I decided that when writing a book filled with aphorisms (aka blog or PowerPoint lines), I might as well skip a step and make it into a PowerPoint. It provides a gag at the start of talks — we have WWGD the book, the ebook, the vbook, the Kindle version, the audiobook, and now WWGD: The PowerPoint. Since putting the presentation up on Slideshare, it has had more than 8,000 views and 500 downloads, which amazes me. Some folks have told me that they’ve used it in their own presentations; they’ve even presented it themselves. Other good folks have translated the PowerPoint into German, Spanish, and Italian (oddly, I still don’t have book publishers in the latter two languages – but I do have PowerPoint publishers).
Amazing that even the free Metro papers – which were pretty much the Associated Press freeze-dried onto paper – are dropping the AP. Even though they’re nothing but a bus-read, they don’t want – or can no longer afford – commodity content.
The AP reports that Huffington Post is going to announce tomorrow the creation of a $1.75 million fund with various donors to pay for investigative reporting. First target: the economy.
This, I’ve long held, is where foundation and public support will enter into the new ecosystem of journalism: not by taking over newspapers but by funding investigations and other slices of a new journalistic pie.
I’ve been hoping to get the resources to preform an audit of the current resource allocation in journalism: Take a town, add up all the journalistic spending there (paper, TV, radio, magazine) and then see how much is spent on investigative reporting (I’ll wager it will be tiny; a fraction of a percent of the total) as well as the beat reporting that feeds it – and judge the value of the results.
When we see that number, I predict, it will be feasible to imagine support from foundations and the public (that is, in the NPR and Spot.US models) to pay for investigative journalism. Indeed, I’ll bet that we could multiply the amount spent on and the output of investigative reporting today. This is how to subsidize news. It’s happening now, as Pro Publica stories run in The New York Times. That is a form of subsidy.
Now to touch the third rail in the debate over the future of news: This is how paid content will work, how news will get money from its public — not by putting content behind walls and charging all readers (the few who’ll remain) to see it but instead by setting up systems to take advantage of the 1 percent rule online that decrees you need only a limited number of contributors (of money or effort) to support great things in a gift economy. See: Wikipedia and NPR. But the public’s contributions won’t go to lifting the sinking Titanics of the old-media failures; I don’t want to contribute to failed newspapers anymore than I want my tax money to go to failed banks and their dividends and salaries. Instead, contributions will need to go directly to supporting work people care about.
The future of journalism is not about some single new-fangled product and company taking over from the old-fangled and monopolistic predecessor. News come from a broad ecosystem with many players adding in under many models for many reasons. News organizations will organize news in this diverse new framework, aggregating, curating, organizing. Laid-off journalists are starting blogs, alongside other bloggers. Some people will volunteer, podcasting their school-board meetings, just because they care. When we demand transparency from government as a default, data will become part of the news ecosystem we can all examine. Some of this will be supported by advertising, some by contributions from foundations, some by contributions from individuals, some by volunteer effort. And it will all add up to a new pie, one slice of which will be efforts such as the one HuffPo is about to announce.
Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said. . . . She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists for the venture. “All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism,” she said. . . . The HuffPost also promises to give a higher profile to work produced by other reporting groups, such as The Center for Public Integrity and The Institute for Justice and Journalism.
: LATER: Here’s Jay Rosen’s post about the project. He’s an adviser.
It is important to stress that the new Investigative Fund is separate from the Huffington Post as both a legal entity and an editorial producer. It is a new non-profit, and so the announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the operating principle is: “report once, run anywhere” because work the Fund produces will be available for any publication or Web site to publish at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post. (Probably through a Creative Commons license, but this has not been decided.)
Much about how the fund will operate has yet to be determined, but mostly what the money is for is to pay journalists and the costs of investigations. Some of those journalists will work for the fund as staff, some will be contracted for as freelancers on a story-by-story basis. Some of the money will, I hope, be used for innovative projects that move in a more open source or pro-am direction. That is one of the reasons I am joining up, to advise on that portion. I also think the Fund is an important and public-spirited thing to do; I want to see it come out right, and gain more resources than it has at the moment. . . .
