What's Next?
Next Steps: What We Heard, What We Need
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
At the end of our New Business Models for (Local) News Conference last week we asked a question we’ve been asking since our first go-round three years ago: What’s next? What do we, as practitioners of journalism, need to do to help sustain journalism in this new age?
It seems there is still a simple two-word answer: More training.
Sure, responses were all over the map (the full list is posted below the jump) and I’ll get to some of those in a moment. But, the most common request at root is for more help understanding our new media environment.
Some of the independent, hyperlocal startups (dare I call them bloggers?) in the audience said they could use help with everything from basic research and editing practices to selling and analyzing ads to understanding business finance. They also want to build a stronger indy-web community that, at a minimum, would be a forum to share best and worst practices.
The churched journalists in the room asked for some of the same instruction: editing for the web, learning the basics of graphics, and web literacy (tweeting, texting and blogging). But, like the indy’s, the guys inside established media organizations need help with the business side (see Jeff’s post on getting “theah from heah”).
Folks want to see programs for bringing business students into media management (much as we tried to do last summer). A few more suggestions:
- Future conferences organized around specific revenue opportunities – some people also want to have a conference organized around verticals and niche sites.
- Research into what kinds of advertising small businesses need.
- Strategies for making that advertising more valuable.
- Looking at what impact greater bandwidth and mobile devices will have on journalism and advertising.
One veteran journalist told me someone should create a not-for-profit, possibly based in a university, that offers free business consulting services to journalism startups. He said the consultancy could cultivate a thousand test cases for our business models – a much better approach, he says, than getting funding for a lab to test them out in one area (which was another suggestion from the panel).
Finally, here are two of my favorites: training for small communities that have lost their papers and a conference aimed at media in Africa and other parts of the world. It is important to keep these areas, so often left out of the conversation, in our minds.
As I said, there are a lot more topics below the fold. We’ll be doing more work on some or most of these suggestions in the coming weeks and months. Do you have more? Send them along!
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What crisis?
Posted on 04. Sep, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.
At the Aspen Institute FOCAS event, where we presented our CUNY New Business Models for News, there came to be an unspoken debate – that is, an idea thrown out but never really engaged – about whether there is a crisis in news and journalism.
I now say that there isn’t a crisis. That’s not what I used to say. Indeed, one of my mistakes in this debate has been accepting the assumption that there was one and allowing the debate to start there: “How are you going to save journalism from the scourge of your damned internet?”
Instead, the discussion should start here: “Look at all the new opportunities there are to gather and share news in new ways, to expand and improve it, to change journalism’s relationship with its public and make it collaborative, to find new efficiencies and lower costs and thus to return to profitability and sustainability.”
One’s view on the question determines one’s response and its level of desperation or optimism.
To generalize unfairly, those who say there is a crisis – most often, those whose legacy institutions are fading – are often known to react by:
* Looking for others to blame for the purported problem – Google, bloggers, aggregators, craigslist, et al (which is to say, not taking responsibility for their own role in it);
* Trying to preserve their past (expecting newsrooms to be supported, unchanged, by some manna from the market – paid content being only the latest prayer);
* Seeking protection from government (antitrust exemptions) or the law (copyright extensions);
* Demanding tribute (saying they are entitled to get paid because what they do is worth so much);
* Giving up (talking about abandoning growth by building walls or shifting to not-for-profit and begging for charitable support).
Those who say there is not a crisis (for- and not-for-profit entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors) instead tend to:
* Look to innovation (collaboration, algorithms, data, streams) to create new ways to make news;
* Look to entrepreneurship to sustain journalism (in blogs and networks);
* Be open to new ways to define journalism;
* Irritate the legacy people by not seeing the crisis they see.
So if we’re looking for an original sin in this saga, I’ll confess that mine has been viewing news from the perspective of the old controllers rather than from that of the community (the people formerly known as the audience), the inventors, and the entrepreneurs. At Aspen, it was Sue Gardner, head of the Wikimedia Foundation, who made me see this as she talked about the wonders that have been done with news on Wikipedia, which no one could have predicted. Being open to such new possibilities is key to building news’ new future.
There are so many reasons to be optimistic about the future of news:
* The audience for news is only growing online.
