How Would You Save Journalism?

Most of these models make a critically flawed assumption: that everyone gets the same thing out of the content, and accordingly, that a one-size-fits-all solution will accommodate everyone.<p>We need to think more deeply about the statistical distribution patterns in consumption of journalism (or of content, period). For instance, many of the recent experiments in selling content -- music, movies, games, etc. -- online have resulted in an interesting dynamic, something like a power-law distribution. Approximately 5-8% of all users will account for 80% of the revenues generated.<p>Instead of trying to beef up that percentage, we should think about <i>tailoring a power version of the product to that power userbase</i>, then charging them the price they're willing to pay (which may be much higher than a mass-market price). In the meantime, everyone else gets the basic version of the content for a more basic price.<p>If this sounds like freemium, that's because it basically is. Freemium is a fancy word for what economists call price discrimination, i.e., charging different prices to different customer bases depending on different channels and/or needs. Saving journalism will mean getting really deep into the weeds on nailing the power law curve for any given type of content.

The end of the article has a great idea, combining both the voluntary donation model and adding a lean component by asking what people would want to read about. I feel like it might not be a success though as readers want you to just know what they want and bring them something new rather than asking you to do research. Maybe choosing from a selection of ideas though, that could definitely work.<p>I'm putting my money on tablet magazines as the future of journalism. Technology has made it so we don't need as many journalists reporting the same news, so it makes sense to redeploy them to niches.<p>On digital magazines the payments are also more frictionless as Apple/Google have already set it up, and I have a theory that the reading style is different too. On the internet people want quick, shallow bites of information, but when you're holding a tablet you probably have at least ten minutes to really get into the deep, quality articles that professional journalists excel at.<p>On my project (issimomag.com) we're having to really push our journalists not just to write but to become true digital natives by finding pictures, videos, soundbytes, mini apps, etc if appropriate to go with all stories. At an event? Get your phone out, or better yet have a camera. The platform can handle a gallery of thirty pictures effortlessly whereas traditionally you'd obviously need to find space for them. In fact the pictures could be the entire story, no more needed. Honestly its a bit of a struggle to change the culture after decades of stagnation sometimes but it's one that journalists need to make.

I think there’s a big place for a Kickstarter for journalism- consumers pay to get the news that they want to hear. I saw this most during the Occupy actions last year. Livestreamers would go out and cover events in their cities, funded through donations. People found livestreamers whose actions and viewpoints got them their news best, and then paid them directly. I’m sure a lot of them felt the thrill of hearing their name thanked over a livestream watched by 1000s. But others were simply paying for journalism- and in a way big news organizations are not prepared to replicate. These weren’t micropayments, but (often) funding of specific things. This month’s cell phone bill, a better camera for better video, a light to see the action better. The connection between spending your money and the results it brings needs to be tight. Watsi knows this about philanthropy and executes perfectly. Maybe we need something similar to that for journalism. This doesn’t leave much room for profit, but I often prefer news sources without profit as a primary goal (Mother Jones, NPR, et al.)<p>This is similar to the change the music industry is going through. There will always be enough money to fund the creation of good music and good journalism. The question is how it will be distributed in the future, and whether those industries will still generate the profit they used to.<p>Musicians now release their albums independently for free or cheap, and then make their cash from live shows and selling merchandise. This directly funds the artist, but doesn’t leave room for a record company to take it’s cut. This freaks out the music industry exactly the way the journalism industry is freaking out. I think we are shifting away from following organizations for our news to following individuals and funding them directly. Talking to them on Twitter. Impacting what they cover next. As much as big news organizations try to imitate this, it’s never the same as talking to and donating to an independent journalist. Like the difference between seeing your favorite band in a tight little club and at a stadium. There might not be enough profit around to fund big newsrooms full of reporters at desks, but I am pretty sure there will be enough money for reporters to make a living, especially if they can come together in collectives in coworking spaces like the leanest of start-ups do.

