business_model - Yule Heibel on Diigo

19 May 09

From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution | Media | The Guardian

Great article by Clay Shirky on the changed status of media production, who owns it, who controls it, with an astute take on abundance. ("That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.")

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-future - Preview

clay_shirky newspapers journalism business_model online_media the_guardian

Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.
The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.
- - bingo. - on 2009-05-19
Add Sticky Note
2 more annotations...
- Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
- This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.

18 May 09

Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price - NYTimes.com

I've used Scribd for a while now - great service. This NYTimes article describes how it's moving into becoming a platform for e-publishing with a business model for authors/ publishers. Also meant as a diversification / challenge to Amazon's Kindle, and to Google.

www.nytimes.com/...18download.html - Preview

scribd online_book online_publishing business_model e-books nyt kindle

08 May 09

The Root Of The Matter: Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism

Excellent summary of a lecture by Emily Bell (head of digital content at Guardian News and Media). Bell gave the lecture at University College Falmouth, where she was just appointed visiting professor in the media degrees program. Her topic: "Journalism Ten Years From Now" - excellent insights. Bell also discusses the business model for journalism of the future: where will the money come from to support it? And there are some very surprising insights here, starting with "News has never been profitable."

web2watch.blogspot.com/...l-on-future-of-journalism.html - Preview

newspapers emily_bell journalism business_model

Unlike net-culture visionary Clay Shirky, though, Emily doesn't think that print journalism has no future. Print will remain an important part of reaching the audience - but it will not be the primary conduit for journalism in ten years' time. Instead, going by the 'clues' we can pick up from the way journalism is changing today, journalism in ten years will have some or all of the following characteristics:
1. It will go where the audience is.
14 more annotations...
- 2. Journalism will be networked, not siloed.
- 3. Journalists will need to be very reliable and trustworthy.
- 4. Journalists will need to be ready to share information whenever they have it and in whatever way will communicate it best to the audience.
- 5. Journalism will no longer be possible without the audience.
- Emily pointed out that all this is well and good, but what most people want to know is: where will the money come from to pay for all this professional, multi-platform, 'always-on' journalism?
- 1. News has never been profitable.
- 2. There is no point asking people to pay for online content; they won't.
- 3. Advertising won't go away
- There followed a Q&A, which covered questions including:
- 1. Will we see an increasing in 'entrepreneurial journalism'?
- 2. What is Emily's view of user-generated journalism?
- 3. Here in Cornwall there is a big digital divide - a lot of people do not have broadband/internet access. How will journalism serve their needs in the digital age?
- The real challenge - for journalists and politicians - will be how to get information to those who currently choose not to receive it.
  - BINGO! She nails it. - on 2009-05-08
  Add Sticky Note
- 4. How does Emily deal with information overload?

28 Apr 09

Kenneth Lerer: How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here

Transcript of Kenneth Lerer's speech at the Columbia Journalism School Annual New Media Lecture Series, April 23, 2009.
QUOTE
A lot of what we're seeing online today is actually a return, full circle, to the way things were when American newspapers began; a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism. There is a long and distinguished history of such newspapers -- from the papers that were fiercely loyal to Jefferson or Hamilton, to the abolitionist broadsheets, to the activist newspapers at the turn of the century. As my partner Arianna Huffington says, the mission of journalism has always been "truth-seeking, not striking some fictitious balance between two sides."
UNQUOTE

www.huffingtonpost.com/...t-here-and-how-w_b_191137.html - Preview

huffington_post kenneth_lerer newspaper business_model journalism web2.0

18 Apr 09

Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter - O'Reilly Radar

Fabulous short video clip of Monica Guzman explaining how to be an awesome news commenter

radar.oreilly.com/...e-show-monica-guzman-on-b.html - Preview

local_news blogging business_model newspapers ignite seattle monica_guzman news o'reilly

10 Mar 09

The Online Experiments That Could Help Newspapers - BusinessWeek

Business Week takes a look at how print media are going niche/ specialty/ local - and surviving/ making money. "The Bakersfield Californian is an anomaly in the newspaper business. While other papers are shutting their doors and filing for bankruptcy, it's expanding. The reason is the paper's 2005 launch of an online social network, called Bakotopia.com..."

