As an exercise for the upcoming New Business Models for News conference at CUNY, I want to take Dave Morgan’s suggestion about cutting up newspapers into four companies — content, production, distribution, sales — and explore the idea of breaking up a newsroom into two companies around two separate functions: gathering and packaging (that is, reporting and editing), each freed to work independently. That last bit is the important change: this means they can work with anyone.
So the packagers’ job would be to find the best news and information for their audience no matter where it comes from: a former colleague reporter, a blogger, a competitor, a TV guy, a print guy, a witness with a camera phone, an expert commentator. You tell them that it is their job to provide the best possible package — or feed — of news for their audience using all available sources and tools — including technology and social networks.
The gatherers’ job is to report. But to stand out and succeed in this post-commodified news market, they can’t just do the stories everybody else is doing. They’ll need to do what is unique and valuable so they get packaged by the packagers. But this also means that anyone can package them: they can produce stories for what was known as a newspaper or for a TV broadcaster and for their blogs.
So how does this economy work? I think it’s a network model. When the packager takes up and presents the gatherer’s content in whole and monetizes it — mostly with advertising — they share revenue. When the packager just links, the gatherer monetizes that traffic, likely as part of an ad network as well.
The hope is that quality wins. Left purely to traffic, that may not be the case. Paris Hilton would win. But that’s where the role of the packager come in — the editor with the reliable brand who went to the trouble to find the best news from the best sources and to add value through vetting and packaging. If you go to that packager because of that value, then the sources the packager uses will get more attention. That, I think, is how news brands survive and succeed: by reliably bringing you the best package and feed of news that matters to you from the best sources. The packagers are now motivated to assure that there are good sources; they want the network to expand and they want quality to be rewarded.
Now, of course, these roles can remain a hybrid. Look at Paid Content, which both gathers and packages. Any good reporter in the future will not only report but will also link to sources and background. An editor who vets and corrects a story is doing so through reporting.
But for the sake of rethinking newsrooms, I still think it’s worthwhile to explore this idea of separating and freeing the functions of the newsroom. We separated them before by medium: print v. digital. But the public isn’t looking at the world that way, only the owners of media did. News is news. That’s why they are being merged back together. But when they are remerged, old roles, old models, old processes, and old politics tend to win out. Print is bigger and older and so it wins. And the organization doesn’t truly change. Also, the organization doesn’t open up to the web and its ecology of links, which bring efficiencies and value not possible in a closed media model. So by freeing these functions to work with the best, wherever it is, and by making their success dependent on that, we really start to reorganize news for the webbed world.
This is the kind of rethinking that should be happening before layoffs come to newsrooms — note today that the New York Times, with America’s most crowded newsroom, just joined that trend with a cut of 100. If this rethinking of the newsroom happens first, instead of announcing layoffs, you might be announcing investments in new external news operations started by reporters who go independent. Andrew Ross Sorkin could start a helluva business in reporting on Wall Street deals that could grow bigger than it can now at the Times — and the Times could invest and own a piece of it and still be motivated to make it big. Ditto the columnists. Ditto Saul Hansell and his Bits blog. And once freed, these excellent journalists could make TV reports for WNBC and finally add some substance to it. Online, reporters’ brands are becoming more prominent and the ruboff of brand value is reversing: reporters were once — and still are — better off for having the Times brand behind them but the Times is also better off having new brands like Freakonomics and Brian (TVNewser) Stelter associated with it.
Pollyanna optimism? Maybe. But we need to start with a new goal and then work back to see whether and how it would be possible to get there. Instead, we’re just waiting for Mr. Grim Reaper to knock on the door with an announcement of layoffs. We need to outrun him.
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.)
Small video cameras are already the hot thing, gadgetwise, at this year’s Davos. Robert Scoble is broadcasting live from his mobile phone, as Jason Calacanis did at DLD. Loic LeMeur is making videos all over for Seesmic (with a bigger camera). I’m playing with the Reuters/Nokia mojo cameraphone (see the videos below). The YouTube Davos Conversation booth is recording the machers on video with tiny cameras.
