Throwing some cold water on the expectations Iceland as journalism haven:

, the problem is that whatever Iceland does, it can’t change the 500-pound gorilla of international media law: the principle that publication happens at the point of download, not the point of upload. The poster child case for this principle is Dow Jones & Co., Inc. v. Gutnick, a case that reached the High Court of Australia in 2002. In that case, Gutnick sued Barron’s Online for publishing an allegedly defamatory article about him, and despite the fact that no one in Australia other than Gutnick’s lawyers actually read the offending article, the judges unanimously ruled that Australian laws applied, and thus Dow Jones (publisher of Barron’s Online) was liable to Gutnick. At least at the time, the High Court of Australia was the highest court worldwide to hear a case involving this issue, and for better or worse, its ruling has carried the day in similar cases around the world since. [...]

With the Gutnick ruling setting the current paradigm for international jurisdiction, the IMMI is not nearly the journalistic fortress it’s meant to be. Plaintiffs will still be able to sue in a libel-friendly jurisdiction (like London, for example) and thereby circumvent all the protections the IMMI is meant to offer. To be sure, if the publisher and his assets are entirely within Icelandic jurisdiction, the plaintiff may not be able to do much about the publication.

Read More – Citizen Media Law: Fortress Iceland? Probably Not.

(via Jay Rosen)

I pitched the whole world on Dolly Freed. Seriously, every magazine you can think of and a hundred more.

Nobody was interested in a profile of a woman who used to eat roadkill, make moonshine, and sit around reading Sartre with her alcoholic and probably-genius father, a woman who later went on to get her GED, put herself through college, and become a NASA rocket scientist who helped figure out the mess behind the Challenger explosion before turning her back on that world for a life that felt more authentic and invigorating.

Yeah, I can’t see the appeal whatsoever.

So after months of rejection, I bought myself a website about and used it to self-publish a long-form feature story about a month ago, called “Finding Dolly Freed.” [...]

So did Radiohead journalism succeed? I guess it depends on the definition of success. In the strictest sense of the word, yes, it worked: I recovered my costs. Yet you could look at the visitor-donation ratio — 160 of more than 5,000 visitors contributed — and extrapolate that this doesn’t appear to be a sustainable model, at least not in its current form. I choose to look at it this way: 160 people sent money they didn’t have to spend, to a person they didn’t even know — that, to me, is wondrous.

Someone else may find a better way to indie journalism in this form — I hope so. I’d be thrilled to see an independent self-publishing model fly, but if you’ll allow me a dogmatic moment here, for it to be truly meaningful the journalism must be inviolable: Story and storytelling matter but so does the journalist and whether he/she has built the story on a foundation of reporting and integrity. Institutional backing confers credibility, but in the wilds of the Internet, you’re on your own; trust begins and ends with you and your standards and approach.

Wired: Dolly, Rejection and Radiohead Journalism

A few years ago Josh Ellis was able to get most of all of his expenses paid for in advance to write a longform journalism piece Dark Miracle: Trinity, The Manhattan Project And The Birth Of The Atomic Age, and still had $25. (Updated: see comments)

(Photo by Alex Torrenegra)

Summary of my view: It’s a great idea, but executing it properly will be extremely difficult.

If you didn’t hear – The New York Times is going to “meter” access to their site. Readers will be able to view a certain number of articles per month for free, after which they’ll have to pay.

I didn’t even know about the Financial Times meter before last week when I first read rumors about the NYT takes the same approach. I occasionally read articles at FT, and have occasionally linked to articles there. Their meter gives me no trouble.

That unobtrusiveness may come at a price. It took me only one Google search to find a way to circumvent their meter – this Greasemonkey script. Apparently, they just use cookies to determine the number of articles you’ve viewed. I’m not sure how many of FT’s paying customers are going to go through the trouble of installing Firefox extensions or manually deleting cookies to get access to the site, but I’d guess it would be more of a problem for the NYT’s larger and more general audience.

So that’s where execution gets tricky. Start making the meter more effective, less easy to route around, and you’re likely to end up making it a lot more intrusive to casual readers. There’s already something of a blogger backlash against the plan, and if the meter ends up being cumbersome, the Times could find their casual readership dropping off (and their advertising revenues declining).

And that’s to say nothing of people outright pirating their articles through copy and paste. If they start trying to implement means to keep people from copying and pasting the text from their articles, they risk alienating their customers even more.