www.businessweek.com/...tc2009038_509195.htm - Preview

businessweek online_media magazines newspapers business_model outside.in kachingle

The Web site has caught on to the point where Bakersfield Californian now publishes 20,000 copies of a free magazine with content from Bakotopia twice a month. The articles range from reviews of the local theater scene to goings-on at various hot spots.
Newspapers had hoped that their Web sites would help them replace evaporating print revenue. But an online ad typically garners one-tenth of the revenue of a print ad, estimates Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute. "The phrase in the industry is, 'You are trading dollars for dimes,'" he says.
4 more annotations...
- But in the middle of it all, the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. "If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer]," Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. "This is cheap and targeted," Pacheco explains. "Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads."
- The idea is to reach out to new audiences, cut costs, and attract new kinds of advertisers.
- This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content.
- Content Aggregated from Other Sources
  
  Alternatively, some media companies, such as the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and NBC, are posting ads to their own sites, but are using others' aggregated content. They work with a startup called Outside.in that aggregates blogs and discussions around specific locations—by state, city, ZIP code—and serves the links up onto a map located on sites such as NBCChicago.com. There, users click on their neighborhood and find blogs and video related to happenings in the next block. Partly thanks to this feature, the overall audience for NBC's Web sites has doubled between December and February. "Our old strategy [of using only our stations' content] just had a limited growth opportunity," says Brian Buchwald, a senior vice-president at NBC. "Now, it's really about focusing on the growth of the market and being trusted by a particular user base."

09 Mar 09

Bring on the techies: How Silicon Valley can help save newspapers | Media | guardian.co.uk

A Silicon Valley CEO addresses the newspaper business model. While not written in response to David Carr's NYT piece, it's a great riposte and refutation of same. Favorite bit:
QUOTE
Companies in Silicon Valley depend on having a fast-paced culture of innovation where no ideas are bad ideas, all voices are heard, technology is embraced not feared, and you are irrelevant if you aren't open to change. To achieve aggressive goals in competitive environments, teams have to work together without hidden agendas or obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originates.
UNQUOTE
I especially like the last clause in the last sentence. That "obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originate(d)" has dragged many a good idea into the Kingdom of the Cynical.

www.guardian.co.uk/...web20-web20 - Preview

the_guardian nathan_richardson newspapers business_model media

One day I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm about, of all things, the width of the Wall Street Journal. After I made a suggestion that was somewhere between novel and off the wall, the then-publisher leaned on the table, looked at me and said: "How old are you, young man?" The suggestion was clear: If you're under 40, you can't possibly understand the newspaper business. I still wish my response, though impolitic, had been: "How old is your thinking?"
While I don't have a quick fix for the newspaper industry's problems, I know one thing: The very companies that are ensuring newspapers' online traffic/existence should be leading the dialogue on their survival. Yahoo, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and AOL (NYSE: TWX) - not the editors, journalists and cadre of analysts who have led the newspapers to the brink - should be put in charge of identifying ways to keep a select number of news outlets viable.
3 more annotations...
- There are three reasons why the tech leaders should be driving this bus: their culture of innovation; their dependence on newspapers; and their track record of creating and growing sources of online revenue.
- Companies in Silicon Valley depend on having a fast-paced culture of innovation where no ideas are bad ideas, all voices are heard, technology is embraced not feared, and you are irrelevant if you aren't open to change. To achieve aggressive goals in competitive environments, teams have to work together without hidden agendas or obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originates.
- Top news sites such as WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com and Marketwatch.com derive an average of 50% to 65% of their traffic from the big portals. Consumers have spoken, and they prefer going to the portals to be directed to their news sources.

outside.in » Newspapers Should Leap, Not Stand

Rebuttal by outside.in's CEO to David Carr's NYT wishful thinking piece on locking down content and throttling the aggregators.

