News Innovation

News Innovators on the Frontline: WestSeattleBlog.com

Posted on 03. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

The husband-and-wife team of Patrick Sand and Tracy Record run WestSeattleBlog.com. She is the site’s the primary reporter and editor, while he handles advertising sales and business development. Since January 2006, the pair have covered the bedroom community of West Seattle (over 65,000 residents) seven days a week, 365 days a year. They started selling ads about a year later. The site now has about 60 advertisers and brings in enough to support the couple and their teenage son, and to pay for occasional freelancers. Next on the agenda: hiring a Saturday editor so they get a day off. We spoke with Tracy earlier this week.

What have you done to build your advertiser roster?
We’re involved in the chamber of commerce; we joined more than a year ago. We sponsor a number of community events. It sounds mercenary, but there’s a lot of ways that you end up networking out of those. We run a banner on a local foot ferry to downtown Seattle.

We offered a free seminar to help businesses interact with their customers on the web. It wasn’t an advertising pitch, we provided some basic information like setting Google alerts so you know if your business is being discussed someplace on the web. Way before you get to Facebook and Twitter, that’s something that a lot of people don’t really know a lot about.

So, how much hand-holding do you end up doing with your advertisers?
That’s my husband’s full-time job. He explains how this is going to work and how we’re going to build a relationship with the business.

I have this disagreement with several people here—we don’t believe people are ready for self-service advertising yet. In some contexts they are, but a larger portion need service. I’m not being stupid like the travel industry that said people are always going to need travel agents. It’ll get to the point where people are ready for self-serve, but it isn’t there yet.

We have learned over the year and a half to better explain to people upfront, before they ever make a commitment, what this is all about and how it might work for them. This is display advt, this is not click-through, this is not conversions.

Overall, as the site gains more of an audience, it becomes something that people are proud of, they say I want to be part of WestSeattleBlog.

Also, when people join, we offer them the chance to have a little advertorial story published, just a couple of paragraphs and a picture. We thought the most interesting reaction came from readers who say it helps them learn about local businesses they didn’t know were here.

What is the big challenge, the big obstacle, you’d most like to get over?
It’s been a struggle invoicing and we’ve just hired a part-time bookkeeper, because it’s clearly getting beyond something we can deal with ourselves. If you try to do that too, besides dealing with clients and covering the news, it just gets out of control.

But, the next obstacle is finding additional advertising opportunities on the site without clutter.

We’ve had inquiries about sponsoring certain parts of the site, but right now it would require some design work.

We also want to be fair. We’ve set up a first come, first served positioning. And to say we’re adding a feature at the top of the page that is a sponsored traffic camera, do we need to tell all 60 advertisers that we have this opportunity and we’d like to offer it to all of you?

People on the business side would say, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll build enough inventory to provide other sponsorship opportunities and that’s the fairness.”
Possibly, but it’s the same challenge that I’m sure our parents faced in running their small businesses. We’re at that point where you know you are going to have to broaden the fold, to bring in someone, whether its on the business side or a Saturday editor, and that person is going to have some thoughts and some ideas. You know it’s not going to be just your little thing anymore.

We know that we’re at that point and we’re trying to figure out the right way to go about it. We feel blessed to get to that point.

You’ve provided a deep dive into your editorial process elsewhere, but do you use citizen journalists to provide coverage of certain events?
It’s a point of pride for us that we don’t ask people to do this volunteer, which even the local newspaper apparently does. If you’re going to write something for us then we’re going to pay you. So, if there’s something that needs news coverage that’s what we do, or we’ll pay a freelancer.

When it comes to reporting something you saw, either crime reports or a little league game, we have a fair amount of that. But, what we don’t do is say “here’s an upload tool, come and give us your stuff automatically.” All of it is done with actual human contact or via email where we write back to say thank you or to ask follow-up questions.

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Calling All Moms (that Blog)

Posted on 02. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

Over the past week we’ve been reaching out to hyperlocal and highly targeted news sites to find out what business models they use to sustain and grow their businesses (see Matt’s post below.)

One of the quickest growing trends in blogging these days — along with sports, music, food and local news — is mom blogging. A clear sign of enthusiasm among readers has been the sprouting of mom-related ad networks like BlogHer and Child’s Play, where web-savvy mom’s and mom’s-to-be can connect with brands relevant to their interests.

