(iverson's) currentbuzz

If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Clay Shirky Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

“The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case,” notes Clay Shirky. I can list models, but no one can predict right now which will be here in 5 years or 50. This piece is based on my remarks at Chicago Journalism Townhall. It is currently a draft, so I welcome your comments or suggestions as I work to develop it further. I have listed the models and included examples of each, however my list is not exhaustive at this point. If you have a suggestion for a site I’ve overlooked, leave it as a comment. Currently, the models and examples reflect mostly newspaper, not television news operations.

The economic assumptions that businesses operate under aren’t the same today as they were 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Today, we live in a time of abundance, not scarcity. Thomas Jefferson noted that an infinite or abundant resource, once created, costs nothing to give away and the original creator retains the original.

Give away what’s abundant, say information or news, to increase your market and build your reputation. Charge for what is scarce, and make money from that. For news, timeliness or in-depth coverage might be the scarce aspects.

Not all opportunities for making money from content can be captured by the creator, but if giving some information away for free increases market, 20% of a large pie, is better than 90% of a small pie.

Those who are making money from models based on scarcity aren’t guaranteed a market share in models based on abundance. In businesses that are based on scarcity, economies of scale prevail, favoring “big” over small and promoting consolidation.

In “freeconomics,” the long-tail prevails and “big” is no advantage. This business model works with small markets, not big operations.

Surveying existing news operations, from small non-profits to large well-established corporations, I identified eight business models alternatives to those typically called mainstream media.

• Collaborate and syndicate
  • The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Record of Hackensack, N.J.; the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.; The Buffalo (N.Y.) News; and the Daily News of New York  share content and look to increase their appeal to advertisers. They can cover stories better with fewer reporters by sharing. Other groups of news operations are doing this, as well as some newspapers and television stations. View Source
• Non-profit funding from grants and foundations
  • Often this kind of model sets out to provide news to populations, geographic areas, or topics that are not covered well by existing media. Chicagotalks.org, Community Media Workshop, chitowndailynews.org, womensenews.org are a few of these. The low barriers to entry in online publishing make these models possible
• Local pay, in an NPR-like model
  • Small with relatively low traffic counts. A few,  MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon,  top 200,000 visitors per month. Some of these are non-profits, too.  Len Witt intends to add a journalist to an existing popular placeblog, with foundation support which he seek to replace with money from local readers.
  • Another from MinnPost. The braubloghas a widget collecting donations from “Highbrau” supporters ($25) and “Lowbrau” supporters ($10) with Ruth Harnisch matching funds.
• Get a patron
  • Mark Cuban has funded sleuthshare.com, bailoutsleuth.com to investigate stock stories and the current bailout. His proposal for a “beatwriter collective” where several reporters are bankrolled by sports team owners, but editorial control remains with the daily newspaper proposes to help newspapers, benefit the sports franchise owners, and be less expensive than advertising alone would be.
• Hybrid model combines features of other models
  • llinois foundations have $350 billion in assets and they are required to invest 5% of that, or $17 billion, in programs that serve a social purpose each year. New legislation recently introduced in the legislature, would allow the formation of  L3C corporations,  which are  hybrid  non-profits that can make some money. View source.
  • NewWest.net is an interesting case. It provides local areas with a turn-key website, but aggregates stories and aims to be the place where water rights and other environmental issues can be discussed on a regional level. They also set up and run events and conferences across the West, and that is one of their revenue sources.
• Post news story “bids”and take reader “pledges” and donations to fund stories. If the story is picked up by a news organization, donors are repaid.
  • Spot.us does this, mostly for the Oakland and Bay area so far. The potential here is in the software which can automate the bidding and donation collection process.
• Begin mobile or online, evolve to print
  • Ohmynews.com (here is the English version which is a translation of the Korean original) the original online citizen news website which had professional journalists as editors and reporters but relied on user-generated content was influential in politics, and evolved into a media institution that has a printed version. MyMissourian from University of Missouri followed a similar path and publishes in print in the Weekend Missourian.
• Open source or “King Gillette” model
  • Free and pro versions where 10% of users pay for the other 90%. Flickr.com uses this model. The MLB sites for each team allow you to get scores, see text of the game for free, but to watch in real-time, you have to pay.