blog.outside.in/...wspapers-should-leap-not-stand - Preview

outside.in newspapers business_model aggregators

“no more free rides to aggregators”. This one hits a bit close to home. At Outside.in we aggregate local media, but we also add value to that media by organizing by location to make it easier for consumers and for newspapers themselves. (We then pass all that extra metadata onto anyone who wants to use it: newspaper or blogger.) The problem with Carr’s idea here is that consumers have already decided that they expect an incredibly customized and personal news experience. It’s “Me-centric” not “newspaper centric”.
3 more annotations...
- Consumers are disaggregating the newspaper and folks like Outside.in, the Huffington Post and others are putting it back together in a format that works better.
- “no more commoditized ads”. Carr bemoans the rise of networks and ad exchanges but glosses over the fact that there are billions of impressions in every market that are not being sold by the best sales teams in those markets — the local media companies themselves! They’ve ceded their leadership in the local market by trying to hang on for too long to high cpms and scarcity. That’s not going to last.
- Local sales needs to embrace the fact that ad networks are a good thing. They roll up audience at scale that sales teams can bring to their advertisers.

The Media Equation - United, Newspapers May Stand - NYTimes.com

This is the article everyone agrees is all wrong: David Carr argues that newspapers should lock the barn doors even though the horse has long left the stable...

www.nytimes.com/...09carr.html - Preview

nyt david_carr newspapers business_model

¶No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.
The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway.
¶No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors.
Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place.
2 more annotations...
- ¶No more commoditized ads. Ad markets and remnant sales have been a lose-lose proposition, ginning up more and more ads for less and less revenue, turning a grim dollars-into-dimes model into a hopeless dimes-into-pennies proposition. Newspapers once thrived by selling scarce ad positions. The downside is turning down ads, and who can afford that right now?
- ¶Throw out the Newspaper Preservation Act. Regulatory reform will allow the industry to consolidate to an economically feasible model and preserve newsgathering. Does Seattle need two newspapers? Did Denver? Sure, it’s preferable for all kinds of reasons. But one is better than none.

02 Mar 09

Man Bites Blog: Hey, You Media Wimps! If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones, Then Go Join Facebook | The New York Observer

QUOTE
Contributing to this catastrophe has been newspapers’ stubborn refusal to consider any news-gathering and -analysis model other than the one that they were used to, one that, most crucially, relegated consumers to the role of passive readers instead of engaged users. It’s a mistake that happens all over the Big Media Debate: misinterpreting the limitations of our print past as prescriptions for our media future.
UNQUOTE

www.observer.com/...ers-learn-love-your-iphones-th - Preview

media business_model newspapers

(1) Media platforms should be bundled into technology platforms;

(2) Premium access—one better than the failed TimesSelect project—will bring in revenue;

(3) Publishers should work more on matching advertisers with users, which is a suggestion that might finally help break the growing, pernicious primacy of Google in raking in Internet ad dollars.
It’s also a holistic point of view that does not raise the phony dichotomies publishers have been beating their heads against for more than a decade: paid content versus advertising; print versus digital; professional journalism versus “user-generated content”; blogging versus reporting.
19 more annotations...
- “I think a lot of the conversation these days is myopic,” said Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post. “The problem is how to monetize all content, which is not simply how to solve newspapers problems. Our problems are ultimately the same as the movie industry’s, the book industry’s, the magazine industry’s, the music industry’s. We all meet on a vast, flat digital plane, which is a sort of Hobbesian, anarchic, unordered place.”
- Advertisers and Web sites signed up for AdSense because it made advertising easy and cheap. Google’s program matches text, picture and video ads to the particular site’s content and users. Publishers earned money from clicks or “impressions,” or loads of an ad on the site. But Google essentially cut the revenue of newspapers by adding themselves in as middle men.
- “Everybody loves to hate Google and I think that’s quite frankly an excuse,” Ms. Warren said. “You have to figure out how to generate revenue from your readers and/or from your advertisers. And you have to be focused to get that done. To blame Google? Or anyone else? To me, it’s kind of a waste of energy. We don’t do that.”
  
