There is a future for news – a sustainable and once-again profitable future with the prospect of expanding and improving journalism by taking it deeper into our communities with increased relevance, engagement, accountability and efficiency.
A team of business analysts and journalists in the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism’s New Business Models for News Project, which I direct, tried to answer the hard questions that have been asked since news organisations began suffering business challenges – and more recently, bankruptcy. Namely: what happens to journalism in a city when its last daily newspaper dies?
Or to put it another way: will there be a market demand for journalism? Can the market meet this demand? And who will pay for the journalism we need? These are business questions and so we sought business answers in research with a wide range of news companies.
The most startling and hopeful number we found is this: some hyperlocal bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000 people, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising. These are sustainable businesses and we believe they are critical elements of the future of local news – a future no longer controlled by a single newspaper but instead by an ecosystem made up of many players with varying motives, means and models, working collaboratively in networks.
We see the faint beginnings of this ecosystem today in the 10,000 hyperlocal bloggers who operate in the US, according to the hyperlocal network outside.in. They are being joined, almost daily it seems, by unemployed professional journalists intent on continuing to report and eating while doing so – for example the New Jersey Newsroom, the Ann Arbor Chronicle, and My Football Writer in Norwich. At CUNY, we surveyed more than 100 of these local-site proprietors and some are becoming profitable.
Keep in mind that few, if any, of these bloggers and journalists have experience in business, advertising or sales. So in our project, we suggest that there are many ways to optimise their businesses. Start by improving the products and services they offer to local traders. Then add the potential of regional advertising that will need outlets when the metro paper dies, as well as smaller networks made up of a few towns or built around interests such as parenting or sports. We even see potential for e-commerce revenue, following the example of the Telegraph, which sells hangers and hats, and now Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune, which has begun selling homes.
Bottom line: after three years, we project that a blogger could hire editorial staff and advertising help – citizen salespeople who help support the citizen journalists – and net $148,000 out of $332,000 revenue. That’s a conservative estimate when you consider that a community weekly paper in such a town probably earns between $2m-$5m.
We still see a role for a news organisation – the successor to the newspaper newsroom – that covers city-wide stories, provides the best reporting that will remain the lifeblood of local journalism, and works collaboratively with many in the community. It is the largest member of the ecosystem but with a staff of 100 instead of 1,000 – and without the cost of printing and distribution – it is much smaller than the old newspaper and that is what makes it profitable. In the US, we have seen not-for-profit versions of this new news organisation rise in San Diego, Minneapolis and New Haven.
There are more contributors to the metro news ecosystem: technology and sales support organisations that enable these players to operate as part of ad and content networks; publicly supported and not-for-profit entities (public media, an individual reporter supported by pledges using services such as spot.us, or a foundation-supported organisation); transparency of government actions and information (which we believe is critical to enabling any citizen to become a watchdog); national networks and the immeasurable but invaluable force of volunteers who contribute to public knowledge, because they care.
Adding this all together, our models projected editorial staff of 277, equivalent to a current newsroom in our hypothetical city of 5 million but now highly distributed among many new entities. We forecast total revenue totalling 10%-15% of that of the newspaper – which is about what most papers earn online today. At that level, we see sustainable journalism of scale but we also see great potential for growth, especially if journalists learn to take advantage of the social engagement the internet enables.
Ours is only one optimistic vision. There is no way to tell if we are right until journalists, business people, advertisers, technologists and citizens invest in the future instead of merely trying to protect their past. The incumbents are talking about building pay walls. Google has just offered its Checkout payment system to enable micropayments – which may be less of a rescue for papers than for the rare unpopular Google feature. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs we interviewed are building new news companies for the new ecosystem.
The latest edition of the Guardian MediaTalkUSA podcast, which I present, features the work of CUNY’s New Business Models for News Project and discussion with two folks who know hyperlocal: Deb Galant, founder of Baristanet, whom I crowned the queen of hyperlocal; and Jim Willse, editor of the Star-Ledger (who begins the podcast confessing that he began his day reading papers … online).
What’s fascinating is that Galant and Willse extend the idea of local networks.
* Galant wished for a local associated press that would enable news organizations and local blogs to share content and distribute each other.
* Galant at first resisted the idea of ad networks because, to date, they devalue sites and she’s already getting national and regional ads – but then, when asked whether she’d want a piece of advertising that would be up for grabs if a metro paper dies, she relented. The problem is that we need a new word and reputation for networks.
* Willse proposed a co-op apartment model in which the members of the ecosystem/network (call it what you will) engage others – a super – to perform mutual tasks (that’s the role of the framework in our NewBizNews models; it’s what Mark Potts’ Growthspur hopes to provide as a service).