According to a recent BlogHer study, there are “42 million U.S. women online weekly doing some form of social media activity.” Nearly half of them have children at home, while 60% are married or live with a partner.

And just like with sports, music and food, mom blogs run the gamut (check out Hipster Mom.)

So we ask you, experienced diaper-changing, news-breaking moms, please join us in our efforts to better understand the future of journalism and take our survey!

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Meet the New Boss

Posted on 02. Jul, 2009 by Peter Hauck.

With some newspaper companies facing the very real possibility of bankruptcy, Poynter Online’s Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds asks “So what are banks going to do with newspapers and newsrooms once they are in charge?” 

Good question. And Edmonds provides some good answers from a “specialist in bankruptcy workouts and ownership change” that he spoke with at a recent conference. Bottom line: While “change is not as abrupt as one might think” in the earlier stages of a bankruptcy, there’s nothing pretty about reorganization.

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News Innovators on the Frontline: DavidsonNews.net

Posted on 01. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

In the course of the coming weeks, we’re going to dig into what has worked—and what hasn’t—for news innovators across the country. These journalists and web entrepreneurs have all taken our survey, which we’re using to build the business models and identify the revenue opportunities that will sustain journalism for years to come. Take the survey here.

David Boraks, an experienced writer and editor, founded DavidsonNews.net in 2006 as a “volunteer community news website” for Davidson, NC. He and two other writers update the site at least twice daily with news from town hall and the people, churches and non-profits of this small community. Boraks finally cut a check to himself—so far he says the amount is “modest”—for the first time earlier this year. We caught up with him this week while he was on (gasp!) vacation.

What has made DavidsonNews work so far?
We’re moving more and more towards the public radio model. Since mid-2008, we’ve signed up 300 readers paying on average $60-65 a year. Before we’d taken donations, but now I call them “voluntary subscription payments” because I really want to reinforce that people are paying for valuable information.

I see our revenues being split 50/50 between advertising and subscriptions. I would love to have 1,000 people a year give me money—getting to that subscription level, plus the advertising revenue that we’re projecting, would allow me to pay myself and the other writers a regular salary. Then, I’d also think about a paywall. If I could transition from free to pay site, I would. I think that needs to be the way the whole industry moves.

Wouldn’t you lament the loss of readership that might result?
I feel like I provide content that’s of value to people and the readers have shown that they are willing to pay for it. There are 6500 registered voters in our town and we get over 12,000 unique visitors per month. I look at that number and I see that about one quarter are one-time readers who come off of the search engines for one story. We have several thousand who read once a week or more. So, when I talk to folks I say we have several thousand readers.

At 1,000 subscribers we would have about one-third of the people who read the site right now. I’m confident that, if we asked, a substantial number of the others would sign up.

So, how do you plan to go from 300 to 1,000 subscribers?
We will continue to do promotion and marketing to build our subscriber base. We recently hosted our first public event, which I called a subscriber party, at a well-known coffee shop downtown. Some local musicians donated performances and we had a few speeches. We had a promotional campaign in advance on the site, which cost us a few hundred dollars. We were hoping for 50 new subscribers, but I think we got 90 who donated $50 or above. Some gave more, I think the highest was $250.

Davidson is a small community. Do you have plans to expand your coverage area?
The total population in Davidson is 9,100 people, but when you include the surrounding towns there are several times that, closer to 100,000. In Davidson, you can’t sell one ad and pay for a lot of employees.

My plan is for a network of sites that connects those other towns. I think there is a market for a network of local news sites that are sharing content and advertising. Even if I don’t own those other sites, I could have my ad sales person selling advertising for the network.

What would you need to expand to those areas?
I would need a town editor, someone who could do there what I do in Davidson. Alternatively, I would need someone to take over Davidson so I could report and edit that town. I do not expect to find a volunteer, so I would need to raise some capital – either from myself or from investors – to finance the expansion. That would cost $50,000 or more.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t need much else. I would add to the part-time schedules of both my designer/assistant and my ad sales rep. As for our technology platform, both our editorial software and ad server software can easily be scaled up to handle an additional market, at no additional cost.

Are there any other revenue opportunities you see out there?
I have had offers from local print publications to republish work from DavidsonNews. I haven’t seen an arrangement that makes sense financially, though, and I’m concerned about diluting my readership. What happens to the value of my content if it’s also published elsewhere? Besides, more people in our town read me than read the local daily newspaper. Our reader survey found that more than half of our readers do not read the daily newspaper at all, which was surprising. But, syndication is something I’m studying.

