A news company in the Czech Republic is getting in to the coffee shop business, in order to attract people to its journalists who will be working nearby. As the New York Times explains:
The newsrooms-cum-cafes are part of a new venture in so-called hyperlocal journalism, which aims to reconnect newspapers with readers and advertisers by focusing on neighborhood concerns at a neighborhood level: think garbage collection schedules, not Group of 7 diplomacy.
Our neighborsgo staff has been doing that in their own way for some time. They've scheduled meet and greets in area Starbucks. Some have been so popular Starbucks asked them to move elsewhere. (What? Not enough $4 lattes sold?)
You might have thought that our industry would have understood this intuitively. After all, journalists know that to cover a community effecitvely, you have to be in that community. You have to live and breathe it. It's old-school, beat coverage.
But hyperlocal hysteria was a digital wave: Use the inexpensive, unlimited canvas of digital publishing to create virtual town squares; bring together citizen content with reporter-generated content and have everyone talk about it together.
Now we're realizing that if you stop there, you may not achieve your goal of helping the community connect or reap good journalism either. Backfence failed because there wasn't anyone to orchestrate the online communities that formed, and maybe because those communities didn't feel enough sense of place just interacting in a virtual landscape. Barista has prospered because there are reporters leading the Montclair, N.J. blog's community.
Our own Dallas Independent School District beatblog has helped coalesce the community of people here intensely interested in the city's schools due to the real-world oureach of our lead reporters, who have engaged sources and citizens directly in conversation day in and day out, online and off.
We're launching a host of new community blogs at The Dallas Morning News now, along with an intensive reporting effort in these communities. Here's hoping we marry our understanding of social media and shoe leather more effectively; perhaps by setting up our blog shop in the corner booth at the cafe.
Right on the heels of my defense of Wikipedia and thoughts about accuracy comes this story about a Wikipedia hoax repeated by journalists around the world. Some kid inserted a fake quote in an article about the recently-deceased French composer Maurice Jarre. Journalists took the quote, reportedly by the composer himself, and inserted it in their obituaries.
By now you've probably seen the spiffy video produced by the Chicago Tribune about its soon-to-be-launched blogging/aggregation site ChicagoNow. They're dealing with the foray of Huffington Post and ESPN into their market, plus the drip drip of social networking sites like facebook eating into their core franchise.
It's only a matter of time before this happens here in Dallas too.
So give the Trib staff credit: They dreamed this up in December and have clearly executed in a coordinated fashion across the entire company toward a defined goal. They have taken the time to create the business plan, hone the editorial concept, build the technology, design the Web 2.0 interface, aggregate the voices and develop a marketing pitch. So it's a good play, well executed, by the way it looks from the outside.
That's how news organizations need to act if they've got a prayer of survival.
Know any companies which could use a dose of that kind of business discipline?
They're aggressively chasing new sources of revenue, specifically transactional opportunities around content (such as selling tickets next to movie reviews etc.) and specialized topical verticals that address the spaces in between the obvious consumer moments.
What if we developed a vertical for the everyday tasks of driving? This would provide a traffic map, gas-price map, pothole map, databases of bridge inspections, parking meter citations and gas-pump inspections. We would provide discussion groups for classic-car fans, parents of teen drivers and other automotive interests. We'd offer a place for sharing photos of souped-up cars and stories about first cars. We'd provide text alerts about traffic problems and road closures. (Many newspaper sites already provide some of these services, but not grouped together. The auto-focused databases are grouped with other databases, as though we want to appeal to some imaginary broad segment of the population interested in data.)
We're working on similar projects. The challenge is how to engage a newsroom focused on daily journalism in providing this kind of content. Not to mention the obvious elephant in the room: Is this journalism at all?
I had an interesting exchange with someone from the BBC at the RTNDA conference I attended last week. I was on a panel devoted to ethics in digital journalism, and much of the discussion and concern among the audience surrounded user-generated content, specifically user comments.
Toward the end of the discussion, I made the point that people in the audience who were expressing disdain for the practice of inviting in user commenary should realize that this is about more than just controlling trolls. Wikipedia and Google, I said, were built on user input -- small acts of creation by millions of users. It's the 'collective intelligence' meme that has built powerful, new information tools, fundamentally transformed business and made billions of dollars for some on the Web.
...is Google, for search; Facebook for social and Twitter for realtime socializing. So says Mr. Jarvis, explaining that content is not king. Newspapers should take heed, he contends:
I think they should follow the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, member of the ruling junta, that their job is to bring communities elegant organization. In a sense, they always have done that; they helped communities organize their knowledge so they could organize themselves; that’s the essence of an informed democracy.
We're trying a measure of that elegant organization on a shoestring with our new communities pages. Yes, I know others have done this before, but we're hoping we can build on their attempts. This is our Plano page, which attempts to organize in an elegant way our listings and other event databases, plus put a blend of internal and external news feeds from selected sources front and center via Yahoo! Pipes. We're also manually choosing good content from sources that don't have reliable feeds, using Publish2.