One of the reasons I signed on with the project is to find ways of supporting that more innovative work. But I also counseled Nick and Arianna (who will help raise money for the fund, and find partners for it) that the best approach is to have no orthodoxy and to support very traditional investigative reporting by paid pros who are good at it, as well as teams of pros and amateurs, students working with masters of the craft, crowdsourced investigations, and perhaps other methods. They were already there with an ecumenical approach, combining old and new.
I was hopeful for Jeff Greenfield’s segment on newspapers’ fate on CBS’ Sunday Morning today because I heard that they’d interviewed the team behind Baristanet and saw that they’d included Newser. Perhaps at last someone would concentrate on the people inventing the future of news. But, no. I’m afraid it all ended up at the same spot it always does: A newspaper guy complains that Baristanet and bloggers are pariahs. Geneva Overholser wrings her hands about newspapers. The guy who tried to save the Philadelphia newspapers but ran them into the ground pins his hope on – you guessed it – charging. Nothing new there. Same old, same old. Oh, for just one story that stipulates the sorry state of papers and the old arguments and instead talks only to innovators who are excited about news and are inventing its future.
I was thrilled to be in the storefront studio of CityTV yesterday because I’ve long admired its innovations in local TV and news. Back in 1993, I worked on a plan for a local cable news channel (it was ruined by the cable people) and was inspired by CityTV to propose a storefront studio of a different sort – in a mall – and cameras all around the market to capture video of the people.
Moses Znaimer, the visionary who created CityTV, sold out and left long ago. Now City is just a tenant in its old building, which has been taken over by a competitor, and soon it will move off of once-hip Queen Street. Back in the day, the entire building and the sidewalk in front were CityTV’s studio for its incredibly diverse – far more than the loaves of white bread that populate American TV – and terribly hip and young staff. This, too, was show biz, but it was less packaged and plastic than the TV I was used to, the TV we still have. Broadcast professionals – what a deadly title – sniffed at Znaimer when he made his TV because he broke all their rules. But later those TV people stole many of his ideas and his TV lives on and it’s still popular.
At the building, I was saddened to see the Speakers Corner video booth that had inspired me to suggest cameras everywhere was gone. People used to go in there, drop a dollar in the slot, and make videos that the station used on air: proposals, jokes, songs, political statements, rants, anything. It gave the pop a vox and I loved it. Now it is a blank metal wall.
But then I realized that the Speakers Corner, too, has been obsoleted by the internet. On YouTube, we all have our booths now, eh? We’re all breaking the tired conventions of television professionals.
I got to hang out in the studio with the crew, who regaled me with stories of the glory days. It turns out, you didn’t have to put a coin in the slot to turn on the Speakers Corner camera; it was always on. And it captured, well, lots of life – much of it on a tape that’s still hanging around somewhere, they say. One of the guys told me the booth would have to get one helluva good scrubbing before he’d go in.
Someone else told me about working at a radio station where a reporter who’d fallen out of favor was assigned to the traffic copter even though he was deathly afraid of flying. He shouted Ohmygod! a lot. Oh, for WKRP.
I enjoyed their nostalgia. It reminded me of conversations I’ve been having with newspaper people about their good old days, which they know won’t return. Yesterday, I also shared my own story from the day with Toronto newspaper people: the strangest job interview of my career.
My wife and I have long loved Toronto and we tried to move there a few times. On our last attempt, I was offered a job to redo the weekend edition of the then free-standing Financial Post. In the process, I had two interviews with Doug Creighton, the legendary founder of the Sun newspapers who then also ran the FP. The morning interview was a delight. I was to go back for the afternoon. “Oh, no,” people at the paper said, “not the afternoon.” Mr. Creighton had the classic newsman’s lunch, you see. It was worse than that: The lunches tended to go on all afternoon and I didn’t meet him until dinnertime – in a dark, velvet-walled old steakhouse – and more than once, he fell asleep. I still hope it was the scotch, not me. The folks in Toronto love the story because they also loved him.
