荒诞者共和

The recipients of media assistance – journalists in developing and democratizing countries – will typically describe "democratic" media as serving two broad goals. The first is "building a culture of free expression," to which end journalists will talk about a range of issues associated with the "watchdog" role of the press and the need to provide citizens with access to news and information. This conception will often compete with another, quite different one that emphasizes providing citizens access to the instruments of communication, perhaps even against the prerogatives of those who own them, and especially where ownership is concentrated in the state or in private centers of economic power. This conception links media firmly to civil society promotion – "enhancing the bonds of community, building citizenship, and promoting individuality," as one Filipino journalist and educator explained it to me.3 These conceptions are not mutually exclusive, and they are joined in a common inquiry: How does a society create and sustain media that engage the public in democratically centered discourse? From this follows several related questions: What is the role of the state in creating and sustaining an independent and diverse press? What about the seemingly intractable problem of inhospitable environments – from coercive governments, antiquated press laws, and marginalized populations, on the one hand, to public apathy and unfavorable markets, on the other? What strategies can journalists in developing societies realistically employ to circumvent, if not overcome, these obstacles free press development?

Unfortunately for the would-be media system architect, there are no good answers to these questions. There exists great disagreement even in established Western democracies about what "free" and "independent" media look like, what purposes they serve, and to whom and how they are held accountable.4 Despite this, it is easy to find, in even the academic literature, breezy proclamations about the global "triumph" of "Western" journalistic standards.5 This makes no more sense than it does to talk about "Western-style" democracy. The United States and the United Kingdom, for example, have both very different media systems and quite different ideas of what makes a democracy work. Thomas Carothers has written that "the principles of democracy are quite clear,"6 but the principles of democracy are also breathtakingly few. "Democracy has no theory to export," Jacques Barzun wrote in 1989, in advance of the democracy aid soon to flow to Central and Eastern Europe, "because it is not an ideology but a wayward historical development."7 At best, he said, democracy has a theorem: that for people to be free they must also be sovereign, and the necessary conditions for sovereignty are political and social equality. How they exercise that sovereignty, what mechanisms they use to ensure equality and to distribute freedoms, is left to them to decide. As a result, institutional forms of democracy vary significantly. Americans, for instance, would find the social regulatory regimes in Switzerland or Sweden oppressive, the coalition governments of Germany, France or Italy a hindrance to effective decision-making, and Holland's non-majoritarian, proportional system of party representation incomprehensible. One might seek to copy any of these as a device for the expression of popular will, or invent something completely different.

So, though it is fine to talk in broad terms about rule of law, respect for human rights (including free expression), and civil society formation, "democracy" is not a theory but merely how the wheels turn. And at the level of machinery, theories about democracy can obscure more than they reveal. Consider the idea that cultural or religious values are the main impediments to democratization in Asia and the Islamic world.8 Maybe the problem stems from the way scholarly work gets reduced to television sound-bites by journalists and aid providers, but the effect is the same: to make simplistic what are complex challenges. For example, in Indonesia – an Asian country and the world's largest Muslim nation – the values that pose critical problem for democratization are not Asian "culture" or Islamic "culture" but the many juxtaposed and overlapping "cultures" that coexist within the same political boundaries: tribal communities in Kalimantan and New Guinea; agrarian, semi-feudal communities in the provinces; a growing middle class; and the technology-adept capitalist elite in Jakarta. Add to this the fact that Indonesia stretches across one-eighth of the world's circumference, in an archipelago of 17,000 islands containing more than 300 ethnic groups that speak as many or more different languages, and democracy promotion starts to look tricky. If a goal of a public-service media system is, at least in part, to link these many pieces into a coherent whole, how best to do that?

For our would-be architect of free and independent media, there is the additional challenge that media, unlike most other democratic institutions, are rooted not in political or civil society, but in economic society. As an industry, democracy promotion has tended (and still tends) to see media primarily as a component of civil society promotion, which is understandable and fine until aid is exhausted or withdrawn. Then it comes time to pay the bills – for salaries, newsprint, ink, transmitters, videotape, delivery trucks, telephones, software, presses, and all the rest. Other institutions of governance also have to pay their costs, of course, but many of those hold the power of taxation. It is certainly not unheard of for media to rely on tax support – the license fee that sustains many European public broadcasters is exactly that – but as a revenue source it is always troublesome, and in editorial terms its effects can be restrictive rather than liberating. Absent multiple layers of statutory and bureaucratic insulation, media that rely on government support will always be susceptible to government meddling, or worse. Rarely can even the most benign governments be expected to favor any interests but their own. More generally, the idea of government support for media, and thus entanglement with them, can be offensive to the idea of a speech market in which individual actors (and their ideas) are supposed to compete without unfair advantage. In real life, of course, some members of the speech market are hugely advantaged, usually by their economic power. Whether such a system is just or not, it is a principled question to ask whether that power should derive from the government purse. As a practical matter, too, the concept of government media is anathema to people in many democratizing countries, where past experience suggests a bad result, and by no means a "democratic" one.