At the same time we're launching a series of beat blogs for about 18 of those communities, with dedicated reporters whose mandate is to reach out to the community in a virtual and real way. We'll bring our scores of citizen opinion contributors in on the project and our NeighborsGo community editors (who solicit conent from users).
Jeff Jarvis kicks off his CUNY new business models inquiry. In typical fashion, he's doing it all in the open. This should be of great interest to those of us working in traditional newsrooms. Key point here, well articulated by Mr. Jarvis:
At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is make hard, unemotional business judgments. The question is not whether content should be free or whether readers should pay; “should” is an irrelevant verb. The question, very simply, is how more money can be made. What will the market support?
More grist for the mill regarding pay-for-content. Martin Langveld at the Nieman lab runs the numbers and determines they don't support just putting up a wall and charging a fee:
A simple tollbooth approach at any price cuts out the vast majority of the audience, and would mean that newspapers were retrenching to print — saying in effect, “If you want our news online, it’s there, just pay the fee, but we’re no longer investing much energy in developing our sites, because there’s no money on that side of the fence.”
I'm quoted in an article on Forbes.com regarding Rupert Murdoch's musings at a cable industry confab. Murdoch asked "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" Just to clarify, I'm not one of those who think Google is the death of newspapers. What I expressed to the reporter was more nuanced than what made it into the article.
I recently attended a two-day brainstorming session in Reno at the University of Nevada School of Journalism as a representative of the Online News Association. Our leaders were the IDEO company, which is a well-known, Palo Alto based design consultancy.
There are others besides Gannett experimenting with separating content generation from production.
Why do that? Because it's hard to get a newsroom to innovate on a new platform when their compensation, salaries and schedules are tied to a legacy one.
IBM's clearly seeking to drum up consulting business, but a new study they have released gives a good case for what needs to be done in the content industry.
They identify four trends in the media business today:
consumer adoption of new distribution formats,
a shift in advertising spend,
digital migration of platforms and
the emergence of new capabilities due to moves by new entrants and existing players.
WorldScreen.com says the IBM study reveals a "'growing rift' between advertisers, consumers and content owners, as media companies 'struggle to keep pace with' new demands from tech-savvy viewers and marketers."
Interesting perspective on how AP online is contributing to the demise in the value of the scoop from fellow Belo-ite Cory Bergman on Lost Remote:
The problem here is local media is paying AP to distribute our most valuable content to others who in turn pay the AP to receive it, therefore helping collapse our window of exclusivity. As this window collapses, our revenue generation goes with it. Since enterprise reporting is the most expensive to produce, in a way AP is disincentivizing local media companies from investing in original stories with national potential.
Cory's KING5 is one of the best local TV stations in the country, but let's face it, local TV rarely breaks stories of national interest that get picked up by the wires. Metro newspapers, on the other hand, receive this treatment weekly if not daily, and to some extent have long ago thrown up their hands as to what can or should be done.
Hearst’s change agenda is not too little, too late. Viewed in the aggregate, these steps indicate a willingness to take bold steps and to look beyond the short term. Whether the strategy is visionary is hard to say, because we’re not really hearing the strategy. The leaked memo, written for internal consumption (but, one assumes, with the anticipation that it would be leaked) enunciates a variety of tactics, but fails to express a single overarching strategy. “Fundametally change the way we do business” is not a strategy. “Transforming Hearst Newspapers into a fully digital media enterprise” might be.
Former Belo employee Cory Bergman artfully describes our challenge in doing journalism in the digital age. The recognition that we have to encompass community, journalism and technology reminds me of the 'three circles' conversation started by Steve Yelvington. Each circle is similar to one these elements: the Town Crier is the journalist, the Town Square is the community and the Town Expert is the technology overlay.
By splitting journalism and business into two buckets separated by a longstanding cultural divide, the two groups fail to collaborate on ideas that tap the strengths of both. And neither have a track record of understanding how technology enables community, the greatest opportunity of all. In fact, nearly three-quarters of local online news consumers say newspapers have failed in providing a sense of community and “connective tissue” in their local cities and neighborhoods (Forrester Research 2009). After all, most journalists want to control the conversation. So do the sales folks. So you need a third element: creative technology folks, empowered with resources, who can infuse community in content and revenue generation, providing value to both users and businesses.
For example: What are readers reading right now? How many people have their eyes on one story? Who are they emailing it to? Where are they blogging it? How are their friends using the site? New York Observer writers note: "It's all about giving users attention, because that's mostly what people are looking for when they're online these days."
As we get closer and closer to the end of the beginning of the digital revolution, it's more appropriate to ask ourselves, what will our jobs like on the other side? Two online thinkers are helping us see into the future.