Newsless.org

I promised RJI’s communications director that I’d put together material for an e-mail that might be useful for the Institute’s mailing list. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize many of these thoughts from my posts here, but you might still find this interesting. Happy 2009, and thanks for reading!

In the conversations about the seismic shifts rocking journalism today, much has been said about community participation in journalism, the proliferation of multimedia storytelling formats, the rise of mobile platforms and the departure of traditional advertising vehicles. Less has been said about how these developments relate to another fundamental shift in the landscape — our society’s 180-degree reversal from being starved of information to being drowned in it. But now that study after study has reinforced this fact, news industry leaders are starting to wrap their minds around adapting journalism to the overload age.

Addressing overload — weaving a mess of disconnected headlines into a coherent, compelling structure — is one of the basic premises of my work at RJI. In the inaugural entry on Newsless.org, I put it this way: “I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.”

As we engineer our experiment in delivering context, we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions to help focus our efforts. I thought I’d share some of them and invite your comments, challenges, footnotes and annexations: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been parroting Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” model so much recently that I forget how many people still haven’t heard it. If you haven’t, take a moment and read the concept. Here’s a taste:

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

I’m convinced this is one of the best ways to approach the question of business models on the Web. News industry conversations about “the business model” tend to settle somewhere near here: “News-oriented websites have a future … but traffic needs to be above 200 million pageviews per month.”

When you eye the Web through the lens of pageviews and uniques and CPMs, 1,000 of anything seems ridiculously paltry. But if your 1,000 “unique visitors” derive value from the work you create, or if you can find advertisers who value the attention of that community, that might be enough for you to make a living. And if your company comprises a number of individuals, each attending to her 1,000 True Fans, this even starts to look like a business.

And if your 1,000 True Fans are motivated enough by your work to effect change in their communities, this even begins to resemble Journalism.

BTW: This principle dovetails nicely with Caterina Fake’s philosophy that you build a real community by greeting each early user at the door. Among the most essential skills that I believe must be taught to tomorrow’s journalists is community management — a skill entirely lost in today’s discussions about newsroom training. Technical training will be obsolete in a year. But the best community managers on the Web today employ principles refined over a long history of community leadership.

BTW 2: Make sure to read Kelly’s follow-up essay, “The case against 1,000 True Fans,” in which he addresses the practical realities of approaching a business this way. But consider that all of his case studies involve artists, whose work is valued even more abstractly than the work of journalists.

Synthesis: “The combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity.”
Aggregation: “A group or mass of distinct or varied things, persons, etc. Collection into an unorganized whole.”

We’ve spent many long years urging news sites to do more aggregation. Battle won. The new motto should be: “Don’t just aggregate, synthesize.”

Jay Rosen passes along via Twitter this CJR interview with Michael Hudson on the subprime crisis. It nicely illustrates the point that the media’s penchant for one-off, disconnected articles leaves us blind to much larger, more important stories:

There were a lot of good individual stories, but the problem was that they often weren’t followed up on. Sometimes they were followed up by the news organizations that did them, but you just can’t have that much impact, even if you’re The New York Times or the Washington Post if it’s like a one-shot story and you’re the only one doing it. Other people have to jump on and look at the story, too, and look at other angles.

This connects rather nicely to the rant I posted in September about our failure to connect the dots of the financial crisis for the public. But it adds a very valuable dimension.

The approach of telling larger stories rather than simply telling more stories isn’t just designed to foster better understanding among the public. It will also drastically improve our reporting. Asking how one story connects to others helps us expose patterns that a series of disconnected articles will only obscure.

Earlier this year, I posted that I wanted to see more focused discussions about journalism’s future:

If what we want to ask is “How can we save serious, detailed, local investigative journalism?” then I suspect we can have a more focused and productive conversation if we actually asked that question. Ditto if the question is “How can we make sure the local school board meeting is covered?” When folks rightly say that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems plaguing journalism, it’s because we lack even a one-size-fits-all question. “How do we save The Newspaper?” certainly isn’t it.

I’ve been hearing fewer how-do-we-save-the-newspaper-ish questions recently, but I’m still picking up conversations like, “What’s the business model for journalism?” So I figure that instead of railing against the questions I’m not impressed by, I’ll volunteer some questions that do nag at me.

I’m interested in being somewhat methodical about this. Again, journalism isn’t science. But an effort to quantify what we might be missing (or in danger of missing) could help us focus our efforts to provide it.

What are the most valuable functions currently performed by news organizations that are imperiled by the transition to digital?

We shall bicker about the “most valuable” component of this question, but I think a little bickering now-and-then is good. More on that in a second. Meanwhile, I’m especially keen on a focus on functions, rather than institutions or processes.

How might we measure the value of these functions?

I’m very curious about this. It seems distastefully clinical, but nonetheless really intriguing. Have there been efforts to measure the value of different journalistic functions? We know a free press correlates strongly with lower corruption. Do we know whether more journalists equals less corruption? If so, is there a sort of margin of diminishing results beyond which the number of journalists per capita doesn’t matter? Does journalism training affect the equation? Is publicly-funded journalism as effective at suppressing corruption as privately-funded journalism?

Outside of corruption, are there other measurable advantages of journalism? What effect do crime reporters have on crime? Does art criticism beget better art? Without the business press, would the meltdown have been worse?

If we could begin to quantify the value journalism provides, I think we could more effectively support it. The current prevailing argument — “Without news organization X, you wouldn’t have had investigation Y” — is acquiring the flavor of Senator McCain’s POW story circa September. If we could make the case that crime coverage tends to suppress crime, we’ve got a great marketing pitch for a community to come together and find some way to support a crime reporter.

What functions have been neglected by news organizations that we should account for in this transition?

I think we digital triumphalists have done a pretty good job of pointing out many of these. Someone should start cataloguing the sorts of brand-new functions tomorrow’s journalism is already starting to perform: like creating a place for communities to coalesce around the news and helping communities organize in the midst of a crisis.

What models of support might map well to each of these functions?

If we’re serious about building a sustainable journalistic infrastructure, I think this question will get us further than almost any other. We have plenty of evidence that different journalistic functions will map better to particular support models. Investigative journalism is already beginning to incline towards a non-profit, philanthropic model. Education reporting might be given to an advertising model of some kind. If we can begin to catalogue different models functioning effectively in different situations, we might be able to answer questions like, “What options should a health industry reporter in Minneapolis pursue to acquire support?”

How should these functions evolve to meet the opportunities afforded by digital media?

Plenty of experimentation on this front is already occurring, of course. As more beats start moving online in force, I cannot wait to see what results. Crime journalism saw the beginnings of a revolution with the dawn of ChicagoCrime.org. Talking Points Memo broke new ground in investigative journalism. Which niches remain untransformed? How do we transform them?

Update: Will tweets along a couple of questions: “Is what journalists value the same thing as what ‘readers’ value?” “How can we monetize it online without it sucking, or whats the next Craigslist?”

I just finished giving a talk about my research for the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Here’s the talk:

Free video streaming by Ustream

And here’s the slideshow, if you’d like to follow along:

Since I’m all about transparency, my notes for the talk are after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »