The European, a German online news service, asked me to write a commentary for a debate on paid content. Here it is in German. And here’s the English text:
I have nothing against charging for content, if you can. After all, I’m selling a book. But I believe building pay walls around online news is a bad business decision.
The discussion about charging for content rises from a sense of entitlement—“we deserve to be paid,” which is an emotional argument—rather than from rational economics.
Charging is an attempt to replicate an old business model in a profoundly changed media economy that is no longer built on scarcity—on publishers’ control—now that everyone can publish. The new link economy rewards openness and collaboration.
Charging is also a distraction from the real goal: profitability and sustainability. We must rethink the entire ledger of the business of news, starting with costs, which must and can be reduced through collaboration, working in networks, and through the efficiency that comes with the specialization the internet demands.
More important, charging brings many costs:
• It creates the expense of marketing (when, online, your audience will market you for free, if you deserve it).
• It reduces audience.
• It reduces advertising revenue.
• It reduces links and clicks, which reduces Googlejuice, which reduces discovery, which limits growth.
But more than any of this, pay walls curtail a news organization’s relationship with its public, with its customers. On the internet, it’s in those relationships where value lies.
The New York Times plans to charge its best customers—its most frequent readers—while enabling what Rupert Murdoch calls the worst customers—those who stop by once from a search engine or an aggregator—to get what they want for free. That might make sense if you are selling a scarce resource: those who drink the most wine pay the most. But online, content and news are not scarce. They are the magnets that draw readers to you so you can build a valuable relationship.
Online also brings new opportunities to find value there. Hubert Burda said at DLD that Focus Online is profitable not because of advertising but because of ecommerce. The Telegraph in London brought in a quarter of its profit a year ago from direct sales of everything from clothes hangers to wine. So media companies are becoming in part, retailers. Does it make sense to put a toll booth at the door to your store to keep people out?
Once you have a lasting relationship, there are more ways to serve customers and make money. Some newspapers are holding events. Some are charging for education. Some are even selling real estate. But to do this, you need to invite, not drive away more readers.
There is one more cost to building a wall, a cost to journalism. Alan Rusbridger, the innovative editor of the Guardian in London, just delivered a monumental speech arguing that charging “removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.”
Rusbridger also warns that there are competitors lying in wait to step in when news organizations build walls. “Let’s not leave the field.” Rusbridger said, “so that the digital un-bundlers can come in, dismantle and loot what we have built up, including our audiences and readers.”
Just as The New York Times announces its pay wall, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger gives an important speech on the topic — indeed, on the very nature of journalism — arguing against pay walls.
Charging, Rusbridger says, “removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.”
In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40 per cent more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by 40 per cent in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000. . . .
This is the opposite of newspaper decline-ism, the doctrine which compels us to keep telling the world the editorial proposition and tradition we represent are in desperate trouble. When I think of the Guardian’s journey and its path of growth and reach and influence my instincts at the moment – at this stage of the revolution – are to celebrate this trend and seek to accelerate it rather than cut it off. The more we can spread the Guardian, embed it in the way the world talks to each other, the better.
Rusbridger warns The NY Times that if it shrinks behind its wall, The Guardian could become the biggest newspaper brand online. He imagines start-ups that “begin each day with a prayer session for all national newspapers to follow Rupert Murdoch behind a pay wall. That’s their business model.” His warning continues: “Let’s not leave the field so that the digital un-bundlers can come in, dismantle and loot what we have built up, including our audiences and readers.
Rusbridger argues, as do I, that this is about more than a revenue line:
There is an irreversible trend in society today which rather wonderfully continues what we as an industry started – here, in newspapers, in the UK . It’s not a “digital trend” – that’s just shorthand. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about an ability to hear previously unheard voices; about respecting, including and harnessing the views of others. About resisting the people who want to close down free speech.
As {legendary Gaurdian editor C.P.] Scott said 90 years ago : “What a chance for the newspaper!” If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it because what ‘they’ do is different – ‘we are journalists, they aren’t: we do journalism; they don’t’ – then, never mind business models, we will be sleep walking into oblivion.
My column in the Guardian argues that we have a right to link and that the link is the basis of freedom of speech online. The issues are important and so I’m posting the entire column here:
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Linking is more than merely a function and feature of the internet. Linking is a right. The link enables fair comment. It powers the link economy that will sustain media. It is a tool for accountability. It is the keystone to free speech online.
But News Corporation has made good on its threat to fight the link, preventing the UK aggregator NewsNow from linking to several of its newspaper sites.
