BuzzMachine

New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today put out an entire edition without anything from the Associated Press within. The sharp-eyed reader will notice lots of local news by staff plus articles from other papers–Washington Post, LA Times, McClatchy, the Glouceseter County Times–and content from online services such as Sportsticker.

It’s one more nail in the heart of the AP as other papers cancel their contracts and more threaten to.

At the same time, Political announces that it will give stories to papers with ads attached that Politico and Addify sell and they will share revenue with the papers. Politico’s deal is the first major substantiation of the reverse-syndication model, a product of the link economy. It’s another nail in the heart of the Associated Press, which is built instead for the content economy.

The old syndication model in the old content economy just won’t work today when all the world needs is one copy of a story up in the cloud with links to it. Today, the more links that article can get, the more valuable it is. So sharing value with those who send links to it only makes sense.

The AP is not bad (no matter what foolish things it may have done in the blog kerfuffle recently). It’s just expensive. Papers the size of the Cleveland Plain Dealer say they pay $1 million a year. As they get more local, as reverse syndiction models come to the fore, as they have to tighten budgets, the industry-supported AP syndication model is mortally threatened. Still, this isn’t about the AP. It’s about the new architecture of news and media.

I was talking with a media exec who started a blog ad network — bless him — but who I thought was taking too high a share of the revenue: at least half. That’s a natural reflex, perfectly understandable: Get what you can. Other networks do that. But the problem for me is that by taking too much, he excluded me from the network — I’m sticking with BlogAds, which takes only 20 percent — and the problem for him, then, is that this slows the growth of his network and a smaller network is a less valuable network. He understands this will because he’s a smart media guy. He wants a large network.

I was actually just trying to channel the network wisdom of Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, and Tom Evslin, who had talked about how to grow networks at a Union Square roundtable about collaborative production more than a year ago. I wasn’t sure I was getting it right, so I went to Evslin’s blog and asked him for a reprise, which he has just provided, brilliantly. I’ll summarize:

The first counterintuitive lesson: Companies that build large networks on the web don’t charge users what the market would bear; they charge as little as they could bear. That is how they maximize growth and value for everyone in the network on top of the platforms they provide.

In his blog post, Evslin takes this a step farther, pointing out that if you run a network that depends on scale, such as an ad network, then the more pages you have to sell, the bigger and better advertisers you can attract and the more you can charge. So if you take a smaller commission for each ad in the network, more sites will join it with more pages, which can now be sold at a higher value.

It gets even more head-scratching: Evslin argues that if you are too profitable, then you will attract competitors who will undercut you and steal market share. “If you’re doing well but running at or close to breakeven,” he explained, “you’ve made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit, which is hard to get funding for.”

So, to sum up: Take the minimum value out of the network to make it grow to maximum size to enable its members to charge more for their value while keeping costs and margins low to block competitors.

That’s not how old networks operate. Cable companies wrap their wires around you and squeeze maximum fees out of you. Ditto phone companies, newspapers, and retailers. But they all face competition from next-generation networks.

craigslist is the Evslin poster child. It foregoes revenue for most listings in most markets—charging just for job ads and for real estate in a few markets—and that turned it into the critical-mass marketplace for most listings. “If Craig now attempted to maximize revenue by charging for a substantially higher percentage of ads, a door would be cracked open for competition,” Evslin writes. “There is no chance at current rates for a competitor to steal Craig’s listings (and readers) by charging less.”

I’m writing about the network model in the book and this will also be a key topic of discussion in our event at CUNY on new business models for news; that’s why I’m talking about it.

What the hell are they thinking in Philadelphia? Inquirer ME Mike Leary just sent a memo saying they are going to hold all but breaking news for the paper and even restrict bloggers from using their blogs to work on stories in progress.

Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

And my message to staff, the few of them left:

Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.

And my question to readers:

Do you care?

: LATER: What a rotten time for Norgman Will Bunch to be on vacation and offline.

: An online producer elsewhere asked me for stats on the cannibalization of print by online. I responded:

That’s not the point. The point is that we need to make the leap over to the next medium and business model and an extra 10 or 100 saved copies now is NOT going to save the business as it was. It’s short-sighted and foolish. So forget that calculation and ask, instead, how to invent the next product and drive audience and advertisers there and reshape the staff — completely — around that. It will be a smaller scale business — no longer a monopoly — but likely more profitable in the longrun if it also relies on collaboration.

: Here’s Steve Outing’s reaction.

: As I write this, the top story on the Inquirer’s Philly.com: Paris Hilton. Oh, yeah, that’s local. But I guess they have to fill the page with something because they don’t have those stories from what’s left of the newsroom staff.