  So perhaps instead of fighting Google for that 60 percent of the pie, news media ought to make themselves first on the next wave of advertising revenue possibilities. That means that The News must make itself a player in the larger online business.
  
  They are already falling behind.
- It’s all about giving users attention, because that’s mostly what people are looking for when they’re online these days.
- Newspapers can also learn something from Facebook’s preference toolbar by making their user experiences more personalized. How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page. And if they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well.
- Unless newspaper sites can become facilitators of the new status culture, they will be left outside of it. And they will no longer be the places where advertisers want to meet customers.
- “It’s really quite remarkable how much our future is going to be driven by information exhaust from the devices we carry around with us,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “We have to think about that future.”
- The idea is this: The news must go mobile.
  
  And if the news is to attract rather than follow advertisers, it must do so right now.
- News won’t be a once a day update or even once an hour, like on blogs. It will be continuous and ambient—all around us through our handheld devices, according to Bill Spencer, an evangelist for mobile technology and co-founder of viaPlace, a location-based data service for mobile users.
- “As events occur they’ll stream right to the individual,” he said. “You’re going to become entwined with information. Information is no longer a thing that you go to. It’s threaded into the technology.”
- So how will all of this get monetized? Well, if Apple’s iPhone 3G has shown us anything, it’s that people will pay for convenience.
- But publishers can also partner with advertisers to create innovative, interactive applications. For example, on Feb. 2, Lucky magazine released their Lucky At Your Service iPhone application. Designed to supplement their March issue, Lucky app users can browse through more than 70 shoes listed in their shoe guide, including ones chosen by editors and advertisers.
- The irony of news that follows you wherever you go is that it is intensely local—just the kind of stuff news sites are jettisoning these days.
- Consider Patch, the New York–based start-up co-founded by Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales. Funded by Polar Capital Group, Mr. Armstrong’s private investment company, Patch launched three hyperlocal news sites in three New Jersey towns on Feb. 5: Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Each individual site combines hard-nosed journalism from professional reporters, information from local government on everything from health department services to volunteer opportunities and various platforms for user participation with pictures, stories and blogs. Patch’s sites don’t just dispatch news articles—they are information portals.
- “It’s the year 2009 and the way people are getting community-news specific information is largely through corkboards and bagel stores and kiosks in town squares,” Jon Brod, Patch’s chief executive officer and co-founder, told The Observer over coffee earlier this month. “There’s a huge opportunity there to really include people’s local lives and strengthen communities through information and that’s really what we’re trying to do.”
  
  “It was a problem everytown, everycommunity U.S.A. was experiencing,” he continued. “Community level news and information was really sparse, fragmented, disorganized and in a bunch of level, archaic.”
- After work, local happy hours and drink specials will be pinged to your phone as soon as you step back outside. This kind of feature is already being developed by small New York-based startup Coovents. In fact, most of these features are already available in various iPhone applications, but perhaps newspapers should start partnering with the start-ups making these new applications so they can add the data sets to their Web and mobile libraries.
- And if Patch came to this town—if it were the new business model for The New York Times, aggressively social, hyperlocal and therefore geo-targeted for advertisers and a better overall service for readers—but on a larger scale, with top-flight reporting and seriously breaking news at every zoom level, would people pay to read the “paper?”
  
  One of the most boring disputes over the future of the media is whether a pay model or an advertising model will ultimately work. Even very hidebound print people forget that they “serve” ads in print only to readers who have already paid. The argument is that readers won’t pay to read content; therefore no eyeballs; therefore no advertisers.
  
  But if news sites entered these other areas—became social, hyperlocal, mobile—perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?
- He pointed out that subscriptions and newsstand sales have never been able to support print journalism without serious advertising revenue. So how can any pay model be expected to cover the costs of journalism online?
- So, this promised land, on the other side of the print/advertising divide, with news organizations acting as social networking sites and offering interactive advertising opportunities that work for advertisers, hyperlocal service content delivered to mobile devices and the devices that are yet to come: how do media organizations interested in preserving the future of a free press operating at the highest level of quality?