The business of media assistance, now at least twenty years old, has thus come to recognize the central dilemma: how to find adequate and diverse sources of revenue while also providing a high-quality editorial product, one that contributes to democratic consolidation and maturity. This is at heart an economic dilemma, for the problems typically identified in virtually all democratic media systems – the lack of professionalism and even corruption among journalists, the tendency to favor sex, scandal, and trivia in print and broadcast – are best understood as economic problems. Public affairs media are, or at least have many of the characteristics of, public goods. Media are also experience goods. The cost of preparing a television news program, for instance, is the same whether it is broadcast to one person or one million, and no rational person will produce such a program if he cannot recover his average cost of production. (The irrational or altruistic person may do this, but not for long.) Recouping those costs becomes more difficult because consumers cannot evaluate a media product – in general, say, which of two newspapers is the higher-quality one, or in particular which newscast on a specific event is the more informative – without first consuming it. Consequently their decisions about what media to consume are likely to be poorly informed.

An additional economic problem for our architect is that the production of this consumption good is an inherently inefficient activity: News is not like automobiles, computers, blue jeans, or other products that fewer workers can now produce in less time than they could ten, twenty, or a hundred years ago. Put another way, good journalism is like good music, and inefficient in the same way. Two hundred years ago, for example, it took four musicians to play Beethoven's Opus 18, No. 4, and it took them about twenty minutes to play it. Today the piece still requires four people and twenty minutes. With some products, productivity remains flat (or nearly so) even when you add new technologies and other innovations to the production line.9 High-quality journalism – the kind that involves reporters who investigate and report, editors who edit and rewrite – works very much the same way. Whether it reaches the public on paper, on air or on line, good journalism is a hand-made product, and the only way to wring efficiencies out of it is, unfortunately, to eliminate reporters or avoid serious newsgathering, neither of which is apt to improve democracy's chances.

Yet another problem for our architect is that the consumption of public affairs media is also inherently inefficient. As Anthony Downs posited long ago, the theory of "rational ignorance" suggests that for most people, time and money is more productively spent doing something other than becoming well-informed citizens.10 For this reason, economist James Hamilton has written, most media engage in "rational omission" with respect to public affairs and investigative journalism, which, in addition to being unappealing to audiences, is much more costly to produce than sex, scandal, and trivia, and brings lower returns.11

It is for these reasons that high-quality public-affairs media everywhere find it difficult to support themselves financially. In developing democracies, consequently, training programs for reporters and editors, funding to support particular types of coverage, and other well-intended and potentially valuable assistance activities are apt to have little or no enduring value in and of themselves. Someone must pay a news organization's operating costs. Government or private subsidy is one solution. Another is the market, where media can compete for audiences and revenues. Neither solution is perfect; under either scenario, media can be excellent, or they can lose their public good character altogether and even hinder the democratic project. As an economic proposition, all that can safely be said is that the availability or unavailability of any revenue source will have implications for editorial mission. And editorial mission matters. As a larger popular and academic literature argues, both developing and developed countries contain many media that are not only financially self-supporting but hugely profitable, but they add little or nothing to democratic decision-making and in some cases even undermine it.12

The problem for media assistance, then, is to identify worthy editorial missions and then to figure out how to build self-sustaining businesses around them. Unfortunately, this kind of long-term approach is not the norm in democracy assistance, which is often criticized for the attention-deficit disorder of donors. Here also lies another dilemma for our democracy architect. What is a "worthy" editorial mission? Again, economic theory about the impossibility of defining the "public interest" suggests that any meaningful answer will be freighted with political assumptions and preferences shared by some members of society but not others. The plausibility of a one-size-fits-all editorial mission shrinks further when we consider the rights of the press and of free expression generally, the mechanisms for enforcing those rights, and the proper role of, the government in producing, packaging, and disseminating information. One can dodge these problems entirely, as some media training organizations attempt to do; characterize the goal in broad normative terms, as some media NGOs do; or, regardless of local conditions, try to impose one particular Western approach, as some international organizations (including the UN and the OSCE) have been charged with doing in post-conflict regions such as Bosnia and Kosovo. The solution in any case will always be in some way flawed. As with the problem of financing, there is no straightforward answer to the problem of editorial mission.