And I showed my FlipVideo (the $79, 30-minute, dead-easy video camera) to Kai Diekmann, editor of the biggest paper, by far, in Germany: Bild. He gets thousands of photos from his readers, who send it up to a simple number via their mobile phones. Now he’s practicing networked journalism and assigning and mobilizing them to shoot things. He also told me that next week, they’ll have a top chef from a popular German food show telling readers in the paper to send in videos that he will put on his show. Where’s the line among media there? Diekmann is then doing with videos what he did with phones and so he was wowed by the Flip and wants to order a thousand of htem. That’s what happens whenever I show it to open-minded new people: I tell them they should buy them by the dozen and distribute them to their readers to become producers. Here’s Diekmann:
I ask the session on innovation (see the post below) for advice: I tell them that I’ve jsut about given up on seeing innovation from the newspaper industry and so I am thinking about getting a grant to start an incubator. I ask the room whether I should and if I should what it should be.
Larry Keeley says that networks outside of newspapers are 700 percent more innovative (yes, he has a way to measure that, which I’ll get). So he suggests creating an award, like the X prize, to motivate innovators. He’s thinking about the Pulitzer of blogs but I’ll disagree with that since I think the Pulitzers skew journalists to do show-off work that’s not often useful; it’s too inward thinking. But an X prize for a company that solves a problem, now that’s interesting.
A herd of journalism-school deans wrote a predictable but also naive and possibly dangerous — and certainly not strategically forward-thinking — attack on media cross-ownership and the FCC’s loosening of its rules in today’s Times op-ed page.
They argue that the government should regulate local broadcast and make content demands on stations. That’s the dangerous part: government regulating news. The deans acknowledge the peril:
Journalists are instinctively libertarian, at least when it comes to journalism. We like the conversation about journalism and the federal government to begin and end with a robust defense of the First Amendment. That’s why journalists have not been leading participants in the debate over the Federal Communications Commission’s regulation of broadcasting, even though the future of our profession and its public mission is at stake
Yes, they said libertarian, not liberal. I hope that’s their sense of collective irony.
The naive bits are that government — more than companies and editors — should be held accountable for the quality of journalism, and that that broadcast journalism was ever worth a damn. At most and best, radio and TV distilled and read what newspapers published (and, yes, fewer radio stations today bother doing even that). Reporting on TV news has long been defined as covering fires and press conferences. It’s not about investigation. It’s not about a multiplicity of voices. It’s not about holding the powerful to account. It’s about stand-ups. For these deans not to acknowledge that — for them not to hold these stations and their producers and reporters responsible for what they call journalism and demand a higher standard — is itself shocking. That broadcast outlets have smaller staffs is, the deans say, “a real loss for American democracy.” Oh, come on. They’re just more efficient at covering fires. The deans sound like union organizers trying to protect headcount.
What disturbs me more about their op-ed is the lack of acknowledgment of the business realities of our industry: both broadcast and print outlets cannot operate as they have and that is why they need to consider merging — to survive.
But what disturbs me most is the lack of strategic ambition and imagination the deans exhibit. When the Times wrote a similar, knee-jerk editorial the other day decrying media consolidation, I argued that TV news could be improved if it merged with print and vice versa. I’d quite like to see the deans consider the idea that news is now omnimedia and it makes sense to stop separating newsrooms by old limitations of the means of distribution. It makes sense to get both newsrooms to produce the news in new ways. It could only help broadcast newsrooms to get a sense of real reporting and to get the work of hundreds of print journalists with cameras. And it could only help print newsrooms to be forced to think and work across media.
I’d have hoped that the deans would see the possibilities not only for the industry but also for their students. Now is not the time to preserve the past but to reinvent the future.
(Disclosure: It almost goes without saying but clearly I have a dog in this hunt as a journalism prof. The deans who wrote the Times op-ed are: Roderick P. Hart, dean of the University of Texas journalism school; Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland journalism school; Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School; John Levine, dean of the Northwestern journalism school; Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri journalism school; David M. Rubin, dean of the Syracuse school of public communications; and Ernest Wilson, dean of the University of Southern California school of communication.)
One of the best possible results of the Networked Journalism Summit, I’m told, is collaborative work by WNYC and the Ft. Myers News-Press to create a tool to enable crowdsourced collections of data from the public (a la WNYC’s Are You Being Gouged, which required lots of manual input and analysis).
This inspires another thought: Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations of all sizes and shapes could share applications that would enable networked journalism? Imagine if any news org could get their hands on that crowdsourcing tool to start mobilizing their audiences to go get information. Imagine if someone created a tool to make it easy to compile news reports via Twitter or photos via Flickr and make it ready for embedded publishing with an optional admin tool to clean things up. Imagine if folks wanted to follow in the footsteps of MyHeimat or NorthwestVoice and reverse publish content from the public into print with less cut-and-paste hassle. What other ideas could you imagine?
