Journalism has gone digital! While this is undoubtedly good news for most of us – the barrier to entry for the field has never been lower – it raises serious questions for the future of the industry. It is widely known that traditional institutions (such as newspapers or magazines) that support professional journalists are failing. Their revenue models are built off a disproven assumption that people are willing to pay for their content.
This is a problem that concerns all of us: one of the hallmarks of a free society is the quality of its governance. Without someone to do the mundane things such as cover townhall meetings or dig through stacks of criminal records for anomalies (termed “accountability journalism”), government tends towards corruption. If newspapers no longer pay their journalists, who will? [1]
As an aspiring technologist/writer, I have tracked this revolution since high school. The amount of research and dialogue since then has spiraled to dizzying heights. It seems every day, a new institution or pundit arrives to offer their voice to the cacophony. (Myself guilty as charged.)
After spending so many years wading through thousands of pages of sometimes-redundant, sometimes-contradictory, always-confusing writing, I feel I have finally created a satisfactory (though not perfect) synthesis of the information for myself. Hoping that others might find this process insightful, I offer this series of articles documenting:
After reading this series, I want you to feel informed about the state of the industry and confident in your abilities to quickly integrate or reject new viewpoints as they arrive. Bonus points if you vehemently disagree with my recommendations.
As a series of articles, it is best read sequentially, although experienced analysts are welcome to skip over this article and directly to the next one.
I give an overview to get everyone on the same page. A state of the union, if you will. I showcase a set of papers I have found to be the most clearly written, interesting, and mutually comprehensive. They cover the current categories of discussion:
I introduce my framework for synthesizing information and present interesting insights which result.
There are those that believe they are donkeys and elephants. Being a donkey will work in some places and being an elephant will work in others. The key is to figure out which is applicable in your particular situation. In the vocabulary where journalism is an industry to save, we forget that industries are made up of …
Or maybe what I think is that
Although some discourse exists on background issues:
Current “discourse” is chaotic: it seems to consist of a multitude of people 2 - Which is ironic because the supposed point of journalism is to not just report facts but to synthesize and convert facts into knowledge. There are many viewpoints but few objective observers available to help readers synthesize this heap of information into comprehensive and analytic-based perspectives. This level of discourse is unhelpful because:
I argue for a holistic framework to categorize different arguments:
It points to flaws in many arguments. They are hitting a nail on the head because they only have a hammer.
What I believe will work to save journalism: * …
Finally, I link to my other articles where I explore concrete …
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (Clay Shirky) is essential reading to gain a baseline perspective. Although it does not offer any new insights, it encapsulates most of the past scholarly conversation in a sharp 2700 word piece.
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
At this point, what needs to be expanded on is an understanding of what models are currently in play and examples of each.
At this point, a certain few people will want more detailed statistics on the state of the industry. While I congratulate you on your (morbid) enthusiasm, I will not do much more than offer links to more comprehensive surveys. They are, unarguably, well written.
At the risk of overusing the word ‘holistic’ and putting all of you to sleep, that is how I am going to describe my….
I am offering a table of contents so you can skip arguments you are already familiar with. I’ve tried to dig up the best argument for and against each model. Ordered from least to most disruptive.
Also note, the points at which I divide these into categories is blurry at best and basically derived from my own sense. You can rearrange as you’d like and get a different scheme. So that’s my editorialization. For those already in the works:
to be done
The web strategy consists of trying to defray declining print subscriptions with online revenue until the crisis wears over. Couple of strategies here but they all boil down to the ability to monetize effectively compared to the costs of running a news bureau.
Eight six per cent of respondents to the Newsroom Barometer 2008 survey agreed that multimedia newsrooms - where digital and print productions run as one process - would dominate in the short term. …
QUOTES: “My expectation,” wrote executive editor Bill Keller of The New York Times in January 2009, “is that for the foreseeable future our business will continue to be a mix of print and online journalism, with the growth online offsetting the (gradual, we hope) decline of print.”80 The paper in newspaper may go away, insist industry stalwarts, but the news will remain. “Paper is dying,” said Nick Bilton, a technologist for The Times, “but it’s just a device. Replacing it with pixels is a better experience.”