It’s true that internet protocols make it easy to block crawlers from search engines or aggregators; one simply adds a line to the robots.txt file on the web server. And News Corp’s rationale regarding NewsNow seems on the face of it to make sense: the argument is that NewsNow charges for its service, separating it from free aggregators such as Google News and Daylife (in which – disclosure – I am a partner).
But NewsNow has fought back, launching a campaign in support of the link at right2link.org. “Linking is not some kind of digital theft,” the NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett says in a video. Linking via headlines, he adds, “is not substantial reproduction of a newspaper’s intellectual property, so it’s perfectly legitimate fair use”.
Right. Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.
We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett, “is a common public amenity.”
I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness* on which journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.
I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel. But if we give anyone the right to restrict our use of that image or information, then we also give the mayor the right to gag us when we want to publish a picture of him skulking into that opium parlour.
What’s public is public – that is, we, the public, have a right to observe, point to, share, and comment on it. And the internet is public.
Mind you, neither NewsNow nor I are arguing that being in public gives anyone the right to copy and steal content. We both agree that copyright and intellectual property must be respected. But linking is not stealing.
Indeed, in the link economy I’ve written about here, linking is distribution; it is a benefit. That’s why I argue News Corp is a fool not to welcome, encourage and exploit links to its content. Links do not stop people from reading it; links bring readers to it.
As Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed response to Rupert Murdoch on the value of search and aggregation, it’s up to the recipient of the link to take advantage of the relationship it creates – and Google creates 4bn such opportunities for publishers a year.
By trying to cut off links, News Corp is also endangering journalism. As an economic matter, the link is how our work will gain audience.
As a journalistic matter, we reporters depend on the ability to read and analyse public statements and documents – from government, corporations or newsmakers – and it should make no difference whether that reading is done by a person or their agent, an algorithm. We depend on the right to quote from what we find – and online, the link is our means of doing so. In fact, linking to source material – footnoting our work and the provenance of our information – is fast being seen as an ethical necessity in digital journalism.
In the end, this fight is over control. News Corp is desperately trying to maintain its control over access to and packaging and pricing of information that now flows freely from many sources. Thanks to the internet, it is losing it – in more than one sense.
* Note that in my draft, I wrote “publicness.” It’s not a word in the dictionary and so it was edited, changed to “openness.” I should have perhaps phrased it, “the public.”
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Tim Berners-Lee on the right to link (via Thomas Stadler):
The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else. . . . We cannot regard anyone as having the “right not to be referred to” without completely pulling the rug out from under free speech. . . .It is difficult to emphasize how important these issues are for society. The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for example, addresses the right to speak. The right to make reference to something is inherent in that right. On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective – like speaking but with a paper bag over your head.
On this week’s On the Media, Bob Garfield interviews me about CUNY’s entrepreneurial journalism program and the idea of teaching journalism students business. See our conference (call) with J-schools around the world that are starting to teach entrepreneurial journalism. We also discussed the New Business Models for News Project.
The irony of the report that The New York Times is going to start metering readers and charging those who come back more often is this: They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least.
That’s according to the math of News Corp., which argues that readers who come via links from search and aggregators and bloggers and such are worthless because they’re not local and they don’t stay; they’re one-click-wonders. The readers who come back again and again, the ones you know more about and can rely on and target better and build relationships with, goes this logic, are worth more. And News Corp. is also threatening to charge them.
So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away?
The logic eludes me. So do the economics.
I know, the argument is that these readers use the content more so they should be charged more. But that is based on the assumption that content is a consumable, a scarcity that drains the more it is read. Of course, it isn’t. Content is, instead, a magnet that can create relationships of value; whether that happens is up to the creator of the content and the quality of service and relevance is gives. That, dare I repeat it, is the basis of the link economy.
But note the verb that started off the paragraph above: should. Readers who read more should pay more. This is the product of journalism’s sense of entitlement.
So why would The Times charge? There are a few possible reasons:
* It has failed at advertising, as I said of News Corp. recently.
* Its costs are too high — and rather than cutting them into a rational business, it desperately seeks some other revenue.
* It is falling prey to PR, to the pressure of outsiders who keep nattering on about charging.
* It has forgotten its own lessons with TimesSelect sees amnesia as a strategy.
I think the risks are great and grave. The Times could have fought to become the preeminent news brand on earth, fighting it out with the BBC for that title. Instead, I fear, it will duck into its shell as the Washington Post has.
I already pay for The Times at home. I hope they would not charge me again. If they do, I will cancel the paper. If they charge me for using the paper more, I will use it less.** I will find other very good substitutes for much of what I get from it — indeed, this will push me to discover and curate new sources. I will read what matters most to me from The Times and discover just how much that is — a calculation the paper should not want to force me to make, not when there is so much new and good competition out there.
