Business Summit
Interview – Bill Mitchell from Poynter
Posted on 27. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
Bill Mitchell has been at the Poynter Institute for ten years. As one of the premier institutions of traditional journalism I’m curious what the internal happenings are there.
How does an organization that trains professional journalists handle on one hand the radical disintegration of the professionalized class and on the other hand embrace the larger swing of online, openness, etc.
I think the semi-recent makover of their site late last year was a start. I’m also intrigued by Bill’s new blog that covers the business side of things.
Listen in…
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Scott Meyer – This Too Will Pass
Posted on 14. Dec, 2008 by David Cohn.
Scott Meyer from Warburg Pincus talks to us about the future of advertising, how to grade a successful startup and is kind enough to give us a positive vision of journalism’s future.
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Alan Mutter – The Next Six Months for Newspapers
Posted on 24. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Alan Mutter’s blog “Reflections of a Newsosaur” is a must read about the economics of newspapers. It is also one of the most depressing blogs out there right now. Alan doesn’t hold back any punches. He only serves cold dishes of reality. At this time, however, the view is merited and contains important information to head. If there is anybody who can give you the straight talk about newspaper economics – its Alan.
[The video is a bit shaky but clears up after a minute].
I tried to find some positive near the end of the interview (tunnel) but Alan didn’t want to add any obvious silver lining. From his view this really is a time to hold on tight, because we are going down a steep hill for at least 6 months. After the interview he jokingly said that as a depressing person “this is his time to shine.” That may be true – but if you need a positive jolt after this video interview I still go back to my recent blog post “Why We Should Feel Bullish About the Future of Journalism.”
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Leonard Witt Interviews John Yemma from Christian Science Monitor
Posted on 17. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Both of these gentlemen attended the New Business Models for News Summit. Leonard Witt was in the “Public Support for Journalism” working group with myself while John Yemma was a roaming journalist.
Before the conference Yemma had alluded to CMS making some sweeping changes but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. Sure enough the next week they gutted the paper program. Their print edition is now limited to once a week while the rest of their work will live online.
Newsroom cuts are still on the table but Yemma sounds as though this leaner newsroom can still get the job done. In hindsight I wish we had put Yemma in the Newsroom Efficiencies working group.
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Innovation: An interview with GlobalPost.com co-founder Charlie Sennott
Posted on 07. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Chris O’brien writes at the Next Newsroom Project….
Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, likes to say he had one of the last great rides in international reporting. He came up as a metro reporter, got sent overseas, and got to do international reporting for the paper he loved. But when he returned to Boston a couple years ago, he learned the Globe was pulling the plug on its international bureaus.
That set off some soul searching that has turned the career journalist into an entrepreneur who wants to reinvent the model for international reporting with GlobalPost.com. The online only international reporting site launches Jan. 12, 2009 and will have 70 correspondents around the world covering international news from an American perspective.
Sound crazy? I thought so. But I changed my mind after listening to Sennott. I saw him speak at the New Business Models for News Summitt in New York a couple of weeks ago (see the video above). And I got to talk with him last week to fill in some of the details of what he has in mind. Sennott is passionate about journalism, and clearly believes he and his partners have a sustainable model for a new international news organization.
“I’ve covered cops, courts, war zones, huge stories,” Sennott said. “I’ve never done a start-up. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’ve never been so excited about an opportunity to try to build something.”
You can listen to my interview with Sennott here:
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Welcome the Information Valet Project – Bill Densmore
Posted on 03. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
The New Business Models for News Summit is actually the second in a series of events. The first “Networked Journalism Summit” included Bill Densmore who is now working on his own project trying to tackle the revenue issue.
(For those keeping track, that’s one video using Viddler, the other two using Vimeo and Blip. Have a video platform you want me to try? Let me know).
I was able to get a brief chat in with Bill who has also provided a brief write-up below.
From Bill Densmore
Thanks for all your work on last week’s “New Business Models for News” summit at CUNY; I was unable to attend. But your on-demand video archives are a valuable fill-in.
I’d like your community to know about the Information Valet Project, which takes a cue from Jeff Jarvis’ advice to start building new business models. Our first summit to define and plan launch of the Information Valet Service is Dec. 3-5 at the new Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Univ. of Missouri. We invite participants. (To register: http://www.ivpblueprint.org)
We’re pushing a fairly specific notion of how to build a shared-user network with a revenue model baked in — the revenue model is similar to the sort of reverse syndication which Jeff talks about, and embraces the networking concepts outlined by Tom Evslin at CUNY.
“Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy” is a strategy summit designed to blueprint the law, ownership, management, marketing and technology of a shared-user network for user-centric demographics, privacy-protected purchasing and advertising exchange and compensation.