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Let a Thousand Models Bloom

Posted on 30. Jun, 2009 by Peter Hauck.

Hat tip to Peter Kafka, who writes MediaMemo for All Things Digital, for sharing a business model — put together by Mark Josephson, CEO of outside.in — of a hypothetical online-only news organization. While Josephson’s metro news operation of the future sports a mighty lean staff — 20 bodies in all, of which six are “news gatherers” — it forecasts a pretty hefty 41% profit margin!

Josephson’s model is available as a Google spreadsheet. And like all good hypothetical business models, its hypothetical P&L looks downright rosy — the page view and ad revenue projections seem particularly bullish. But that’s what models are all about: State your case, make your assumptions and be prepared to defend or adjust them. Which Josephson does in the article’s good comment thread.

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An Iranian Journalist’s Invaluable Cause

Posted on 29. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

 
Every journalist deserves to get paid for bringing new information to the public. Especially those who face direct opposition from foreign military regimes.

This morning I heard an NPR piece titled ‘Bureau Tehran,’ Live From Massachusetts. The subject of the story was Iranian journalist Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, who runs her news site Tehran Bureau from her family’s living room in Newton, a small suburb of Boston.

The story opens a new window to an area of journalism that’s quickly growing: International reporting on a do-it-yourself level. For most of her updates on what’s occuring in Iran, Niknehjad uses two laptops and often relies on emails from “contributors of Iranian descent, both in and out of the country.” As of now, those contributors provide her with information for free, and typically avoid taking bylines.

According to the NPR piece, Niknehjad started Tehran Bureau seven months ago and within the past few days her audience has grown from about 9,000 to 19,000.

Information “was coming at me like bullets,” Niknejad says at one point in the interview. “I didn’t have time to sculpt it all into stories, so I just started posting it as fast as I could. The information was raw, so instead of going in and taking the blood out of it, I’ll just copy and paste to put out information.”

When I heard that I immediately thought of how blogging and twitter have become vital outlets for free speech in a country confined by religious despotism, political injustice and information censorship.

And then I heard the NPR interviewer, Tovia Smith, say that when Niknejad migrated to the U.S. at 17 she had no intention of becoming a journalist, and instead coincidentally fell into a legal reporting gig after finishing law school. Smith explains that Niknejad had never intended to pursue the path of a reporter in school, but now, with the current lack of substantial Iranian news reaching the public, “she says reporting is her calling.”

That made me wonder how Kelly Niknejad values — in terms of revenue, and perhaps even profit — what she does for her country’s people and the broader global community. I went to her website and found a donations page that highlights the importance of her reader’s support to sustain ongoing coverage, since Tehran Bureau does not “accept funding from any government, religious or special interest group.”

So, I sent Niknejad an email about her recent NPR interview and asked her if she would be able to talk about the dollar/rial value she places on her and her colleagues’ coverage, especially while Iran remains conflicted and without a free press.

“When we covered the Iranian election, we were working on a $0 budget,” she later told me over the phone. “Ideally we would have liked to have had correspondents in other provinces outside of Tehran, so we could have captured the atmosphere throughout all of Iran. But we didn’t have enough funding for that.”

“Right now we have about 20,000 people following our coverage on twitter alone,” Niknejad added. “If every one of those readers donated $5, we would have enough money for a full year’s budget.

“Of course there are many people who have been incredibly generous beyond donations of $5, but in terms of covering our costs, it hasn’t been enough for us to expand. We have a dedicated core of people who are working for free outside of their own jobs, so it’s been incredible so far. But if we had the funds to pay them and they were able to make a living from this, our correspondents would be able to comit that much more time and energy to reporting.”

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MinnPost Tweets Local Ads

Posted on 26. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

MinnPost.com launched an innovative micro-blogging advertising service yesterday that they’re calling Real-Time Ads. The Minnesota-based not-for-profit created a new sidebar widget that will publish messages from an advertiser’s Twitter account or blog rss feed, as long as it has been updated within the last 72 hours.

In a post announcing the launch yesterday, MinnPost founder Joel Kramer described the Real-Time Ads product as “a fast-paced marketplace, full of advertisers’ messages that are newly posted and thus up-to-date.” Moreover, he believes this kind of “just-in-time” advertising provides a kind of information that could draw readers back again and again.