At the Star-Ledger’s new LedgerLive daily news show from the newsroom (unofficial motto: It’s not TV, damnit), we are watching a big, old paper fight for its survival as it announced buyouts and a possible sale. And the grand irony is that we’re watching this even as the paper reinvents itself in a new medium: online video. The new show and the momentous news about the newspaper came in the same week.

I was in the newsroom on Friday to watch LedgerLive being broadcast and I heard the staff talking about the paper’s and their future, of course. Some of these folks are going to be, well, independent in the fall if they elect to take the buyout and it comes off as announced.

But what struck me listening to them is that they are not prepared for that independent life. I was looking at this from the perspective of being both a former newspaperman who did find a new life in the academe and elsewhere and from the perspective of now being a journalism educator. It is vital that we prepare journalists for this new and independent life or we will lose their journalism. Preparation, to me, means both training - it’s a great thing that Ledger print people are making video in the Rosenblum Method - and setting up an infrastructure to help them create sustainable journalistic enterprises if at all possible. The first factor is why I’m trying to establish a continuing education program for professionals at CUNY. The second is why I’m holding a summit for new business models for news there. That’s my perspective.

I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now.

Debbie’s message aired on Tuesday from her (very nice) garden in metaphorical PJs:

On today’s LedgerLive, reporter Carol Ann Campbell responded in her PJs:

Unfortunately, this reprises an us-v-them, pro-v-am rivalry. Fine. Let’s get that out of our system.

And then I’ll challenge Deb to come back and now share her secrets with her still-ink-stained peers: How do you find life after print, Deb? What would you advise a print journalist in the post-print era to do? And I’ll challenge Carol to imagine a new world where she might operate independently. It’s hard but it may be very necessary.

I just pledged to support David Cohn’s effort to prove that the public will pay for reporting at Spot.us. Won’t you? It’s not the only solution to the future of journalism. But it’s one.

I’m writing the section of my book about publishing and exploring new models. Would love, as always, to get your thoughts on what I’m writing:

Rick Smolan has found another way to support his gorgeous and thus expensive collaborative photography books: sponsorship. He is best known for producing America 24/7, a book chronicling one week in the life of the U.S. with 1,000 top photojournalists. More recently, he produced America at Home, with a companion for the U.K., and it was underwritten by an obvious sponsor: Ikea. (He also had another innovative idea: You can pay to get the book with your photo on the cover.)

So here’s the question: Why shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page. Would it be any more corrupting to have ads in this book than next to a story I write in Business Week? Well, you’d have to tell me. If I were to have had a sponsor or two for this book, who would it have been and what would you have thought of my work as a result? If Dell bought an ad—because, after all, I now have nice things to say about them—would you have wondered whether I’d sold out to them? I would fear you’d think that. What about Google itself? Obviously, that wouldn’t work. Yahoo? Ha! Who might want to talk to you and associate themselves with the thinking in this book while also helping to support it? I’m not sure. Let’s discuss that for the paperback I hope gets published. Come to my blog and tell me what you think.

….So that’s what I wrote in the manuscript. But, of course, we can discuss this now. Do you think I should take a sponsor or two for the book (I’m not saying it’s an option; this is a discussion)? If so, who would make a good sponsor? Who wouldn’t? Would it affect your thinking if a sponsored book cost less? Should I then wish for a sponsor not only because it reduces the risk for the publisher and me but because it means more books could be sold at a lower price spreading the ideas in the book farther?

Thoughts?

: If we had any guts - and we likely don’t - we could auction a sponsor position on eBay. How’s this for a model: The sponsor, like a publisher, pays an advance but commits to pay a CPM based on copies sold but on a scale that’s reverse that of publisher commissions (the more copies that are sold, the lower the CPM goes).

Maybe that could be a model for news sponsorship, too: Sponsor a story and the more links it get, the more audience you get, the more you pay at a lower rate.

: LATER: Rick Smolan asked that I add this note from him responding to some of the comments:

1) I completely understand the skepticism many of your readers expressed at the mental image of a sponsored book - what comes to mind is a product dripping with logos and not so subtle product placement - an annual report disguised as journalism.

2) The truth of the matter, at least as it pertains to the books that we produce, couldn’t be further from that. Don’t think advertising - think PBS Special: “The Following program is made possible through a generous grant from X Corporation”. That’s it. Period.

3) As far as logos and credits for sponsors, if you look at AMERICA AT HOME or any one of the other books we’ve produced, the first page of the book carries the logos of the sponsors and at the end of the book is a page explaining their contribution to the project. That’s it.

4) Because of the support of our sponsors (which include Apple, Google, Ikea, HP, Fedex, Kodak, Adobe, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies) more than five million copies of our books adorn peoples coffee tables around the world.

5) Every single book we’ve produced for the past 25 years has been sponsored. Why? Because no publisher would publish our first book, “A Day in the Life of Australia” we went to the business community in Australia and self-published the book - it went on to become the #1 book in Australia and sold 200,000 copies (in a market where 10,000 was a best seller).

