Comments on: Cutting up the newsroom

By: Gatherers and Packagers: When Product and Brand Cleave 4 Realz « Network(ed)News

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:15:29 +0000

[...] , economics , glam , networked news , news , newsfeed , rss Jeff Jarvis writes about the coming economics of news: When the packager takes up and presents the gatherer’s content in whole and monetizes [...]

By: News Packaging «

News Packaging « — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:58:30 +0000

[...] Jarvis is thinking about the next steps in the newsroom in his blog posts here and here. There is a lot of analysing of the production of newspapers now…. value chain [...]

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:59:15 +0000

I think the role of the “packager” is completely changing in the next years.
Perhaps we can learn sometthing from the music industry. (People also learn from the music industry. Now they know you can personalize content… why not news content?… so they want it.) People want to make their “own newspaper” soon. RSS feeds, iGoogle, RSS Reader et cetera are all first steps in this direction… but it will get better.
Why shouldn`t there be something like “Last.Fm” just for news? You will get personalized news, you still can stay in the “lean backward” mood…

Just a thought….

By: Brian Cubbison

Brian Cubbison — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:15:23 +0000

Maybe Kinko’s will provide a low-cost, easy-to-use newsprint service. Send your news and ads by RSS feed, and they get packaged efficiently into attractive pages and printed out each night for you to pick up and deliver.

Next, we’ll have to figure out health care.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:02:43 +0000

The litmus test for the ’sections’ is how/if it stacks up against what Kevin Kelly terms ‘generative values’ - of which he identifies 8 here:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

I.e. your gathering section will easily pass based on the timeless value of (e.g) ‘interpretation’. There are probably more than those 8, but it is apowerful uidea to apply to new business models.

By: Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media » Friday squibs

Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media » Friday squibs — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:15:09 +0000

[...] Cutting up the newsroom. Jeff Jarvis does a thought experiment in chopping the newsroom in two, with gatherers on one side and packagers on the other, working hand in hand. Lots there to chew on. [...]

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:47:35 +0000

I love this idea. It parallels the trend in recent decades towards entrepreneurialism in all industry sectors. But with that comes a lot more risk shift. Suddenly the reporter is an entrepreneur, without health benefits or a pension. That may appeal to a good chunk of reporters, but do we want to make that a requirmenet for entering journalism?

Some people are great reporters but bad entrepreneurs.

By: AnnBrocklehurst.com

AnnBrocklehurst.com — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:58:49 +0000

Sorry, but lots of good content is indeed scarce

While Jarvis has argued in the past that, as far as content is concerned, we live in “a post-scarcity era” (see the Long Tail), I don’t think that’s entirely true…Let’s look at a local news example — and I’m not talking overhyped hyperlocal either.

By: Craig McGinty

Craig McGinty — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:11:50 +0000

That striking out on your own as a journalist is something that I think a lot more people are going to have to think about.

A good example in the UK is:

http://www.myfootballwriter.com/

And since doing something similar myself I’ve learnt many lessons about the value of networks, search and ultimately owning your own copyright to see it as a viable option.

Is the something larger news organisations can use to their advantage? It would take some original minds to grasp the potential I think.

By: Simon Owens

Simon Owens — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:42:04 +0000

I’d like to see an every man for himself approach that utilizes some of the things you talk about here. Let’s say I’m a business reporter at The New York Times and I get laid off. Rather than joining another newspaper, I open a blog account and begin to utilize those sources and the rapport I built with them and start competing directly with the Times.

Then I join some kind of ad network like Federated Media, plus adsense and Amazon affiliate, and let them figure out the advertising while I focus solely on breaking stories.

Eventually, as the web usually does, there will be a way to filter this information — the most reliable reporters will have the most readers.

With a few exceptions, the blogosphere isn’t doing much original reporting. I’d like to see a lot of old-media reporters use the skills they’ve learned in the print world and apply them to blogs. Then they have far less overhead and can profit directly from their reporting.

Of course, they’ll be missing out on the massive resources from a newspaper, but perhaps the equivalent of that will somehow arise out of all of that.

Does any of this make sense?

By: Michael M.

Michael M. — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:34:19 +0000

Your take on it makes a lot more more sense than Dave Morgan’s, I believe, but I’d go one step further. Break the paper up by section!

Some of the most profitable parts of a paper are it’s special inserts and magazines: Travel guides, auto guides, etc. Have each section autonomous, and get each sales department to really focus on profitable niche sales. Have a weekly put out on local school news, for example, and you can sell your advertisers mothers with children. Have a local business weekly, and sell your advertisers just the business community.

Then, the daily paper or website can aggregate these mini-pubs if there is a demand for that. But by better targeting your audience with tighter sections, you lose a lot of wasted eyeballs.

In other words, treat each section like its own publication and have the main paper/site act like iGoogle, aggregating it all together.