Clay Shirky has ridiculed micropayments, saying that we don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. I’ll ridicule metering, reminding those who contemplate it to remember what we think of meter maids. We curse them.
There is only one thing that can happen should The TImes put a meter on us. It will shrink.
** I should expand on this point. I would not use The Times less because I like it less, because I want to punish it. I love The Times. I read it every day. What I’m saying is that by metering, The Times will have me make a new economic decision every time I want to read a story: Is this unique content I will get only here (there is a good deal of that) or is this commodity information I can get elsewhere (BBC, Reuters, Washington Post, Politico, TechCrunch…). The Times then restricts our relationship and it is in that relationship that it has to find value.
In the post below, on Google standing up to China over its spying on dissidents and censorship, I note how Zeit Online calls Google a quasi-state — in a post under the headline “The Google Republic” — and Fallows says Google “broke diplomatic relations with China” as if Google were a nation.
What this says, of course, is that the internet is the New World and Google is its biggest colonizer: the sun never sets on Google.
It also says that on the internet, new states form across interests, ignoring borders. Those interests can be business — and we’ve seen what look like business-states before — but also causes, principles, and dangers (e.g., Al Qaeda). Interest-states will gain more power and that power will come from nations.
Just as what we’re seeing in the economy is more than a mere crisis — it is the shift from the industrial economy to what follows — similarly, in political structure, we are beginning to witness the emergence of new and competitive interest-states. In What Would Google Do?, I said this:
Whatever causes they take up, Generation G will be able to organize without organizations, as Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody. That ability to coalesce will have a profound destabilizing impact on institutions. We can organize bypassing governments, borders, political parties, companies, academic institutions, religious groups, and ethnic groups, inevitably reducing their power and hold on our lives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2008, Richard Haass argued that the world structure is moving from bi- and unipolarity (i.e., the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one’s in charge). We now operate in an open marketplace of influence. Google makes it possible to broadcast our interests and find, organize, and act in concert with others. One need no longer control institutions to control agendas. Haass chronicles the dilution of governments. Bloggers Umair Haque and Fred Wilson have written about the fall of the firm, and earlier I examined the idea that networks are becoming more efficient than corporations. In my blog, I follow the crumbling of the fourth estate, the press. One could debate the stature and power of the first estate, the church. What’s left? The internet is fueling the rise of the third estate—the rise of the people. That might bode anarchy except that the internet also brings the power to organize.
Our organization is ad hoc. We can find and take action with people of like interest, need, opinion, taste, background, and worldview anywhere in the world. I hope this could lead to a new growth in individual leadership: Online, you can accomplish what you want alone and you can gather a group to collaborate. Being out of power need not be an excuse or a bar from seeking power. That may encourage more involvement in communities and nations—witness the youth armies that gathered in Facebook around Barack Obama, a powerful lesson for a generation to have learned.
: MORE: Siva Vaidhyanathan responds (as part of a conversation between us in both this post and the one below):
My book plays this in a slightly different way: The Internet has enough diverse interests and players that it demands governance. No traditional state is in the position or willing to assume that role. So Google governs the Internet.
One could read this showdown (as I do) as a classic international power conflict between a major traditional state and a new, virtual state: the Googlenet.
Google is taking a risky stand to defend the Internet generally. This is what a weaker, threatened state would do.
I am astounded and delighted at the news that Google is no longer comfortable censoring search results at the call of the Chinese government and is threatening to pull out of the market. Google said it discovered cyberattacks and surveillance aimed at cracking the mail accounts of Chinese supporters of human rights. Said Google exec David Drummond on the company blog:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
I know some will say that Google wasn’t doing that well in China anyway (it controls 31% of the market); they’ll ascribe cynical motives. But I say: Name one other company that finally said “enough!” and put ethic, morals, and company standards over its lust for the Chinese market. Not Yahoo. Not Cisco. Not Nokia. Not Siemens. Not The New York Times Company. Google has.
Here’s what I said in What Would Google Do? about China:
Google has censored search results in China, arguing that it is better to bring a hampered internet there than no internet at all. I don’t agree and believe that Google has more power than it knows to pressure countries around the world to respect openness and free speech. Google, like Yahoo, has handed over information to governments—Google in India, Yahoo in China—that led to users being arrested simply for what they said. As an American and a First Amendment absolutist, I’d call that evil.
Here’s what I said in a talk at Google’s offices in Washington. (Thanks to commenters, the time code for the start of the topic is 23:38.)
I can well be accused of being a Google fanboy; I wrote the book. But I have been consistent in my criticism of Google’s actions in China. And so now I have not choice but to become even more of a fanboy. I applaud Google for finally standing up to the Chinese dictatorship and for free speech.