A final challenge facing the would-be democracy promoter, beyond the ambition of this article, is that the very nature of democracy is changing. Even as democracy has become the only normatively acceptable choice at the level of the nation-state, it has arguably been cheapened by its ubiquity. The relationship between decisions that average citizens take at the ballot box and the circumstances of their daily lives grows ever more tenuous in a global economy. For journalists and those who wish to assist them, this paradox represents both an editorial challenge and a financial one. On the one hand, it prompts the question of how journalists are to understand and explain the challenges facing their countries and communities within the larger framework of global governance. On the other, it exposes news organizations everywhere, but particularly in developing societies, to additional competition in the markets for content, production, and distribution, and of course for audiences, too.

There is little discussion about the so-called "democratic deficit" in the democratization industry, and to be fair, the deficit is not its concern. Overwhelmingly the industry's practitioners work in and care about places where, against the experience of political repression, ethnic conflict, and war, people are trying to reassert control over the conditions of their own lives, and in many cases to reclaim their dignity as human beings. And at its best, the industry is not much interested in the institutions and processes of formal democracy unless they make participatory democracy real – that is to say, they give citizens a voice in government decision-making and provide some measure of social and economic equality. Where the democratization industry focuses on these kinds of places, people, and problems, it is hard not to be impatient both with realists who argue that it cannot be done and with moralists who underestimate how long and hard the work will be. Though the industry, in its thinking and behavior, is frequently paternalistic, anti-intellectual, and even faddish, it deserves credit for its emphasis on public participation of a kind which has largely disappeared from advanced representative democracies (what Robert Dahl, in fact, calls polyarchies13), and which is increasingly difficult to resuscitate anywhere, never mind in states struggling to escape authoritarian or violent pasts. At least some of the uncertainties that bedevil media assistance thus derive from those that bedevil democracy generally.

A Guatemalan Apologue

In late 2004, I was doing field research when a colleague's email referred me to a trade magazine article about the Media Management Center, a journalism research and training organization whose home offices in Evanston, Illinois, are upstairs from my own at Northwestern University. The Center is the gold standard in media industry executive training programs, affiliated with both the Medill School of Journalism and Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Its research is widely praised and its recommendations carefully noted in the media industries it serves, not only in the United States but around the world. In visits to news organizations in developing countries, I have frequently referred editors and publishers to the Center's web pages, where it generously makes its research findings freely available.14 The article in Editor & Publisher was another in a series of accolades. The success story in this case was a Guatemalan newspaper, Nuestro Diario, which since its founding in 1999 has enjoyed singular commercial success in a market where it competes with five other dailies. Nuestro Diario is especially popular among younger and less-educated readers, and the article quoted several 14-year-olds in the tourist haven of Antigua, about 40 kilometers out of the capital city, who claimed to read it "cada dia," every day. "I like the sports, the stories about soccer, the crime stories, but the main thing is, it's entertaining, a way to pass the time," said one young man.15

"Nuestro Diario," the article went on to conclude, "is an ironic instance of the student turning teacher, the hottest case study on the international newspaper circuit."16 For the paper's rapid growth in the six years since it opened, the publisher credited marketing and editorial strategies he had learned at Media Management Center seminars.17 According to Editor & Publisher, Nuestro Diario had applied a "rigorous readership formula with steely discipline,"18 and it quoted Mike Smith, a principal in the Center, to the effect that U.S. publishers were already seeking to replicate Nuestro Diario's success with young readers in such products as the Chicago Tribune Company's Red Eye. And for good reason: Nuestro Diario, with a circulation of about 300,000, has nearly doubled the number of Guatemalans who read a daily paper. It is the largest-circulation newspaper in Central America, distributed almost entirely through street and newsstand sales. Compared to its competitors it has relatively few advertisements (with only 8 percent of the national advertising market), but its circulation is more than twice that of its closest competitor, Prensa Libre.

