(iverson's) currentbuzz

Five Star consists of four sections printed on heavy, expensive stock. They’re called the A Section, Culture, Focus, and Words, and the first three—all but the tabloid literary section—are broadsheets, roughly 13 by 23 inches. That was a pretty standard size in the day when newspapers were newspapers, but it’s zaftig by current standards, two inches wider than the present Tribune, which was narrowed by half an inch in 2007 and another inch in February. The dummy’s 56 pages in all, with a coffee-table heft that sends a message: read me or don’t, but your home will feel tonier for having me in it.

Maybe I’m groping for analogies, but Five Star suggests to me the day Hollywood’s knees stopped knocking and it hit back at television with CinemaScope. Five Star is the antithesis of RedEye. It’s not portable and it’s not disposable. For one thing, the pages are simply too big and heavy to negotiate on a bus or train; for another, you’d be barely done with one article when you pulled into your stop.

Read the whole story:

Your New Sunday Tribune? | Media | Chicago Reader by Mike Miner.

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.

Clay Shirky Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

“The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case,” notes Clay Shirky. I can list models, but no one can predict right now which will be here in 5 years or 50. This piece is based on my remarks at Chicago Journalism Townhall. It is currently a draft, so I welcome your comments or suggestions as I work to develop it further. I have listed the models and included examples of each, however my list is not exhaustive at this point. If you have a suggestion for a site I’ve overlooked, leave it as a comment. Currently, the models and examples reflect mostly newspaper, not television news operations.

The economic assumptions that businesses operate under aren’t the same today as they were 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Today, we live in a time of abundance, not scarcity. Thomas Jefferson noted that an infinite or abundant resource, once created, costs nothing to give away and the original creator retains the original.

Give away what’s abundant, say information or news, to increase your market and build your reputation. Charge for what is scarce, and make money from that. For news, timeliness or in-depth coverage might be the scarce aspects.

Not all opportunities for making money from content can be captured by the creator, but if giving some information away for free increases market, 20% of a large pie, is better than 90% of a small pie.

Those who are making money from models based on scarcity aren’t guaranteed a market share in models based on abundance. In businesses that are based on scarcity, economies of scale prevail, favoring “big” over small and promoting consolidation.

In “freeconomics,” the long-tail prevails and “big” is no advantage. This business model works with small markets, not big operations.

Surveying existing news operations, from small non-profits to large well-established corporations, I identified eight business models alternatives to those typically called mainstream media.

• Collaborate and syndicate
  • The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Record of Hackensack, N.J.; the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.; The Buffalo (N.Y.) News; and the Daily News of New York  share content and look to increase their appeal to advertisers. They can cover stories better with fewer reporters by sharing. Other groups of news operations are doing this, as well as some newspapers and television stations. View Source
• Non-profit funding from grants and foundations
  • Often this kind of model sets out to provide news to populations, geographic areas, or topics that are not covered well by existing media. Chicagotalks.org, Community Media Workshop, chitowndailynews.org, womensenews.org are a few of these. The low barriers to entry in online publishing make these models possible
• Local pay, in an NPR-like model
  • Small with relatively low traffic counts. A few,  MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon,  top 200,000 visitors per month. Some of these are non-profits, too.  Len Witt intends to add a journalist to an existing popular placeblog, with foundation support which he seek to replace with money from local readers.
  • Another from MinnPost. The braubloghas a widget collecting donations from “Highbrau” supporters ($25) and “Lowbrau” supporters ($10) with Ruth Harnisch matching funds.
• Get a patron
  • Mark Cuban has funded sleuthshare.com, bailoutsleuth.com to investigate stock stories and the current bailout. His proposal for a “beatwriter collective” where several reporters are bankrolled by sports team owners, but editorial control remains with the daily newspaper proposes to help newspapers, benefit the sports franchise owners, and be less expensive than advertising alone would be.
• Hybrid model combines features of other models
  • llinois foundations have $350 billion in assets and they are required to invest 5% of that, or $17 billion, in programs that serve a social purpose each year. New legislation recently introduced in the legislature, would allow the formation of  L3C corporations,  which are  hybrid  non-profits that can make some money. View source.
  • NewWest.net is an interesting case. It provides local areas with a turn-key website, but aggregates stories and aims to be the place where water rights and other environmental issues can be discussed on a regional level. They also set up and run events and conferences across the West, and that is one of their revenue sources.
• Post news story “bids”and take reader “pledges” and donations to fund stories. If the story is picked up by a news organization, donors are repaid.
  • Spot.us does this, mostly for the Oakland and Bay area so far. The potential here is in the software which can automate the bidding and donation collection process.
• Begin mobile or online, evolve to print
  • Ohmynews.com (here is the English version which is a translation of the Korean original) the original online citizen news website which had professional journalists as editors and reporters but relied on user-generated content was influential in politics, and evolved into a media institution that has a printed version. MyMissourian from University of Missouri followed a similar path and publishes in print in the Weekend Missourian.
• Open source or “King Gillette” model
  • Free and pro versions where 10% of users pay for the other 90%. Flickr.com uses this model. The MLB sites for each team allow you to get scores, see text of the game for free, but to watch in real-time, you have to pay.

