News Innovation

News Innovators on the Frontline: The Alternative Press

Posted on 22. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

The publisher of The Alternative Press, Michael Shapiro, left his position as a litigator at a law firm in New York City to launch the site in October 2008. A longtime blogger, he started The Alternative Press (the online-only alternative to printed papers in the area) in just his hometown of New Providence, NJ. But the coverage area expanded quickly and now includes 10 surrounding communities. He says life has improved since trading in his legal eagle wings for community news, even though he’s still pulling 20-hour days.

Notably, Shapiro’s territory includes Millburn and Westfield, where he rubs shoulders with some big-time media players–Patch (recently bought by AOL) and The New York Times’ The Local (in Millburn)–experimenting in hyperlocal.

How has the launch of Patch and The New York Times’ The Local blog affected your business?
It’s interesting; I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far with how it’s affected our business. Before they got there, I wondered how it was going to impact us. I thought the lure of a big company, with lots of money, would cause a problem. But, we’ve not only held our own, we’ve attracted a lot of their users and one of their reporters came over to us.

The only place it’s hurt us is in the area of publicity. Believe it or not, despite what we’re doing and the success we’ve had, not a single media outlet has covered us at all. They’ve done all of these stories about Patch, The New York Times, and BaristaNet and here we are, I created the site from scratch, we’re bringing in money, we’re bringing in more in revenues than any of those sites with the possible exception of BaristaNet, which has been around for years, and nobody has covered it. [Editor’s Note: The NYT launched a self-service advertising vehicle for The Local on Wednesday.]

It’s kind of frustrating because it’s like, “this is newsworthy!” Here’s a local guy, with all local people competing with him in the same market and we’re never mentioned. If it was something where we weren’t getting traffic or we had no advertisers, I well could understand it. But at this point, we have more advertising than both of them combined. That’s incredible to me.

Have you done marketing to get the word out?
We’ve done PRNewswire and other things to get publicity but nobody picks it up. Otherwise we have grassroots pr. We’re at the Summit street fair and we’re doing email marketing. But, that kind of limits us at this point. Our traffic keeps going up, but if we could get mentioned in a major publication, even in the stories they’re doing about Patch or the Times, our users would go through the roof.

Talk about how you’ve been able to ramp up so quickly. Your staff has grown right along with your coverage area, how have you been able to manage it?
We now have over 100 paid freelance reporters, over 20 columnists and a 3-member sales team, all built up since October.

On the sales and business side, one avenue has been bringing on people like realtors or people with sales experience who are looking for part-time gigs. Like moms whose kids are gone in the morning until three, so they have that chunk of the day and then they’re back to being moms.

Basically, we’re always looking for sales people. We are struggling to handle the volume, we cannot handle the number of calls coming into us. Just in our 10 towns alone, there are approximately 20,000 businesses, so we need more bodies reaching out to the businesses that are not calling us.

What do you see as the potential for growth on your sites?
We have almost unlimited space for advertising, even if we hit the space we can start rotating ads. If we do a back of the envelope, it’s literally millions in revenue. We say to people you can advertise on our site for as little as $99 up to google.

We have a free business directory. For $99 you get an annual premium directory listing, which includes a logo or photo, a link to their website and it comes up first in the directory.
The same goes for real estate listing, which runs $15 to post your house for 3 months, as well as the community calendar. Inventory for those is basically unlimited, but our sales people aren’t even selling them right now.

As far as growing the number of towns, we could be in 100 towns tomorrow, but my feeling is you do it right. Before we launch, we go to do outreach to leaders, build a local advisory board, and put some reporters on the ground.

We’re probably going to continue a gradual expansion to more towns in our area. I don’t know if we’ll grow at the pace we went in the first year because 10 towns is a lot to cover.

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ESPN Shoots for Hyperlocal

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

ESPN is extending its reach into hyperlocal sports coverage with plans to launch metro-based websites around the country, The New York Times reported today.

As part of a trial run that started with ESPN Chicago, the self-proclaimed “world leader in sports” is gearing up to add three new cities to its target list: New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. The company plans to keep costs at a minimum by using their existing resources and hiring about 15 people for all three of the new outfits combined.

Whether or not those costs remain as low as ESPN intends, the move into local coverage is likely to bring in some strong local advertising dollars.

“In less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June, according to data from comScore, an Internet measurement company. Second place went to The Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors,” the Times wrote.