When Creighton’s paper, the Telegram, folded in 19tk, he stood on the desk and led staff from it to the offices of the new paper he was founding, the Sun. It was a bad-ass tab in a staid media market that also sniffed at him and for quite some time, it was a roaring success, expanding to other cities across Canada. Creighton was ousted from the company and he died bitter about it. Today, journalists in the city told me, the Sun is in trouble, beaten down by free tabs.
The point of this is not to lament good days gone. It’s to focus on how two innovators, Znaimer and Creighton, in their time had the balls to walk down the street, break old conventions, compete with sacred cows, invent something new, and find success for a very long time. What we need today is not nostalgia about their exploits. We need more Znaimers and Creightons.
And we have them. Look at the web. It’s thick with Moses and Dougs who don’t give a damn if the old media professionals sniff at them.
I doubt it will get very far, but there’s another well-meaning but ultimately dangerous attempt to provide a government rescue for newspapers: a bill to enable papers to switch to not-for-profit, tax-free status from Sen. Benjamin Cardin. “A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media.” Yeah, I’ll bet. It’s doubtful that taxpayers will want to help bail out newspapers, too.
The obvious danger is government certifying what is and isn’t news and who does and doesn’t do it. Should my blog get to be a tax-free, not-for-profit enterprise? Who gets certified? Further, Cardin’s proposal also would forbid papers as charities from endorsing political candidates. That takes more voices out of the democracy. Not good.
But the real danger here is that these rescue attempts delay the inevitable. The sooner that papers reinvent themselves for the new age, the better. If this delays that inevitability, papers will only languish in the past and others will come and overtake them.
This is the problem, too, with the auto bailout and even the banking bailout. We are bailing out the past, not the future. We are forestalling the need to change. Change isn’t easy. It’s hard on people. It’s destructive. It will leave voids and vacuums. But it is inevitable. The smart thing to do today is to run to the change, seek it out, find the opportunities in it, deal with the hard problems it brings instead of avoiding them.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the Rotman business school in Toronto – a favorite city of mine – tomorrow, March 25, starting at 5p. The fee includes a copy of What Would Google Do?. Autographs are free.
The Ann Arbor News announced today that it will close in July and will be replaced by a new company and site, AnnArbor.com. (Disclosures: I have been advising the project and used to work for Advance, the parent company.) From the publisher’s letter:
This is a difficult day for all of us at The Ann Arbor News. I’ve announced to my colleagues here that we will publish our last edition in July, when a new company called AnnArbor.com LLC will begin sharing local news and information with the community.
I don’t have to tell you what a special and unique place Ann Arbor is; we get to embrace and experience our community’s vibrancy daily. Our company knows that, too, and has chosen our special city to use as a laboratory to create new ways to share local news and information. Our owners have decided to continue to invest significantly in our market, and will be starting a new online media company to better service our tech-savvy readers and advertisers.
In July, AnnArbor.com will be born as an incredible community resource online, in print and around town. Like Ann Arbor, it will be a special place for everyone in the community to learn about, participate in and share everything that’s going on in our area.
We have shared with you before in our pages the extreme challenges that our industry and our newspaper have faced over the last couple years. Out of those challenges has come a new opportunity. Our new strategy reflects shifting media consumption habits and advertising revenue in the newspaper business, and particularly in Michigan.
As we say hello to AnnArbor.com, we will say good-bye to The Ann Arbor News. . . .
We’ll be building our new product from ground up in Ann Arbor, and we’re excited to work with you to help shape the design and features that will best serve our community and advertisers.