Evslin noted that the former newsPAPER industry — because of its unique content and relationship with 50 million customers who pay for information daily — is in a unique position to provide the content seed corn needed to jump start a network business — if it comes together on a platform and protocols.
We’ll put forward fairly specific ideas for doing this forward as a point of departure — and expect to hear modifications. We’ll end up after 2-1/2 days with a commitment to form a collaborative that will move forward with whatever is the consensus approach.
I hope there will be other events like IVP Blueprint — at CUNY, and elsewhere — which advance specific projects for sustaining the parts of journalism which contribute to participatory democracy.
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Sustainability: Reporting back from the New Business Models for News Summit
Posted on 30. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
[From Chris O'Brien with the Next Newsroom Project]
The biggest challenge the news industry faces these days is creating a new business model to sustain journalism as we move forward. Digital tools have created enormous opportunity to tell stories in new ways and forge deeper connections with our communities. But once you get past that, the discussion always circles back to one question: How are you going to pay for it?
On Oct. 23, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism gathered 120 folks at its mid-town campus for the New Business Models for News Summit. The event was hosted by Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at CUNY who blogs at Buzzmachine.com.
CUNY’s j-school is fairly new, and just moved into a new facility a couple of years ago. CUNY has received a $3 milllion grant to create a Center for Journalistic Innovation. One of the goals of the summit was to help CUNY further define the mission of that center. CUNY needs to find another $3 million in matching funds.
By the end of the day, we probably had more questions than answers. No surprise, right? If a solution could be found in one day, it probably would already have been discovered.
I was blown away by the caliber of folks in the room that day. The conference kicked off in the morning with a series of lightning presentations. The full schedule is here. There were too many presentations to discuss them all. Most folks had five minutes to talk, and usually I was left with about a dozen questions I wanted ask. I’ll probably do that via e-mail over the coming weeks.
My main takeaways from the day were far different what I would have expected going in. I’ve been in search of new ways to generate revenue to maintain the newsrooms we have (or some version of them). But the big lesson of the day was to focus on the other side of things: Cost. There was widespread agreement across the day that cost structures of newsrooms need to be dramatically lower. But before you think I’ve become a cheerleader for the rampant corporate cost cutting plaguing us, hear me out.
The cost reductions being discussed at the summit were aimed at being “smarter” than the strategies we’ve seen. This needs to be done in a different way than most places are trying to do it now. The content creators are the last things you should be cutting, not the first.
Second, at the same time costs are being reduced, the newsroom needs to be transformed into a network to leverage more out of what remains. As Jarvis likes to say, “Do you what you do best, and outsource the rest.” The focus of the newsroom in this new era needs to be more outward focus than inward focus.
Jarvis kicked things off with an overview of the day. He sees news as being distributed, rather than centralized. Instead of going to the news, people expect the news to come to them. “If the news is important enough, it will find me,” Jarvis said. “That’s a whole new world view.”
“Do we even have a newsroom?” Jarvis asked. “Do we need the room? What do we need it for? Do we just need a network?”
Here’s his presentation:
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“How Joe the Plumber and Google saved News”
Posted on 29. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
Opportunities:
1. Local – While we didn’t get to the local discussion until the end, this was clearly seen as the biggest opportunity. And not just because we want to help Google’s Eric Stein hit his numbers. The reselling of AdSense by news brands who have local salesforces is a substantial opportunity. Businesses like Reach Local are ready to cut out local newspaper salesforces. And, there’s an opportunity even if you don’t have a salesforce to work through businesses like Clickable to help Joe the Plumber reach the local audience through the newspaper’s site.
2. Data Sales. It’s already a vibrant business for many publishers. Whether it is through selling data to providers like Tacoda or Ascerno, using other data services to create B2B or local services, news publishers are sitting on top of a meaningful amount of data that can drive revenue.
3. Ad Networks, when managed right, are also an opportunity. When tied in with data, ad networks can unlock value that publisher otherwise can’t sell. Whether this is good or bad over the long term is still a question. Should sites follow the Washington Post and ESPN and cut out Ad Networks entirely? Many in the room felt that Ad Networks allow the best news brands to focus on selling their high-value inventory themselves while delivering extra monetization for unsold inventory. The other side of the argument – that Ad Networks create channel conflict and undermine brands – carries merit. Success comes from managing what inventory is given to Ad Networks and what isn’t.
4. The technology to create a totally effecient market exists today. While online ads are now part of a big distributed network where frequently the seller of the ad isn’t the publisher of the conent, the market is still inefficient. Only reselling AdSense has delivered on this promise. The other parts of the chain, including Ad Exchanges, are starting to gain acceptance, but are not yet easy for publishers to scale. In the future this will change and create more opportunities.
