Wendy Norris's List: Disruptive business models

By now it is relatively common knowledge that America's news industry is undergoing profound and frequently tumultuous change. Every news organization is affected by the development of the Internet and the resulting changes in revenue streams, audience<br/>habits and community needs. Traditional media companies have been particularly distressed by shifts in the markets and business models that historically supported them-and the conversation about how to "save" or "reinvent" journalism has been largely<br/>focused on their concerns.<br/><br/>To a growing group of practitioners, funders and observers, however, the challenge is not saving traditional news organizations or traditional forms of journalism. The challenge is creating, strengthening and protecting informed communities and local information ecosystems, of which journalism is a necessary component.<br/><br/>Thus enters the nonprofit model, which allows organizations to pursue a journalistic mission without the competing demands of operating a for-profit business. Nonprofit news startups have been created in communities across the country, most with funding from major donors or foundations. The Knight Foundation alone has funded more than 200 experiments with what it calls a "build to learn" approach.

"The conversation avoided most of the usual future of journalism tropes: there was no "who's a journalist" questions, no desperate warnings about journalism's downfall or overly rosy pictures of journalism's future, there was no discussion of which new gadget would save journalism. Instead, the panel focused on the very concrete nuts and bolts of developing, launching, and maintaining a new web-first newsroom."

""NewsRupt builds web and mobile applications for newspapers and journalists. Our first app is Qluso, an online app\nthat allows news editors to bid for exclusive stories from freelance journalists. It aims to help news editors find quality stories at the click of a button and help freelancers get the best price for their story and get paid on the same day."

"The key thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches. That's what often happens. You have half of an idea and someone else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property. You know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will 'remain valuable' and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. "

"What do you need to do to build a case for virtualization? It can be a cultural shift for a company to adopt virtualization. It requires different skill sets and an approach that turns a data center into a network that optimizes an infrastructure according to the principles of a shared infrastructure."

"One of the things I've noticed over the past few years, in discussing the various business models that are working for content creators, is that one of the regular criticisms we get is that "this won't work for 'x'." Or something along those lines. Basically, they want to write off any success story as an exception, and yet they like to use any "failure" of a business model experiment as proof that innovative business models can't work. That all seems backwards to me (after all, if a single failure disproves a business model, then we can conclude that the business of selling CDs or movies "failed" the first time one of those offerings flopped).\n"

Courses taught by NYT staff

"Automattic is a funny little company. Since we evolved out of an open source project, we've tried to apply some of the ideals of the open source world to the company."

A la carte bunding and pricing of content.