Will the Chinese people revolt at losing Google? We can only hope. Will other companies now have to hesitate before doing the dictators’ bidding? We can only hope. Will Google be punished by Wall Street? It probably will. But as I’ve argued, we should hope that Google’s pledge, Don’t be evil, will one day be chiseled over the doors of Wall Street.
Google has thrown the gauntlet down in favor of freedom. What Should Google Do? This is what it should do.
: MORE: Said Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center: “In a world in which we are so used to public relations massaging of messages, this stands out as a direct declaration. It’s amazing.”
: Says Reuters: “The world’s dominant search firm may be hoping other search and e-mail leaders, both global and domestic, will rally around it in calling for China to lighten a heavy-handed approach to the Internet that includes frequent censorship and allegations of government-backed hacking.”
: YET MORE: Zeit Online calls Google a quasi-state that is willing to stand up to China where the U.S. and Germany are not. But it also warns that Google’s interests are not what they seem. (In German.)
Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it. In China, foreign companies tend to be deferential to the authorities to the point of obsequiousness, in a way that you would almost certainly never encounter in the United States or Europe. . . . In this situation Google has undertaken a bet-the-farm confrontational communications approach in China. They will not have made this decision lightly. Dressed up in the polite language above is what is essentially an ultimatum: Allow us to present uncensored search results to our Chinese users or we’ll walk.
: Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows whereof she speaks on matters China and internet, says Google is doing the right thing.
And if a major U.S. company — indeed, Google has been ranked the #1 brand in the world — has concluded that, in effect, it must break diplomatic relations with China because its policies are too repressive and intrusive to make peace with, that is a significant judgment. . . . But its government is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world. To me, that is what Google’s decision signifies.
: Siva Vaidhyanathan responds to me here. There’s a chicken v. egg debate about what’s leading this: the attacks or the censorship. I agree that the censorship is a tool in this power struggle; it clearly was not the catalyst or it could have been four years ago. But I think it’s also evident –see Sergey Brin four years ago — that Google, despite its public pronouncements about a crippled internet being better than no internet, struggled internally with its China policy. Slapping China over censorship is now a way to bring make the fight about attacks about China. Pick your sin — attacks, censorship (or the death penalty or repression of dissent or dangerous and fatal products) — somebody — Google — finally had the balls to make China the issue. I’ve sat in WEF meeting where some have shushed me and others for daring to criticize China: it’s a Chinese thing; you wouldn’t understand. Well, bullshit, it’s a human thing; it’s about rights (pick yours).
: See my post above on the rise of the interest-state.
Two newspaper companies hired new chiefs last week. The Star Tribune hired Michael Klingensmith, my former colleague at Entertainment Weekly, and Journal Register hired John Paton, now head of Spanish-language publisher impreMedia and a newspaperman with roots in Canada. The latter didn’t get the attention it deserved.
Paton has executed a strategic vision at impreMedia, turning it into company that truly puts digital first, hiving off functions that don’t add value and cutting costs to make the company sustainable (that’s the half of the budget that gets too little attention these days), and beginning to build a new relationship — including a commercial relationship — with the emerging ecosystem of news.
Klingensmith, on the other hand, is a big-media executive. I was disappointed that the Star Tribune did not take the opportunity of bankruptcy — or of this hire — to redefine itself. That’s painfully evident in Minnesota Public Radio’s interview with Klingensmith, in which he talks about print and portals. (Sherman: Stop messing with the wayback machine; it’s not 1999 anymore.)
Paton’s work is largely unsung because the product is in Spanish. That, I think, is why his announcement didn’t get as much attention. So I decided to interview Paton via email about his plans for Journal Register. (Disclosure: In our discussions about the future of news, Paton has become a friend and an advisor for the CUNY J-school and my entrepreneurial class.)
JARVIS: What did you do at Impremedia to make it a sustainable news company in the Hispanic market?
PATON: The first thing we did was to decide that in our company, a print company, when it came to products we would be digital and brands first and print last. It was our radical way of focusing everyone on the future. By recognizing our competitors and our future were digital everything we built and did had to follow that decision.
More than two-thirds of any newspaper company’s expenses are in support of the core business of content, marketing and sales. Our digital competitors don’t have that two-thirds cost structure, so we attacked. it. We outsourced all printing, distribution and pre-press ad make up and page make up. We plowed a big part of the savings into expanding our digital resources – web, online video, mobile platform and widgets. We standardized I.T. We then outsourced the back end of all our digital support. Then we started cross-training journalists into one-person multi-media journalists – an ongoing process.
