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We have seen how the current global financial crisis affects the business of news. I don’t have to remind you the number of foreign and domestic media outlets that have shut down their operations over the course of the past months.

In Greece, we are accustomed to the idea of the media being subsidized by the state. To be more accurate, we-the taxpayers-pay a sum in every electrical and water bill in favor of the national radio and television stations. Until the late 80s supporting the public broadcasting company wasn’t heavily scrutinized as it is now. When the first private radio and television stations began airing their programming, the Greek audience entered in a new era of media products, free of state control but still under the regulation of the free market [or ratings].

Some believe that the Greek media industry follows the standards set by the American one, yet this might not be true anymore. With the advent of social media and the proliferation of trustworthy alternative news sources [bloggers, citizen journalists, collective efforts such as Huffington Post and The Daily Beast], the traditional news organizations and their respective business models started losing a notable share of their audience and income.

From that moment, the media corporate divisions commenced grappling among  different strategies to reinforce their sources of income while trying to remain relevant with the trends, now set by the audience. In the midst of this blurry environment, a scholarly drift toward media state funding has appeared in the US, which has already begun to divide practitioners and academics. The reasons nurturing this disagreement are more than prominent: people bear the fear that the state would eventually intervene on the broadcasted content, thus opening a  new chapter in the debate of media transparency and accountability; on the other hand, how many media outlets will eventually rise above the current financial crisis and ride the wave of change in the rapidly evolving media landscape?

To follow this ongoing conversation start from reading Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine and his article “Giving up on the news business” and the Columbia J-School-sponsored report “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” by Leonard Downie Jr., and Michael Schudson.

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