While we are inviting current Ann Arbor News employees to apply for positions with the new company, it is with a heavy heart that I let you know that job losses will be unavoidable. We have an extremely talented staff at The Ann Arbor News and they have done a tremendous job through very difficult times. There is nothing they did or didn’t do that would have sustained our seven-day print business model. . . .
We hope you will embrace this change with us and help us along this journey to shape our new online media company.
They are holding community meetings starting in April to do that. I’ll talk more about the project as its proceeds.
On Peter Day’s always-informative business show on the BBC, Cisco’s John Chambers said earlier this month that a downturn is a chance to go into new lines of business. Buying the maker of the consumer hit video camera Flip is certainly is that. I think it could be genius. It’s about new ways to communicate easily, new networks. The Flip has many surprising uses.
Last year at Davos, I showed it to Kai Diekmann, editor of Bild, the giant tabloid (in spirit if not in paper size) in Germany, and he lunged for it, saying he simply had to have it. Bild had been doing amazing things with MMS on mobile phones, turnking all of Germany into paparazzi by having them send photos to the number 1414; Bild pays for photos it uses. You should use video, I said to Diekmann. We are, he said. But ahve you seen the Flip? I asked and pulled it out. This was that scene:
I know from Bild staffers that Dieckmann dispatched them to buy a bunch of Flips in the U.S. (they weren’t available in Europe) and out of that came a fascinating business and news move: Dieckmann went to another manufacturer and created a Bild-branded video camera just like the Flip. The paper offered them for sale for 69 Euros. In five weeks, he sold more than 21,000 of them. Note well that the software on the camera defaults to sending video to Bild. So now the paper has thousands of cameramen all over Germany. Here’s that story, recorded on my Flip from this year’s Davos:
Alan Mutter, advocate of charging for content, debates me on the point in the LA Times. I made my arguments about why pay won’t work; Alan responded; and then, over objections from the paper that I was breaking the format, I demanded the opportunity to rebut the rebuttal in an effort to get to more specifics in this unending and highly speculative, theoretical debate. I’ll quote from that because this is what I want to say to many of the believers in the pay meme:
…[Y]ou find many ways to say that papers should charge and that readers should pay, without saying why, without addressing the value to the public and the competitive economic environment for the publisher, and without getting specific about the complete financial projections of your model. You’re a Silicon Valley start-up executive, Alan, and I wonder whether you’ve ever seen a successful business plan built on shoulds.
You also bring up some common red herrings. No one I know is saying that the blogosphere will replace the press. Please show me the links to the respected bloggers and journalists who say that. I know none.
You do, however, assume that journalism will come only from institutions of the scale of the incumbents. There, we disagree (and we’ll discuss that tomorrow). I believe that the news will come from networks of various parties contributing, gathering, sharing news and information for different reasons.
The Wall Street Journal example is also a bit of a red herring. We should view the pay model with suspicion precisely because that is the only example ever raised. I repeat: Its subscription fees are paid on expense accounts. And I would love to see a full accounting of the revenue from joint subscriptions — print and online — that are attributed to each medium. I’d also like to see the cost of subscriber acquisition marketing, churn management and customer relations. Again, let’s look at the complete financial projections.
So, Alan, I’d like you to respond to the specific business questions I raise above and get specific yourself: How much do you think a paper could charge? For what? How many subscribers would you forecast? What would the impact on audience size and advertising inventory be? What would the impact on search-engine optimization be? What do you project as the cost of subscriber acquisition?
You say that “smart people” will pay for “unique and valuable information.” How much of that can a paper produce in a day? For that matter, how much of that do papers produce now? As I travel across the country, I have been picking up wafer-thin local papers — on paper — that are filled with Associated Press and syndicated copy, rewrites of commodity news I already know, fluffy features and “news” that began life as press releases. Now is the time to be bluntly honest: What is the real value of newspapers as they are made today? What are they worth?
That is asking the question from the customer’s point of view, and that is where this discussion must start.
