DATELINE SYDNEY: An absorbing day here at the future of journalism conference. It is clear that Australian journalists are both facing up to the digital challenge and fearing its consequences.
The key question that cropped up throughout was about whether journalism can be funded if newspapers - or broadcasters - collapse due to the loss of advertising revenue. I was living under the impression that papers here were defying the trend in the rest of the developed world because circulations are, largely, standing up. But it appears that the same decline in ad revenue and sales, although not as steep as in the US and Britain, is occurring.
Eric Beecher, who runs four websites including the iconoclastic crikey.com.au, said: "I can't see a funding model for serious journalism in future, not one that will pay for large staffs with specialists, and foreign correspondents and stringers, everywhere. I can't see ads paying for big operations that costs tens of millions of dollars. Websites can attract millions but not the necessary tens of millions."
John Cokley, a journalism lecturer at the University of Queensland, in accepting that situation, urged journalists to do much more to market their work, to understand the demand and then discover a business model to fund it.
But this kind of approach clearly isn't on the mind of Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. In his thought-provoking contribution, delivered via satellite, he said, more than once: "I have no commercial aspirations whatsoever". Instead, his concern is to uncover the social value, rather than the financial value, of participatory journalism.
This strikes me as the nub of a fascinating debate. We journalists have got used to the idea that our trade, craft, profession, whatever, is inextricably linked to the making of profit. After all, that has been the case for more than a century. But will that continue once the great profit-making platforms (aka newsprint newspapers) die?
Rosen reminded us of a historic truth: journalism has never been a self-sustaining activity in commercial terms. Could the net change all that? He clearly believes that the empowerment of citizens will encourage widespread acts of journalism. Much as I admire his various open source reporting projects, such as newassignment.net, I wonder whether it is hopelessly idealistic too.
Rosen pointed out that he sees a role for professional, trained journalists in future. Though they will interact with "amateurs" - citizen journalists, bloggers - their skills and, most importantly, their daily devotion to reporting, researching, collating, selecting, processing and disseminating news will be of great importance.
But that takes us back to the main question: who will fund them? I don't buy Cokley's entrepreneurial idea. I like the idea of philanthropy but I know it's idealist. I think advertising will still raise a lot of money, enough to fund small staffs. It still may not be enough.
I'll come back to more of Rosen, and more on this conference later.
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"We journalists have got used to the idea that our trade, craft, profession, whatever, is inextricably linked to the making of profit."
Sorry I have to disagree with you there. I think the main problem with journalists is that too many have no concept of business and making a profit. Especially in the US.
Here's one editorial business model that combines investigative reporting, participatory journalism, cross-platform promotion - and no advertising.
www.moneysavingexpert.com is a "consumer revenge" personal finance site funded entirely by affiliate deals with price comparison services
It regularly runs campaigns - on rip-off back charges for example - that would make advertisers run a mile.
Many of the ideas and stories are based on tips submitted by readers posted on the site's forums - then checked out professionally by the site's editorial team.
Finally, the site's founder hires himself out on TV, radio and newspaperss as a pundit - thus securing priceless maketing for his business
Clearly, they did well to identify a niche and this would not work for a general news site.
But it does show that perhaps there is life beyond the advertiser's shilling
The trouble with todays papers are that they are run by journalists who think they are accountants - or accountants who think they are journalists
The first lot can't count and the second lot can't spell!
I think the smart publishers will embrace new types of advertising, new models and new creativity in order to fund their operations. This is how the biggies will survive. This is also how smart magazine brands - indeed most if not all ad supported brands - will survive also. But they will have to hire the right people and be open to new ideas. In ten years, advertising will have changed massively, with online and mobile offering loads more opportunities, even if we can't see it clearly now. This will increasingly fund dynamic news operations whose home will be mainly online though not exclusively. IMHO.
Hold on there, Roy. Before you paint me with flowers in my hair and bell bottoms on my hips and attach to my work the imagery of excess "idealism" allow me a coda to my remarks at the conference. (And thanks for your question, too.)
I was asked about the commercial prospects for what I was doing with, for example, OffTheBus.Net, which is a project of NewAssignment.Net. I said that it was not a commercial try at all, and that I had no intention of making money from it. It's non-profit, a research activity of mine at NYU. The agenda is learning.
But the reason for this is not that I underrate the importance of an economic model for news, or of finding a way to pay professional reporters and editors. I think both are very important. Having studied the press and the history of the public sphere over a 300 year stretch, I know how critical marketplace success has been in securing a free, independent and powerful press. Those who went into the business of providing information have been pushing the development of the press along for hundreds of years. It was true in the eighteenth century; it's true today.
However, I knew going in that "open source" reporting projects aren't--realistically--going to be money-makers because we are still at the stage of trying to figure out whether it's even viable to do this kind of pro-am journalism. We need to know what the puzzles and problems and practical challenges are. It's far better for our developing knowledge if we do not burden the experiment with commercial goals and targets that may not apply.
Also, there's a kind of political problem involving the people you recruit and the implied social contract: "You volunteer for our open source investigation, and if it works we'll take the money and use it to replace our lost ad revenues." That is not a stable--or fair--bargain.
Furthermore, I haven't noticed that the people who jump up and down, shouting, "where's the business model? where's the bloody business model?" are moving any closer to a working business model. Have you? Realistically, it seems to me we are at a place when there is no business model for news right now. Too often, "where's the business model?" isn't really a discerning question, but a club with which to beat the Internet. That's not what you are doing by asking it, but it does make us think about where "realism" truly lies.