And this leads to another question I sent to the folks working on that app: What platform would be best for this? One thought is Django. Others like Drupal. I don’t know enough to know. Your suggestions?
I went to Aftonbladet.se, the site of the large Swedish tabloid, to check out what Martin Stabe pointed me to: the impact of a paper’s site adding blog links to those bloggers. It’s a nice feature with popup profiles of the bloggers at each link.
But I discovered something even more interesting: We’ve heard news sites preach the gospel of making “every page a home page” since readers more and more are coming into content directly from search and links and not from a packaged home page. This presents the challenge of how to promote and lure readers to more content.
Well, Aftonbladet seems to have taken the every-page-a-home-page strategy quite literally: As I clicked around from story to story, the bottom half of each page was filled with the content from the home page. The home page followed me around, trying to tempt me to try something else they’d packaged and recommended.
Relevant to yesterday’s post about the NYTimes Company’s International Herald Tribune outsourcing part of its business coverage to Reuters, Times Online in London says talks are underway for a deal with Mothership Times as well. Clearly, this would be a way for both to compete with the soon-to-be-invigorated Wall Street Journal.
I’m trying to catalogue some of the lessons I learned in my entrepreneurial journalism course at CUNY. There’ll be more, especially after the students and I share our postmortem in the final class, Wednesday. But here’s a start.
The students presented a dozen businesses to a dozen jurors who had it in their power to award up to $50,000 in seed money (thanks to a grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation). I have said from the start that I couldn’t be too open about the class because these are the students’ proprietary ideas and if one of them has the next Google (or New York Times, for that matter), I don’t want to ruin it. So I’ll be brief (Saul Hansell already deftly and succinctly described many of them). And, besides, maybe one of you would like to invest:
The jurors were quite engaged by a proposal to have the public help decide what followup stories journalists should do. Other likely grantees (if the entrepreneurs answer some questions and meet some conditions): a multimedia blog serving BedStuy; a service to help high-school athletes sell themselves; a content/social service helping people in their late 20s and early 30s with personal finance even if they think it is boring; and an already-started online magazine for and by Muslim women (which has already sold an impressive 1,500 subscriptions at $20 each). The rest did not receive grants but as I told the students after the judging, I have taken businesses to some of the people on that very jury who turned them down, but those businesses went on to get funding and launch. That’s how startups work: seduction. There are more very good proposals in the bunch: a hyperlocal tourist site in Oregon (it was too small for the majority of judges but that’s precisely why it was a particular favorite of some of the others); a social site for teen girls built on existing social networks; a metablog and search engine for the best of the music blogs; a hyperlocal green blog, community, and directory; a social network for big-team sports fans; a series of videos about successful black businesswomen; and a site that captures what’s really happening in leading cities around the world from journalists working there.
The jurors — again, the list is here; they brought many distinct perspectives — were, I’m glad to say, quite engaged in the process. They asked very good questions — that’s what yields many of my lessons learned, below. They were passionate in their deliberations. And here’s the best part: Jurors volunteered to act as mentors to the students’ businesses. I couldn’t have asked for more from them.
So, some lessons:
* You can never be short and clear enough in your elevator pitch. This was one of the first things I told the students when we started together. When my old boss Steve Newhouse talked with the class, he told them about a company he’d bought, explaining what it did in 17 words, which he counted on his fingers as he told the students they should all do likewise. But at our jurying session last week, I saw the judges get confused a few times, and hearing these pitches through their ears, I understood why. In Hollywood, this is called high-concept: the show you can describe in one phrase (’It’s Cheers meets Survivor and the audience gets to vote Cliff off the bar’). We make fun of that; it’s a sign of dumbed-down TV. But startups are different from sitcoms. If you can’t describe what you’re doing — to customers as well as investors — in 17 words, then you’re probably trying to do too much or you haven’t worked hard enough to define what you are doing or you simply aren’t describing it well and you’re going to lose people.
* I also wasn’t tough enough on the competitive analyses. They all did them, but the judges hammered hard on the marketplace. It is almost inevitable that when someone with a startup is asked about competition, he or she will answer, “none.” But I told the students that’s never true and, besides, in a networked world, you actually want company in your space. It gives you something to link to and it gives you an analogue others will understand. You can always be better than your competition, unless there is simply too much of it (which was the judges’ issue with a few of the students’ businesses).