5. Smaller scale opportunities include: Subscriptions for specific high-value content, but not for general news; Branded content, but more of a niche solution; In Germany, Focus is directly selling products as well as doing lead generation; Virtual currencies may present an opportunity down the road; Video is an opportunity, but it’s comparatively small.
So, why isn’t this working?
Measurement. The lack of reliable metrics are holding growth back (note, this is a challenge for everyone in online advertising, not just news). This is an issue that lacks short-term solutions. But, incremental progress keeps being made and eventually a solution should emerge.
The challenge of creating a growth business inside of a mature business. For instance, objectively, reselling ad sense makes sense. But implementation has been tied up with internally slow decisionmaking and technical implementation.
The mindset of replacing print losses with digital presents a fundamental challenge. It doesn’t align with where consumer behavior is going to be. And, the timeline for building digital value doesn’t line up with the realities of the declining print business. Competitors by contrast, are able to focus on just scaling their digital businesses at their natural pace. News brands that solve this problem will be the big winners.
And now the list of ideas we came up with for further discussion: AdSense, Display, Online Video, Lead Generation, Direct Transactions/Retail, Conferences, Co-branded content, Subscriptions, Syndication, Data Mining, Product placement, Auction Model, Market Research, Licensing, Republishing web to print, Sponsored Feeds, Virtual Goods, Email.
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Rapporteur Wrap-up – Ben Wagner for Networking Group
Posted on 28. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
From Ben Wagner on behalf of the Networking Group.
If “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of endpoints,” then one task as digital journalists is to scale our networks — be they organically-grown, hyperlocal blogs or corporate-driven, international communities — as quickly and effectively as possible.
In a broadly-ranging, nearly consensus-free conversation, the “Networks” break-our group explored one case study, factors necessary to support network growth, and inherent challenges.
Tom Evslin provided two key points for our discussion of Debby Galant’s Baristanet, a blog covering news specific to Montclaire, NJ.
- The best Editorial networks grow organically from the bottom up. Individual entities tend towards expertise and passion, but lack platform or ad sale expertise.
- The best Tool networks tend to form top down with standardized platform tools and metrics, plus centralized ad ops.
It stands to reason, then, that a top down initiative like Microsoft’s Sidewalk — possessing platform, metrics, and ad ops standardization lacking editorial expertise, flexibility and voice (see “The Cracks In Microsoft’s Sidewalk“) – might fail.
Likewise, though Debby’s Baristanet is a local success, her network value is less than it could be. Moreover, she is forced to spend resources on platform and ad ops, instead of pure content creation.
Baristanet, then, would benefit from a broader, hyper-local site-supporting platform.
Outside.in’s Mark Josephson and NowPublic’s Merrill Brown contributed valuable insight from a platform perspective on incentivizing network engagement:
- Egos: We’ll make you a star!
- Revenue: My ads on your page.
- Reward/Reputation
In the waning minutes of our conversation, Harvard’s Thomas Eisenmann connected the conversation to a key question as news organizations continue to decline: If a city’s primary paper disappeared, would hyper-local coverage replace the centralized, enterprise-journalism oriented newsroom?
In the end, Thomas’s question lingered alongside a number of others:
- What are the best examples of journalism networks?
- Are journalism networks fundamentally niche?
- Can niche networks serve investigative journalism?
- How does a historically corporate, top-down infrastructure grow a network?
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Public Support for Media – Wrap-up
Posted on 27. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
Jan Schaffer- J-Lab: rapporteur for the Public Support group.
Possibilities for public support of news media are clustering in some key areas – foundation grants, member donations, targeted micro-payments, and government support.
Our group discussed how some forms of public support can threaten a news operation’s independence, either by funding coverage of certain topics to a degree that can skew the overall news agenda, or by subjecting the newsroom to corporate or political influence.
By far, the Holy Grail for public support is to raise an endowment big enough to generate the annual revenue needed to run a news initiative, be it a newsroom or a Pro Publica project. This liberates news projects from continual fundraising and lets them concentrate on the journalism.
NPR-like drives for donor support have sustained public radio, but can contribute to tensions between the national programmers and local affiliate.
Several experiments are just now underway that involve soliciting micro payments from individuals. Len Witt’s Representative Journalism project asks people to support a reporter. David Cohn’s Spot.us project asks people to fund a particular story. And Harvard’s Berkman Center has developed software, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), that aims to engage vendors and customers in new ways.
Should government support the news media in a BBC-like model, possibly with an Internet tax? Such ideas met with cautions of recent influence peddling by executives the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Could the cost of producing news content be supported by those who aggregate it, much like the cable companies support CSPAN? Or could major universities like Harvard shelter news projects? Perhaps.