The second decsion was we would let the outside world in. We would share our content for free and we would play with anyone who wanted to play with us – mainstream media or bloggers. That led to our relationships with ESPN, AOL, MySpace, etc. And our launching of the Community E-Journalism Labs in Los Angeles and New York where we said we want to work with entrepreneurial journalists and help them make a living. We have opened up discussions with companies like SeeClickFix and Outside.In to augment our resources and let us re-allocate ours.
The third decision was that we would put in place a very strict protocol that follows the new news ecology of news creation and consumption. Every story of merit is first sent out as a mobile alert, then it goes to the web. After that our publications, editors and journalists use social media to push audience to the web. This process is repeated and enhanced all day with the addition of video and audio. The last step is the printed product. We are currently working to change that product to be a very different product which has to reflect how much of that story has developed and been consumed.
The result was in less than two years we went from 9 products on two platforms (print and crappy publications sites full of shovelware) to nearly 100 products on 7 platforms – with about 45% less costs.
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JARVIS: What are your plans for Journal Register? What will a paper there look like in 1-5 years? Will it look like a paper?
PATON: JRC needs to enter the modern news age in a much more focused and vibrant way. That means the re-allocation of resources to a digital first and print last focus.
In my opinion, JRC is too much like most of the newspaper industry – closed to their communities and input from the outside world. They need to understand the papers and their online counterparts are just a part of the news ecological system.
One of the first steps will be to establish community E-Journalism labs in our communities where we have dailies. There is no way to be hyperlocal without harnessing the power of entrepreneurial journalists and the labs help do that by making content and more importantly sales arrangements with those entrepreneurial journalists.
Second step will be to initiate and, in some cases, expand relationships with companies like Daylife, Outside.In, SeeClickFix, GrowthSpur – any company that lets JRC expand its resources in content, audience and sales while allowing it to re-allocate and focus on its core business. I am very excited about ideas like explainthis.org and others that look at community crowd-sourcing for assignments.
The third step is to tackle the two-thirds infrastructure cost bucket.
Down the road print will change. I suspect the physical size will change and the print content will be much less “he said yesterday” journalism. The focus will become very local with national and international news procured from the very best sources. With so much of the breaking news on the digital platforms, print will become longer-form journalism complimented with vibrant opinion pieces to spark and facilitate debate of issues of importance to the communities. The online forums will expand and continue that debate.
Print will also become a much more malleable term expanded to mean the tablet versions of the actual print product.
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JARVIS: I’ve argued that the future of news is entrepreneurial. Here you are, trying to update an institution. GIven the cost structure and culture of traditional news companies — and their failure, all in all, to reimagine and remake themselves for the digital age — what makes you think that it’s better to spend your time reforming an old company than starting a new one?
PATON: That is a very valid question.
Essentially, I believe that despite the traditional cost structure, the legacy companies do have a running head start with deep relationships with readers and advertisers and their communities. They have solid, if challenged, revenue streams and they are profitable. There are no technological or web content developments closed to them and they can harness that profit to change.
At impreMedia we proved legacy media can be changed.
Finally, while now only one part of the news ecological system, legacy media is an important part. Continuing the core mission of local journalism going forward on multiplatforms, profitably, I beleive. is an important mission for this country.
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JARVIS: OK, now focus on one ecosystem — say, New Haven’s. Besides JRC’s paper and site, the Register, the town has The New Haven Independent doing good and pioneering journalistic work online. There are independent bloggers. There are students covering the university. There’s an alternative paper. There are new sources of information, such as data from government. There’s Spanish-language media, a market you’re familiar with. There’s broadcast. So once you focus the Register and its resources on its greatest value, what is that value? What should your news organization add to the ecosystem? Is it more than reporting? Curation? Community organizing? Education? What else? And what does this mean for skills a Register journalist should have?
PATON: The New Haven Register has a long and deep commitment to journalism in New Haven. It can trace its history through predecessor companies and founders to the Connecticut Gazette co-founded in 1755 by Benjamin Franklin. Some of the first newspapers in the country were founded in and around New Haven. They have always changed to survive and can continue to do so. But now only as one part of of the news ecosystem.
The Register can bring something most new competitors cannot to the party – resources. It has more advertiser relationships, more revenue, more staff and more profit than any of its competitors. It can harness those resources to make the kind of business relationships with entrepreneurial journalists and companies that are doing fantastic work in that community. By doing so it expands that work and will let the Register focus its resources on other initiatives.
This approach lets the paper, as a news organization, engage again in investigative journalism and in-depth reporting of issues of importance to the community. It lets the company’s journalists spend time data mining important government information and developments that may not necessarily be highlighted.
Re-allocating the Register’s resources to create compelling original content is one benefit but the ability to curate content and add resources to put that info in context is also very exciting. Those efforts will stimulate debate in the community and the paper will become a much bigger forum for that because of those efforts.
