CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Professor Jeff Jarvis, business analyst Jennifer McFadden, and Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang of Mignon Media follow up their morning presentations at the New Business Models for (Local) News Conference with a Q & A session.

]]> http://newsinnovation.com/2009/11/23/newbiznews-video-business-models-and-q-a/feed/ 0 http://newsinnovation.com/2009/11/19/next-steps-what-we-heard-what-we-need/ http://newsinnovation.com/2009/11/19/next-steps-what-we-heard-what-we-need/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:12:16 +0000 Matthew Sollars http://newsinnovation.com/?p=2683 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!

New Business Models for News Next Steps:

How do we get a cooperative relationship? Or not?

More help from the Schools for “Bloggers”–
- Equipment
- Training
o How to sell
o Style, editorial, quality
o Research
o Video
o Trending
o Analytics
o Biz Finance
o Marketing
o Mistakes /best and worst practices
o Relationships

Training / Education for the Pros in the newsroom:
Content programming
Networking – building the network
Simple graphics, basics
Editing for the web
Web literacy – sms, tweeting, blogging, etc.

Transparency – read more watchdogs from the community
- Press government to make data available in a usable format

Map out a route for an existing newspaper to reinvent itself into the New News Organization – with specific steps

Get business school students to learn media management

Partnerships in technology, databases

Big media guys need quality/reliability scores for bloggers

Way to spread listservs

Making clickthrus more trackable, making ads more valuable for the advertisers

APIs, APIs, APIs

Making comments rateable

Assignment desk
Better aggregation tools

Advertising (how to make it more valuable for the local advertiser):
- Offering a suite of services to local businesses (consulting, optimization)
- Standardization
- For schools or others: more research on what local businesses need

Selling Data –

A way to maintain newsinnovation momentum throughout the year

Hack-a-thon – developers and journos collaborate to see what results.

Community building among sites – a Blogger meetup?

Targeted conferences around specific revenue categories – B2B, etc.

Success stories

More on social media

A lab to test the assumption in the newsinnovation model

Access to capital – a meet up of investors and journos.

More on web metrics, and what happens as we shift to mobile and streams from web pages

Mentoring program – for communities that have lost heir papers

Best practices / less tech more content

Impact of improved bandwidth and improved smartphones

Conference on media in Africa & other parts of the world

Yes, our work assumes that “in a metro market of 5 million people, the hyperlocal network will be able to get 1.75 million readers (35 percent penetration) in Year 1, growing to 3 million readers (60 percent penetration) in Year 3,” as TechCrunch points out.

That would allow a large blog to increase its gross revenue from $126,976 in the first year to $331,640 in the third, while growing its net income from $42,277 to $148,269 in the same period — assuming that staffing costs will also increase. Some sites are already coming close to those figures without optimization and efficiencies we believe ad networks and the framework would provide. Click here to view the Hyperlocal & Framework models as a Google Document. Be sure to click on the Revenues for Blogs and the Income Statement for Blogs tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet to view all figures related to this post.)

We’ve compiled our numbers for each market size based on several revenue opportunities, including advertising, business-to-business services and e-commerce. While not all of these opportunities would work for all sites, our team found enough revenue models to support our assumptions.

And from what we’ve been reading, there is certainly strong interest in hyperlocal news these days. See the PBS Engage/Knight Commission online survey about community information needs published in April, as well as our post on ESPN going local. As a final note: to cover the largest targeted readerships we extended the taxonomy of hyperlocal to include vertical sites such as music, food, sports and mom blogs.

Again, we welcome readers to play with these numbers and see what they can come up with. (The New Business Models for News Project has been funded by the Knight Foundation.)

Download the Hyperlocal/Framework Excel file here.

From this first list, I was surprised by how many of the folks pointed to the value of a printed product. It is the most noteworthy area, of many, where my early assumptions were proven incorrect.

Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang of Mignon-Media have been helping us with this project and were instrumental in developing this list of revenue opportunities.

As we’ve been talking to news start ups from around the country, most everyone says they want to hear about new ways to make money, whether it’s to hire more reporters or just make sure that what they’ve built so far is sustainable. Maria from Uruguay summed it up pretty well in a comment to one of our posts yesterday:

We are a 3 million people country with a really poor advertising market. People are also concentrated in the capital city (the half of the population). Moreover, as you may know, the charity donation, or non-profit, or foundations culture is not developed in Latin America as in the United States and also there are no much resources. So, what are your suggestions when I try to encourage my students to think in new proyects for investigative journalism and new business models?

Maria, we hear you. Even though we think traditional online advertising will remain the core of the US news business for the foreseeable future, the share of revenues from advertising will likely decline. So, we’re putting together a list of new revenue opportunities that will go up on the site in the next few days. (We’ll also lay out examples of new ad units–or interesting modifications to established ad units–that may be helpful).

But, while we’re putting the final touches on that list, we want to hear your ideas for new revenues open to news organizations. All ideas are welcome! Throw them into the comments section.