So yes, it will be tricky to pull off. With a sufficiently generous meter (20 articles a month seems reasonable), affordable access rates (I’d be great if they also had some metered plans – say 50 articles a month for $5, instead of having to buy unlimited access), unobtrusive technology, and, of course, high quality content, they could have a winning business model on their hands. (I’d also encourage them to offer free unlimited access to libraries, schools, charities, etc., as well as to visitors from developing nations.) But it will be a hard balance to pull off, especially if NYT bigwigs push for tight security and restrictions.

See also: Paid content has a good look at the ends and out of it.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

Wall Street Journal: How Google Can Help Newspapers

(via Wu)

Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content starategy .

When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants have criticised aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content, commentators have questioned why the company doesn’t simply make its content invisible to search engines.

Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up lionks to it in users’ search results.

Murodch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Mumbrella: Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index

(via Jay Rosen)

I’d be quite happy to see News Corps shoot themselves in the foot, but I have the feeling people who actually know what they are talking about will stop this from happening.

Two interesting idea-bombs via Jay Rosen:

To my eye, one of the more interesting new-model ideas popped up at this summer’s meeting of investigative reporting nonprofits outside New York. The idea, mentioned by two participants, was to set up a separate unit that would do contract or customized research for paying clients. Revenue generated would supply one piece of the business-model formula that would pay for the core investigative reporting business.

The concept seemed both promising and potentially ethically tricky, but in any case it seemed like a fresh approach. Fresh, anyway, till I discovered that the owners of the Economist have been doing this since 1946 through the Economist Intelligent Unit. These days the EIU, with more than 40 offices worldwide, sells country analyses in 200 markets, provides custom research and presentations for executives, convenes conferences on both government and business topics, and more. It calls itself the “world’s pre-eminent global research and advisory firm.” If that’s true, it’s obviously a business that’s bringing in tens of millions of dollars annually in revenue.

Online Journalism Review: Research for hire: A revenue model for the news?

And:

Common Craft, a professional “explainer” service:

Common Craft is a small company owned by Lee and Sachi LeFever in Seattle, Washington, USA. The company was founded by Lee in 2003 as an online community consulting company. We started making videos in 2007 with our first video: RSS in Plain English. Since then, we’ve published two kinds of videos:

1. Educational Videos – Videos we create to sell on this website (our current focus)
2. Custom Videos – Videos we were hired to create by companies like Google, Ford and LinkedIn.

Combined, we’ve created over 30 videos that have been viewed over 10 million times online. Our current focus is building a library of educational videos that help educators save time. If you’re in need of a custom video, please contact us or visit our Explainer Network to find talented producers.

Rosen indicates they are very busy.

Under the circumstances, I think it may prove very difficult for commerce-oriented enterprises to succeed over the long term. Someplace like a dry cleaner is able to make money because it doesn’t need to worry about being undercut by competitors who aren’t trying to earn a profit. If for some reason Bill Gates decided to pour $5 billion into a foundation dedicated to offering not-for-profit dry cleaning services to Washington, DC then the existing dry cleaners would be in huge trouble. They don’t have that problem because nobody wants to run non-profit dry cleaners. But lots of people want to write about political issues for reasons that have nothing to do with profit-maximization. And my sense is that organizations are increasingly doing this. CAP/AF was a think tank early adopter in terms of building robust in-house new media capacity, but to the best of my knowledge just about every think tank and advocacy shop in town would like to get in on the action. And ultimately, a proliferation of content that’s not supposed to make money is going to make it even harder than it already is for those trying to make profits to do so.

Think Progress

(via Jay Rosen)

See also: Kevin Kelly’s article The New Socialism.

Once again, speaking in defense of those of us who publish original news in blog format:

Yes, we have cultivated sources. Not “just” the community members who kindly turn to us when they see a crash or a fire or a crime, because they know we will cover it NOW, but also politicians, community leaders, government employees, other ‘insiders’ who know we understand that if they feel something is important enough to check out, chances are it matters to thousands of community members, so off we go to dig in.

And yes, we sit through never-ending community meetings. Almost every night of the week. Some afternoons too. From design review, to Hearing Examiner appeals, to hearings scheduled just as formalities for some ongoing government process – buried in published public notices – and we go to City Hall and the County Council Chambers and the courthouse downtown.

We cover important stories that others don’t bother with. No paper in our area, big or small, saw fit to bother with a murder trial last year that started with a shooting in an area of our neighborhood where “that just doesn’t happen” and led through a story of stalking and self-defense, with the teenage suspect ultimately exonerated after a year behind bars. They all read our work so they knew it was happening and chose to ignore it.