So, will ESPN’s new sites further the brand and potentially dominate hyperlocal sports media? Or will they fail to reach their targeted audiences like The Washington Post’s LoudounExtra.com? We talked to a few sports bloggers in different cities to see what their reactions are:

“Sounds good to me,” says Bryson Treece of Dallas Cowboys Nation. “I look for opportunities like that all the time to get my coverage out to a broader audience. I think it’ll also be good for them. ESPN are the running joke right now in terms of their coverage, so hopefully this will help them get back in touch with their readers.”

“They definitely have the brand name, so it sounds like another blow to the local newspapers in those cities,” says Brian Cook of MGoBlog, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “As a blogger, I haven’t seen the sort of content on ESPN that would frighten me. Now, if they started hiring well-educated sports fans and used them to move into deeper analysis, that would worry me. But, as far as I’m concerned, they’re not doing that on a hyperlocal basis yet.”

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A Thank You to Local Arts & Entertainment Sites

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

We’ve already profiled one sports site in-depth–MGoBlog, the soup to nuts destination for University of Michigan sports fans. Many more profiles are on the way.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to profile every site that fills out our survey, but they all deserve our thanks and recognition. The information they’ve provided will help us build better business models to sustain journalism in the future. So, here is an early list of all those in the broad Arts & Entertainment category (arts, food, music, and sports) who have filled out our survey so far.
[…]

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Charity or Collaboration?

Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis.

The New York Times has accepted free stories from ProPublica. It has endorsed a journalist getting help from the public via Spot.US to underwrite a story that might appear at NYTimes.com. And Poynter’s Bill Mitchell says the paper is even wondering about foundation support for its work (but for perspective, I suspect one could safely say The Times is wondering about any possible economic model of support).

All this is being viewed as charity: giving The Times gifts directly or indirectly to produce journalism in its pages, physical or digital.

I think that’s looking at it – and at The Times – the wrong way. I prefer to think of it as a few of many possible forms of collaboration to create journalism that may or may not appear in the paper (and to which it may or may not link). I prefer to think of the paper as the organizer of networks of journalism.

Thinking that way, then when The Local, the hyperlocal blog at The Times, asked for a volunteer to cover a meeting it wasn’t planning to cover, you could say that it was asking for a charitable act. I’d rather say The Times was opening up to collaboration.

And let’s say that a local blogger covers the meeting and reports on it on her own blog and The Local takes advantage of that by aggregating, curating, quoting, and/or linking to that report. The net result is the same but that’s not charity. It’s cooperation.

Go one step farther: Say that The Times lends a video or sound recorder to that blogger so she can better report on the meeting and provide more coverage to her and The Local’s readers. Is that support an act of charity to the blogger? No, it’s collaboration. (By the way, this will be happening when CUNY provides equipment and training to members of the communities in The Local’s footprint as part of a Carnegie Corporation grant we just received.)

When we define The Times solely as a commercial institution that produces and controls an asset – the news – then any provision of money or effort to it appears to be charity.

But when we define the news as the creation of a larger ecosystem and The Times as just one member of it, then help – money, effort, equipment, training – instead appears to be collaboration.

And once one looks at the ecosystem through the lens of collaboration, then many other things are possible: then The Times (or any other member) could organize many members to work together to produce journalism no one of them could do alone. Then we start to account for the value of the work of the entire news ecosystem not based solely on the size of the staff of the last newsroom standing in the community; we open up to volunteer and entrepreneurial effort that can expand the scope of journalism far, far past what that one newsroom could do.

So I say that The Times and other papers opening up to the work of others supported by others is not an act of begging and charity if it is one bit of evidence of opening up to collaboration.

Now having said all that, I’m aware of the issues that are raised by giving of any sort and Clark Hoyt‘s and Bill Mitchell‘s columns address many of them: the potential for influence from the donor leading the list. There can also be tax questions (only a gift to a 501c3 is a charitable deducation and when is value received by a for-profit company taxable income?). There are labor delicacies when volunteer take on the work formerly done by staffers (there’s one of the reasons that professional journalists sneer at citizen journalism; it’s not always about high standards but instead about self-interest).

Still, I say it’s important to open up journalism and its institutions and players to many kinds of collaboration in a new ecosystem. That cooperation should extend to the commercial – revenue – side of the equation as well, as advertising and ecommerce networks enable each member of the ecosystem to gain more value together than they could alone. This is a key assumption of our work at the CUNY New Business Models for News Project.