With new operations coming online daily, and some going offline, it is an exciting time to be involved in the news business, but difficult to keep up with all the changes. The Online Journalism Review (OJR) compiled a list of 20 sites on the rise that includes sites which are non-profit and several that are for profit, who use a local advertising model for money.

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• Alternative Models Take Shape (newspaperdeathwatch.com)
• New York Dailies Try Sharing Nicely (newspaperdeathwatch.com)
• Knight Foundation Gives $390K To Four Local News Sites (paidcontent.org)
• PBS should become the NPR of TV (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• New Models To Compensate Journalists And Writers (techdirt.com)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About News (gigaom.com)

Remember what Clay Shirky says, “For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”

Here is a list of all the newsroom libraries and research layoffs and buyouts from IRE listserv by  Michelle Quigley with
Updated 6/8/2009

Here is my list of new roles for journalists:

• curation Whether you write about religion or not, this project provides a concrete example of journalistic curation. The work of the journalist as curator, according to Jeff Jarvis, is to “create order, to correct and vet” information. Mindy McAdams fleshed out the role further, explaining that a journalist curator uses selection, culling, context, arrangement, organization, and expertise to create a networked, hyperlinked project, like exhibits in a museum. The resulting project is non-linear and interactive — a searchable, Web-based structure of knowledge, made up of text, hyperlinks and effective site navigation. (from my Poynter story)

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• From Outside the Newsroom (jobsearchingblog.com)

“That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.”via Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky.

the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

via Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky.

Woof, woof. No, I’m not barking mad. At the recent Chicago Journalism Townhall it was apparent that many in the audience and on the panel didn’t have a “big picture” view of the how disruptive technology and disruptive innovation were going to make what business experts and veterans of the news business thought into quaint misunderstandings. Misunderstandings which were associated with large financial consequences. In this piece, Clay Shirky reminds everyone that news industry mavens did see the internet coming. They did have some ideas for making money. The trouble was, their ideas didn’t fit with the way internet was going to disrupt the very relationship between buyer and seller, consumer and content creator.

Links from my blog about the townhall and its follow up (aftermath?)
http://biverson.com/?s=townhall

Interview with a couple of panelists before the event
http://communitymediaworkshop.org/podcast/?p=33

The “official” Chicago Journalism Townhall site
http://chijournalismtownhall.com/

Audio from Chicago Public radio (interesting comments on each page, too)
Part 1
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=32307
Part 2
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=32309

The Twitter feed from the conference (#cjth)
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23cjth

Other links and reports about our event:
http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2009/02/chicago_journalism_town_hall_meeting_of.php
http://www.suntimes.com/business/spirrison/1455598,CST-FIN-SPIRR02.article
Posted via email from Noteoreous

Andrew Huff comments on the Chicago Journalism Townhall:

Gapers Block was founded as a labor of love — we were all volunteers, and we didn’t even think about making a living on it. We took donations and occasionally ran ads, but they covered the cost of the server and not much else. Only after a couple years which saw GB take up more and more of my time and attention — as well as gain more interest from advertisers — did we take the step of incorporating it as an LLC, and another year before we started treating it as a business (more or less).

via me[THREE]dia | Andrew Huff.

Read this piece by Steve Rhodes. It is long, but worth the read, for a reporter’s view of what went on in the Townhall.

Every time someone said something that enraged me, I looked at Andrew Huff and Barbara Iverson, who were sitting side-by-side on the panel; they were always shaking their heads at the same times I was. At one point, Barbara started to name what she had identified as eight business models that work on the Web (some the same, some not, as the business models Rich Gordon identified for us on Saturday). Ken Davis cut her off, saying “You’re overwhelming us.”

Problem identified.

via The Beachwood Reporter.