What appeals to Nuestro Diario's readers, said Editor & Publisher, is the paper's "predictability."19 Part of that predictability is the number of pages, which on most days is 32, making it easy for readers to find favorite features while also making limited advertising space more valuable. The paper employs numerous elements of design and presentation – such as leaving the first six pages of the newspaper ad-free – that MMC research has shown are reader-friendly and thus promote sales. The reporting style of the paper, said Editor & Publisher,

is to tell stories with a mix of text, photos and graphics. There are lots of short captions, giving information that is not repeated anywhere else. The main story, always short, almost never quotes anyone. Instead, there are snippets under headshots of the sources, who may be witnesses to a crime or giving an opinion about what happened…. In a package of text and graphics occupying just a third of a page, there might be more than a half-dozen ways to enter the story. On the big story that stretches across pages 2 and 3, there might be 25…. Every page is produced separately and reporting teams compete just to get on it…. Nuestro Diario is also filled with pictures of ordinary people – exactly what readership studies say readers and non-readers want to see.20

The article then quoted Smith: "The first challenge you hear to this is that it's ‘dumbing down journalism.' I often say to people, well, you try to get that much information in a half-page of text. I don't think that's dumbing down – I think it's smartening up the presentation."21 Perhaps so. I have worked with and written for the Media Management Center on occasion, enough to know that it mixes scholarly expertise with industry needs in a way that its clients value highly. It has made a science out of the news business.

But of course the news media are more than a business. Their products affect how people perceive their choices in a democratic society, and the quality of those products is critical if those choices are to be meaningful. Few would dispute this proposition, even those who honor it in the breach. Beyond that, the implications of the proposition are not clear. Quality is a subjective measure, though presumably it has something to do with the balance of public-affairs information and entertainment available in any one medium. If so, there is the added difficulty that is very nearly impossible to disentangle the "entertainment" aspects of media goods from purely "informational" ones. A soap opera, for example, can be more effective in educating people about a public health issue than years of news articles or a barrage of government public-service announcements.

Viewed as an economic proposition, the problem of quality is that the overall character of any good, and particularly media goods, will be dependent on, if not inseparable from, the business constraints put upon it. One such constraint is revenue source, but here, too, evidence about outcomes is mixed. Advertiser support, for instance, is often assumed to be inimical to public service, but with the exception of public broadcasting, the world's exemplary public-service media earn the majority of their revenues from advertisers, not readers or viewers.22

The problem of media goods and business constraints has been a matter of debate in developed democracies for a long time, and has been resolved in a variety of imperfect ways. But in developing democracies the problem is new. And where democracies are immature, or where political, social, and economic reforms co-vary in potentially destabilizing ways, the problem is especially significant. It is arguably the case, for example, that in a country such as Guatemala, Nuestro Diario makes few or no contributions to public discourse and democratic transition. Put another way, democracy may continue to mature in Guatemala, but the success or failure of Nuestro Diario will have little effect on its chances. The paper's business success is remarkable, and that success may be a sign of social stability in a country where the national psyche is scarred by 40 years of military dictatorship, civil war, and genocide. But Nuestro Diario is by any reasonable editorial standard a bad newspaper. It is engaging in its way, but to call it a work of reporting is charitable. It is a collection of "captions" and "snippets" and "headshots" that substitute full-color, garish graphics for narrative context and editorial explanation. Its "predictable" editorial features include cartoon-style reenactments of gang killings and political executions (sans the blood and corpses), and lots of sex. Perhaps its most distinctive predictable feature is a daily pin-up girl, printed as a centerfold.

Nuestro Diario is one of five independently published tabloids that constitute the newspaper market in Guatemala. (There is also a government newspaper that publishes official bulletins and announcements, Diario de Centroamerica.) Prense Libre, at more than 50 years old, is the politically conservative dean of the group and controls 45 percent of the newspaper advertising market. Nuestro Diaro is of course the readership leader, with total sales nearly 12 times that of El Periodico, an erudite and aggressive investigative paper, and also of Siglo Veintiuno, the other elite paper in Guatemala. The fifth paper in the market, Al Dia, is aimed at the same poor and mostly young demographic as Nuestro Diario, but has not enjoyed nearly the same success, with daily sales of fewer than 45,000 copies. All the papers distribute nationwide, but distribution is spotty, and readership is concentrated in and around Guatemala City, where all the papers publish.

In 2004, I visited El Periodico because of its reputation as the country's most vigorous investigative paper, the winner, along with its publisher, of numerous honors from international press freedom groups. It has also survived repeated rhetorical, legal, and physical attacks on its reporters as well as assassination attempts on its publisher, José Ruben Zamora.