Importantly, this approach will let the paper re-connect or perhaps connect for the first time with constituencies that either don’t engage with the paper or perhaps feel disenfranchised by the paper’s current coverage and platforms.
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JARVIS: Now please answer the same question from the business perspective: What will the the Register’s commercial relationship be with the ecosystem and economy of New Haven? There are all those entities above plus craigslist and local merchants’ own sites. You’ve already talked about making sales arrangements with entrepreneurial journalists (I say: bravo). Will the Register still compete with those other enterprises? Can it be a platform for their success — and how? At impreMedia, you’ve told me, you hived off distribution, enabling former employees to set up new companies that now serve not only impreMedia’s properties but also Impremedia’s (former) competitors. Do you see something similar happening with local papers? What will the heart of the Register’s own business be? What’s not core?
PATON: No legacy media news company can move forward and become hyperlocal, as it must, unless it harnesses the power of entrepreneurial journalism. And the only way to harness the power of entrepreneurial journalists is to make them your partner and help them make a living. The E-Community Journalism labs will strike content and sales relationships with community members. We will faciliate cross-publishing with some, ditto sales. Sales training will be important. The motto will be that if they win we win too. The Register, as can any community daily, afford to lead the way in these developments. No business deal works if it is too one-sided.
I believe it is important we use the power of our traffic to strike ad relationships with local merchants. By creating vibrant search directories we help drive traffic to the merchants’ sites and stores. Hitching those directories to the power of Google is a win-win for everyone. There are so many ways we can help ensure a vibrant future for the communities we serve.
It is still too early for me to know what outsourcing initiatives will be undertaken but I can say that in my past experience this has resulted in employees being set up in independent, vibrant and profitable businesses and working with our competitors to lower costs and drive profits.
The newspaper industry has been scelortic in its ability to change. It now must find the willingness to do so and become much more flexible than it has ever been.
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Jeff, I should add to my comments I just sent you that I am still stupified at the amount of fear in the newspaper industry. I believe that fear has got to the point that it cripples critical thinking and action. More of the same with less is just prolonging a sure death. Thinking about change and implementing it ensures survival as news organizations….
One more, one more thing: Newspapers need to become fearless again about making their mistakes in public. We used to be good at that. We lost that along the way. The web and is ever self-correcting actions make for a fearless place of ideas.The industry has to find the strength to execute, fail and execute again, again and again. And we have to stop talking and start doing. We should remember our Ben Franklin: “Well done is better than well said.”
My response to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s study that found most original reporting in Baltimore still comes from major media:
No shit.
We need a study to determine this? Well, maybe we do. I think it is worthwhile to have a baseline to compare where news goes in years to come. When I argued the need for an audit of news today with a Google News creator, he wondered why today’s news should be the starting point. My response: Only because that is where the conversation is, as in: “What are we going to lose?” So fine, let’s measure the value of what exists today and look at the resources that go into producing it (including the waste on repetition and commodification). So fine.
But I think the study also brings some dangers.
First, predictably, it only fuels the defensive passion of old media nya-nyaing the news, witness the NY Times: “But the study offered support for the argument often made by the traditional media that, so far, most of what digital news outlets offer is repetition and commentary, not new information.”
Second, it defines news as news has been defined. We should be rethinking our definition of what is news — for many people, it’s not stories about juvenile justice, one of Pew’s subjects — and how it should be covered — not necessarily in articles — and how it is spread — that is the role of blogs and twitter — and not be stuck in old measurements.
Third, it sets up a strawman and then lights the match: Do blogs give us most of our news? No, they don’t. Well, then, they must be worthless, eh? We’ll be lost without big, old media, won’t we? Just what we need. (Though to the study’s immense credit, it also notes how much of local news is repetitive and does not include original reporting.) “This study does suggest that if newspapers were to disappear, what would be left to aggregate?” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the PEJ, told the AP. There’s the strawman: Without papers, we’ll be without news. No, we at CUNY believe the market will deliver it more efficiently and perhaps — perhaps — more effectively. It may not be news as those papers defined it.
We must keep mind that we are at the dawn, the very dawn of the new news ecosystem. There is no scalable business model in place — though, in our studies at the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, we see them on the horizon and we see new companies starting to build it. When the Associated Press called me about this study on Friday, I said I knew of four dozen reporters in New Jersey who have left their jobs at newspapers and are dying to continue reporting in entrepreneurial startups and are waiting for the kind of help we envisioned in our project. Companies such as Impremedia and The New York Times are just beginning to consider their relationships with the ecosystem.
We are also just beginning to see experimentation with the form of news, moving past the articles the study measures. News is becoming more of a process than a product; it is being disseminated in new ways thanks to search and social and algorithmic links. News is changing.