* The audience isn’t an audience anymore. News is becoming more and more collaborative as witnesses share what they see and communities join together to create news.
* Those who make news are more accountable to their publics.
* News is opening up to more diverse voices and perspectives.
* News is becoming far more specialized and targeted, which is to say that it can give deeper service to more communities.
* New technology – and freedom from the limits of the old means of production and distribution – allow the reinvention of the form of news, organized around streams, topics, ideas, and concepts still being imagined.
* News is more efficient thanks to the link – do what you do best and link to the rest – and specialization. That is what makes it more sustainable.
Some – but not nearly enough – of this optimism is inherent in the future we imagined in the New Business Models for News Project, funded by the Knight Foundation. We used the financial lingua franca and assumptions of the present world – CPM advertising, page views per user, even the concept of a page and a site – because that made it easier to describe what can follow and made our vision of sustainable news more credible. We were criticized for being too optimistic about audience penetration and ad rates.
But I think we were not nearly optimistic enough. We have to leap past the idea that news is a collection of pages worth 12 views per user per month (or, quoting Martin Langeveld, 0.5% of time spent online). News shouldn’t be a site we force people to come to but, as Google’s Marissa Mayer said at Aspen, we have to find ways to insinuate news and its value into anyone’s – her words – hyperpersonal news stream. We shouldn’t create sites but instead create platforms that enable communities to share what they know and need to know, with journalists contributing value – reporting, editing, aggregation, curation – to their ecosystem. We should build and assume much greater engagement and define engagement not as consumption but as creation. We must value that creation (and not consider it merely a reaction to what we do). We should forecast much greater relevance and thus value for both the market and the marketer.
We should set the bar way higher. And that is the real problem with letting the discussion start with the pessimism, depression, and desperation of the perceived crisis among the past’s players, who aren’t inventing the future. It limits the possibilities.
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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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Never Quit and Be Honest With Yourself – An Interview with Tristan Harris
Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by David Cohn.
I’ve had the good fortune to run into Tristan Harris and finding out that we live in close proximity.
Tristan is the founder of Apture. Similar to two other Stanford computer scientist, Tristan understands and wants to improve how people find information on the web. Apture allows reporters to link out easily without necessarily losing the reader to another page.
More intriguing to me, however, is Tristan’s general experience as a young journalistically minded entrepreneur.What has he learned and what is advice to those that may come after him?
The first half of this interview focuses on Apture and his experience creating it – the second half about working on a startup in general. Never quit…..and be honest with yourself.
Untitled from Digidave on Vimeo.
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Interview with Tom Evslin
Posted on 05. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Looking over attendees for the New Business Models for News Summit you might be confused as to why Tom Evslin was there. Many of the names you would recognize as professional life-long journalists or entrepreneurs. Tom, however, is not and has never been a journalist. But his sharp understanding of networks and networked economies is incredibly illuminating. His blog Fractals of Change, is highly regarded for that very reason. My questions to him in bold below.
Tom – as someone who is an outsider to journalism, what were your thoughts on the day and the situation journalism faces.
Let me start with the day. As a technology person who has been around industries that have changed because of technology and the Internet it was heartening to see newspaper people recognize the magnitude of the change and not justify the head in the sand approach. There was general consensus that this is not an-incremental change and incremental solutions won’t work.
In Telecom and other industries – there is generally denial until the very end. But for most people who attended there was a real awareness that change isn’t necessarily bad. It is disruptive but it can lead to journalist being more effective at their mission, provided they can figure out little details along the way like … how to get paid for it.
The bigger subject is a fascinating one because it probably is true that journalists have never had tools that are as good as the tools that are avaliable now. The ability to selectively crowdsource a story if you need to, or build a story as Jeff described it, even if the story itself isn’t the focal point, where you start something and pieces of it get filled in around it through the link economy, video can be mixed in and the man on the street is everywhere, etc. So the tools for journalists to do their job are fantastic. And the physical impediments are smaller than they have ever been. But the business model hasn’t been figured out – and journalists have to eat like everyone else.