I think that journalism ( in the sense of newspapers) is largely doomed. For the general purpose "where did a bomb go off?" news, one site per country is enough, so the biggest site will simply win ( and can sustain itself on an ad model). For more in depth reporting, I do not see a way to beat hobbyist or semi-professional blogs, since there is simply no way how a journalist can beat a specialist. Especially if the specialist is working for free. [1] Above of this, I think there is a market for long form journalism, which can be sold by ebooks. ( And probably these ebook sales require a quality blog as advertisement.)<p>So I think that a lot of journalists will need a new job, since their old one was generated by the trouble of moving paper around. And I think the future of journalism will be very few news portals, who produce baseline chatter, plus a lot of much more specialized sites in addition to a few aggregators. Unfortunately this is a construction which is easily swamped by PR bullshit. So an editorial board, which publishes curated links, may actually be worth something.<p>[1] This does not mean that an average blog is a good source, it means that the best blog will always beat an average newspaper article. A random tech journalist can simply not beat Bruce Schneier in anything crypto related.

Why is journalism necessary?<p>The premise of journalism is that society is made better by masses of people reading entertaining narrative stories about public figures. The stories don't have to be true. You just have to be (a) insulated from adverse legal outcomes, and (b) the story shouldn't bring the newspaper into disrepute among the people who read it or the people who pay the bills.<p>In other areas of life, when we need information disseminated to people who need to know, we don't immediately reach out to talented and entertaining writers. We might create data collection system, reporting systems, alert systems, computerized dashboards, systems of peer review, systems to identify people who provide reliable information, that sort of thing. We may sometimes want stories about daily life, but for that you might call on the services of an anthropologist, not a poet.<p>So why, when it comes to public affairs, do we think we need the ink-stained wretch? Perhaps because that's how it's been done for the past few centuries. Enfranchisement reached the common person slowly, and information reached the masses via printed documents, which were a mix of necessary daily information and entertainment. For most of that time, the press was as ridiculous as it is now, and usually far more partisan. The period in the middle of the 20th century, when it at least aspired to civic-mindedness, was the anomaly.<p>Let us not take for granted that an informed public and the institution of journalism are synonymous.<p>Disclaimer: ex-journalism student

I think one interesting model missing is the cross publisher subscription model. Think Netflix for Journalism. I send in 10 dollars a month for access to a bunch of different Journalism sites. The publishers get paid a bulk rate for access for the subscriber base. If you're not a member, you get more adds of hit the paywall on those sites.<p>The problem is that it's a very difficult business to start and run and has less money in it than the Movie and TV industry.

&#62;"The journalism industry seems to be in trouble. Newspaper revenue has shrunk from $57.4 billion in 2003 to $38.6 billion in 2012."<p>I think what the article is trying to say is that the <i>printed</i> journalism is in trouble. And it might well be, but there are a lot of other forms of journalism that are rising up.<p>We might not see something homogeneous resulting from it or a direct substitute/evolution of these printed media formats. Maybe one of the consequences of living on a permanently connected society is that we no longer need a periodical summarization on whats going on in the world.<p>But as a journalist myself, theres a couple of things I'd like to see, even if they might not be profitable or practical:<p>1. A big daily newspaper shifting the news producing cycle. Devote the web to last minute, daily news. Create a weekly focused on analysis and long features.<p>2. A tool to reach different groups of readers with different ages and ways of consuming news pieces.<p><pre><code> 2.1 How are teenagers discovering these days whats going on in the world? Through links in 4chan? ok, lets put links in 4chan then. 2.2 How are 60-somethings engaging with important issues? through long forwarded mail chains with powerpoints attached? Great, lets do that! </code></pre> 3. A way to effectively measure audience, something more useful than pageviews and time spent on a page.<p>4. An advertising platform that doesn't consider ads something to sell for cents on the click. This has been one of the major disrupting elements in the printed journalism world. We used to sell ads for A LOT of money, even when (or maybe because) there was no way to effectively measure the reaction of the reader.<p>But mostly what we are seeing is a total transformation of a business and I don't think theres a way to change that or "save" anything. It's similar, in a sense, to what happen to music labels a decade ago.<p>A. The business structure cannot sustain the current way the people are using the product.<p>B. People in charge are worried of making big changes that might render them obsolete, therefore they try to maintain the statu quo.<p>C. Most of the income is gone. Ads are cheaper and people buy less newspapers.