El Periodico's newsroom and business offices are in a renovated home in a middle- to upper-class residential neighborhood in Zone 13, near the airport. No sign identifies the place as a newspaper office, but there are always a few motorcycles and several conspicuously armed men standing at the front entrance. One wears the uniform of a private security service; the others do not. The entrance doors they guard are heavy steel, with a magnetic lock. Like every other building on the block, El Periodico's offices lie behind an 8-foot concrete wall topped with coils of razor wire. Exterior windows are covered with iron bars. Here and there, other buildings on the street have signs on their doors announcing themselves as private residences. El Periodico draws the attention not only of the authorities but of thugs with the potential to harm both people and property. Neighbors want to be sure that anyone looking for El Periodico does not get the wrong building.

As a business, El Periodico struggles. It has tried in various ways to appeal to younger readers, so far without much success. Its staff, ironically, is on the whole young, in their twenties and thirties, about 70 percent of them women. Some of the more senior editors, and José Ruben himself, are in their late thirties or forties, and all began their journalism careers at other papers. Zamora, 48 when I met him, is a civil engineer by training. He was a founder of Siglo Veintiuno in 1991, but left that paper with his investigative editor, Sylvia Gereda, to launch El Periodico in November 1996, shortly after civilian rule returned to the country. The editors and reporters I met at El Periodico work there because the paper does what editor-in-chief Anna Carolina Alpirez characterizes as "journalism that matters."23 Alpirez, like many others on the editorial staff, came to El Periodico after having established a reporting career elsewhere. For some on the staff, it is a last stop; if El Periodico fails, they say, they will leave journalism and do something else. Several of the reporters said they would not work at any other paper, even as they acknowledged that El Periodico's editorial policies and some of its more pointed editorial features cost the paper both readers and revenues.

On the editorial side, El Periodico is two papers in one. The majority of staff work on producing the daily product, and a much smaller group is devoted, full-time, to doing long investigative pieces. In its daily reporting, El Periodico covers national and local news, including the country's growing importance as a conduit for illegal drugs and immigrants into Mexico and the United States, and the consequent rise of Guatemala's political and drug assassinations. It also covers sport and entertainment, but neither at length, and it does some business reporting. El Periodico's cultural reporting includes reviews of pop music, movies, and nightlife – but also reviews of high-brow entertainments, including books, a rarity anywhere. And like Nuestra Diario, El Periodico has a daily "girl photo," though usually a modest one (that is to say, fully dressed) that takes up a half page or less. The girl photo is a fixture in Latin American newspapers, even this one. José Ruben believes the feature helps to sell the paper. The women on the editorial side see it as incongruous with El Periodico's style of journalism. Marketing Director Carolina Marquez thinks it hurts the paper's brand identity. José Ruben also elects to publish regularly a columnist whom the entire staff considers politically and socially regressive, a throwback to the country's militarist past. José Ruben publishes him for reasons that no one could fully explain or which, if they did, I could not understand. The idea seems to be that the columnist represents a social and a journalistic value the paper wishes to promote, opinion diversity.

El Periodico competes for readers in a small market – the 20 percent of Guatemalans who do not live in poverty. These are educated, middle- to high-income readers who work in government, business, and education. The paper's signature work is investigating corruption in the national civil service and federal government, stories that are accompanied by a strong and reported editorial page. Special sections, done several times a year, examine the history of political violence in the country and its continuing legacy. José Ruben writes most of the lead editorials, and his voice stands out as the editorial identity of the paper. In 2003, when former Army General Efrain Rios Montt ran for president as candidate of the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG) party, despite a constitutional provision barring former military officers from holding that office, El Periodico was the paper that most vigorously reported about and editorialized against his candidacy and the court that authorized it. The law notwithstanding, Rios Montt was hardly the ideal chief executive for a country on the mend. A former Army chief of staff, he had seized the presidency in a 1982 coup and ruled Guatemala for a little more than a year until he was himself deposed in August 1983. In his short tenure in office, Rios Montt had implemented a counter-insurgency plan modeled on the French experiences in Algeria and Vietnam, destroying hundreds of rural villages and often slaughtering their civilian inhabitants. By the end of 1982, the policy had driven approximately a half million refugees either into Mexico or into Guatemala's slums.24 More than 200,000 had died or disappeared.25