6) After that first success we certainly had publishers interested in being our publisher but our projects (which usually include not only a large format illustrated book, but also a TV show, website, exhibits and worldwide PR) cost millions of dollars each to produce and no publisher is willing to risk such large amounts on a single title.

7) In terms of journalistic integrity, our agreement with sponsors is that they get no editorial rights of censorship or input. In order to be able to engage the talents of photographers and editors from Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post, etc we have to ensure this editorial independence.

The fact that Time, Newsweek, Fortune and US News regularly feature our books on their covers (and even mention the role of the sponsors as part of the story) speaks volumes.

9) In addition to the funding our sponsors also run full fledged marketing campaigns to promote their sponsorship. Kodak for example has run full page ads in the Wall Street Journal promoting the fact that they were the sponsor. Nikon ran full page ads in Newsweek. Apple created promotional videos.

10) Ironically, a company has a much greater chance of having its products featured in one of our books if they AREN’T a sponsor. That’s because we actually remove any photo that contains a sponsors products to avoid the impression that we are doing product placement. Our current book AMERICA AT HOME is a perfect example - it was sponsored by IKEA yet there isn’t a single photo of an IKEA product in the book.

The one nod to IKEA is that when book buyers order a customized book featuring their own family or home on the cover those personalized covers carry the IKEA name (note: about 21% of the people who purchase this book are actually customizing it - an amazing trend in publishing). Not a single person has complained about this - probably because people seem to have a great deal of affection for IKEA.

Fred Wilson asked on Twitter this morning for a good place to have a cup of coffee in New Paltz. Otherw who know the place made recommendations. I went to Google Maps to find reviews, just as a friendly favor, because I had a spare second-cycle (don’t tell my editor; I should be editing now).

And then it occurred to me that there’s a business here, which I proposed in what I hope is the first Twittered business plan and elevator pitch.

(Now that I think of it, I might require my students in my entrepreneurial journalism course this fall to pitch their entire business in 140 characters. My old boss Steve Newhouse told last year’s students how he’d bought a business he could describe in seven words. That’s tweet-length. And as much as I hammered in the need for a clear and cogent elevator pitch, the students agreed after their juried session that they hadn’t honed them enough. So I like that, the new elevator pitch: Twitpitch.)

Anyway, the idea I pitched this morning is a marketplace of knowledge and favors: I tweet a request. People who have the knowledge or a moment look up something for me because I’m too busy or too mobile. I pick one that works for me. And that person earns cycles — more favors — which can also be redeemed in cash. The primary currency, however, is cycles. Rex Hammock suggested it’s a merger of Twitter and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and I agree except that I don’t want pennies, I want favors — or a way to reward generosity. It’s perhaps a mix of Twitter and the Zivity model (more on that later).

Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review, writes an eloquent elegy for the newspaperman and his myth.

Something is coming, some turn in the media universe, a turn in the future of my newspaper. A turn that will mean the end of me, of us. There will be reporters. Editors. Something called online producers and multi-media coordinators. Mojos. Slojos and Nojos. Bloggers, froggers and twitters.

But there won’t be newspapermen. At 58, I am among the last of a dying race.

And what a race it was. An American archetype.

He goes on to recall the myth of the newsroom, a myth that attracted me, too: tough guys, bad dressers, smokers, drinkers, schmoozers, crusaders on a Hollywood set with a typewriter soundtrack. Ah, the romance of it.

Oh, the danger of it. I think it is the tug of that romance that has held newspapermen back from changing, from seeing new opportunities in new challenges, from realizing that they weren’t about the myth but had a job to do.

So as much as I love what Smith wrote and how he wrote it, I disagree with him at the end when he says:

No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. “Communities of interest” will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square.

No instrument? Quite to the contrary, the instrument we have in the internet is quite promising. Its potential is not yet realized and may not be realized but it is there. What we need now are not nostalgic romantics but brave doers — aren’t newspapermen supposed to be brave? — who will recognize that potential.

Democracy has found its new public square. We’re in it. The question is: What is our role there? How can we help what happens there? What do we bring to the square?

The Star-Ledger in New Jersey just broadcast its first live, daily noon news show on the web and I’m delighted to report that it bears no resemblance to television. That was the point.

When my friends and former colleagues at the paper told me they wanted to create a show, the one thing I begged them to do was not emulate local TV news. Please, God, anything but that. They had the opportunity to create something new and break all the stupid conventions of TV news. But how?

This is the only contribution I made to the project: I introduced them in Michael Rosenblum and the chemistry was a thing to behold. Rosenblum sounds like Gilbert Gottfried in both accent and bluntness (which is not all that different from how the paper’s editor, Jim Willse, sounds; they bonded). The Ledger folks showed him some video they’d made. He was impressed, so far as it went; photographers are good at shooting video. Then they showed him the TV studio they had built and he growled: Why would you want this shit? No, the story is in the newsroom. That’s what a newspaper is. So do it there. So much for the nice studio.