* Galant and Willse also liked the idea of collaborating on journalism, doing more as a group than any of its members could do alone. That’ll be the subject of their next lunch.
It is gratifying to see these people who work in the heart of local adopting and extending some of the ideas we discussed at the Aspen Institute.
By the way, we will hold another meeting in New York to discuss the models, sometime in early November (as soon as I’m sure I’ll be back in full fettle). In the meantime, please take a listen:
Zephyr Teachout has a good column in tomorrow’s Washington Post predicting the disaggregated university. It’s very much in harmony with what I wrote in What Would Google Do? – that complete chapter here. I also gave a talk on the topic via Skype to the Media Education Summit in Liverpool this week; the audio (not very good) is here. The bottom line of all this: Education will follow the path of newspapers, toward a disaggregated, distributed, more efficient future based on abundance rather than scarcity, with control at the edge.
Yesterday I tweeted about Google’s offer to bring its checkout to enable micropayments for newspapers: “A cynical act, I’d say: a tool no one uses used to coopt foes on a useless quest.” In response, Charlie Williams tweeted, “How about savvy & low risk?” And I said that savvy and cynicism are by no means mutually exclusive.
Compare these two columns about Twitter: one by Mike DeArmond, a sports hack in Kansas City, and one by Roger Cohen in The New York Times. They are each frustrated that Twitter doesn’t fit into their set-in-concrete view of what they do and what journalism is – and how others fit in.
The sports guy’s column is, of course, the sillier:
Let’s quit tweet, tweet, tweeting like the birdbrains do. I don’t care what your friend had for lunch. . . .
I really don’t object to the message so much as the medium. . . .
I became a journalist because I love words. The way they can be used to paint an image, to link observation and explanation.
It is why I think it is wonderful to write about how some questions are so rambling that they climb the wall, scoot around a corner, take a stop in the men’s restroom, and only then arrive at their intended point.
You can’t do that with Twitter. You’re limited to 140 characters. And most people waste even those.
Now Cohen:
Twitter’s pitch is “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” That’s what it does — up to a point. It’s many things, including a formidable alerting system for a breaking story; a means of organization; a monitor of global interest levels (Iran trended highest for weeks until Michael Jackson’s death) and of media performance; a bank of essential links; a rich archive; and a community (“Twitter is my best friend.”)
But is it journalism? No. In fact journalism in many ways is the antithesis of the “Here Comes Everybody” — Clay Shirky’s good phrase — deluge of raw material that new social media deliver. For journalism is distillation. It is a choice of material, whether in words or image, made in pursuit of presenting the truest and fairest, most vivid and complete representation of a situation.
It comes into being only through an organizing intelligence, an organizing sensibility. It depends on form, an unfashionable little word, without which significance is lost to chaos. As Aristotle suggested more than two millennia ago, form requires a beginning and middle and end. It demands unity of theme. Journalism cuts through the atwitter state to thematic coherence.
In each case, The Journalist is confronted with something new and if it doesn’t fit in with their world and worldview, they find reasons to reject it, to diminish it, to make it the province of others, not The Journalist – because it’s The Journalist who is empowered to say what journalism is. DeArmond’s going for laughs, Cohen for profundity, but they’re each only showing that they are not imaginative enough to recognize the power that comes from a new tool – no, not the tool but the connection to the people who are using it. I’d never let my students get away with that. I always try to get them to look at a tool and see how it can be used to improve journalism, not just violate its age-old dictates.
In these screeds, we also get a glimpse of these Journalists’ definitions of journalism. I say that news was made into a product by the necessities and limitations of its means of production and distribution in print and broadcast. News is properly a process, I believe. Cohen says, no, it must have a beginning, middle, and end, a narrative he sets, an order he gives, a chaos he rejects. He says elsewhere in his column that presence is necessary to do journalism; he thus says that it takes a reporter to report, that news without the journalist him or herself bearing witness to it is not real news. He puts The Journalist at the center of news. I say the journalist is the servant of news. I tell my students to add journalistic value to what is already being spread – reporting, fact-checking, perspective, answers – but recognize that the news is there with or without them. It is gathered and spread by the people who see it and need it with new tools, like Twitter. Like it or not.
: LATER: But at the same time, here’s The Times’ David Pogue using Twitter to talk with the public to do his journalism.
As I prepare to go under the robot on Monday, I’ve found that the process includes drugstore embarrassments. They’ve only just begun.
It starts with Viagra. As I’ve explained, a man’s plumbing doesn’t do the two things it’s supposed to do for at least some time after the prostate is taken out. In the hope of fixing one of those functions, doctors now prescribe low-dose Viagra even before the operation.