26 Feb 09

But Who's Counting? (MIT Technology Review)

QUOTE:
Konrad Feldman, a cofounder of San Francisco–based startup Quantcast, sees big business in audience measurement.
UNQUOTE
No one really knows how many people visit websites - the measuring tools aren't available, but Quantcast and Google aim to change that.

www.technologyreview.com/...22122 - Preview

advertising business_model google page_views quantcast

Why care about something as arcane as dodgy audience measurement? Here's why: where content is free, as it is on most websites, the only thing that will pay for quality journalism--or, really, anything valuable at all--is advertising. For most new-media businesses, "display" or banner advertising is the main source of operating revenues. But the general inability to agree on audience numbers is stunting the growth of display advertising.

Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content

Thought-provoking...

www.editorandpublisher.com/...stopthepresses_display.jsp - Preview

micropayments monetizing business_model kachingle

To start with, publishers have to get over the idea that they are going to get paid directly by the user. For the vast majority of a news publisher's content, there can be no barriers before an article asking the user if he wants to pay a penny or a nickel, or buy a $2 monthly subscription, to read on.

The user must be given the option of whether to pay for a Web site's content (by financially supporting the site), or read it for free. I'm betting this one will be a tough pill to swallow for many industry executives with traditional media mindsets, but it's critical because it fits the culture, indeed the nature, of the Internet. Traditional micropayment schemes for online news content -- "pay up or go elsewhere" -- fight it, and thus are doomed to fail, in my view.
Newspaper executives also have to grasp the notion that few publishers will be able to get very many people to pay for their content specifically. The Wall Street Journal Online can do it, because many of its paid online subscribers are businesspeople who can charge the subscription bill to their expense accounts. Most other newspapers will only be able to charge online users directly for truly premium content that is not replicated somewhere else
9 more annotations...
- Newspapers probably can charge for some multi-platform personalized news and information services, if they're good enough and useful enough. But that's not charging for the content (the news), it's charging for the valuable service of individual customization.
- Your once-powerful newspaper brand doesn't mean as much as it used to, and to get paid for newspaper content online, it must become part of a giant pool of content that's financially supported en masse.
- Now what happens is that Kachingle tracks your Web site and blog visits over the month. If you visited NYTimes.com 30 times, Editorandpublisher.com 10 times, and the blog SteveOuting.com 10 times (but none of the other sites that you support), then NYTimes.com would get 60% of your monthly Kachingle fee, and Editorandpublisher.com and my blog would get 20% each. In other words, the money you spend on your monthly Kachingle account is allotted by how often you visit the sites you support, rather than every site you support getting an even split of your money. (You may click to support a blog, but then never return to it; that blog won't get any of your money other than for the initial visit.)
- If you'd like to understand more about the problem with any content system having "mental transaction costs," read this 2003 article by Clay Shirky, in which he makes a solid argument why microtransactions for Internet content cannot work, and explains why so many micropayment companies -- going back to the mid 1990s -- have failed. (In response to the recent wave of calls to resurrect the micropayment model for online content, Shirky recently wrote this blog post slapping down the arguments of its proponents.)
- The trick -- and this is the part that traditional-thinking publishers will have trouble accepting -- is that you are not just asking users to support your content, you are asking them to support all the news and blog content online.
  
