Reverse syndication
In the story about their layoffs today, the New York Times mentioned, as it often does, that the Baghdad bureau costs them $3 million a year.
I’ve been wondering about a new way to help support that bureau: reverse syndication.
Now, the Times supports that work not with advertising associated with it directly — who wants to associated a brand with war? — but by doing the other things — food, entertainment, autos, homes — that bring in the money. And it runs a syndicate in which it sells its stories to other news organizations. But I know from my time in newspaper online sites that syndication is a dying business as newspapers cut back all the costs they can and as the web link pretty much obsoletes the model: Why buy the content when people can get it to already online?
So how about turning that model around: Let’s say the Times says to Tribune company that it will provide all the reporting on Iraq for Tribune’s readers. But instead of charging Tribune for syndication, the Times pays Tribune a share of the ad revenue it gets from traffic Tribune sends to the Times. Tribune, which is also engaging in layoffs, can’t afford to do everything anymore and so it has to do what it does best and link to the rest. Granted that the ad revenue on a Baghdad story won’t be great but added traffic would add revenue and would help.
And if this model works, wouldn’t Tribune also want to link to Wall Street coverage from the Times. Or the Wall Street Journal and Reuters could compete for that traffic. There’s a church-state question here: Would Tribune be motivated to link to any of these three because they have the best coverage or because they pay the best commission? Given equal quality, the best commission will win. But Tribune has to give its readers the best links to the best coverage or its readers will seek those links elsewhere. So I think quality will succeed.
(This is the first of two posts exploring new models for the business of news — I’d love to see you explore more. I also want to give credit for inspiring this to Jim Kennedy, the head of strategy at the Associated Press, who drew a similar model when I first brought Daylife to meet him as he tried to figure out how we as an industry could help support quality coverage from local papers that right now aren’t motivated to take national traffic since they can’t monetize it well. This may be a model that addresses that.)
Tags: Book, journalism, newbiznews, newsinnovation, newspapers, norgs, wwgd
February 15th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Another great analogy would be farming. It’s no use for one farmer to grow each and every fruit and vegetable, it’s better when they specialize and share their wealth.
Yes, selection may decrease, but the increase in quality should make up for that.
bz.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
[...] Reverse syndication - with newspapers losing money and laying off people, may be it is unavoidable that we will read the same story by the same reporter even if we thought we are reading multiple newspapers for wider perspectives on things [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
[...] Jarvis calls it reverse syndication: big publishers pay smaller publishers to link to their material. Jarvis has a fascinating, albeit [...]
February 20th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I’ve begun to promote a similar idea, specifically in the public media world. Local public TV and public radio stations today pay hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions to NPR, PBS, APTS, PRI, APM and other content providers (with NPR and PBS being the most obvious). This has stifled the local public media companies’ ability to produce local content. They blow all their cash paying the networks.
Reverse syndication in this world, to my thinking, is to have the networks sell their content to the public (ads, membership revenue) and give all the content to the local media outlets for free — with the caveat that embedded ads pass through with the content. Local outlets could then produce local media and still pick from the best national media and arrange it into locally-relevant streams/blocks on the web, on transmitters, etc.
This would also clean up the nasty co-dependent relationships between the local stations and the networks, as it would clarify the roles of each.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:25 pm
This already exists. Except in the model that already exists, companies syndicate content (for free) to other sites that post it on their own domain, where they can monetize it themselves. The benefit to the syndicator is that the articles are filled with links back to the parent site.
So everyone wins: in your metaphor, if the Times did this, the Tribune would get free (!) war coverage, the Times would get more traffic, and both could monetize the results. And they don’t even have to establish some kind of complicated revenue-sharing agreement!
March 8th, 2008 at 2:04 am
[...] there are other models for local support. When I wrote about reverse syndication as a model for national coverage in newspapers, served up by the New York Times and its [...]