Should philanthropic foundations be catalysts for what news media ought to do, rather than simply funders of the status quo?
As important is the question of whether news organizations would be more successful attracting public support if they reframed their mission, less as an act of information, and more as an act of community building.
“Can you make the case that you are filing a need?” asked Jay Rosen.
Can you show that news media exist not just to cover community, but to build it as well?
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To Be Efficient, Start From Zero
Posted on 27. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
From John Hassell – Star-Ledger, rapporteur for the News Efficiencies group.
We were the fun group — the cost-cutters.
Charged with finding new efficiencies for newsrooms, we struggled a bit to come up with a model that would produce useful lessons. Ultimately, we decided to focus on a market like Philadelphia or Dallas and, rather than tweaking the existing daily newspaper model, to start fresh with an online-only news organization.
Andrew Heyward of Marketspace LLC led the discussion, and we began with traffic and revenue assumptions, then worked backward to create a newsroom that fit within those limits. With Neil Budde of DailyMe doing the math on his iPhone, we projected a website with 800 million page views/year at $5 rpm, for total revenue of $4 million. We set aside $2.1 million of that revenue to pay an editorial staff of 35 FTEs $60,000/year.
Here’s how the staffing broke down:
-Content creators who do blogging/photography/video/curation of beats: 20
-Community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism: 3
-Programmers/developers: 2
-Designers/graphics artists: 2
-Producers who do site management, etc.: 5
-Editors: 3
There was a spirited debate about whether there should be a newsroom at all; in the end there was general consensus that staff members should be out in the community reporting as much as possible, but that a scaled-back newsroom provided a valuable space for collaboration.
Easier to agree on was a list of things our staff would not do:
-National entertainment
-National sports
-National/international news
-Editorial page
In the areas of primary focus — local government, education, high school sports, etc. — we envisioned beat reporters working with networks of local bloggers to expand the reach of the staff.
We left questions about how to monetize all of this to the revenue group, but as Michael Rosenblum of Rosenblum Associates put it, “We’ve created a digital aquisition machine, and we find creative revenue opportunities based on that content.”
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Newspapers Collapsing… Due to Lack of Adequate Network?
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by adeola.oladele.
Private newspapers are collapsing.
In some developing countries, having a private newspaper is gold.. an implication of real democracy in its government.
But the U.S. is way ahead in the sense that it has experienced its share of having various private newspapers, and now, it’s leading in the reality of the failure of many of those newspapers. Why is this happening? Is it because there’s lack of adequate networking?
No.
Here’s why:
The U.S. is one of the leading countries in terms of exposure to the internet.
“Anywhere the internet use gets over 50% of the population, newspaper is going to fail. The internet has now replaced what we used to have,” said Thomas, Eisenmann, Harvard Business School.
There is a prediction that those developing countries where private newspapers is a big deal will also eventually experience what the U.S. is experiencing as the country gets more exposed to the internet.
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Network of Newsrooms?!?
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by adeola.oladele.
There’s a focus on linking Newrooms together across the city/state/globe… to exchange ideas…
“There’s a public exchange of videos among some stations in Europe,” said Christiana Falcone, Wolrd Economic Forum, an example of journalist drawing closer to having a network for their newsrooms.
Should this be encouraged among journalism organizations in general?
Someone responded that you can’t create it for all of them, such as newspaper organizations because of the way they’re structured.
How would it be like if newsrooms have a network?!?
This question was not really address, but I don’t think most news organizations would want it. They like the competition too much. Everyone wants to be the one to release a breaking news first!
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What consumers want… Networking…
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by adeola.oladele.
“The greater the quality and quantity of the content, the greater the audience.” Thomas, Eisenmann, Harvard Business School.
People go to google, if they don’t find it, they go to Yahoo
The key is to make sure you’re meeting the needs of the audience. That’s what these two giants (Google & Yahoo) are doing. Some blog owners have links to other sites, and they direct people to visit those sites for more information/resources. In turn, they don’t loose their audience, which some sites are afraid of. Actually, people do come back to these sites just because they know that the site can lead them to where they’ll find what they’re looking for.
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Effects of Being Actively involved in a Local Network:
Posted on 23. Oct, 2008 by adeola.oladele.
Some local bloggers don’t really contribute to the network they join, they feels like they don’t need to be an audience in the network. They join but don’t contribute.
Such bloggers are encouraged to participate actively. Contributing in a local network can boost it to become a global network.
Big things start little.
Tom Evslin, Fractals of Change said, “One conclusion you can reach is that the development of local sites means the development of local newspaper. It starts from the bottom and goes up.”
When people contribute to local networks, it can impact the success of their local businesses. Hence why people should be devoted to their local networks.