  But if this bothers you, think about it for a minute. When you get your users to sign up for Kachingle and start paying for content, you're helping lots of other Web publishers. And as all those other Web publishers and bloggers encourage their users to sign up for Kachingle, they are helping your site earn more money. Call it the power of the commons. The winners are the blogs and Web sites with the best content and that attract the most visitors and fans. Newspaper sites can win at that game, right?
- Also, there's the social networking aspect of the Kachingle service, which will use Facebook and Twitter, for instance, to spread the word. Let's take an example in which I’m a paying Kachingler and I click the medallion on Editorandpublisher.com to support it. Assuming I've approved this in my privacy settings, Kachingle will note that "Steve Outing just became a financial supporter of Editorandpublisher.com via Kachingle" (or wording along those lines) and post it to my Twitter feed and my Facebook news feed, for my followers and friends to see and be influenced by it.
- Typaldos strongly believes that that's the wrong approach, because it again puts up barriers to contributing. "Having two systems would be incredibly confusing to users ... and not user-centric which is the big paradigm shift that has to happen for this model to work," she says.
- Typaldos argues it this way: "Every time a blogger signs up a Kachingler, that person is now a potential contributor to every other Kachingle-enabled blog/Web site/service. So as bloggers/Web sites sign up Kachinglers they are tapping into the economics of ‘increasing returns.’ If NYTimes.com tried to have its own system, it would not benefit from the millions of other Kachinglers that the millions of other Web sites/blogs had signed up. Yes, it's true, they have to share the dollars of those Kachinglers, but since the distribution is based on daily visits, it doesn't really matter which site signs them up, just which sites they truly love (and turn on contributing for)."
- from what Typaldos says about her patent, that would mean a Google acquisition of Kachingle

11 Feb 09

“BREAKING NEWS”: Why the New York Times and Harvard Should Merge « What’s the Big Idea?

"The business model – which is another way of saying the underlying purpose – of just about everything is changing right now, and that includes the university and the newspaper."

bobmassie.wordpress.com/...times-and-harvard-should-merge - Preview

bob_massie newspapers ideas harvard business_model

03 Feb 09

Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive? - O'Reilly Radar

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) ponders Adrian Holovaty's announcement that Everyblock will be opensource/ available. Some interesting comment responses.

radar.oreilly.com/...blocks-dilemna-how-do-you.html - Preview

everyblock local_news business_model open_source adrian_holovaty

Everyblock was funded through a Knight News Challenge Grant and they've come crossroads as Adrian explains:

But now we've reached an interesting point in our project's growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we're open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That's a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock's philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

What do you think? How can they keep the project alive and perhaps even make it profitable if they are providing development resources to the competition?

19 Dec 08

From magazine warehouse to a printing facility « Manifest Magazine

Interesting idea by Manifest Magazine (Wahyd) to "replace" Cambridge MA's Out of Town News (which will close 1/1/09) with a print-on-demand shop.

Related to this: I left comments on Scripting.com and Doc Searls' weblog (both blogged this).

manifestmagazine.wordpress.com/...printing-facility - Preview

manifest_magazine newspapers business_model harvard cambridge_ma

20 Nov 08

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs - NYTimes.com

Article about attempts by some alternative news organizations to recreate themselves as non-profits. Lots of interesting angles, from the demise (or at least being under siege) of traditional newspapers to the rise of alternative business models (embodied by the "watchdog" sites referenced by the article's title) for paying journalists/ newsrooms to stay in business.

www.nytimes.com/...18voice.html - Preview

nyt newspapers journalism business_model

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
10 more annotations...
- That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
  And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
- But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
- Nonprofit news online “has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper.”
- The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media.
- So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
- The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
- MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Mr. Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
  The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Mr. Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
- “There’s room for a whole range of approaches, and we’re living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply,” Mr. Bass said.
- Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
  - had no idea they were changing to non-profit! - on 2008-11-20
  Add Sticky Note
- VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Mr. Donohue and Mr. Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego I.R.S. filings.
  On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Mr. Lewis writes a political column, and Mr. Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Mr. Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
  “Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

10 Nov 08

Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque

As usual, a brilliant essay by Umair Haque on Obama's win and what business can learn from it in terms of innovation.
QUOTE
Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.

Obama presidential bid succeeded, in other words, as our research at the Lab has discussed for the past several years, through the power of new DNA: new rules for new kinds of institutions.
UNQUOTE

discussionleader.hbsp.com/...s_seven_lessons_for_radic.html - Preview

obama umair umair_haque management innovation business_model

1. Have a self-organization design. What was really different about Obama's organization? We're used to thinking about organizations in 20th century terms: do we design them to be tall, or flat?

But tall and flat are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think - spatially and literally - in two dimensions: tall organizations command unresponsively, and flat organizations respond uncontrollably.