He wrote:

“Imagine a restaurant that can post its daily lunch special in the morning and then its dinner special in the afternoon. Or a sports team that can keep you up-to-date on its games and other team news. Or a store that could offer a coupon good only for today. Or a performance venue that can let you know whether tickets are available for tonight. Or a publisher or blogger who gives you his or her latest headline.”

The service is in a free, four-week trial period and has already drawn over a dozen testers from a pool of over 30 invitees. The final cost to subscribe will be set at the end of the test period, but Kramer says it will be “below $100.” Each MinnPost page will carry three subscriber messages in the widget, selected randomly. According to real-time ad media kit, MinnPost averages 700,000 page views a month, which means a subscriber’s message will be viewed roughly 70,000 times.

Certainly, at such a low price point and with only 32 slots available (for now), Real-Time Ads won’t be a revenue game changer right off the bat for an organization looking for a path to sustainability. Maximum revenues would be about $150,000 per year, enough to pay for another staff reporter, but not much else.

“We look for game-enhancers, and this could prove to be one,” says Kramer. “The important thing is that the current set-up is just the beta set-up; we can do many more things — at both higher and lower prices — if the demand is there.”

He says two ideas would be to create premium slots to guarantee placement at certain times of the day or a lower-cost model that would function more like a classifieds page.

Kramer says the widget did not cost much to develop—under $5,000—and Kramer says it will remain a relatively inexpensive, self-service product aimed at advertisers who already blog or tweet.

“We hope if people find it exciting it will encourage them to set up their own blog or Twitter account,” says Kramer. “But we’re not going to be their online advertising consultants.”

But, at least in the short term, even experienced online customers may need some hand holding. Although MinnPost is not the first site to use Twitter and rss as an advertising tool—see TheDeets and The Windy Citizen—the concept confused some of the internet savvy advertisers they approached for the free trial.

“Only a few people understood it immediately,” Sally Waterman, the MinnPost advertising director, wrote in an email. “Most “decision-makers” did not. I had to talk to most people about it at least once — and most of them had to pull in the people that are actually doing the tweeting and the RSS updating, and then I had to talk to them, too. Once they understood it, they liked it a lot. This has also been a catalyst for many of our clients to start conversations about social marketing and how it fits into their business.”

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Take our survey!

Posted on 26. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

We sent our survey to nearly 200 independent local and hyperlocal websites this week. We’re looking for business and editorial information from websites across the country so we can develop a set of business models and best practices to make sure news has a bright future.

We’ve already gotten a great response from dozens of bloggers and publishers, including Anali’s First Amendment, based in Quincy, MA, and The Windy Citizen from Chicago, to name just two. Thank you!

But, we want to hear from all of you. Visit our survey page in the sidebar and follow the link to the survey. After you’ve finished, send it along to your your online publishing colleagues.

(If you did not get an invite from us, don’t freak out! We tried really hard to come up with a comprehensive list, but it’s just really hard to find all of you.)

Finally, rest assured that your information will be treated confidentially. The data we collect will be used only in the aggregate and will not be associated in any identifiable way with an individual website.

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Shaping the Future

Posted on 26. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

The rapid erosion of the newspaper business has resulted in a lot of smart folks giving new thought to the future of journalism. As part of our research for the new business models for news project, we’re providing summaries and links to reports, studies, essays and conferences that bring value to the discussion. Take a look at our Shaping the Future section.

And, as always, let us know what you think.

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The Potential Value of Online News

Posted on 23. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

Photo from PWC's "Outlook for Newspaper Publishing in the Digital Age"

Here’s a sign that news still has some $ value.

American newspaper consumers are willing to pay 68% of what they spend on their daily papers when it comes to online news, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study shows.

Whether or not that’s enough to sustain an online-only business model (considering the lack of advertising dollars floating around the internet,) it’s the highest national average out of more than 4,900 interviews conducted in seven Western countries.

On the other end of the spectrum, newspaper consumers in Holland are only willing to pay 38% for online news. Perhaps when information can be freely shared the phrase “going Dutch” loses its meaning.

The other five countries included in the survey — Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland and the U.K. — fall somewhere in between America and Holland, while the total average for all seven regions amounts to 62% of current newspaper payments. Of course, that doesn’t factor in the elimination of printing costs and pressman unions, or the issues of content piracy and advertising revenue for online media. But it’s a start to mapping out a foreseeable new landscape.

