Hooked on Journalism

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Normally, when Maureen Dowd talks about "vice," she's referring to Dick Cheney, the former vice president whom she saddled with that nickname years ago.

With Cheney in mind, some readers of her New York Times column this morning might've spit out their coffee when they read her opening line: "Can vice save journalism?" (Of course, other readers might've done a similar spit take when Dowd called a certain Republican kid on the block, "Vice in Go-Go Boots.")

Dowd, however, was referring to actual vice (as in sin), and wondered if it could possibly return newspapers to profitability. In one of her characteristic rhetorical flourishes, Dowd wrote, "In these times, when big-city papers and magazines are disappearing and shrinking—The New York Times is cutting 100 more newsroom jobs and Condé Nast is closing four magazines—we need life rafts. Publications once buoyed by splashy ads evoking drinking and sex are now conjuring ways to use drinking and sex to subsidize the news." (This, friends, is how you win Pulitzer Prizes by the boat-... dinghy-... uh, life raft-load.)

Specifically, Dowd wonders if letting newspapers run legal sports books would help juice their bottom lines. She talks to Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News, who has already advocated for this, going so far as to tell Forbes' Dirk Smillie in August that a government-approved plan allowing sports betting on newspaper websites "would save every newspaper in America." (Every? Even Deseret News? What profits a newspaper if it gains tons of online revenue if its employees lose their souls?)

Gambling is great, but why stop there? Maybe newspapers need to start taking ads for escort services and "massage" parlors to, um, stimulate their revenue? So what if some alt-weeklies abandoned these ads years ago. In New York, the weekly New York Press stopped running them in 2007, as did New York Magazine. (The Village Voice, my onetime employer, remains proudly fluffed by adult classifieds: So much so that in August 2007 the paper ran a jokey cover made up entirely of fake escort ads.) An Associated Press report from the time cited numbers from the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women that put the revenue from sex ads at $10,000 a week: If the Times, the Wall Street Journal, or anyone else wants to be a truly national newspapers, multiply that figure by every city and everyone—heck, even the Deseret News!—could hoover up that money and reopen overseas bureaus or prevent some buyouts.

Then again, why wait for escort agencies and massage parlors to buy those ads? Why don't the newspapers turn some of their own staffers into high-end companions? What if the papers themselves organized fancy events for big spenders—you know, classy individuals like business executives and lobbyists who could pony up, let's say, $250,000—to "meet" and "greet" reporters and editors in a cozy off-the-record kind of way and see what new leads come from it? And besides, a lot of those clients will pay just to talk. (Now that's what I call a "two-way" communication model!)

Surely no one would have a problem with that kind of revenue model, right? We're all adults, here. What could go wrong?