One more caution: As we debate and explore the opportunities for charitable and volunteer support of journalism, it is important – critical – that we not declare surrender against the hope that journalism can be sustained in profitable enterprises. This is the keystone of our NewBizNews work at CUNY. We will estimate how much charitable support is possible in a market and what it can buy. We will also emphasize the importance of including volunteer effort in viewing the value of the ecosystem. But we also stipulate that none of that – not foundations, not the goodwill work of bloggers and neighbors – will support the level of reporting and journalism a community needs. And we believe that the market will support journalism – even the growth of journalism – commercially. We are working on models to examine how both the revenue and efficiency of enterprises in the ecosystem – news organizations to bloggers – can be optimized (we’ll be putting out models as we get closer to our first August deadline).

: LATER: Include in this discussion HuffingtonPost’s charitably supported investigative arm; the new Texas Tribune supported by VC John Thornton and friends; and a new philanthropically supported investigative unit in the U.K. They are not the future of journalism; they are part of it.

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News Innovators on the Frontline: Texas Watchdog

Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

Two and half years ago, Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, saw the potential for a local online investigative news outlet. Having worked in both journalism — at The Tennessean and The Denver Post — as well government accountability — at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research — Trent had all the right credentials.

Fortunately, a chance meeting with some like-minded funders at a journalism conference in 2006 brought him enough start-up money to launch Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit news site in Houston covering local and state government corruption and waste. The Watchdog’s first story went online in August 2008. Since then the three-member team has divided up the work needed to run an investigative news outlet. All three tackle the editorial work: reporting, editing and assigning stories to freelancers. In addition, Trent handles their public affairs and “carnival barking,” while his colleagues, Jennifer Peebles and Lee Ann O’Neal, manage the site’s databases and bookkeeping.

Texas Watchdog recently joined 25 other nonprofit news organizations at the Pocantico Estate in New York to lay the foundation for an investigative news network.

How did Texas Watchdog get started?
When the Sam Adams Alliance gave us our start-up money, part of the deal was that if we were to make this work, we would have to be in a place with a big enough market for this kind of journalism, a place where we can sustain the work we do. There are only a few places in the U.S. to do that, and I hate to say that because I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time and I love Nashville. But you need to be in a state with a big media market, and that means California, New York, or Texas. These are the places where America’s ideas come from, for good or for bad. So, we ended up picking Houston, Texas, as a place to launch this idea.

In part we thought it was a great market down here, because it’s a big city that wasn’t drenched in media. There was room for us. And Houston has more than it’s share of billionaires, so we thought we might be able to knock on a door and make a 501(c)(3) work.

How do you keep new revenue coming in?
We’re real new, and this whole concept is real new. We don’t have a big benefactor yet. So, a big chunk of our revenue comes from running educational programs that teach people about journalism. Half of our time is doing investigative and enterprise journalism here in Texas. The other half is us, at different times, going around the country and getting revenue by teaching individual groups — whether civic groups, public policy groups or blogging groups — how to do, for lack of a better term, journalism. We teach them how to file a public records request. We teach them how to look at their city halls and their schools.

With the decline of newspapers, they’re getting less information than ever before, so we’re able to give them the tools to find that information themselves. We’ve been able to cobble together a budget, between our initial grant money and creating revenue this way, to get us to the end of the year.

What do your freelancers get out of that?
Well, I can’t tell you exactly how much we pay them. But I will say that we pay our freelancers very well. I know how it feels to be in that boat. I worked at a newspaper once that paid something like 50 bucks for a freelance front-page story. It made me want to walk into the publisher’s office and beat her like a baby seal. It was embarrassing. Good writing deserves good money. Although, keep in mind, our medical benefits amount to a couple of Band Aids and some Aspirin. We’re not in a good position there yet, but hopefully we’ll be there in the next few years.

Sounds good, maybe I’ll swing by Houston in the near future. Do you see any opportunities to expand in other ways?
If you look at New York City as an example, The Village Voice used to be the one waving its fists in the face of City Hall and at the same time doing great media and music coverage. Alternative weeklies have all gone down hill since those days. So, I wouldn’t mind expanding to other areas of coverage some day. But that’s really down the road. Right now our bread and butter is doing the investigative journalism that major metros just don’t have the time and budget to cover anymore. And the local-er, the better for me. If I could find corruption on the sewer commission, brother, I would work on that all day.

What about working in conjunction with other local news outlets?
We get picked up by other news outlets fairly often. But it’s weird. We’re here to help supplement what’s missing in journalism in Houston, but at the end of the day we’re a competitor. We’ve been all over this great story about the Houston airport, with these bizarre companies operating in secret, and nobody’s picked up on it yet. But that doesn’t shock me, because we did the same thing when I was in Denver. When I was working with The Denver Post, our competitor was the Rocky Mountain News, and when they broke something really good that we didn’t have, we tried to make every excuse in the world to convince our editors, “aw, that’s not a real story. We knew that all along.”