With new operations coming online daily, and some going offline, it is an exciting time to be involved in the news business, but difficult to keep up with all the changes. The Online Journalism Review (OJR) compiled a list of 20 sites on the rise that includes sites which are non-profit and several that are for profit, who use a local advertising model for money.

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• Knight Foundation Gives $390K To Four Local News Sites (paidcontent.org)
• PBS should become the NPR of TV (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• New Models To Compensate Journalists And Writers (techdirt.com)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About News (gigaom.com)

Remember what Clay Shirky says, “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 reporting we need.”

Here is a list of all the newsroom libraries and research layoffs and buyouts from IRE listserv by  Michelle Quigley with
Updated 6/8/2009

Here is my list of new roles for journalists:

• curation Whether you write about religion or not, this project provides a concrete example of journalistic curation. The work of the journalist as curator, according to Jeff Jarvis, is to “create order, to correct and vet” information. Mindy McAdams fleshed out the role further, explaining that a journalist curator uses selection, culling, context, arrangement, organization, and expertise to create a networked, hyperlinked project, like exhibits in a museum. The resulting project is non-linear and interactive — a searchable, Web-based structure of knowledge, made up of text, hyperlinks and effective site navigation. (from my Poynter story)

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three core reasons why Wall Street failed so badly in the fall of 2008: The firms lacked a higher purpose, lacked a clear strategy, and mismanaged their risk.

via Why Be an Ethical Company? They’re Stronger and Last Longer – BusinessWeek.

Companies that didn’t go boom in the bust:

Charles Schwab & Co. (SCHW) has largely avoided the huge fallout. So has US Bancorp (USB). A quality both of these companies share is a laser-like focus on customer service and on honesty and transparency. This comes from their cultures.

Neither company touched the subprime mortgage securitization market, because they saw it as risky and simply not the kind of business that served the company’s long-term interests. I’d wager, as well, that these companies didn’t feel comfortable asking their employees to sell unethical mortgages to customers, a practice undertaken by many subsidiaries of the big Wall Street investment banks and large bank-holding companies.

People in the corps that lost money were afraid to speak up about what they saw that was wrong, because “The silencing of employees who sought to challenge strategy and risk-management practices likely also undermined the banks’ moral authority and emboldened those who already felt inclined to do the wrong thing.”

The big bonuses being given out by firms like Citibank, suggest they are still on the wrong-track with a short-term focus on making money quick. The author gives examples of companies where ethics has tempered greed, and the businesses have profited or done better than the cut-throats.

Costco, where they pay employees more, and also the differential between what the CEO makes and regular employees is not as great as at many businesses, has a better employee sales rates than its competitors.

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3-D printers can make it as easy to create small objects out of plastic as it is to print text on a sheet of paper. But until recently, they cost a few thousand dollars, putting them of the reach of crafting enthusiasts. Now a wave of open source desktop prototyping devices such as Makerbot and RepRap are trying to change that. They are fairly inexpensive and backed by a robust community that is happy to share designs, tips and mods. Hobbyists call it ‘having China on your desktop.’

via 3-D Printers Make Manufacturing Accessible | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

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• 3D printing summit this weekend in Providence + MakerBot raffle (makezine.com)

Posted via web from Noteoreous

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