So I had to go to the drugstore and buy the little blue pills. But I don’t need them, I wanted to announce. Medical reasons. Really.
The doctor had prescribed 10 of the little blues but the pharmacy gave me only six. That’s evidently as much whoopee as my insurance company will pay for. But this isn’t for whoopee, I told the pharmacist; it’s for cancer. No matter. I could buy the extra pills for almost $20 each. Jeesh. In my day, erections were free. No more.
A few days ago, I sucked it up and dealt with the other missing function. I went to the drugstore’s incontinence aisle – yes, it’s a market niche – and took a pack of pads and another of full-size, pull-up, absorbent underwear to find out what I’ll need. Thank goodness at least that the guy behind the counter was a guy, I thought. So I asked him. He turned around to the two women pharmacists behind the counter and said to the cuter one, in front of everyone: “Does he need the underwear?” He might as well have gotten on the mic and asked for a price check for pull-ups for the guy who’s peeing in his pants. Jeesh.
But the pharmacist was nice. “You won’t need the diapers,” she said. Good news. Except why did she have to call them diapers?
Google has an image problem – not a PR problem (that is, not with the public) but a press problem (with whining old media people). Google is trying hard – too hard, perhaps – not to argue with the guys who still buy ink by the barrel. Google is only causing them to buy fewer barrels. And newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google’s success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses.
What should Google do? I think it needs to become news’ best friend.
* * *
This week, I called The New York Times on internet bigotry. Now I’ll call the French media on a subset: Google bigotry.
Last night, I got email from a Le Monde journalist who said, “I’m on the way to write an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly.” She went on to wonder whether these critics would move to Bing and, at the same time, whether Google would become the next Microsoft with a negative image and government pressure (aren’t those two questions inherently contradictory?).
I wanted to know if it was possible for you to respond to my questions?
I threw out my glass of Bordeaux (it had turned) and poured a nice American cabernet and then responded:
There’s one problem: I do not buy the premise of your story. I’ve seen this story again and again, especially from France. I’m not sure what it is the French have against Google, but it’s some form of national insanity, I think. Most French publishers rejected my book, What Would Google Do?, because they said they wanted a diatribe against Google – that, it appears, is the French reflex. Only after I blogged that did my brave publisher come forward and publish it as La méthode Google.
Do some people complain about Google? Yes, it is often the same people who complain about the internet and about change and technology and simply use Google as their target simply because it is so big and so innovative.
Google is the fastest growing company in the history of the world, according to the Times of London. It is the No. 1 brand for three years running, which means that people not only know but admire it.
So who are these people who you say are part of this “rising tide of discontent” about Google? How do you measure it? How big is the tide?
How big was it? What is its impact? I don’t see it. I see journalists doing this story because they want to.
Google is not a monopoly. It is a competitive company and it took advertising dollars for one simple reason: because advertisers found a better deal there – buying performance, not scarcity, with Google sharing their risk – than they ever found in our old media. It is media companies’ fault that they lost their customers after cheating them for too many years.
Privacy? That is an overused word. The issue is not privacy, as I say in my book. It is control. You should also look at the benefits of publicness, which come when we share things about ourselves and find others like us. If you have problems with privacy then you have problems with every member of Facebook and its clones across the world and the entire generation that made social sites huge.
With all respect, it appears to me that you have already drawn your conclusions and written your story – that there is this “rising tide” you see against Google, that is a “monopoly,” that people are leaving for Bing (introduce me to some, would you?), that it now has a “negative image.”
I don’t see it.
* * *
Last week, I got an email from an Israeli journalist, which said: “These days we are working on an article about Google, focusing on the company’s failures rather than on its well known successes.”
Another reporter decides what to say before doing the reporting. Oh, it’s hardly uncommon. But I decided not to bother with this. I’ve done it too often: arguing with a reporter’s premise and then not appearing in the story because I dared to disagree.
* * *
This week, a Google PR person I met at the Aspen Institute sent me links to a public exchange in editorials in the Seattle Times. It started with an editorial lambasting Google, using Italian newspapers complaints as its peg: “Google is a wonderful thing. It is also a dangerous thing, as it keeps demonstrating in its quietly rapacious way.”
But they got their facts wrong. They said that if a paper didn’t want to be in Google News, it couldn’t be in search. All they had to do was a little research – otherwise known as reporting or fact-checking – to find out that was false. They also suggested that the government should go after Google under the Sherman Antitrust Act. A Google attorney sent a response explaining the law and business to them:
Your Aug. 30 editorial ["Rapacious? Google it," Opinion] seems to misunderstand both competition law and how Google News works.