I think we got far enough in the day to figure out that’s where we are – but we didn’t get much further. There are a few possible models for journalist and a few hyper-local models but there is a distance to go in terms of figuring out how they can make a living in journalism. It’s not a question of what value journalism can add – there is general agreement that credibility, editing, facts, and quality reporting are things that journalists bring that is of value- but it is hard to see how revenue can come from it right now.
Are there any direct comparisons or analogies from when you worked in Telecom?
Any industry under threat tries to cut its way to greatness. Particularly industries that have had a controlling situation for a period of time. When indsturies were essentially monopolies or they have a franchise it’s very hard for the owners or stockholders to realize the value is evaporating. Their first reaction is that these are temporary times and cutting back is a solution.
Often this is a good first reaction – because they were monopolies these companies typically have a lot of fat. But there comes a point where you can’t cut anymore. There is nothing left to cut and if you keep cutting the product gets damaged and its a downward spiral. That is Telecom, newspapers, and perhaps the car industry.
What’s different though? Related to this I think is a comment you brought up about the economics of Craigslist. That growth of a network is more valuable than high revenues per network node? So that if you charge as little as possible – but the network grows in size, it becomes impossible for others to compete. Is there a way newspapers could leverage that?
It’s maximizing your network by drawing out as little cash as you can until you are in a sailable position.
I’m just guessing here – this is just speculation because the answer is probably different if you mean local, regional, national or global.
It’s probably easiest to see where local news organizations, hyper-local in web terms, analogous to a small-town newspaper could achieve this status. I think we will fairly quickly find the model and tools wher ethe local site becomes an indispensable part of people’s lives and advertisers are eager to support it – because it has a consistent readership with identifiable demographics.
By making readers contributors (which newspapers have always done to some extent with wedding annoucements, etc), using the ability to crowdosurce when trains are late, where crime is, etc – the local sites like Baristanet can become an even more apart of people’s lives than the small-town newspapers used to be.
At that point in time – they won’t need to charge a lot for advertising because they will have a lot of it – and they will be in the Cragislist spot where they can charge so little it will be tough for competition to sneak in. A rival local newspaper will have real competition. But competition would be good because it would mean together they would figure out the proper economics.
I think there would only be one winner – at least until the winner gets sloppy. Because if one builds a good network in terms of people then there is not much sense in being part of the inferior network. If it’s as simple as traffic reports where you have 1,000 readers sending in updates and you have lots of people texting in so that site has the best traffic reports and somebody else starts up another network their site is going to be useless because nobody is on it – and why would anybody join it? It’s useless.
I’m not sure what this looks like at the regional national or global level. It’s hard to have a community if everybody reads the NY Times – the Times is doing an experiment with TimesPeople – where if you join the community you know what your friends are reading, etc – they are trying to be the host of a lot of little communities -because that is more interesting than worldwide – everyone read this article. So being a larger group that hosts smaller groups with an excellence at national or international coverage. That could work for NY Times WaPo organizations – but not many of those. They could be advertising supported if people integrated it into their daily lives.
I don’t know what happens inbetween at the regional level. I think it’ll be important because from a governance point of view – we need the information.
Last thoughts?
I’m optimistic – I think something will evolve because we have such a need for the information. People are interested – maybe cause there is more information or maybe because they are scared – but a positive thing for journalists is that there is this hunger if there is a business model for supplying it.
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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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Interview – Dave Chase and Experimenting in the Revenue Side
Posted on 31. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
May the post Summit interviews continue.
This one with Dave Chase from NewWest and Sun Valley Online. (Learn more about NewWest from this interview with Jonathan Weber from the 2007 Summit)
[Disclaimer: The audio isn't perfect. This is interview #2 via Skype. I'm using iShowU to record my screen. I will soon find a way to get the interviewee's audio higher quality. In the meantime, bear with me. Feel free to ask Dave Chase follow up questions in the comments - I'll track him down to respond.]
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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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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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The New York Observer – Politicker.com
Posted on 05. Mar, 2008 by David Cohn.
From Brian Kroski who was interviewed at the Networked Journalism Summit here.
“Observer Media Group, the parent company of The New York Observer, is launching a project covering local politics through a distributed network of reporters, editors and columnists. This project will put reporters on the ground in all 50 states of the US, covering local politics news and national stories with a local perspective. This distributed network of reporters will be provided with tools to allow them to file photos, stories, and videos immediately – directly from their locations. These individual states will be their own news media sources and also contributed to a national aggregated, built from the bottom-up politics news site. This project was recently profiled in the New York Times.”