I paid a reporter to cover it daily — it lasted a few weeks — even though at the time I couldn’t really afford it — just knew it had to be done and I couldn’t do a full day of court justice while also managing the rest of the site. Now, months later, we have the revenue to pay more journalists to work with us – freelance for starters but I hope more permanent soon – including two veterans whose jobs were cut at local papers big and small for $ reasons.

So, dear old-media folks who I understand are acting out of pain and fear – I have been through layoffs myself — please stop attacking and dismissing everything with “blog” attached to it – it is only a publishing format. If there is a specific writer you are upset about, call them out by name/site, but get educated and learn that the “blog” world has a surprising amount of REAL JOURNALISM going on, produced by REAL JOURNALISTS, and since some of us small operations seem to be showing signs of sustainability, this just may be the way a lot of REAL JOURNALISM is produced for the foreseeable future – you are welcome to buy a domain, install a CMS, and get after it yourselves, too.

–Tracy Record, editor/co-publisher, West Seattle Blog
(Seattle, WA, 650,000 pageviews/mo., 20,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once weekly)

From: Jay Rosen’s Tumblr

West Seattle Blog

I caught some of David Simon’s testimony to the Senate on the radio the other day. It was like nails on a chalk board for me – listening to the same dead wrong arguments over and over again.

Ryan Tate says some of the things I wanted to shout through the radio:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

Gawker: David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur

Memo to newspaper journalists: “online news” doesn’t begin and end with Matt Drudge, and newspaper subscription never paid your salary.

The Huffington Post announced today that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund.

“The importance of investigative journalism cannot be overstated — especially during our tumultuous times — and we are delighted to be creating an initiative whose goal is to produce stories that will have a real impact both nationally and locally,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. “Everyone who recognizes the role good journalism plays in our democracy is looking for ways to preserve it during this time of great transition for the media. The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is one of the ways we are addressing that need, while also providing work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets. We are grateful to the American News Project and The Atlantic Philanthropies for their generous contributions, and intend to engage with other donors as we continue to expand the Fund.”

Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, said, “There is no more critical reporting than investigative journalism. This nonprofit investigative journalism venture is a very important and logical next step for The Huffington Post. Our mission will be to produce and distribute distinguished, independent journalism made widely-available to all news outlets. We are proud to be working with our prestigious partners and look forward to expanding and building upon this venture with other investigative news organizations from around the country, and the world.”

Full Story: PressThink

From an un-scientific survey of laid off reporters:

Many of the respondents have found new jobs. It’s too early to tell about those who lost their jobs within the past year, but for those who did so between 1999 and 2007:

• Just under 36 percent said they found a new job in less than three months. Add those who say they freelance full time, and the total jumps to 53 percent.

• Less than 10 percent say it took them longer than a year.

• Only a handful – 6 percent – found other newspaper jobs. The rest are doing everything from public relations to teaching to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store.

While they’ve found work, many of the people with new jobs are making less money. The midpoint salary range for their old jobs was $50,000 to $59,000. Those who listed salaries for their new jobs were a full salary band lower – $40,000 to $49,000.

Of the people who volunteered their old newspaper salary, only 2 percent made less than $20,000 a year. Of the people who gave me their new salaries, that number shot up to 17 percent. The age of those at the bottom of the salary scale has changed surprisingly as well. The median age of those who made less than $20,000 at their old newspaper job was 24. The median age of those now making less than $20,000 is 48.

Full Story: American Journalism Review

On Monday, Seattle P-I owner The Hearst Corp. said that while it would end the print edition of the paper effective Tuesday, it would continue to maintain Seattlepi.com as a source of local news and opinion.

It marks the first time that a major metropolitan daily has attempted the switch from print and online to digital only. The shift could eventually be replicated in cities across the United States.

But at least in Seattle, the new digital product will be very different from the old operation — in both size and tradition.

Managers said the site will have an editorial staff of 20, down from more than 150. An additional 20 people are being hired to sell advertising. The staff writers remaining include columnists Joel Connelly, Art Thiel and Jim Moore, as well as cartoonist David Horsey.

Full Story: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Put simply, it’s getting too expensive to gather news.

So here’s a novel idea: Let’s get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge.

Remember, most professors aren’t paid for what they write now. When I publish an article in an academic journal, I don’t earn a cent. But I also don’t engage more than a handful of readers, mainly fellow specialists in my own field.

It wasn’t always that way. A hundred years ago, many of the leading lights in the social sciences and the humanities wrote for the popular press. If we want to revive the press – as well as our own struggling disciplines – we might look to their example.

Consider Robert E. Park, founder of the “Chicago School” of sociology and one of the most prominent intellectuals of the early 20th century. After earning his PhD in 1904 from the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, Park became secretary and press agent of the Congo Reform Association. Park’s muckraking magazine articles exposed Belgium’s vicious atrocities in the Congo, helping to turn world opinion against the colonial regime of King Leopold.