So I’m fine to look at the PEJ as a historical artifact, a touchpoint for future discussion. But, for God’s sake, don’t consider it a write-off of that future.
On Friday, we at CUNY had the honor of playing host to a conference (call) for more than two dozen educators around the world — New York to Arizona to Berkeley to Guadalajara to London to Oslo — who are teaching or starting to teach entrepreneurial journalism.
Here’s the wiki where we will continue to share syllabi, case studies, course materials, and videos. Here is a link to download the recording of the hour-long call (fast-forward past the howdys).
We share similar but not identical goals. We all agree that it’s important for journalism students — and journalists — today to understand the economics of news. Some of us add that it was irresponsible of our institutions not to teach this in the past. We agree it is important to bring entrepreneurship into the industry. Some of us concentrate more on new entrepreneurial ventures, others more on bringing innovation into existing companies. Some say journalists aren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs (I disagree) but all agree that entrepreneurship is a way to teach both innovation and business. Some notes from the call:
* At Arizona State, entrepreneurship is now a required course for journalism graduate students. AS emphasizes the need to get journalists to learn how to talk to people in other department and disciplines: how to work with engineers, especially. So AS gives student teams budgets for programming their projects; they’re looking at offering 5-10 hours per team for AS programming resources and 5-10 hours for programming resources teams find outside. They want teams to build but don’t want them to be tied to one platform. Cool, eh?
* Larry Kramer at Syracuse asked about cooperation between journalism and business schools but on the call there were notes of caution. Business students, one said, aren’t there to be entrepreneurs; business school teach corporate culture, said another; and these business students also don’t learn media. Kramer wants to teach the Harvard Business School case method but is looking for cases written from the journalistic perspective.
* Seek and ye shall find: Bill Grueskin of Columbia said the school has used a Harvard Business School case on the Norwegian wonder, Schibsted, and HBS will have another on Huffington Post. But HBS charges. Columbia created such a case on Politico and offered it to fellow faculty for free. Columbia also teaches a 60-minute MBA course and is putting that online.
* David Westphal of USC talked about the pluses and minuses of teaching interdisciplinary classes with students from various pursuits; he said it’s worth the effort to get different perspectives.
* Jay Rosen at NYU said he wants to get students to grapple with the entire problem of sustainability in journalism, putting it all on the table: journalism, audience, technology, business. He wants to “override the siloization of journalism.” He also said we need to work to attract different students who are entrepreneurially minded.
* Jim Willse, ex editor of the Star-Ledger who’s teaching at Princeton this term, said we need to give scholarships to publishers to get them into entrepreneurial programs, to change their culture.
* Many of us – Maryland, Columbia, CUNY – agreed that it’s important to have entrepreneurs and investors into class to expose journalists to their thinking.
* For our part at CUNY, here is a report from my last entrepreneurial class (funded by the McCormick Foundation) and a description of how the class works. Here also are the new business models for news (funded by the Knight Foundation) that now inspire much of our work. Note that we just added a course in hyperlocal built around running The New York Times blog, The Local, in Brookyln. We are working with The Times and others to also tackle hyperlocal advertising opportunities and challenges (funded by the Carnegie Corporation); more on that as we progress.
: ALSO: In Germany Ulrike Langer polls the journalism schools there — which operate in or close to media companies — to see what they are doing in entrepreneurial journalism and finds activity at those run by Burda and Axel Springer. (It’s in German.) Next call, we’ll have our German colleagues join us. If you know of such work going on elsewhere in the world, please let us know.
Deborah Howell was unafraid to learn in public. That, I think, is her best lesson for us all.
Deborah died today in a roadside accident while vacationing in New Zealand. She had been ombudsman of the Washington Post, chief of the Advance Publications’ Newhouse News Service in Washington, and editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She was 68.
She and I worked together in various stages of our careers, most recently consulting for our former employer, Advance, in a daring project to fold the company’s 174-year-old newspaper in Ann Arbor and replace it with a an online service based on blogs and in the community. Our former boss, Steve Newhouse, paired us because I was to be the hot-air balloon — this project was, after all, a chance to practice what I’ve been preaching — and Deborah was to be the ballast, the traditionalist with experience in the eternal verities of journalism and respect from journalists.
But our roles often reversed. I was the one holding Deborah down as she grabbed new ideas with the fervor of a convert and fretted that we weren’t being radical enough; I was cast by contrast as the conservative. She was quicker than I was to criticize and reject the work of traditionalists simply because it wasn’t good enough. She was open, eager, and fearless learning new technologies and their implications and opportunities. We brainstormed via wiki.