Click below to hear an audio clip from our interview with Trent Seibert.

The Texas Watchdog Team

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E-commerce and News, Lessons from the UK's Telegraph

Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

Revenue, revenue, revenue. For good reason in this economy, all of the sites we’ve talked to so far have wanted to hear ideas for making more of it.

So we’ve been a bit surprised at how few are experimenting with e-commerce, which is frequently held up as a strong potential revenue stream for online news. Sure, we’ve heard from a few sites making good money from t-shirt sales and affiliate programs.

But American publishers should heed the experience of the Telegraph in the UK, which started launching a series of e-commerce efforts in 2008. The 154-year-old newspaper now says that a hefty percentage of its revenues come from online users buying those goods and services directly through the site. That’s a nice figure going onto the P&L as advertising revenues continue to shrivel.

“One shouldn’t expect advertising on its own to support the costs of a newsroom,” says Edward Roussel, the Telegraph’s digital editor. “E-commerce is less cyclical, less prone to downturn and more reliable as a revenue stream.”

The Telegraph has been quite successful getting readers to pay for access to games or to services that highlight the organization’s databases. The site’s fantasy football and cricket service and CluedUp, a brand aimed at puzzle nuts, have been perhaps most successful. The Telegraph also gets a commission on transactions made with their personal finance and sports betting partners.

Of course, the Telegraph sells merchandise, too, ranging from tulips or a pond vacuum in the garden store, to Panama hats sold in the travel section. Roussel says developing a system that seamlessly matches product to editorial content is still a challenge, but he envisions a day when the e-commerce gardening application will recognize the rose in an article and serve up offers for that rose or something close to it.

Roussel says not all merchandise lines work as well as others, saying the fashion shop, for one, hasn’t broken through as hoped.

“That’s not how people view a site like ours, they don’t view us as a destination to shop,” he says. “That means we have to work harder to come up with the partners that will work.”

Roussel says that publishers need to embrace the ways in which the web has drastically “shortened the transaction chain” between advertiser and consumer. Whereas advertising used to be about delivering information to readers so they could then go out to make a purchase, Roussel says, “now we can say: do it here and now. That’s the value added for news sites–allowing people to make the acquisition on the spot.”

Far better, he thinks, for news sites to embrace this updated approach–providing valuable services for a fee–than to erect paywalls around content that in the age of Google is readily available elsewhere (an opinion echoed here today).

“The fundamental value of journalism is that you pull in a wide audience, then you can direct them to a series of high value services that they’ll pay for,” Roussel says.

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News Innovators on the Frontline: CityBizList

Posted on 15. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

CityBizList is a free email product sent to business people every morning in five metro areas—Baltimore, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C. Founded in 2005 by Edwin Warfield, CityBizList is aimed at the general business reader, but with an added emphasis on commercial real estate and the lawyers and bankers who serve that industry in each city. They also have a commercial real estate email for the state of Maryland.

Warfield and his partner, Jay Rickey, produce the emails for each market everyday, with production help from partners overseas. They see an opportunity to fill a void in local business journalism as both daily newspapers and business weeklies struggle with their print legacies and a sour advertising market. We spoke to Mr. Rickey late last week.

Can you describe the product and your editorial process?
Everyday is a grind. We’re generally running 35 to 40 headlines everyday in each of the five markets that we’re in. So, Edwin and I are buried in SEC filings. We get a lot of our news from public information that generally journalists don’t go get. We also post news from different sources, whether blogs and other news sites that allow us to reproduce their information or press releases we receive.

You have an outside contractor in India handling some of your production and editorial work. Can you tell us a bit more about that relationship?
They do a lot of work for us. We serve as the creativity behind all of the work, to make sure that it’s locally relevant. But as far as some of the manual labor, even some of the editorial judgment, there are companies over there formed by people who have earned their MBA in America and went back to India. They’re brilliant people, and the costs are lower.

Generally, they compile the information, post it to the site, and show it to us to make sure it reads properly. On top of that, if there’s an SEC filing that comes out, as I’m scouring an 8-K or 10-k, I pull the information I want them to summarize for me. I understand what’s newsworthy, I just don’t have time as I’m compiling 20 news stories everyday to actually do all of that work.