In 2003, Rios Montt was serving as president of Congress, a position that provided immunity from prosecution. In 1990 and 1995 he had sought to run for president, but both times his candidacy had been barred by the Constitutional Court. In July 2003, however, a Constitutional Court packed with FRG judges approved his candidacy, a decision that a lower court stayed days later as an affront to rule of law. When it did, Rios Montt gave a radio address urging his followers into the streets. By then the campaign had already turned violent, with 22 people connected to political parties having been assassinated. It would soon get worse. Several hundred FRG supporters, many recruited from rural departments, came to Guatemala City wielding guns, machetes, and clubs. On July 24 and 25, approximately five months before the election, the capital city was the scene of violent riots in which masked and armed men sacked office buildings, fired machine guns from roaming trucks, burned piles of tires in the streets, took hostages, and attacked journalists covering the melee, killing one. Both the U.S. Embassy and the UN mission in the city were forced to close. The Guatemalan government, led by President and FRG party leader Alfonso Portillo, took no action to quell the riots, and indeed members of the Army and the police participated in them.26

Mayan peasants in the highlands, fearing the return of a military regime, began streaming toward the Mexico border, where they were either turned away or herded into refugee camps.

A month before the riots, on the morning of June 24, a dozen armed men had gone to El Periodico publisher José Ruben Zamora's house posing as investigators from the public prosecutor's office. They forced their way in, then stripped, tied up, and blindfolded José Ruben, made him kneel with a pistol to his head, and beat his children in his presence. Throughout the attack, the men took orders from someone by phone. According to Zamora, one of his attackers told him, "If you value your children stop bothering the people above. I don't know who you've annoyed high up the ladder, but we have orders that someone up high despises you. Whatever you do, do not report this."27

The attackers left after three hours. They demanded money and promised to return if it was not paid. Zamora sent his wife and children out of the country for the rest of the campaign and continued with his work. "We are all vulnerable to delinquency in this country," he said, "and I have a duty to carry on."28 International human rights and press groups rallied to El Periodico's cause, and the World Association of Newspapers and the U.S.-based Media Development Loan Fund urged the State Department to lodge a protest over the attack with the Guatemalan government. It did so, with the result that police security around the newspaper's offices increased. Three months later, in December 2003, General Rios Montt was eliminated from the ballot in the first round of voting after polling only 19 percent. He lost his congressional leadership position too, exposing him to prosecution both in Guatemala and in Spain. By contrast to El Periodico, Nuestro Diario remained steadfastly silent on the critical constitutional questions surrounding the general's attempt to recapture the presidency, though it ran photographs of the riots and their aftermath, along with plenty of "snippets."

To be sure, El Periodico was not the only news organization to suffer violence during the run-up to the 2003 elections. Other journalists covering the riots, particularly television reporters, were attacked, and one suffered a fatal heart attack while being chased. Journalism is a dangerous enterprise in Guatemala, and the more dangerous for those who take it seriously.

If El Periodico is on the hard road to independence, it has chosen to be there. The paper was at one time in a business partnership with Prense Libre, and together the two created Nuestro Diario. As part of the deal, Prense Libre held 60 percent ownership of El Periodico. Eventually the joint venture fell apart because El Periodico could not meet its financial responsibilities, leading Prense Libre to take El Periodico's shares in Nuestro Diario as payment. In the deal, El Periodico also lost access to its printing press. Zamora and his partners could have solved their financial problems by selling El Periodico outright to Prense Libre, thus becoming the "high end" product in a group that would have served virtually the entire Guatemalan newspaper market. (Al Dia, for example, was created for this purpose, a joint venture of Siglo Veintiuno and Costa Rica's La Nacion.) But had it done so, the thinking went, El Periodico might have had to abandon its commitment to investigative reporting; at any rate, a sale would have turned José Ruben and the rest of the staff into someone else's employees. So instead they negotiated a loan from the Media Development Loan Fund and bought back their shares from Prense Libre. Though the three papers are no longer legally or financially linked, El Periodico and Nuestro Diario still occupy adjoining buildings. From the outdoor patio that separates El Periodico's cramped newsroom from its business offices, one can look through several windows into Nuestro Diario's spacious and well-appointed newsroom.

Somewhere in the wide editorial space that separates the two newspapers lies the dilemma that faces journalism everywhere, but that is especially acute in developing democracies: the more closely a media product takes on the social and economic characteristics of a public good, as El Periodico's investigative reporting does, the less support it will find in the market; as a media product loses its character as a public good – as with Nuestro Diario's murder-as-entertainment features and pin-ups – the more likely it is to be financially sustainable, but the less its sustainability affects the outcome of democratic transition.