To me it's the wrong question if you want to find a way to pay reporters. We have to start further back in the inquiry: how do we create editorial value online, using the strengths of the Web? One of the strengths is you can have many people participating in the "flow" of information to journalists. NewAssignment.Net is trying to figure out how that pro-am principle works. The answers may be important to finding the next business model. My judgment was that a non-profit project stood a better chance of success in providing those answers.
I think this way of proceeding is, precisely, the realistic one, given where we are now in the migration of the press to a new continent.
So please: argue with me and tell me I'm wrong, but take the flowers out of my hair.
I think any discussion about the funding and business model of journalism in the future needs to broadly factor in the operating costs of the Internet itself.
I was lurking in the back of today's conference and listened with interest to each of the speakers. Karim Temsamani, General Manager of Google Australia and New Zealand, reeled off some awe-inspiring statistics of how the Internet consists of exabytes and several ice ages' worth of content.
That is just today, so imagine what it will be like in 10 or 20 years? Yes, no doubt we will invent greater and faster data transmission rates and storage capacities - but who will bear this cost? Who will expect to be reimbursed?
By and large, users have come to expect content to be free. With the advent of Web 2.0 - social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc. - they have also been empowered to create and share their own content.
Journalists and techies speak of 'convergence' - a brave new world of high-quality video on demand, IPTV, podcasting, vodcasting, mobile device photography, all annotated by folksonomies, forums, wikis and Lord knows what else. Phew.
When the big media companies throw their weight behind 'going digital' it will mean even more data.
Network operators are worried. The amount of data being sent per user on the Internet is growing faster than the cost of sending that data is decreasing.
I'm told by some industry experts that the current economic model for the Internet is quite unsustainable.
So, too, are current Internet advertising models, according to some pundits.
Many techies insist that some kind of user discrimination will be required to ensure overall quality of service - i.e. users will have to pay to access "data-intensive" content.
So, I wonder just how long this increasingly fragmenting something-for-nothing proliferation of news and views can last? Or will we all have to eventually pay up if we want to see the good stuff?
Anyway ... just a thought.
(Blog discussion FORMATTING note. Due to a recent change in software, BLANK LINES are stripped out -- making longer messages harder to read.
To insert a blank line, you'll need to type a space before hitting return.)
"We journalists have got used to the idea that our trade, craft, profession, whatever, is inextricably linked to the making of profit."
Surely Journalism should be about finding out the Truth.
and as for the Internet becoming overburdened, that is just the Global elite tying to prevent that from happening, they don't want you to know about stuff like this :-
http://www.wearechange.org/2007/11/we-are-change-uk-confronts-sir-richard.html
or this :-
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=q71iddDm_U4#
or this :-
http://www.infowars.com
or this :-
http://www.eutruth.org.uk
As Jay Rosen rightly said above: "Hold on, Roy!" The fundamental element of my remarks, which I remember I had to state twice for the benefit of the audience, was that we journalists need to adopt innovation and leadership from within our own ranks, find our own business model and stop relying on that of 20th century media manufacturers, and LEARN from our competitors in the media marketplace -- advertising people and PR people -- if we are to remain in business. "Learning from" does not mean "becoming", as I told David McKnight in about row 3 ... we journalists don't need to become advertising or PR types ... but we would certainly do well to learn from their amazingly successful business model. Otherwise, journalism will die and no one will notice, because we'll be "out of business".
Advertising creatives and producers know very well how to make money out of information, as do PR consultants. Journalists, it appears, don't yet have that group mindset which allows them to see this fairly obvious thing: charge for your work by the minute and get results for your client. I remember noting for the audience that there is little evidence of Big Media going out of business; what is in evidence is them shifting their products from journalism to something else. if journalists want that market share back, we're going to have to COMPETE for it. So let's compete on our own terms, with what educators call "an internal locus of control", in laymen's terms making our own destiny. If we don't do this for ourselves, who will?
I was at this conference and even appeared on one of the panels and I must say I found the whole thing profoundly dispiriting.
There was a lot of talk about new business models, and a lot of people talking about online in a detached fashion. The dirty secret about online is that it's not hard, it's not rocket science. It's about stories.
The problem is, no-one at the conference talked much about stories, beyond sounding a bit like record company execs and almost blaming their audience for turning away from "serious" or quality journalism, whatever they may mean.
No one asked if we are telling the right stories? No one asked how we could be telling stories differently. No one wondered what kind of stories might people want to consume.
The conversation around serious/quality journalism was all about finding different models to protect what is currently being done. It was all a sleight of hand - people were clearly thinking that if they pretend to change, then they can avoid real change.
Could it be that one of the myriad reasons for falling paper sales and declining TV news audiences is that people are fed up of the same old, repetitive nonsense and beat ups?
Everytime I hear or read "a row has erupted", my heart sinks because I know there is another beat up around the corner, another second hand opinion being peddled. There was no row until the journalist looked for the most opposite viewpoint they could find.
Fair enough - it's worked for a few years, but we really need to confront that issue. And in saying all of this, I don't claim to have any answers, but I am willing to be part of the conversation.
It strikes me as fairly simple - when your business/market/product is failing, you would ask your customers for help, rather than bleat on about business models, the decay of society and dumbing down.
I believe in fervently in serious journalism, but what I heard on Thursday and Friday was about status quo protectionism once you scrape away the words about business models.
Just my 2c's worth...