And while most of the readers surveyed say general/breaking news is more important to them than any other type of coverage, they also say it’s not the kind of news they’re likely to pay for. Instead, financial news ranks the highest with 97% of the respondents willing to pay for the content. Sports news ranks second highest with 77%.

The greatest potential for paid online news can be found in specialized, targeted and relevant information, the study reconfirms. In other words: people are willing to pay for tailored content that’s harder to find for free.

On the upside for non-financial and non-sports journalists, “that creates both an opportunity for advertisers to reach their consumers and for newspapers to develop ‘hyper-local’ or ‘local-local’ sites addressing content at the neighborhood and suburban level,” say Marcel Fenez and Marieke van der Donk, who wrote the accompanying report. And that gives the U.S. a lot of legroom to create new business models for journalism.

But while there is plenty of untapped potential for online growth, PricewaterhouseCoopers contends that print news will remain the largest source of revenue for newspaper publishers “for some time.”

Disclosure: I still buy print newspapers.

Click here to view the full report, including charts.

Click here for an online-only revenue outlook by our comrades Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang.

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State coverage as a worthy charity

Posted on 22. Jun, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.

There’s nothing unsexier in journalism than covering state government. “Trenton bureau” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Paris bureau,” does it? Do you know the names of your statehouse reps? I’ll confess I don’t.

And so my biggest fear in the death of metro papers is the vacuum that will be left in coverage of state capitals. I don’t buy the dire predictions that journalism itself or investigative journalism will die with those papers. Washington will still be covered; one could say it’s over-covered (if often poorly covered) today. City government will be covered because it affects people’s lives directly and because there’ll always be somebody to catch the mayor red-handed.

But statehouses? Unless your governor is a former movie star or pro wrestler or client of prostitutes, they don’t get much – enough – attention. And even when it does get covered, there’s no obvious and endemic advertising support. Capital coverage was the gift of broccoli from news organizations and no one’s likely to bring that dish to the new news potluck.

That’s why I think that in the new ecosystem of news, state capital coverage may need to be publicly and charitably supported. Unsexy though it may be, it does affect our lives and purses. And witness the inanity in Albany lately, state government is populated too often with crooked fools who must be watched.

I’ve had a few email exchanges on the topic with John Thornton, a venture capitalist in Texas who’s worrying about state coverage. “It’s where the economics are the most up-side down,” he said:

Think about this:  the total 08 Fed budget was $3.1 trillion.  Subtract, national defense and entitlements, and it shrinks to $1.3 trillion.  That’s the “discretionary spend” which is the dominion of Congress.  Sure, there is always room for better coverage of Congress, but I’d submit that it’s pretty well covered as is.

On the other hand, the cumulative state budgets are $1.6 trillion, or 30% *more* than the discretionary spend of Congress.  These taxpayer dollars are, of course, spread out into 50 byzantine and corrupt state capitols, the coverage of which has fallen dramatically and continues to do so.

So how will such coverage be funded? Thornton is counting on philanthropy. He said:

It’s certainly apropos to look at the public radio and tv numbers.  Austin’s npr station, kut has 200k listeners and 17k contributors—the best conversion rate I know of.   They raise $3m from individuals and $3m from contributors. . . .

Dance companies in Texas raise $20mm a year. . . . If journalism philanthropy, 10 years from now, were the size of dance, we’d put 150 reporters on statewide issues and could literally change the way state government operates.  Think about that:  an extra 20 at the capital; a couple each for all the agencies and the school board; 20 on the border.  You almost can’t spend that much money responsibly.  I don’t need opera.  I don’t need visual arts.  Don’t need symphony.  Just give me dance, and I’ll change state government.

What this needs is people with the passion of a Thornton to sell the cause and raise the money. But as with NPR and Wikipedia and Spot.US, not everyone who benefits has to give to make the nut.

This is one of the areas we are investigating at the New Business Models for News Project. The question we are asking is how much potential charitable giving we can project for news in a market and what that will support.

We will also look at how the rest of the ecosystem can support this coverage. For example, wouldn’t it be wonderful if your town and city blogs and sites had at the ready charts to tell you who your state reps were and what they’ve been doing: their votes and expense accounts, too? Support will come not only with money – it has to start there – but also with the attention papers used to be able to give such coverage.