Obama's organization blew past these orthodoxies: it was able to combine the virtues of both tall and flat organizations. How? By tapping the game-changing power of self-organization. Obama's organization was less tall or flat than spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.
2. Seek elasticity of resilience.
10 more annotations...
- What happened when McCain attacked Obama with negative ads in September? Such attacks would have depleted the coffers of a 20th century organization, who would have been forced to retaliate quickly and decisively in kind. Yet, Obama's organization responded furiously in exactly the opposite way: with record-breaking fundraising. That's resilience: reflexively bouncing back to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources.
- 3. Minimize strategy.
- 4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That's 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world.
- Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
- And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can. You must maximize, stretch, and utterly explode your sense of purpose.
- 5. Broaden unity.
- Obama intuitively understands a larger truth of next-generation economics. Unified markets are what a world driven to collapse by hyperconsumption is desperately going to need. We're going to need not a hundred different kinds of razors - and their spiralling costs of complexity and waste - but a single razor that everybody, from the slums of Rio to the lofts of Tribeca, is overjoyed to use.
- 6. Thicken power.
- 7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal.
- That seventh lesson is the starting point for tomorrow's radical innovators - because it's the thread that knits the others together. And it's where you should start if you want to use these seven rules to start building 21st century institutions - whether businesses, non-profits, social enterprises, or political campaigns.

07 Aug 08

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Getting local coverage in gear

Wow, lots of excellent suggestions in this blog post, and nice discussion of how the newspapers aren't covering the local news AT ALL.

newsosaur.blogspot.com/...ng-local-coverage-in-gear.html - Preview

newsosaur local_news newspapers business_model

Denver metros can't (or won't) take the steps necessary to report the news in their own backyards. And local news is the only thing they have to sell.
I can't get local news online.
8 more annotations...
- I define "local" news as the type we use to see in zone sections.
- We filled them with all the stuff that readers were interested in but couldn't find anyplace else: births, deaths, divorces, marriages, anniversaries, engagements, school-lunch menus, school calendars, zoning hearings, local city council meetings and meetings of the subcommittees, school news, lots of prep sports, features and “business of the week” profiles. We crammed in as much as possible. It was all relevant to readers because it happened in their neighborhoods or suburbs.
- Zone sections were an invention of the ad departments, which were convinced that if you offered a small business an ad that didn't have to go ROP, they would buy in.
- The sections fell into disfavor and disappeared – and all the good LOCAL stuff that readers wanted also disappeared.
- To the credit of the Post and Rocky, they have tried some zoning (both print and Web) using “citizen” journalists, but the stories are what you’d expect: warm and fuzzy feature stories.
- So, if I don't get my national and international news from the Post, and the paper makes no attempt to cover anything about where I live and work, then why should I subscribe to a newspaper that is not relevant to my life?
  
  It gets worse. The Rocky Mountain News, the Post’s partner in the Denver joint-operating agency, pretty much hews to the same line as the Post in regard to what gets covered. I read the same stories in both newspapers.
- I'd hate to be a newspaper editor today, but if I were. . .
  
  Instead of spending time bemoaning how my owners are going to kill my paper, I'd make real sure that the people on my staff were covering news relevant to the communities where subscribers live.
  
  I'd fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I'd send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.
- What do I do with all this news? Put it on my web site as a zone section.

03 May 08

How do we fund journalism in future? | Greenslade | Guardian Unlimited

Roy Greenslade reporting from a "future of journalism" conference in Australia, asking after 'the business model' for newspapers / journalism of the future. He mentions Jay Rosen, who joined the conference via satellite hook-up, and this in turn sparks some interesting conversation on the comments board (particularly by Rosen himself).

blogs.guardian.co.uk/...o_we_fund_journalism_in_f.html - Preview

greenslade the_guardian journalism business_model newspapers jay_rosen

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 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."
8 more annotations...
- 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.
- Jay Rosen
- 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.
  - - see Rosen's rebuttal/ clarification in comments - on 2008-05-03
  Add Sticky Note
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?

Yule Heibel's Library tagged business_model → View Popular