I get to take part in a lot of these discussions and find the following response handy (via <a href="http://newsmary.tumblr.com/post/32264906546/your-approach-to-saving-british-newspapers-will-not" rel="nofollow">http://newsmary.tumblr.com/post/32264906546/your-approach-to...</a>):<p><pre><code> Your post advocates a ( ) technical (X) legislative () market-based ( ) crowd-sourced approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the rapaciousness of modern publishers.) ( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist ( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it ( ) No one will be able to find the guy ( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste (X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model (X) Users of the web will not put up with it ( ) Print readers will not put up with it ( ) Good journalists will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business ( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt (X) It will destroy the competition that makes journalism great Specifically, your plan fails to account for ( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news ( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC ( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives ( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct” ( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism ( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism ( ) The high cost of investigative journalism (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting ( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism” ( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist (X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football ( ) The necessity of the editing process (X) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism ( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog ( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything ( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income (X) Rupert Murdoch (X) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering ( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting ( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) The tragedy of the commons ( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing ( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites and the following philosophical objections may also apply: (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause ( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting. ( ) Information does not want to be free ( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly ( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk ( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug ( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did (X) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins (X) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy ( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue ( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once. ( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due ( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists ( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things ( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Free society depends upon a free press ( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got ( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into. ( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies. ( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses. ( ) You are Jeff Jarvis ( ) Or Dave Winer Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!</code></pre>

I worked for a newspaper group from 2001-2008 trying to convince them to reinvent themselves and veer off the suicide course they had chosen.<p>They have to stop trying to be "portals" in the crap late-90s meaning (which reflects their legacy model, especially AP-affiliated era) and start differentiating.<p>If you're a local paper, stop wasting newsprint on regurgitating what everyone already saw on a website, television, or heard on a radio while you were still busy laying the pages out. Stop stroking your vanity opining in editorials about things for which you have no special knowledge and demonstrate that the only reason your opinion is more "valuable" than the reader's is that you buy ink in barrels.<p>If your content is valuable to readers and actually has lasting value, they'll still buy it in print. They'll also buy it as a pushed product to whatever device they prefer. If it's valuable to other content outlets, they'll pay for it as well. Drop your AP affiliation (a rent-seeker that makes government look amateur in comparison) and actually sell to aggregation or re-print customers instead of paying AP for the privilege of sniping your content for resharing and offering you nothing of significance to your readership.<p>Unfortunately every news group I encountered in those 7 years were too hide-bound to "how we used to make money", and the vast majority were inbred from top to bottom. Run a multi-million dollar news group? Well obviously you started as a cub reporter and have a journalism degree, which of course makes you imminently more qualified to see into future markets than some outsider who isn't a journalist.<p>The industry has signed up for a suicide pact, and only after they succeed in that will new and viable players rise up to fill the real demand for relevant news.

Most of my friends under forty don't read a daily newspaper. Yet as they marry, buy a house and have kids a curious thing happens - they develop an avid interest in local news.<p>Newspapers should refocus solely on local and state news. They should deliver it digitally on smart phones. The revenue model is the hard part, but I'd probably go the subscription route.<p>But your local newspaper is never going to evolve gracefully. They will keep publishing the old way until their current subscribers die off and then will slowly go out of business.<p>But there is a huge opportunity out there for the entrepreneur who gets it right.

They left out the Carlos Slim model: Some rich guy with an agenda keeps the paper alive by giving it money, giving it cheap loans, or just buying it. A lot of small, political magazines operate this way.

no-one has mentioned the obvious - tax. the UK gives cash to the BBC via a compulsory television licence fee. say what you will about the beeb, it comes up with some excellent stuff. someone more eloquent than me could surely make the argument that a functioning democracy needs an accurate and neutral repository of history as it happens. think of it as a news API and let others figure out how to make it local etc. tax in the US? YMMV...

Another option is to make the content more compelling. Let's face it - even the NYTimes (which I pay for) has a lot of really poorly written articles, especially in the Tech and Business arenas. It takes a lot of my time to sort through the mess of factually incorrect stuff in order to get good information. In fact, a lot of the reason I pay for the Times is for the commentary - Krugman, Friedman, etc. I would pay more for better journalism.

Create a group of highly respected editors coming from a wide variety of perspectives that are salaried (no bonuses) and appointed for a single fixed period, and that can present stories from a wide variety of sources. These editors are to agree not to work for another news organization for at least a year after serving.<p>It would have no writers or television crews of its own, but would pick the best stories from organizations that do.<p>Any member of this board could pick a topic to cover. And a majority of the board could shoot down a particular piece for failing to conform to its standard.<p>One half hour broadcast a day I can watch any time would be nice and a web site. I don't care if its ad-supported but advertisers are to have no say on content. Some independent funding will probably be necessary. Make it a kickstarter project.