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Why hyperlocals should go mobile

Posted on 18. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

Because the stories that work best on mobile are the bread and butter of hyperlocal coverage, says Mark Potts.

“Mobile is really the sweetspot for local sites,” he says. “Google Traffic is never going to pick up the two-car accident downtown or stuff of interest to a small subset of people, like the little league game tonight has been rained out. Those are the classic hyperlocal stories, and that’s where mobile would be great.”

As he wrote in a two-part series on local mobile last week:

What really distinguishes mobile is immediacy and location…The phone in your hand is your direct pipeline to solving problems right here, right now, and mobile-enabled services have to recognize that. It’s the purest definition of the old “news you can use” chestnut.

Beyond editorial content, mobile advertising revenues are potentially too large for new metro organizations and hyperlocals to miss. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, mobile marketing budgets will increase 26% this year while overall marketing expenditures decline by 7% (via MediaPost).

While mobile is bucking the downward spending trend resulting from the recession, the emerging medium is still only a small fraction of total marketing budgets, at 1.8%. The MMA projects that mobile ad spending will grow from $1.7 billion this year to $2.16 billion in 2010.

So, even though the examples of successful mobile products–including Yelp–Potts cites are organizations with substantial r&d budgets to burn through, he says there are inexpensive ways for smaller companies to compete. He says they should look at off-the-shelf offerings, new products coming down the pike from the content management providers or by turning to a company like Newsgator for a custom iPhone app on the cheap.

Potts argues that the hyperlocal play in mobile advertising will grow as more phones start to geolocate (or even begin to augment reality). An app could blast out coupons or special sales from local vendors—like half-priced slices from the corner pizza guy—to readers walking by.

“Local sites end up as an ad agency at that point and everybody wins. The sites take a little slice off the top,” Potts says.

So, are there any independent hyperlocals out there with killer mobile apps? Let us know, we want to hear from you.

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Could Campaign Finance Reform Benefit Journalism?

Posted on 16. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

Absolutely, says Jay Hamilton, who argues that changes in campaign funding would bring untapped information to the public.

Earlier today I spoke with Hamilton, a Duke University economics professor and author of the book, “All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News,” who told me campaign finance reform could open a new valve for news, especially as media coverage shrinks.

“If you think about the problem as people not having enough information about public affairs,” he says, “campaign finance laws further limit the amount of information we’re able to get.”

The idea behind tying campaign financing to journalism is that fewer funding restrictions would lead to an expanded role for campaigns to publish more viable content along with their own takes on current events. Increases in their allowed spending would, presumably, lead to more campaign members performing research, conducting surveys and aggregating news for public use.

And while campaign ads, sites and infomercials don’t exactly scream journalism!, they certainly play a vital role in the broader information world. In his book Hamilton divides that world into four markets:

A market for producers — Information that helps you do your job. The majority of people who work on Wall Street read the Journal in some form. So do most business journalists.

A market for consumers — Information that lets you know the best places to eat, shop, visit and rent.

A market for entertainment audiences — Information that satisfies your personal interests. Or helps you forget about the economy for a little while.

And a market for voters — Information that allows you to make smarter electoral decisions. For example checking a campaign website to find out how your local assemblywoman voted on different bills.

“Today there are enough campaign organizations like MoveOn.org that have a journalistic function,” says Hamilton. “And the web makes it so much easier for people to examine information thoroughly.”

Of course the typical concern with a campaign or special interest group that provides information to the public is how certain political agendas come into play. Then again, that could easily be said about the blogosphere. As The New York Times reported a few months ago, a group of liberal bloggers have linked up with organized labor and MoveOn to form a new political action committee they are calling Accountability Now.

Perhaps journalism is coming full circle to the days of pamphleteers, when most of the country’s news was published by highly partisan printers. And if so, would the American public see a difference?

“The argument among opponents of campaign finance reform is that voters can’t process information well enough, that they are easily deceived by ads.” Hamilton says. “But I believe in the Web 2.0 world, where there is a new demand for political knowledge, the discussion should be reopened.”

Click here to read a Duke Magazine Q&A with Jay Hamilton on fact funding.

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About the New Business Models for News Project

Posted on 12. Jun, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.

We at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism believe that the discussion about the future of journalism — as newspapers and other news organizations find their business rapidly eroding around them — needs to be informed by facts, figures, and business specifics. That is why we created the New Business Models for News Project.