Your business is completely based on advertising and you sell some that advertising yourself. How do you feel about selling advertising as a journalist?
I was associate publisher and general manager of a real estate publishing group in Chicago and I think if you were to interview my former editorial team they will tell you that I’ve skated that line as well as any body they’d ever worked with.

Coming from journalism school, I understand the journalism side. But I also understand that companies need to make a profit. I’m fine with it because I’m an entrepreneur trying to create a business. I’m okay with it, but that’s just me. I think other people would not be comfortable with it.

Do you think journalists should work on becoming more comfortable with selling ads?
I think that sales people and journalists are two completely different personalities. Most of the journalists I’ve worked with would never ever want to be on the sales side, it’s just not in their personality. Whereas on the sales side most of these guys wouldn’t know how to write a sentence, but they’re great communicators, they love to go out and schmooze with people. There’s just not a whole lot of people that can do both sides.

How many markets do you plan to get into? What comes next?
We’d like to be in 10 markets by the end of the year. It would require that we get a little bit of VC funding. The staff would come through. We’d like to hire a managing editor and an outside sales person. Those would be our next two positions, but we would need a little bit of funding in order to get up to the next steps.

How do you identify those markets? Is it based more on advertising or editorial?
A lot of it is synergy based on locations we currently serve. It’s both advertising and editorial. For advertising, there’s a historical theater that’s being auctioned. The client, a local development corporation, is advertising in Philadelphia, D.C. and Baltimore. There’s a reason for them to be advertising in multiple markets.

Editorially, for instance, today I had a story about a new retailer coming on to the market in Prince Georges County in Maryland. That’s an interesting story to both the Baltimore and D.C. markets.

We broke the story this morning, before most other media markets had it, that Smith & Hawken was shutting its stores. The SEC filing came across last night. That ran in every single market because its pertinent in all of them, so that story got re-purposed. With a business-to-business crowd there’s some interesting things you can do.

What do you see as an obstacle to the growth of your company?
The primary thing is revenue, and it should be that way with anyone you talk to. Let’s say the Chicago Tribune went down. There are still 150 to 200 blog sites out there that get a pretty good audience. So, why couldn’t the Tribune be a central source of information from all of those blog sites? Then you could establish a sales force to represent those sites—it would have to be some sort of revenue sharing model.

I would think that an outsourced sales staff that someone launching a site like ours could turn to would certainly create an opportunity for people like Edwin and I to grow more quickly.

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A Budding Investigative News Network

Posted on 14. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.

Watchdog journalism has a viable future.

Twenty-five nonprofit news organizations recently came together to form the beginnings of an investigative news network to fill in the growing void left by newspapers.

Some of the budding network’s members include Bill Buzenberg, executive director of The Center for Public Integrity, and Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post.

The network’s first conference at the Pocantico Estate in New York established a shared aim to foster the “highest quality investigative journalism,” and addressed more personal concerns for the reporters and editors involved, i.e. employee benefits, health care, and general liability insurance — aspects of journalism you don’t hear about too often these days.

Neiman Lab talks about some of the finer points behind the network’s creation, including ProPublica’s decision to remain outside.

While there’s plenty of work to be done before the network begins bird-dogging the bad guys, several key questions were raised during their initial conference:

So, as we prepare for an upcoming Q&A with Trent Seibert of Texas Watchdog — one of the 25 organizations at the Pocantico conference — we will also continue to track the network’s ongoing development.

In the meantime, you can read their lofty declaration on the conference’s home page. Or click here for a more layman summary.

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News Innovators on the Frontline: Gothamist

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

Gothamist.com was launched in 2003, as co-founder Jake Dobkin says, “by a few friends having a good time, talking about a subject they were interested in.” They only realized a few years later that they could sell more than enough advertising to sustain the site. Today, the Gothamist is a profitable brand with sites in 10 cities across the country and 3 cities abroad. But even with a national footprint and stable of national advertisers, Gothamist remains a lean organization with just a dozen full-time employees. Scores more write for the sites part-time. We spoke with Dobkin earlier this week.

What happens if the daily newspapers start going out of business, what does that mean for Gothamist?
Newspapers like The New York Times have really been financed by wasting an enormous amount of other people’s money and it’s hard to feel good about what they’re doing.

If the Times goes out of business because they’ve made poor business decisions, then so be it. They haven’t been that innovative, they tend to copy other people’s ideas, and they’ve made some poor decisions by investing in declining assets. And that same argument applies to pretty much every paper.

