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May

2008

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

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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 annotation(s)...
- 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.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-05-03
    - see Rosen's rebuttal/ clarification in comments
  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?