Full Story: The Christian Science Monitor

(via Ethan Z)

After a day or two of playing with the numbers, he came back to me with an interesting picture: Based on its current level of online ad revenue, he says, the L.A. Times could support a staff of about 275 people at their present salaries, and even offer a slight bump in benefits. This factors in office space, equipment, and all other major costs. And get this: The paper would be a solid moneymaker, boasting a profit margin of about 10%.

Of those 275 folks, Stanton figures, about 150 would work in the newsroom; the rest would sell ads, provide tech support, and handle various administrative duties.

This is far from a perfect solution, of course. Many older readers, in particular, are bound to balk at any arrangement that tries to force them online. What’s more, cutting the news-gathering ranks to just 150 would sharply curtail what the Times could do, while causing a great amount of pain to those who’ve lost their livelihoods. The paper today has about 625 reporters and editors around the world (a stable that’s down from the 1,000-plus when I was there just a couple of years ago).

But perfect isn’t an option for the newspaper industry anymore. “In turbulent times,” Drucker wrote, “the first task of management is to make sure of the institution’s capacity for survival.” And that’s just it: With 150 journalists, a paper such as the L.A. Times could indeed survive—and still provide an indispensable service to the community.

Full Story: Business Week

(via Jay Rosen)

The Arizona Guardian and Heat City are two examples of web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists.

The Arizona Guardian is run by four Phoenix-based journalists who were recently laid off from the East Valley Tribune. The Guardian covers legislative issues and other aspects of the state capitol.

Heat City is run by Nick Martin, another journalist laid off by the Tribune. The website covers criminal justice and media issues, but the centerpiece of its coverage is the trial of accused serial killer Dale Hausner.

Full Story: Media Shift

(via Ethan Z)

I know I’m stating the obvious, but if I brought anything away from last night’s journalist mash-up, No News Is Bad News, it’s that West Seattle Blog is HOT, HOT SHIT right now.

The premise of the event was … well, I don’t remember. But, what it became was a chance for 150ish journalists and a few of their subjects to come together in one room, talk about the state of the industry, pontificate on how we got where we are and who’s to blame, and toss around ideas for how to save QUALITY JOURNALISM (not necessarily ink and paper). West Seattle Blog, perhaps more than any other voice in the room, is demonstrating an idea, a business model, and a way to preserve local journalism. They have skin in the game. They’re making it work. They’re not just talking about it, they’re doing it. And doing it well. But they’re not saying they’ve found the digital news solution, either. They’ve found something that works in West Seattle, not necessarily the rest of the country or even the city.

Full Story: Seattle Weekly

West Seattle Blog

(via Jay Rosen)

In response to a long, righteous article in the New Republic about why the decline of newspaper is going to be bad for democracy, ex-journalist Dan Conover holds forth:

Goose a few newspaper journalists these days and they’re likely to exclaim something about why Americans should care about saving their industry. And it’s likely to sound something like this: “Without us protecting the public as investigative watchdogs, government corruption is going to run amok!”

Which might be a compelling point, were it not for five little things:

1. Watchdogging government is hardly the primary purpose of modern newspapers (it doesn’t even make the Top Three in most outfits), and if Watchdogging ever interferes with Job No. 1 (generating double-digit profit margins for shareholders), Watchdogging is right out;
2. Few newspaper “watchdog” reports are based primarily on original research;
3. Newspaper editors, for all their posturing about government openness, have roughly zero interest in opening up their own processes and decision-making to public inspection;
4. The amount of resources devoted to truly investigative, power-challenging, applecart-upsetting, potentially unpopular stories at the average American newspaper is likely dwarfed by the comics page budget;
5. And finally, this argument assumes without evidence that even if my objections were untrue, newspapers would still be the appropriate place for this important societal function. [...]

Ever wonder who does most of the public-policy grunt work in America? For the good guys, it’s typically underpaid crusaders at civic-minded non-profit groups, people who care about clean water and safe food and healthy children other such left-wing nonsense. Newspapers count on these scruffy muckrackers, even though they typically distance themselves from their “radical” agendas.

The bad guys, like the American Petroleum Institute, or, say Envron, hire platoons of well-groomed lobbyists, experts and public-relations specialists to sell their stories. And even though they are deliberately engaged in distorting the truth to protect their interests, these people are treated as respectable, credible media sources.