It could be solved by going the infrastructure route. I'm thinking a free ISP with ads instead of monthly payments as a source of revenue. The ISP would have a whitelist of websites that are available, everything else is blocked. Businesses would pay a monthly fee to the ISP to be added to its whitelist. In return, ads would be displayed after users spend a certain amount of time on their website, with ad revenues going directly to the website.<p>The free, ad-driven ISP would start out as an experiment in a small area. It would be available via public WIFI to primarily serve mobile devices without cellular data plans.

Social media and on-line communities are more democratic than traditional journalism, however we miss out on an important form of journalism: investigative journalism.<p>Wikileaks fills a void, but is dependent on security exploitation.<p>In the future we will potentially miss out on a valuable occupation. Perhaps corporate/government sponsorship for investigative journalism is the way forward.

Imagine a world where Best Buy hired tech reporters to cover tech news and also sold the technology products to their readers.<p>Or where fashion magazines sell the products they cover on their website rather than advertising.<p>Why haven't they moved toward this? Journalistic integrity?

I don't know about everyone else, but I wish I could read less news of higher quality. I would subscribe to a news service that only gave me a handful of news articles at the end of the week—well researched and written by people who know what they are talking about.

I would argue that the internet's erosion of our attention span is making 'journalism' type articles less and less appealing to users.<p>I really hope, as @pippy remarks, that investigative journalism finds a place.

I think dig jobs should be considered Intellectual Property and be protected for some short ~day-week time period.

Pay what you want. 50% goes to taxes.

They point to HumbleBundle as a potential replacement model, but that one has already stagnated. So many repeated games in the humblebundle offerings makes each new one less desirable. Recently they started with 'humble-bundle-of-the-week'... which gave me two weeks of things they'd already offered... which means that they've effectively turned into a traditional online retailer: "Hello, here's our inventory".<p>The uniqueness and freshness was lost and the unsubscribe button was struck - without that <i>je ne sais quoi</i>, there is less forgiveness when regarding their foibles - the spammy emails of the same content, the "Every game has a linux version (but actually may not!)", the lack of a mechanism for patches and updates, some games shipping in a broken state. It was fun while it lasted, but as they transition to a quirky-but-regular online retailer, their original business model is not proved robust.

I recently had a discussion here about Nazis rounding up people for concentration camps and why the right to bear arms does not help much. IMO the first amendment is a better defence than the second.<p>In the end that's what journalism is for - telling us when and where democracy and our rule of law is failing. Doing so clearly, authoritatively and with impact.<p>Wikileaks is in that definition journalism - as was watergate. We will all be much much poorer if we cannot ensure the survival of that journalism.<p>I think the secret lies in the fact I cannot tell between a blog post about a conspiracy nut in a parking garage and a blog post about the deputy director of the FBI in a parking garage.<p>Ben Bradlee could. We need editors if we are going to keep journalism.

A much more interesting subject than how we can save journalism is whether journalism can save us.

First off, journalism is a multi-faceted problem that insiders think about in terms of their past relationship and outsiders think of with contempt. The above dynamics make it a very challenging problem to move from here to there.<p>The failure of legacy print publishing isn't about advertising. The failure of legacy digital publishing isn't about advertising. Information needs to be treated as you would any physical asset. The primary difference is that information is the most liquid asset in the world. Information has very few barriers to transmission, supply is almost entirely an artificial constraint and only a question of time and demand before a market for information is satisfied.<p>What that means is that print papers are slow transmission conduits with a relatively high artificial barrier on supply. Information follows diffusion principles in that it naturally wants to move from high to low states. Got secrets? ;)<p>Snazzy UIs, native readers and whatever kind of third-party aggregator everyone wants to build will be a failure. I know for fact that if I paid journalists anything, they would write on nwzPaper; no questions asked.<p>At a 13% proficient literacy rate in the US, and worse in most of the world, it's a challenge to cultivate a new journalism environment online, but it is absolutely a solvable problem.<p>Patch.com, Examiner.com and Yahoo's associated content have all but thrown in the towel. AOL has bet big on Armstrong and Patch and per their February job req, it looks like they want to double down!<p>The new journalism content and revenue model can only develop on top of the right platform. The stakes are quite high as the first winner will also win many adjacent markets as well!<p>I am biased, but I've got years of thinking and development into developing an actual platform solution that can efficiently scale global. Six months of beta knowledge and data and the next iteration coming soon.