Admittedly, this formulation of the dilemma is overdrawn. Nuestro Diario's ability to engage young people, especially the many who are poorly educated and employed, can hardly be a bad thing – even if the content falls short of some desirable level of public affairs reporting. This is especially true in a country where genocidal wars have left a population that is overwhelmingly young. Moreover, one sign that a country has begun the process of democratic consolidation is that its media cease to be predominantly oppositional and begin to feature a broader array of choices, including lighter and more entertaining fare for more diverse audiences. Viewed in that light, Nuestro Diario may be more important for what it represents than for what it produces.

El Periodico, by contrast, is important for what it produces. Investigative reporting is what press freedom is for. It gives that freedom its raison d'etre, and it requires skill and tenacity. Done well it also requires money and time, sometimes a lot of both. That is why so few of the world's news organizations do investigative work. It is cheaper and less risky to cover official statements, news conferences, and other events specifically designed for news coverage – Daniel Boorstin's "pseudoevents."29 Anywhere it is done, investigative reporting is based on the premise that real news does not happen on TV talk shows or in press conferences, but in places that are often mean and grubby, and sometimes dangerous. Reporting real news also invites recrimination and even revenge. In such a country as Guatemala, where rule of law and civil society support are still weak, doing investigative journalism requires extraordinary courage and ingenuity.

Of course, none of that matters a whit if one cannot keep the lights on. To survive or, better, to become profitable, El Periodico needs to be a well-managed business, one that where possible learns from its competitors. Juan Luis Font, the young managing editor of the paper, spends a great deal of time thinking about new editorial features or promotions that might attract readers or advertisers, all while protecting the core investigative and editorial functions of the paper. So does the paper's sales manager, Juan Carlos Velazquez, an old university friend of José Ruben and with him a founder of Siglo Veintiuno. Like their colleagues at Nuestro Diario, Font and Velazquez have studied the findings from the Media Management Center's "Readership Institute" study, and both believe that El Periodico could and should follow many of the study's recommendations.30 But not all of them. One Readership Institute paper specifically questions whether investigative reporting is "relevant" to young adult readers, an empirical challenge that strikes at the heart of El Periodico's editorial mission.31 Other Readership Institute reports say that stories that are "too long" or "cover too much" are "inhibitors" to readership.32 Obviously individual news organizations will decide for themselves what these findings imply for their business, but it is certainly possible to conclude that the kind of reporting that is central to El Periodico's social mission is, simply, a poor business choice. Former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations Executive Richard Longworth reports anecdotally that newspapers across the American Midwest construe the Readership Institute findings to preclude any international news or even national news; these papers instead focus on the sort of quick-hit local features than have made Nuestro Diario so successful.33

In 2004, according to Juan Carlos, El Periodico was in the red, though both he and the paper's general manager, Carlos Gonzales Campo, expected the paper to become profitable soon. Another problem was cash flow. About 10 percent of the paper's revenues in 2004 came from advertisements paid a year in advance, and though the paper grew in circulation in 2004, the growth was not that significant. In any case, Juan Carlos was tied to advertising rates he had negotiated months earlier. He believes El Periodico must grow its subscription to 50,000, almost double the current figure. When I ask how he would do that, he smiles and says, "I suppose we have to change the product."34 Juan Carlos believes the paper needs more entertainment features – specifically, advice columnists and comics. In 2005, led by Juan Luis and investigative editor Sylvia Gereda, the paper launched a weekly supplement for kids. The paper's young marketing manager, Carolina Marquez, is even more frustrated. She believes she can offer valuable guidance on what features readers want – and, as important, what they do not – but is rarely consulted. El Periodico's mostly male and mostly middle- and high-income readers, she says, are insufficient to sustain the paper over the long term. Carlos Gonzales, a retired banker and an old friend of José Ruben, agrees. "Our ‘elite' is not economical," he says, "but it is an elite that likes to read. The biggest challenge is to increase readership, but we're not getting anywhere. We're stuck."35

There is a third way to sustainability, but El Periodico has chosen not to take it: The paper could survive on grants from regional and international media and human rights organizations, official aid organizations, and other donors. In effect, El Periodico would then operate as a not-for-profit firm, on the implicit presumption (if not the explicit legal requirement) that its core activity is neither profitable nor self-sustaining. Given its reputation, the newspaper would not have a hard time attracting grants, at least in the short term. From the beginning, indeed, El Periodico has benefited from outside donations of money and technical expertise, and at crucial times it would have gone out of business without them. Such revenue sources, however, are unreliable, and they often come with donor expectations that the paper's management believes could compromise – or could appear to compromise – its independence. And as a matter of principle, Zamora and his colleagues believe that if they can make the paper a market success, they will also make a statement about Guatemala's progress toward democracy.

