism alive?

KVH: What’s important to remember is that the media system we’ve lived with for many decades didn’t arise just out of the ground. It was supported by regulatory policies and government subsidies. But these were subsidies that helped build those big media conglomerates. What we need to do now is think creatively about how do we use tax money to sustain quality journalism.  What we think of as government sounds scary. But I’m not talking about censorship; I’m not talking about government intervention in any way in journalism. But the frame work that would support high quality journalism – by the way, as other countries do in Norway and in France where there is support for people who take subscriptions or support for publications that have a very low ad ratio so that there’s more public interest journalism. So I think that’s the challenge ahead.

JN: Can quality journalism translate to the Internet?

KVH: I would recommend to you an article in the New York Review of Books this issue by someone who’s written for The Nation over the years as well, Michael Massing. He has some good examples of quality Internet journalism. So I do think if we can maintain journalism and that kind of journalism, which is really what this country should be about, which is tough-minded, questioning, rigorous journalism that holds power accountable – watchdog journalism. I’m not here to say that the journalism we’ve had over the last few decades in the newspapers that are now collapsing has been exemplary because think about the failure of the media, as I spoke about, in the lead-up to the War in Iraq or the failure to alert citizens to the financial collapse, to even question the bubble economy that we were living in. No, I’m talking about the possibility of a journalism that may die. But seriously, think of the Michael Jackson coverage. All due respect to him, but the coverage was out of control. So in terms of where our TV and our cable are going, where radio is going, it becomes harder to find high quality journalism. So that is important to sustain. There’s a reason we have these vast corporate media conglomerates. I think that anything we can do to sustain, in the midst of this crisis, a kind of pro-democracy, smaller scale media, we need to do. It’s critical.