Rosenblum and his partner Lisa Lambden came in and taught more than a dozen staffers how to make stories the Rosemblum way — that is, without its stupid conventions (no B-roll, no noddies, no stand-ups, no establishing shots; just show me and tell me the damned story). And then they worked with the paper’s digital seer, John Hassel, and editor, Jim Willse, and others to create the format of the daily show.

The idea from the start was to have somebody in and of the newsroom and after auditions they found a perfect reporter Jersey-guy host, Brian Donohue. He just talks with you and they show the stories the thing-formerly-known-as-a-paper’s new video journalists have made. In the rehearsals he has also been interviewing people in the newsroom via a TV screen; I’d rather have him just sit down with the real people and talk. But that aside, I think the tone, style, and content are great.

I like the show but what I think is more important is bringing a new video culture into the newsroom with Rosenblum playing Obama, telling them, “Yes, we can.”

Here’s Hassell’s blog post about the show. Heres Rosenblum’s.

: Later: Lost Remote and its commenters got snarky about the show and I snarked back (see comment #28). Let’s get this straight, people: Local TV news sucks. It is no model for what newspapers or anyone should do in video online. It’s cheesy. It’s unbearable. I’m delighted that local TV news priests don’t like what the Ledger did. That’s best indication of success I can imagine.

At a Berkman center session last week about supporting investigative and international reporting — “difficult journalism,” in convener Ethan Zuckerman’s wording — I talked about the link economy v. content economy and at lunch, one of the participants asked what the link economy requires of us. Try this list on for size:

1. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.

2. The recipient of links is the party responsible for monetizing the audience they bring. In the old content-economy model of syndication, the creator sells content to another and the one who syndicates has to come up with the ad or circulation revenue sufficient to pay for it. Now in the link economy, it’s reversed: When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it. As Doc Searls said at the event: this is a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”

3. Links are a key to efficiency. In other words: Do what you do best and link to the rest.

4. There are opportunities to add value atop the link layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity. There is also an opportunity to add context (here are lots of links about Darfur but here is a page that will explain what they mean). There is also a need to add reporting and new content and information atop a link ecology. There is a need to create infrastructure for linking (full disclosure: I am involved with two companies trying to do this — Daylife and Publish2). There is a crying need for advertising infrastructure and networks to help the recipients of links monetize them.

In the fits of wishful thinking we hear about the fate of newspapers, one of the most common is that papers will go private and be taken off that mean and nasty stock market. But there are no white knights. Read this story about Avista Partners, buyer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, trying to dump the goose before it’s cooked.

But observers said the effort by lenders to sell their debt could shift the strategic landscape for the highly leveraged Star Tribune. In the first place, it could be a sign that those lenders no longer believe the Star Tribune will be profitable enough to service their debt, despite all the cuts that have taken place at the newspaper in recent months.

Investors seem to share those doubts, bidding only 53 cents on the dollar this month for shares of the senior portions of that debt.

Observers also said that despite Lazard’s attempt to find a buyer locally, the likeliest candidates to buy the debt are distressed-debt hedge funds, whose traditional focus on returns could trigger demands for even faster cost-cutting at the newspaper.

The debt taken on in going private will kill some newspapers living under it. Journalism has to survive on the marketplace from sustainable enterprises and those enterprises must reinvent themselves. Or this will happen:

what is this?

Will a daily American newspaper (circulation 50k+) fold this year?

% chance over time

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Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

: SEE ALSO: Alan Mutter on the Strib. He also reports that Journal Register it technically defaulting.

My Guardian column this week reprises the discussion from my post about Google as the new pressroom and then adds some thoughts about news organizations sharing open-source platforms. Snippet:

The Guardian is spending a few years building its own platform, but can every news organisation afford this? No. And will technology ultimately differentiate one news provider from another? I doubt it. So why not share a platform with many sites, sources and voices? In the UK, I have suggested - naively, I know - that the BBC should provide that platform for all news efforts (professional and amateur). Isn’t that a proper definition of public-service publishing?

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn’t be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.

At the Guardian’s seminar, I asked what the paper is if not a manufacturer, distributor or technology company. “Fundamentally, it’s courageous, independent, liberal journalism,” was one editor’s reply. “That’s the essence of the Guardian, or should be.”

Exactly right. But this also treats the Guardian as a product and I asked - in the spirit of Roussel’s effort to reimagine a paper - whether online it should be something else, with a different relationship to its public: a platform, a network, a community, a collaboration. Should the Guardian strive to be the world’s leading liberal voice - or voices?

Thanks again to Edward Roussel and Bob Wyman for inspiring the discussion.