Dan Okrent, Time Inc.: “When you are saying 5 million that is because you are just still trying to print a newspaper. You are putting it in gas vehicles and delivering it. But the only cost we have to cover is the cost of the newsroom.” If the NYT were willing to charge $21 a month online they would cover the newsroom. Okrent: “Newspapers are trying to protect circulation revenue for the product that isn’t going to exist down the road. And what we need to do is to say we can eat it, but we are going to get to this other place, because we have a product that is worth it.”
Examples:
Summary: If you look at the competitive analysis, they’re effectively fucked compared to startups with no journalists who are mooching off their content.
Form a cartel like the music industry and charge content aggregators money, perhaps while giving away content for free to consumers.
Couple of really high profile cases here. This has the potential to turn newspapers into a game of the rich.
In effect, this is saying that we can’t compete in the market. We need social handouts. Assuming funding can be gotten (which is questionable!) The question is more of a game-theoretical one: how do we incentivize these people to do a good job?
QUOTES: The amount of money O’Shea has assembled to launch his project is dwarfed by the $30 million backing the Pro Publica non-profit investigative venture, the $5 million in seed funding committed to the nascent Bay Area News Project in San Francisco and the approximately $4 million raised by the newly launched Texas Tribune.
PROS:
After all, the number of people willing to write for free is vast. In 2007, I was in charge of recruiting writers for the expansion of The Huffington Post. I calculated that I would need 75 unpaid blog submissions per day, Monday through Friday, in order to make the site work. That target seemed absurd at first. Yet within two months, hundreds of willing bloggers had signed up, the majority of them credentialed authors published by major publishing houses.
CONS: If one’s goal is to cover the niche uncovered by private broadcasters, what inspires you to do a good job and not just regurgitate government press releases? How do you measure the quality of investigative reporting?
Mr. Balboni, who created the New England Cable News network, said he was a passionate defender of for-profit journalism. “I believe deep in my heart and soul that the discipline of the marketplace makes for a stronger organization,” he said. “It gives you a far greater chance to be a self-sustaining enterprise, without having to turn to government or foundations,” which can be mercurial, he said. …
One of the problems is how you measure success in the non-profit sector. There has to be work done on that. As an online news network they have the ability to diversify. If you are operating in only one community, you have only a small number of foundations interested. “You can’t really sustain the work as a hyper local nonprofit.” Also, they have one engineering team that services six websites and one administrative backbone. They spend $400,000 on Minnesota Daily, vs. MinnPost, which he says spends $1 million.
Examples: * Huffington-Post Investigative Fund http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/announcing-the-launch-of-_b_180543.html
The story for this goes: some kid … and funds journalists (pays for their content.) This is counting on those high-tech startups not being able to find content elsewhere or to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Examples:
It might be the case that none of these will work by themselves, but together push a news organization just over the edge of profitability.
Bill Mitchell: Went to a community meeting in Ann Arbor to talk to people about what life is like without a daily newspaper. What people tend to think about when they lose or aspire to a particular way of interacting with news, have people thought about ways of attaching value to the experience of interacting with news and are their ways to generate revenue around that experience?
Joan Walsh, Salon: “What Arianna realized before a lot of us is that there is this culture out there, there are people who live to write. To give them a platform to right and give them help to make it better is not merely exploitation. If real journalists partner with their audience, bring in a source, and give him or her a blog (as Salon has done) you’ve created a sense of community that leads to sustainability.
David Bennahum: There are effectively “citizen journalists” on the ground who are contributing to some of their eight sites to cover things they can’t afford to cover. People will pay money to get that training. “These are things we need to explore.”
\1 This is an exaggerated version of the same problem the music industry is facing. Exaggerated in that it is even easier to copy-paste an article than to share music.
Experienced analysts can skip this section which is meant to bring others up-to-speed.