It is easy to find media in the developing and democratizing world that are supported by grants from nongovernmental or international governmental organizations (NGOs and IGOs), as well as media that are staffed and operated by NGO or IGO personnel for the express purpose of pursuing some other democracy-enhancing goal, such as developing civil society, promoting public health, or supporting national and local elections. Often, however, donor-supported media wither and die when aid is withdrawn, redirected, or exhausted – as eventually it always is. Some of these media firms are supposed to die: at least in the judgment of their funders, they have served their purpose. Other media firms have survived by becoming so aid-dependent as to have forfeited any meaningful claim to editorial independence. They constantly retool their editorial mission to appeal to donors. In the process, these media frequently lose public credibility, thus undermining the case for their continued existence, and they fail to develop the managerial capacity to survive on their own. In the meantime, their presence can have the unintended and undesirable effect of competing in the market for audiences and advertisers against other media that are trying to provide independent voices in a changed political, social, and economic landscape.

Of course, donor-supported media do not have to collapse into editorial irrelevance. Some are excellent, far superior in quality to anything else available, especially in societies where legal protections for the press are weak or nonexistent. In Cambodia, for example, where hopes for democracy collapsed after the 1997 coup, the not-for-profit Cambodian Daily has emerged as one of two papers of record (the Phnom Penh Post is the other); it survives on donations. Such a paper is sustainable until the donors' money runs out, and then the calculus changes.

The dilemma of sustainability was first summed up for me in 1999, in a conversation with Sheila Coronel, a distinguished investigative reporter in the Philippines who is now the executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in Manila. Good journalism that survives the worst political and social conditions, Coronel said, may have trouble when it faces competition from a variety of other outlets, including many that trade in entertainment and sensationalism, and others that are subsidized by governments. Reflecting on her time working as a journalist during the Ferdinand Marcos era, she said, "Tyranny of the state may be better than tyranny of the market. As journalists we knew what to do with the state – you topple it. But what do you do with the market?"36

The same problem exists in other democratizing regions. A 2005 article in deScripto, the professional journal of the Southeast Europe Media Organization, notes that

since the media requires two markets to survive economically (audience and advertising), it has to be interested in financially successful management, but at the same time it must irritate the economic status quo because of its duty to research such themes as part of investigative journalism. So it may and often does happen that journalists are challenged to research subjects that may not be in the best interests of people or organizations which are stake or shareholders in the media. Economically speaking, media ownership is not an easy position. On one hand, media entrepreneurship is encouraged in a very difficult and complex market, and on the other hand, it is the source of independence problems, often negatively impacting freedom, the open media market, and above all, media culture. Ownership is the position at which economy, quality, money, and public communication values meet and where all those factors come into a difficult crux in a democratic culture.37

This "crux" is of course not unique to developing and democratizing states. Western journalists confront it daily, if in a different context. In a 1997 speech to a roomful of Russian journalists (then still enjoying freedoms that have largely eroded under President Vladimir Putin), Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland talked about the erosion of Western journalism standards under the onslaught of financial pressures that he said were "redefining the market – downward."38 In the United States, "our lowering of standards and refocusing of reporting is being subliminally, subtly dictated by market concerns in a rapidly and at times violently changing global economy."39 Exempting only the Public Broadcasting Service – a not-for-profit – Hoagland charged that the financial markets' demand for steadily increasing quarterly profits had gutted news organizations of their core purpose and most editorially important features, and in the process posed a "threat to democracy."40 And then he corrected himself: "I realize to my Russian colleagues I must sound something like a cry-baby. Here I am, complaining of the problem of too much money while they strive to find enough resources and moral support within their own society to establish and pursue independent reporting and editing. If they are successful, perhaps years from now they will get to the point of having the problems I have complained about today."41

In fact, they already do. Though a host of factors affect the sustainability of a news organization, the economic dilemma in news production is much the same in both developed and developing states: The character of some information goods is such that few if any for-profit firms will choose to produce them, with the result that they may not be produced at all. Put another way, media independence in an open and free society is largely a function of revenue sources, and revenue invariably colors one's definition of "independence." And where markets have greatly liberalized but press freedom is still restricted, as in Guatemala, the twin goals of financial and editorial independence can be especially elusive. Nuestro Diario is a market success largely because it avoids the high expenses and low returns of serious news production. El Periodico has won international editorial acclaim, but struggles for audiences and revenues in its own market.