That was a lesson for me. My prior interaction with Deborah had been as a blogger when she was the Post’s ombudsman. In that role, she found herself more than once in a hornets’ nest. She made a mistake and didn’t correct herself quickly or abjectly enough for bloggers’ taste. The paper killed comments about a controversy involving her, violating the bloggers’ sense of the propriety of a historical record. She found herself in the middle of the print-v-online war in the Post newsroom (which simmers still). I was among the critical. She never called me on it at a personal level. She stuck to the substance.
Here’s Deborah rethinking the notion of blogging at a meeting of ombudsmen:
Jarvis thinks all ombudsmen ought to blog. His blog is at http://buzzmachine.com. He said bloggers “distrust the institutional voice and trust more the human voice. The more we represent that personal voice, the better.”
That caught me up short. I got a laugh at the meeting when I said, “I hardly have time to go to the bathroom. Start a blog?” Instead of responding to 600 letters, he said “a blog post is more efficient and adds to the conversation.” I’ll think about it.
I learned that Deborah had little fear of learning. I argue that we must all learn in public now — which means making mistakes and finding lessons and moving on. We online need to be more generous with others as they learn our ways. There’s no sense in replacing one orthodoxy with another. What we need instead is curiosity. That is what Deborah had.
Before the Post, Deborah was in charge of the Newhouse Washington bureau when I was the online editorial guy in New York and what I remember most about that time was her tireless, quixotic efforts to find a business model for the Religion News Service, which the company owned. Deborah fought for and protected this poor child the way she did all her journalists. That’s why they were loyal to her.
I’ve long said that the only real fringe benefit to being a journalist is that you get an obit in the paper when you die. Lately, I’ve said I fear I’ll outlive the papers I worked on. But maybe there’s a new mark of a legacy. When I searched Google today for news on Deborah’s death, I found this:
Deborah’s friends and colleagues gathered around her new home online. And they spread the tragic news of her death and paid tribute to her:
Good-bye, Deb.
: LATER: Here are David Carr’s and Ken Doctor’s remembrances.
Two things strike me about News Corp.’s battle to get cable fees:
(1) Again and again lately, the company is surrendering the advertising battle. In newspapers, it is saying that advertising won’t support its high costs and so it will sacrifice traffic and advertising the hopes of building build pay walls. In MySpace, the company handed over its advertising fate to Google and then couldn’t produce. Now in TV — which is where Murdoch fils says the future of the company lies — they’re trying to eke fees from cable operators.
(Under must-carry rules, a station can demand premium placement — which would benefit audience and advertising — or can demand a fee, but the cable company can decline to pay and carry the station. That’s the stand-off occurring now.)
(2) News Corp. may succeed at getting fees from cable operators, but I predict that will raise prices for consumers as more and more fees are passed along; consumers will be further enraged that they have to spend money for bundles of channels they don’t want or watch; and that will give regulators the cause they need to demand a la carte pricing — which will end up hurting and likely killing second- and third-tier cable channels subsidized by bundles and wil hurt cable operators as they end up charging less.
Add to this the paper-tiger nature of News Corp. threat to take Fox stations off cable. Oh, no, they taunt on crawls across the screen, you won’t get American Idol. Except we will, online, on Hulu, co-owned by News Corp. For News Corp. knows that the value of its own stations as ad vehicles is diminishing as the value of internet distribution rises. And so then this story comes full circle as News Corp. will likely threaten to charge consumers on Hulu — again, a capitulation in the advertising model.
What we’re seeing is the disaggregation of another media form. We don’t buy albums; we buy singles. We don’t buy newspapers or magazines; we aggregate, curate, and link to the best stories we like, bypassing editors’ packaging. We don’t go to bookstores to get the books the system decides to put on the shelves; we buy what we want from Amazon. We listen to radio less and listen to our own playlists more (a trend that will only accelerate as we listen to new forms of radio on our phones). Now we will end up picking and choosing TV channels and even shows, diminishing the power network and station programmers’ and cable MSO’s hold over us.
At the highest level, what we’re seeing is the death of the mass audience — and the value of distribution — and the advertising model that supported it.
I don’t think advertising is dead. I think it’s dying for mass companies with high cost structures. Advertising will shrink, as Bob Garfield argues in the Chaos Scenario, and it will migrate to new media and new forms. News Corp. knows that; every media company finally does.
So I think we’re seeing News Corp. milk the dying cash cow. Newspapers aren’t going to grow and will shrivel and sometimes die. The value of local stations is only going to shrink. (MySpace was a mistake.) So News Corp. is begging for cash wherever it can get it — from readers online or viewers on cable (via cable companies’ billing) — no matter that there’s no strategy there.