* In one of the early classes, Jim Kennedy, VP for strategy at the Associated Press, heard all of the students’ then-still-nascent ideas, gave feedback to each, and then said: Well, guys you’ve all proposed websites; what’s up with that? We felt properly chastened and old-fartish. This is what inspired more than one of the students to build their businesses where they should have been conceived, atop existing social networks and platforms. And during the jurying, Fred Wilson also pushed one student to include SMS or Twitter feeds from the audience’s mobile phones as news. We should have spent some more time cataloguing the possibilities. That’s what the web is really all about: new possibilities, new opportunities. Hansell is right in his blog post: A critical lesson from the class is that media enterprises can be started atop existing platforms. So next time, we will catalogue them.
* I also required the students to formulate marketing plans — which, in most cases, means an analysis of social and viral potential. It was very hard for them to come up with comparable audience numbers and that is the underpinning of any media business plan. I’m not sure what to do about that. I also pushed students to do market research: to interview their customers (it’s just reporting). Those who listened that that benefiteed (one business, for example, changed its target audience when it found that the original target wasn’t as interested as they thought).
* I’m glad I spent a lot of time on advertising, getting down to the details of CPM, CPC, CPA, RPM, and all that. It was foreign to all the students — as it is to many or most journalists — but as they well understood, this is how they’re going to eat. The idea of selling ads is properly daunting for them, but the good news is that ad networks are beginning to emerge that may help support media enterprises such as these. At the end of a three-hour class session on ads, I asked whether the students were OK with what they’d just heard and one said, with a wry grin, “Well, that’s journalism.” A fellow student didn’t see or hear his irony and jumped down his throat, lecturing him about why we have to understand how to sustain and support journalism or else they won’t have jobs and we won’t have reporting. It was one of those moments in class you can’t pay for.
* My not-so-hidden agenda in the class was to teach journalists about business and sustaining journalism and I hope that mission was accomplished. Whether they start their own businesses or become managers or just so they can make wise career choices, I believe it’s necessary to understand the pressures and opportunities presented by the change in the economics of media.
* Journalistic entrepreneurship is not an oxymoron. To my amazement, every single one of the students said they wanted to start these businesses; I was hoping one or two might be so ambitious and independent. Now, of course, real job offers with real salaries will properly distract some of them. But the fact that these young journalists want to think entrepreneurially surprises and delights me. The fact that they realize they may need to work independently should surprise no one. It is a lesson to the industry: Give this kind of talent an opportunity to invent and innovate and they will.
* But we need an incubator. These businesses need ongoing advice and nurturing, most do. Just during the semester, I quickly learned that each student-entrepreneur and business needed even more individual attention than I’d anticipated; they and their needs were unique. If we are going to get innovation in the news and media businesses, then we need to bring help and resources to the effort. Just as big, old media companies can’t just sit there and think that the future will come to them — when, instead, it’s passing them by — so the industry has to actively support innovation with incubation. I have plans. More on that another day.
Bottom line: I loved being in this class. The course itself was a risky venture but it surpassed my expectations. As I’ve said here, I felt as if I were on the board of a dozen exciting startups. It was energizing working with the students’ creativity and passion — which was only intensified, frankly, by the possibility of real money (a stronger motivator than grades). I hope this also sends a small message to the industry about the possibilities for and need for innovation. And I hope at least one of these students might end up being the Pulitzer, Hearst, Ochs, Sarnoff, or Paley of this century. Could happen.
I’m amused that the Times is wowed that Fox News has a small trick that can broadcast TV while moving.
Except iJustine can do that with nothing more than her purse.
Years ago, I told a friend of mine at News Corp. that TV should be putting web cams in the homes, offices, and even cars of experts and sources so they could go on the air anywhere, anytime. One of her TV colleagues pooh-poohed the idea, insisting that this wouldn’t give them “broadcast quality” (is that an oxymoron?).
And, of course, soon you won’t even need Justine’s purse. I met last week with Nic Fulton, who has been leading the mobile journalist project using a stock Nokia phone with software that lets a journalist publish video, audio, photos, and text. That’s not live — yet — but soon will be.
TV from a truck? Dern, what’ll they think of next?