Under the antitrust laws, there’s no problem with a company becoming successful, so long as it earns it fair and square. The problem is when companies act illegally to maintain their market position — by foreclosing competition or making it difficult for users to switch. No one has seriously suggested that Google’s success is due to anything other than hard work and constant improvement.
Your editorial also wrongly suggests that news organizations can’t withdraw their content from Google News without also removing it from all Google searches. That’s false. Publishers are in complete control over where and whether their content appears.
News organizations can use a universally honored technical standard called “robots.txt” to block their content from being indexed by Google and other search engines. And if they want to be removed only from Google News, they can just tell us directly, and we’ll remove them.
Still, of more than 25,000 news sources, only a handful have chosen to be removed. Why? Because Google News sends news organizations more than a billion clicks each month, which they can use to win loyal readers and generate more advertising revenue.
The Times wasn’t at all embarrassed about being so wrong and came back against Google again. Just because they wanted to. Just because they felt like it. Just because they need an enemy to blame for their own failing business.
* * *
Google is far from perfect. It ain’t God. In my book, I complained about its opaqueness while demanding transparency from the rest of us and about its policies in China. There’s plenty to criticize.
But these media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy. It’s not just that they dislike the competition – and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they’d use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don’t know how to (or rather, they’d prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they’ve refused to understand.
What should Google do?
I’m not sure but I’d start by using Google’s platform to enable the new ecosystem of news, the entrepreneurs who will build the future of journalism – and that could include the incumbents, if they have any sense. That framework could include promotion (via GoogleNews and more), revenue (via Google advertising), technology (publishing, content, and measurement tools), consultation and education (on maximizing attention, on using new tools), and R&D (Google Wave for news, the hyperpersonal news stream….).
Google should position itself as the friend of news and then maybe it won’t matter if it is newspapers’ friend; they’ll just come off as the whiners they are.
: LATER: Google News published a video explaining some of what goes into its scraping and ranking and how to improve your chances of getting good links. It’s a first step:
Note that Google News is now trying to understand, through others’ citations, which publications are first or early on a story so it can link more effectively to news at its source.
Peter Day, one of the best radio interviewers I know and the very best in business coverage, talks about media mayhem this week and I got a chance to discuss the New Business Models for News Project with him. Take a listen here.
I was growling at my iPhone on the train this morning as I read a prominently promoted New York Times story about the rumored Chelsea Clinton wedding that didn’t happen. Sixth graph:
The persistence of the rumor despite the lack of tangible evidence says something about today’s free-for-all Internet media culture, where facts sometimes don’t get in the way of a good story. It also says something about the Clintons and the mistrust they have engendered over the years that so many people do not take them at their word, even over a question like this.
It’s bad enough that the reporter, Peter Baker, made two such gross generalizations but it’s worse that there was no backup for either in the story.
Who spread the rumor according to Mr. Baker? Here’s every attribution in his story:
* “The wedding rumor mill got started by the Boston Globe…”
* “Then New York magazine picked up the ball…”
* “In July, the New York Daily News said…”
* “’There is no truth to that,’ Mrs. Clinton said on Fox News…”
* “The Washington Post reported…”
* “The Post followed up…”
* “On Sunday, the New York Post reported…”
* “The New York Post concluded…”
I don’t see a damned thing about “internet media culture” there, do you? Not one snarky, unreliable, rumor-mongering, content-stealing, value-sucking blog. Nope, not one mention of Gawker. Just big, old newspapers and magazines. Indeed, the only refutation of the rumor – the fact-checking of it – appears to have been on Fox News. (I also saw no editor asked whether they continued to spread the rumor because they didn’t trust the Clintons.)
This is the sort of internet bigotry that pops up in The Times like clockwork.
Mind you, The Times as a whole is doing lots of innovative things online: The Local (in which CUNY is involved), its blogs, its twittering, its API – plenty to praise.
Yet this snarling about the internet still bubbles up from the newsroom, from reporters and from the many editors who choose to publish it. That’s the newsroom culture – as opposed to that damned internet media culture – you keep hearing about as an impediment to change. This is how newsrooms fight it, using the one weapon they have: the keyboard. They may be forced to blog and podcast but they can always get their revenge in print. Good, old, comforting – though unsubstantiated, rumor-mongering, never-let-the-facts-stand-in-the-way-of-a-good-story – print.
In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans. The New York Times and the Guardian, to name two, reportedly have visions of tote bags, mugs, and events in their heads. And I think that’s a fine idea. No salvation. But a fine idea. I’ll wear a Guardian hat proudly. I’ll go watch Nick Kristof present a slide show of what he did on summer vacation. (Other papers are merely using the m-word to cloak a pay wall; you know what I think about that.)