The project is researching best practices in the business of journalism online, gathering new ideas and experiments in revenue for news. We will build complete business models to share with the industry and with the journalists, communities, entrepreneurs, technologists, and investors who will create the future of news.

The project is funded by the Knight and McCormick Foundations. Two earlier conferences leading up to the work of the project were funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The work of the project’s first phase will be presented at the Aspen Institute in August and will be shared, publicly and in progress, on this site.

Our work begins with the assumption that there will be a market demand for quality journalism, watchdogging those in power, and that the market will find a way to meet that demand. The question so many are asking is how. We will attempt to answer that by projecting the future of news in a metropolitan area, concentrating on four perspectives — hyperlocal, the new news organization, publicly supported journalism, and the framework to support this new news economy as a whole.

We will use as our model market a hypothetical top 25 metro area in the U.S. where the sole daily newspaper has ceased publication. In short: We are asking what will fill the void. We posit that no single company or product will do that. Instead, an ecosystem made up of many players operating under many models and motives will emerge. In all cases, we are agnostic as to who owns and operates these entities: legacy or new companies, large or small. In that context, we will examine:

* The optimal hyperlocal (town or neighborhood) blog or site. We will look at how to maximize revenue to such sites, whether they are run by sole proprietors, larger startups, or established media companies. This will include helping sites provide the best and most valuable service to local advertisers; establishing local networks of fellow hyperlocal sites to increase sales and revenue opportunities; larger metro-wide networks; and exploring other revenue opportunities, such as paid models and commerce. We will look at what these sites need to succeed, such as networks, promotion by aggregators, and technology.

* The new news organization. Even after a market loses its daily paper, we believe there is an opportunity for a new news organization to be reconstituted around key journalistic roles serving the metro-area. We will project the scale of such an enterprise: its audience and revenue yielding its resources and functions: reporting, aggregation/curation, perhaps organizing the broader community and its news efforts. How many employees can a profitable, journalism-centered business support and what can and should they do? What is its relationship with other players in the ecosystem?

* Publicly supported journalism. We do not believe that any single savior– foundation, government, device, or massive public contribution — will rescue an existing news organization as it operates today from the crush of the market. But we do believe that publicly supported journalism — that is, from individuals, foundations, and perhaps companies — can play a role in this model city’s news ecosystem. This could take the form of a local Pro Publica or of crowdsourced funding through a platform such as Spot.US or of an expansion of public broadcasting’s role. The key question we will answer is what level of support will likely be available — projecting from current efforts locally — and what those resources could provide.

* The ecosystem’s framework. We will examine the supporting infrastructure this ecosystem will likely need, bringing together independent players to reach critical mass so they can recognize greater market value (in, for example, advertising networks and in mutual promotion) and greater efficiency (in, for example, technology platforms, the ability to create collaborative projects, training in journalism and sales, search-engine optimization…). Once again, we are agnostic to ownership: These functions could come from a single company (which is how we will present the model); they also could be provided by a legacy player or they could be offered by various players. To quote Mark Potts at one of our CUNY conferences, “You may want to be small, but to succeed at being small, you probably have to be part of something big.”

In addition, the project will gather and also propose a catalog of revenue models, working with those who are building systems to support paid content; interviewing local advertisers to learn more about their needs; talking with sites in the U.S. and elsewhere to learn what is working and not working for them; examining the possibilities for more unusual revenue streams such as e-commerce.

After this work is well underway and after the Aspen report in August, we plan to extend the project’s work to examine more business models, such as national and international content exchanges; interest-based sites and networks;

The project is headed at CUNY by Prof. Jeff Jarvis, head of the interactive program. Peter Hauck is project director, working with Jennifer McFadden, business analyst; business researchers Kate Albert, Gary Frangipane, Noah Xifr, Darshan Dedhia, Frank DiBartolo, and Senem Coskun of Baruch’s Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at the Zicklin School of Business; and reporters Matthew Sollars and Damian Ghigliotty, both graduates of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. We are grateful to the Field Center’s Edward Rogoff and Monica Dean for their support.

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Diller: Directories “still make nothing but money”

Posted on 11. Jun, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

Barry Diller spoke to PaidContent earlier this week and in talking up one of his babies, citysearch.com, he makes the case for local online directories. Of course, Diller also says the work of building those directories is “impossible.” Here’s the exchange with Staci Kramer:
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