Saul Hansell just wrote a wonderful post at the Times Bits blog about his experience as a juror in my entrepreneurial journalism class and how much entering the field of journalism has changed with so many new opportunities:
. . . . The ideas covered a wide range of topics — a hyper-local site for Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn to a global magazine for Muslim women — but what struck me was how much an aspiring publisher can now count on technology services to accelerate many parts of starting a business. Google’s Ad Sense, of course, was on nearly everyone’s plan as a source of advertising revenue. There are specialized ad networks too that were relevant to some ideas. One of the judges, Courtney Williams, who runs the interactive division of Radio One, a black-oriented radio station group, offered to include the Bed-Stuy site in his new black-oriented online ad network.
One proposal for a music site wanted a music blog search feature and figured it could simply count on Google’s custom search engine capability rather than embarking on the daunting task of building its own search engine. An idea for a site about how to live the eco-conscious life, planned to use Meetup to connect to users.
Social networking, of course, was high in everyone’s minds. Several people planned to use Ning, the social-network-in-a-box service started by Marc Andreessen. But the most discussion was about Facebook, and in particular whether today you could start an entire online service entirely within Facebook. Several ideas —i ncluding a concept on personal finance for young people, a service meant to match high school athletes with college recruiters, and a site meant for teenage girls — all contemplated whether they could piggyback entirely on Facebook.
Even the most old fashioned idea—the magazine for Muslim women — was accelerated by technology. The magazine, called Sisters, has actually started, run in part by Doaa Elkady, a CUNY student. She told the jury that the market Sisters is aiming for would prefer a printed magazine to an online site. What is interesting is that Sisters is starting by distributing a digital version of the magazine in PDF format, and it has 1,500 subscribers paying $20 a year already. She asked for $6,000 for advertising that could double the subscriber base and enable the magazine to start a printed version, its ultimate goal.
Indeed, most of the students asked for between $5,000 and $15,000, with which they felt they could get their ideas up and running. (Most figured they would have to work part time to pay their own rent.) Even if those numbers were wildly optimistic, the fact remains that in today’s world you simply don’t need to be hired by a publishing company with ad salesmen, layout artists, and printing presses to get your ideas into the world.
It seems to be a great time to be starting out in journalism. Just don’t ask advice from anyone who has been in the business for more than five years.
I will write about my experience in and lessons from the class in greater depth this weekend.
Today’s an exciting day for me at CUNY: the jurying of the students’ business proposals in my entrepreneurial journalism course.
Eleven businesses are up for the chance to receive an award of seed money (thanks to a two-year grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation). It’s a wide range: hard news, hyperlocal, sports, personal finance, teen, green, culture, world news, even a magazine. They’ll each have five minutes to present the business and the jurors will have about seven minutes to ask questions and push and probe. Then we’ll retire to the jury room (wine, beer, humus, and kebabs to be served) and decide which businesses deserve seed money. The class requirement was that the students come up with a sustainable journalistic enterprise. At Clay Shirky’s suggestion, we’ll also judge them on innovation. But at the end, it’s all about risk: The jurors have a bit more than $45,000 available. They don’t need to grant any of it; it’s up to them. They will act as investors and put the money where it will have the best chance of succeeding.
The jurors are a stellar bunch, all very generous with their time and advice: Fred Wilson, VC; Joan Feeney, editor and a founder at Entertainment Weekly and CondeNet; Betsy Morgan, ex of CBSNews.com and now CEO of Huffington Post; Catherine Levene, COO of Daily Candy; Ed Sussman, head of digital at Fast Company and Inc.; Courtney Williams, an executive at Radio-One; Jim Willse, editor-in-chief of the Star-Ledger; Debbie Galant, founder of Baristanet; Rikki Tahta, founder of Covestor; Andy Weissman, VC, now of Betaworks; Clay Shirky of NYU’s ITP; Saul Hansell of the New York Times. Others who’ve spoken with the class and given them advice but couldn’t make today’s session: Steve Newhouse, Advance.net; Jim Kennedy, vp of strategy at the Associated Press; Marcel Reichart, vp of strategy at Burda; Craig Newmark of craigslist; Steven Johnson, founder of Outside.in; Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda; Scott Meyer, CEO of About.com.
Only in New York could we have assembled such a cast of expertise in journalism, media, management, advertising, marketing, startups, and venture capital.
I’ll write about the class more after the jurying.
