Newsless.org

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.

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?”

To pick up one of the threads from yesterday’s post, let’s talk about that first question for a minute: “How do we increase the amount or intensity of attention we draw?”

I would argue that right now, news websites are making a play for a very thin slice of our audience’s attention pie. Our primary focus is throwing a ton of headlines against the wall and hoping something sticks. The front page of most news websites is tuned to the world’s shortest attention span; every time someone visits that page, we want them to see something different. Many of us set our home pages to auto-refresh, so if you leave the page open in one of your browser tabs, you’ll see fresh headlines when you click back to it. Once we hook you with one of those headlines, our goal is to keep you clicking as many times as possible before you click away. We try to entice you with links to “similar stories,” “related stories,” “other stories from this section.”

In short, again, we’re focused on capturing merely that fraction of our audience’s attention that seeks to know what’s just happened. In so doing, we mostly ignore the fraction of that attention interested in what led to what just happened, or the fraction that just wants to know what new businesses have opened recently in their neighborhood, etc.

In recent years, we’ve begun to lend some thought to creating what the folks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution call “durable content” — “information like calendars, guides, sports stats and databases that, with some updating, can be posted and used over long periods.” But I’m proposing that we treat the vast bulk of what we do as “durable content,” and focus our attention on adding to that, not creating ephemera.

Why? Let me draw an analogy:

Sociologists will tell you that the best way to lift all boats in a society is to focus not on income inequality, but on wealth inequality. Income is tenuous; wealth is durable. Wealth (i.e. possessing assets, owning a savings account, etc.) encourages long-term planning, increases the investment of individuals in their society, serves as a hedge against hardship and can be passed on to future generations. Best of all, wealth compounds on itself; it creates more wealth over time. When we encourage people to invest their money, we’re trying to get them to convert their income into wealth.

The news sites of today are obsessed with information income, but they’ve amassed little information wealth. We’re living from information paycheck to information paycheck.¹ I want us to start investing all our information in an archive that  acquires compound value over time.

Wikipedia is an example of an information asset. I’d say Frontline has done a good job of creating an information asset. DavisWiki, a site I’ve mentioned before, is another.

Davis, CA, has two daily newspapers — the Davis Enterprise (since 1897) and UC-Davis’ California Aggie (since 1915). Both newspapers have devoted reporting and production staffs. That is, plenty of information income every single day. DavisWiki is built entirely by volunteer contributors, so it likely has a volatile, mostly undirected stream of information income, but virtually all of that information is invested into the growing archive of the site.

Compete traffic patterns for three sites in Davis, CA

Look at the Compete.com traffic patterns for the three sites.² That blue line is DavisWiki, the Aggie’s in green, and the Enterprise is red. The Enterprise is subscriber-only, and the Aggie makes it difficult to find stories more than a week-old, so neither is quite representative of your typical daily news site. But I think this offers an instructive look at the value of the wiki vs. the value of the two news sites. On the wiki, traffic builds as the site grows over time. The ephemeral news sites are only “worth” what they posted recently.

Also fascinating: Compete points out the two top keywords driving folks to each site. For both newspapers, the keywords are all variants on the newspaper’s name (”davis enterprise, davis enterprise newspaper, california aggie, the california aggie”).³ One of the top queries driving folks to DavisWiki is “cheap movie theaters in Sacramento.”

By making our sites into information assets, we will be going after a much broader slice of attention than we do today. To do this, we have to invest our information properly, not into static articles, which depreciate over time, but into living stories, which increase in value as more information is added or linked. Over time, we’ll grow a long tail of content that accrues attention and (by extension) revenue⁴ even while it’s mostly untouched and unpromoted.

1. I may have carried this analogy too far, and for that, I’m truly sorry. [↩]
2. Yes, Compete’s traffic metrics are totally off, but the relative figures are informative. [↩]
3. Search as navigation. News site publishers recognize that. [↩]
4. That’s how this relates to the business model. [↩]

You might have noticed that I’ve said nary a word about the business model. I would love to be able to ignore the business side of this equation and focus all my attention on fixing the journalism, but the content model I’m proposing will certainly have implications for the business model online (positive ones, I think). And as segments of the economy crash around us, it might just be a good time to set up my thinking on that.

I’ll frame the discussion this way: The news product has lessened in value for each of our two key stakeholders — audiences and advertisers. Why? I’m sure you already know this part:

1. For audiences, an overabundance in the supply of information makes news less valuable. Much of the info news organizations publish — national and international news, recipes, opinions, gardening tips, movie reviews, etc. — can now be found in greater quality and greater supply elsewhere. And our main franchise, local news, isn’t valuable enough to support our large reporting, editing and production staffs.
2. For advertisers, meanwhile, our products are increasingly no longer the best gateway to an audience interested in their products. If you want to sell a car, you use Craigslist or list it on a car-shopping site.

This one-two punch seems like a hopeless situation for publishers. Reasonable people are asking, How are we ever going to fix the news if we can’t pay for it?

I’ve got few answers, but I do have a pair of assumptions to match my pair of stakeholders.

Assumption #1: “Where attention flows, money follows.”

Kevin Kelly’s contention that attention can always be monetized is the article of faith that keeps many a publisher in the business, I think. It’s certainly the reason Google acquired YouTube and Murdoch purchased MySpace. The cheaper information becomes, the more scarce and valuable attention becomes. That value can be converted into money.¹ Newspapers, for example, have always sold a portion of the attention we attract to advertisers.

Assumption #2: Not all attention is created equal.

People looking for products to buy compose some massive share of Google’s giant stockpile of attention. Many businesses will pay good money for a portion of that share. But much of the attention news websites attract is difficult to sell to advertisers. We’ve had trouble monetizing sports stories, for example, although they typically bring a large percentage of traffic on your standard metro daily newspaper site. And just try finding a (non-political) advertiser for your politics site.

Among the reasons news companies put out so much commodity content — the aforementioned recipes, gardening tips, and movie reviews — is that advertisers love the attention this content attracts. But it can be tough to find buyers for the attention garnered from “serious” journalism.

Of course, any amount of attention can be monetized to some degree, with remnant advertising or Google AdSense. But unless we’re talking huge amounts of traffic, publishers tend to find the returns on those forms of advertising insufficient to cover the cost of providing the content in the first place.

So when we talk about figuring out our business woes, I think we’re actually asking two questions:

1. How do we increase the amount or intensity of attention we draw?
2. How do we sustainably convert that attention into money?

Fair warning — most of my research is going to focus on the first question. But I’ll also be sniffing for insight on the latter.

1. For more on the attention economy, see Michael Goldhaber. [↩]