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…

[The video is a bit shaky but clears up after a minute].

Click To Play

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.

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:

(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.

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:

Edward Roussel, digital director of the Telegraph hit both of these themes during his presentation. Roussel said the challenge is for newspapers to recreate themselves as networks. That means focusing as narrowly as possible on the distinct, premium things that you can do for the community, and then linking to everything else. As part of that transformation, Roussel advises: “This is a time, even in a recession, when news companies need to be investing more money in the things that define them.”

Looking at the Telegraph, Roussel said his paper made a big move to lower costs by outsourcing its technology. “Let’s face it, if you work at a newspaper, your technology sucks,” he said. “So get rid of it. We reduced half our technology staff.” But, and this is important, they did not cut their tech budget. Instead, they’re using as many free and open tools and platforms as they can. That budget now goes much further. “The key thing about the network economy model is that you get better service for less money,” he said.

Looking elsewhere, he said there were opportunities to outsource distribution, technology, sales and marketing. “But don’t cut editorial,” he warned.

“People keep asking, ‘How can we raise revenues to match print?’ ” Roussel said. “That’s the wrong question. You need to be thinking about how to lower expenses. In a network economy, your costs come right down. You don’t need to be thinking about something as radical as not having a newsroom.”

Dave Morgan, founder of Tocada, an AOL subsidiary that does targeted advertising, echoed Roussel’s philosophy. Here’s how he summed up the current challenge:

“It’s a market problem, a business model problem, and a cost problem,” he said. “It’s not a journalism problem.”

His advice: Disaggregate the news operation into five pieces: local news and editing; distribution; sales and marketing; printing; digital.

“Distribution is a cost that alone will sink what’s good in newspapers,” he said. So, spin it off or outsource it.

The ad sales department: “They are order takers. They are offering limited, creative solutions.” Outsource this, too.

Morgan also noted: “Tethering digital to side of newspapers is killing digital. Go back to early digital newspaper conferences, and you’ll see that many of the digital executives there left and became successful somewhere else. Those companies couldn’t understand. They built little speedboats next to their cruise ships.” What was less clear to me was whether he was suggesting greater separation between print and online, or more integration.

The other speaker who really left an impression on me was Tom Evslin, founder of ITXC, a voice over IP company. Evslin talked about how to build the networks that people keep talking about. I think most of us recognize at this point that establishing various networks of source, collaborators, customers, etc., can be incredibly valuable and really help leverage whatever it is you’re hoping to do. But creating those networks in easier said than done.

“The value of the network is proportional to the number of people in the network,” Evslin said. “But how do you get a network started if it doesn’t have any value? Imagine how hard it was to sell the first telephone?”

“When anyone proposes a network, you have to ask, ‘How do you create value for initial users so you can get over the hump?’ Don’t let them brush that off. Especially if the goal is be interactive. I thought I would create a wiki around this novel I was writing. Predictably, the discussions never got going. It wasn’t because people didn’t come and look. Only 1 out of 100 would contribute. If you’re trying to get a conversation going, you’ve got to grow very big before you can get a conversation going.”

So, how do you get started?

First, Evslin said, look for communities that already exist and try to bring them over to the network. For newspapers, that might mean finding ways to bring committed, passionate print readers over the online as participants in some form.

A second option is to independently create value for that first user. For newspapers, this means building networks around content. That content has value, whether or not there is a network around it. But if you can take that content, and find a way to build a network around that subject (for instance, green technology, schools, etc.), then you can hopefully use the content you’re creating to jump start a network around it.

In the afternoon, we broke into five working groups. I was assigned to the “newsrooms” work group which was charged with finding new efficiencies and structures for the newsroom. Our official charge is here.

We spent about two hours in the group and had some lively debates. Our group leader, Andrew Heyward, put me on the spot at the start by asking whether we need to have a newsroom. My answer: No, but there are good reasons to have one. A newsroom gives you a place to educate, both colleagues and potentially, the public. Having a place to gather can help spark innovation (as long as it doesn’t have a structure that’s too restrictive). For the most part, the group agreed and we moved on to defining what that might look like. You can see a summary of our discussion here.

We took the approach of essentially creating a new news organization from the ground up. But the other way to look at this question is to ask: How would you make a current newsroom more efficient? After leaving the discussion, a number of things occurred to me that should be explored:

1. Use templates for the print paper. Spend less money on designing the paper every day and use that money elsewhere. Newspapers have been trying to design their way out of their problems for years, and it hasn’t worked. I don’t think this something print readers think about. They want substance and content, not more pictures.

2. Cull circulation. Most newspapers are underwriting a chunk of their circulation to fight churn. What if you stopped spending so much money trying to sign up new subscribers? That costs a lot of money. This would require a change in ad rates. But I think it might save costs in the long run.

3. Reduce editors. I love editors, but it seems a lot of content, especially shorter stories, could be posted directly the Web. Many newspapers now let reporters post to blogs without editing. Why not the main site?

4. Newsroom salaries. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this, but it would seem that how we pay people needs to be rethought. Some online news sites pay employees by traffic they generate. That’s ruthless, but still, I wonder if that might work for some online jobs at newspapers?

So what’s next? The folks at CUNY will be taking what was learned and using that to focus their mission. There are a few things I would love to see CUNY do, and some of these were mentioned toward the end of the day:

1. Create a clearinghouse for information about this subject. We need to know who is trying what, whether it’s working, and why. Sharing lessons learned is going to be vital for all of us. Examine case studies, establish a set of best practices.

2. Create a kind of Harvard Business Review for news business models.

3. Bring more people from the business side into the discussion. They’re passionate about the future of news, but they’ve had even less opportunity to innovate. Could there be a Poynter Institute for helping them rethink and retrain for their jobs?

4. Bring in folks from industries outside of journalism. I’m thinking places like Proctor & Gamble. Companies that have entirely different businesses and so think differently about their relationship to their consumers and their products. These might not be the right lessons for news, but I think hearing radically different business perspectives could help shake things up and generate some new thinking.

5. Be bold. We can’t just be about tweaking advertising models. That’s helpful, but stepping outside of the industry into an academic setting ought to allow for deep, radical thinking that challenges all assumptions about who we are and what we do.

If you want to know more about the summit, you can dig into the tweets here. And check out the summit blog here for summaries of all the sessions.

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.

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?

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?