What the Times and Guardian seem to be considering is membership in the NPR mold – give us money and get a T-shirt to brag about it. That works at NPR because the network is a charity and supporting it is a political statement. The same might be true of the Guardian, which operates on a mission (“the world’s leading liberal voice”) and is owned by a trust. But the Times, as the product of a profit-making company with shareholders? I’m not sure. We’ll see.
In any case, the membership bar has moved up. It’s not enough to let people give you money and promote you. Now you have to invite them to have a real and meaningful role in what you do, even a sense – if not a stake – of ownership and, consequently, control.
Take Wikipedia. At the Aspen Institute two weeks ago, Wikimedia Foundation head Sue Gardner said they calculated the value of the work people put into editing entries. They could measure only the time that went into edits and updates, not the time writers may have spent elsewhere researching and writing. Even so, the value of time spent added up to hundreds of millions of dollars. That is how this incredible asset was built: minutes at a time. Note well that Wikipedia did not become valuable because it extracted money from the market and its users pockets. It became a great asset by enabling people to make it, to take control of it, to have a sense of ownership in it. It thus requires very little resource to run – and it gets the money for that from these users. Now that’s membership.
Note that Wikipedia is trying to figure out what value it needs to add back to its community’s product, not as a controller but as a contributing member itself. That’s part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.
Now take craigslist. Craig Newmark was also at Aspen, befuddling the media machers, as he always does. But he shouldn’t. They are the ones who created his model. Newspapers created value by becoming the marketplaces in their communities for home, merchandise, and job transactions. Craig created the successor marketplace the best way he could: by being free. He extracts minimal value to grow to maximum size; those are the confounding network economics I describe in What Would Google Do?. The point is that Craig did not create a marketplace he would control, as newspapers did; he created a marketplace the community built and he supports that with customer service. He serves the community as a member.
When I was last in London, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was contemplating membership and he told me about the Barcelona Football Club, which is owned by its fans and in which members have the privilege to vote on leadership and more. Can a newspaper be owned by its community?
This morning, I recorded the next Guardian Media Talk USA podcast with Baristanet founder Deb Galant and Star-Ledger editor Jim Willse and we discussed the CUNY New Business Models for News recommendations, which center on creating collaborative networks among the new players in the next news ecosystem. Willse riffed on the idea of creating co-ops, like New York apartments, where the community sets its rules and hires the super to make sure the heat is on. All benefit, all have a stake in the success of the community.
Add all this together: contribution to a community to build it as an asset; ownership of the community by the community; members having a mutual stake in the community; members exercising control over the whole. That is membership. Not tote bags.
How far would and should news organizations be willing to go with this extended vision of membership? I can see newspapers as they have existed being quite uncomfortable with the idea of handing over control and even membership to the community. I can hear their fears of being co-opted or gamed. But that comes from still thinking of news as the property of a single company. Those days are soon over.
When you think of news instead as the province of an ecosystem that is distributed and owned at the edges by many players operating under many means, motives, and models, then the notion of contribution, ownership, and control changes. People own their own stakes but they benefit by joining together cooperatively. They create a tide upon which all their ships rise. That’s a network, not a company. Everyone contributes, everyone gains value and so does the whole: Everyone cooperates in systems of enlightened self-interest. Thus greater value is created (see: Wikipedia v. World Book) because more people contribute value but it is not owned centrally and benefit moves to the edge.
In the new post-industrial economy, I argue that there are three opportunities for growth and value: building platforms, building value atop those platforms (as entrepreneurs), and building networks to help these entities optimize their value. That is how news and many industries will be rebuilt, I believe.
In this vision, then, the basis of news is the platform, not the newspaper company. The value is built by owner-members, more than staff. The infrastructure for the network is a service to it, not a barrier to entry.
Yesterday, I was down visiting Vivian Schiller and her management team at NPR – who, by the way, are clearly having great fun (unlike other folks I know in the business). We talked about the New Business Models for News Project and NPR’s role in this new ecosystem. I think NPR and its stations can provide a platform and network services to many players in local markets and take a key role in the future of the news ecosystem. And NPR understands the beginnings of what it means to have members, so long as they move past tote bags.
So, yes, news organizations, please think about membership. But don’t think if it as merely a revenue opportunity. That is doomed. It is insulting. It brings to value to its members. It’s only a new price tag for a new product: a mug instead of news. No, instead use this opportunity to think about opening up as an enabler and member of a new network, a new club, and don’t think of yourselves as the owners of this club but instead as just another member.