It’s businesses like Gothamist that will replace the Times or other dailies. It might not be Gothamist per se, because this business is very competitive, but it will be somebody like us.

Things are going to get much smaller, but that’s what happens when a monopoly dies. That doesn’t sound like a horrible thing to me. In fact it sounds like a pretty exciting thing. I don’t know why we should root for the 500-lb gorilla.

Gothamist relies on the reporting in those papers for a certain percentage of its coverage, will Gothamist increase its editorial staffing to fill the void?
We only aggregate 30 percent of our content from the Times, the Post or the News. Some of that news will come from independent media. There are something like 500 or 600 independent news sources in New York, and they will not disappear. Some of the rest we will report ourselves. So, we’d still have sources for the news, we might have to work a bit harder at it. If the Times went out of business, we’d get a bit of that advertising and be able to pay for more writers.

I’m sick of this idea that we’re just parasites. We break 5 or 10 stories a week. We broke the pug story last week– where the lady with a sick dog was arrested after an altercation with a Hasidic cop on the subway. That story ended up in the Post and The Daily News the next day. We broke the story about the Vox Pop Statue of Liberty being tortured. That made it into the Post.

We definitely aggregate more stuff from the dailies than they take from us, but given their budget is 300 times as large that’s not surprising.

Most of your advertisers are national, are they generally buying into the entire Gothamist network? Do you use sales reps?
Most of our advertisers are national, but they generally prefer specific cities. They’re national brand advertisers who have a preference to buy cities per campaign.

We’ll still do most of the sales ourselves. I’ve hired a couple of people over the years to help in reaching out to specific brands. But, mostly it’s a lot of people coming to us. Hopefully we please them and hopefully they come back—maybe they tell their friends or other media partners about us.

Do you have a local sales operation?
Only to the extent that we have a list of targeted local advertisers—30 or 40 in each of our big cities—that we talk to. They’re advertisers like museums, show venues, large stores, people who organize events in those cities. They are the same kinds of advertisers that you’d see in an alt-weekly.

What needs to happen on the business side of the online news space, in your view?
The one thing I’d like to see that would be helpful to smaller guys is some kind of real self-service model that works and is targeted at smaller local advertisers.

All of the alt weeklies collaborate in a clearinghouse to sell national accounts. Each of them owns a portion of the company, and gets a share of the profits. We need something like that, but it first requires a tech solution for local self-service and I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe it’s that they’ve tried and it hasn’t worked.

Without it, if you’re trying to run a neighborhood blog it’s going to be hard to do if you’re not doing direct sales. I believe in sales, but hearing it isn’t going to make you do it.

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Talking Fantasy Newsroom

Posted on 09. Jul, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.

Martin Langeveld over at the NiemanLab posted yesterday on the essentials he would build into a newsroom if he were starting one from scratch. His ideas include what should be obvious by now, like incorporating the url into branding and encouraging what Jarvis calls the link economy. Langeveld also suggests wikifying the news and thinking of it more as a free-flowing process rather than a product. He writes:

Stop thinking about posting stories. Instead, organize your content management as a cascade; let it flow from raw input into Tweets, social networks and blogs; distill it into a wiki; repurpose it into podcasts, print and niche products.

Down in the comments, however, Vin Crosbie, a media veteran and professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, suggested that the post put the cart before the horse. Better to start with how a news business can afford to pay the journalists before coming up with what they’ll be doing, he writes:

I suggest the initial effort be formulating a business model. To do anything else initially is just journalist daydreaming…Only if the spreadsheets showing your forecast revenues and expense over the next year show enough to live on, then you can decide what brand name or URL or Web site design to use, how many hyperlinks to embed in your stories, how to use Social Media, etc.

What Mr. Crosbie suggests perfectly describes the mission of the CUNY New Business Models for News project. We’re working on developing a number of business models that can support the work of journalists in that future newsroom, who will be called on to do everything that Langeveld lists and much more. But coming up with a business plan does mean that we have to play fantasy newsroom to a certain degree. And in this new media landscape (especially in this economy), we think we’ll need to staff our newsroom with the best bloggers, reporters, researchers, aggregators and technologists that we can find. Oh, and we’ll also need journalists with strong curating skills to manage a host of outside bloggers and freelancers that will help provide coverage. Essentially, we’re looking for an Albert Pujols for every beat.

Well, maybe we’re guilty of a little journalist daydreaming, too. But those future newsrooms, whether they’re fantasy or not, will have to stand the test of a rapidly evolving consumer and advertising marketplace. We’re going to take our best shot at getting it right. Stay tuned.

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