But more frequently — and with a boom last week, when Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, bought The Washington Post — the tycoons who have led the digital revolution are giving traditional print outlets a hand.
Call it a sense of obligation. Or responsibility. Or maybe there is even a twinge of guilt. Helping print journalism adapt to a changed era is becoming a cause de jour among the technology elite.
Google, which has been criticized for profiting from news content created by others, began financing journalism fellowships for eight people this year. The founder of Craigslist, the free listing service that helped ruin newspapers’ classified advertising, helped finance a book on ethics for journalists.
A co-founder of Facebook, the social network many young people rely on for news, recently bought New Republic magazine, and the founder of eBay, another classified ad killer, started an online news service in Hawaii. Steven P. Jobs, the former Apple chief executive, went out of his way to advise newspapers how to adapt their products for the tablet era.
“So ironic,” Les Hinton, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in a Twitter post last week about Mr. Bezos, that The Washington Post “should be consumed by a pioneer of the industry that almost destroyed it.”
Technology industry leaders, who “deal in fact and code,” are supporting the press because they value it, said Merrill Brown, director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University and the former editor in chief of MSNBC.com.
“They’re concerned about where the country is going and share a commonly held point of view that what we do is important for democracy,” said Mr. Brown, who is also a partner at the venture capital firm DFJ Frontier.
This union of the press and digital patrons is sometimes awkward. For starters, tech moguls seem to do their best to stay as far away as possible from the news media’s prying questions. Mr. Jobs was famously prickly around the press, while Mr. Bezos has shunned all interviews about his purchase of The Washington Post except for one — with The Washington Post.
Technology’s helping hand has mostly been extended to newspapers and magazines. And some tech-focused companies, like Yahoo, have long been involved in the news business, hiring their own reporters and editors, setting themselves up as direct competitors to traditional news outlets.
On the business side of newspapers, executives have done little to hide their suspicions about the technology companies that are reaching out. Several years ago, while Mr. Hinton was publisher of The Wall Street Journal, he described Google as a “vampire” sucking the blood from newspapers because of how it aggregated news articles on its Google News site.
Frank A. Blethen, the publisher and chief executive of The Seattle Times, scoffed last week at the overtures Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, had made to journalism causes. “He clearly disrupted classified advertising,” Mr. Blethen said. He added dismissively about Mr. Newmark’s efforts in journalism ethics, “and now he’s portraying himself in this public policy realm.”
Many critics of the newspaper industry say its predicament is its own fault for allowing upstarts like Craigslist to outflank it with better methods for advertising automobiles, rental apartments and other merchandise.
Mr. Newmark declined to comment on why newspaper officials blamed him. He said he supported journalism initiatives — media ethics and fact-checking are two pet causes — because he valued news he could trust. He said he was not even convinced that Craigslist had hurt newspaper classified advertising.
“I’m still waiting to see any hard evidence for cause-and-effect,” Mr. Newmark said. “I’ve been paying attention for a long time.”
Mr. Newmark said he donated $42,000 to the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., to host a seminar related to a book Poynter recently published on journalism ethics and for the development of a related Web site.
Brian Stelter contributed reporting.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/business/media/technology-industry-extends-a-hand-to-struggling-print-media.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