So it seems the New York Observer’s parent company is moving into networked journalism in a big way: Politicker.com
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Ed Sussman: Fast Company Launches Social Networking Bonanza
Posted on 18. Feb, 2008 by David Cohn.
“When editors are going to assign a story we typically think about different elements that go into it; who is the writer, who is the photographer, do we want a video or a podcast or any kind of poll? Now we ask an additional question: what is the community aspect?”
I met Ed Sussman briefly at the Networked Journalism Summit where we talked about Drupal, a subject I’m fond of. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ed, along with Lullabot, was working on a massive relaunch of FastCompany.com using the open source content management system Drupal.
If you haven’t checked out the site – you should. It is one of the most sophisticated implementations of Drupal I’ve seen. The NY Observer, for example uses Drupal in a very sleek manner – and while the site looks great, the social networking capabilities aren’t there. Fast Company, however, is trying to leverage the networking aspects of Drupal in every way possible – from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. They’ve spread their arms out pretty wide in the hopes that they caught something interesting for everyone. I think they are about 3-5 years ahead of their time in terms of internet publishing with a major magazine.
I caught up with Ed briefly to talk about the new site and what lessons there might be for beat bloggers. I think Fast Company is moving more and more in the direction of beat blogging – and their website is about 3-5 years ahead of their time in this respect. If you have any doubt about their intentions – just consider their recent contract with Robert Scoble, one of the original great bloggers period, who today literally broadcasts moments of his live in streaming video via Qik, Twitter, Facebook and whatever means he can, to connect and chat with viewers in real time.
So, without further adieu – here’s the interview.
This site is more than just “beat blogging” – it’s creating a network for your site. You have dived head first into the deep end. Why?
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What’s Next – Chris Lydon, Open Source Radio
Posted on 18. Nov, 2007 by David Cohn.
Received via email from Chris Lydom at Open Source Radio.
“Dear Friend of Open Source:
The summer is over, and so is our hiatus.
The Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson Institute at Brown University.
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What’s Next – WNYC, News-Press, NewAssignment.Net and More
Posted on 16. Nov, 2007 by David Cohn.
A conference call took place between Jim Colgan and Howard Parnell from WNYC, Mackenzie Warren from News-Press, Jay Rosen and myself from NewAssignment.Net and Jeff Howe (almost all profiled in this section) took place earlier today.
The seeds for this call began at the Networked Journalism Summit when Jim Colgan and Mackenzie Warren began talking and realized they were both looking for a software solution that would enable a more seamless effort in crowdsourced journalism.
After some emails back and forth a conference call was organized and the participants have agreed to move forward and 1. Determine what this software would look like and 2. Find a way to make it happen.
Details about this endeavor will be disclosed publicly as they come to fruition.
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What’s Next – PJNET
Posted on 11. Nov, 2007 by David Cohn.
At the Networked Journalism Summit Leonard Witt grabbed Lisa Williams for a quick discussion about an idea he has called Representative Journalism.
Back at Jeff Jarvis’s Networked Journalism Summit as I was networking with Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.com and telling her about Representative Journalism and about a grant I was writing aimed to it. She took a look at my grant proposal and then wrote in it:
Journalism is becoming a high-tech profession. And like other high-tech professions such as software and biotechnology, professionals experience instability – layoffs, job changes, changes in their organization’s mission. The good news about this change is that it provides entrepreneurial opportunities for journalists – but few journalists are taking advantage of these opportunities.
I am now trying to incorporate that thought into my own ideas as I try to advance this Representative Journalism concept. Right now I am trying to come up with a full blown Representative Journalism plan so I am blogging on it less but thinking of Representative Journalism more than ever.
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What’s Next: OffTheBus.Net, WNYC and Ground Report
Posted on 08. Nov, 2007 by David Cohn.
OffTheBus.Net has shared content GroundReport and this week is doing a four day collaborative investigation with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show.
These working relationships are direct results of the Networked Journalism Summit.
If you’ve started a working relationship with anybody from the NJS, let us know!