Much of what passes for watchdog investigative reporting is based on studies conducted by these pesky non-profits, or by anonymous government underlings in some state auditor’s office, or the federal GAO, and so on. They produce the proof, editors build stories around their findings, and each year on press awards night, some reporters get plaques that credit them with the whole enterprise.

Is there newspaper reporting, investigative or otherwise, that takes on a public-policy issue and challenges ruling orthodoxy without a boost from an interest group? Probably. But newspapers generally refuse to poke the status-quo without being able to cite some interest group for raising the issue. Wanna know why? Because the status quo is where the money and power are. Do the math.

One final thing about this weird dance of newspaper reporters and watchdog groups. In the old days, each benefited. Today, the only thing the newspaper gives the watchdog is greater exposure — not the ability to publish, not the credibility to contact influencers and decision-makers. What newspaper people won’t tell you is that their value to the original institutional watchdoggers is declining. Rapidly. [...]

These systemic failures do nothing to limit government corruption. Rather, the first-hand knowledge of how easy it is to warp press coverage and spin public opinion has the opposite effect. Through our sloppy standards and the overarching greed of our corporate paymasters, my former profession has encouraged generations of corporate and governmental sleaze. We didn’t watchdog President Bush’s claims about WMDs. We didn’t take seriously the voices that had been warning for years about the impending collapse of the subprime mortgage market. If your local newspaper gives the mayor’s denials of proven but complex facts equal weight with the facts themselves, then your city hall is likely rife with sleek, smug injustice. And so on.

Full Story:

(via Jay Rosen)

I’d previously written about the need to save professional media – not necessarily established newspapers – here. This definitely makes the case that the role of the big established news organization is a lot less important than we might think.

I used two examples: The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Jena 6 and the New Yorker’s immigrant detention centers. In the case of the former, regional bloggers covered the case until it got the attention of the Tribune’s Howard Witt, who went to Jena and did a story and managed to get it on the national radar. In the case of the latter, it’s still not a widely known issue and I imagine it was actually pretty heavily researched by advocacy groups before the NYer.

So really the main things that bloggers are missing is perceived legitimacy and authority of the establishment media: the power to make what advocacy groups or local or regional bloggers say matter. The establishment media completely failed the public on two most important issues facing us today: the pretense for the Iraq War, and the economic meltdown. Hundreds of bloggers were debunking the Iraq War claims as they were being made, and at least a few (Billmon for example) were warning us about the subprimes. If only anyone had listened.

They have been abject failures on one of the other most important issues of our time: the drug war. Gary Webb’s career was ruined for exposing the CIA’s complacency in drug running. Today, the best journalism on that beat is coming from an online source: Narco News.

In other words: maybe we really are better off without them after all.

1. Public funds investigative journalism
2. Angel funding for investigative journalism
3. Government funds Journalism
4. A Non-profit Trust funds Journalism
5. Regular Donation Drives funds Journalism
6. Small, localized, Print on demand newspapers
7. Small, online only news teams
8. A mix of free papers for young people and special editions with analysis for an older crowd
9. Subsidize serious reporting with consumer service coverage
10. Subsidize serious reporting with non-intrusive business line extensions
11. Small Newsroom of Investigative reporters, brand name bloggers and community managers
12. Subscription based site plus free articles
13. iTunes type Pay for each article using micropayments
14. Newspapers consortiums join forces with distributors like Google or Yahoo

Full Story: Media Videa

(via Jay Rosen)

See also my article on new revenue sources for professional news media outlets

What I imagine is a newsroom that is also a cafe. Of course the reporters would have desks somewhere private to do work (a 2nd floor would be ideal), but the front of the newsroom would be a public space where people could get coffee, eat a bagel, use the wireless, etc. At least one reporter would be on-hand to talk with members of the public during business hours. These would be publicly announced “office hours.” We wouldn’t make a big pony-show of it, it would just be a part of the cafe’s appeal. You may just be hanging out – but perhaps you’ll end up in a news story!

Aside from being a revenue stream (coffee, bagels, etc) it would create a deeper connection between the news organization and the public. Could story tips be garnered this way? Perhaps it would be a great way to meet and encourage citizen journalism partners. Could a “Newsroom Cafe” take on MediaBistro in the workshops/training department? Could the space eventually be used to organize civilized public debates? Is this something that could be franchised and repeated in the following cities: San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, etc?

Full Story: DigiDave

And of course, see also: New revenue sources for professional news media outlets

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Interesting links for Tuesday by andydickinson.net
• What journalists can learn from weeklies « Save the Media
• DigiDave | Communication is Key: A Journo-Entrepreneur's Important …

So let’s move to the concrete: the business model. How do we monetize this theoretical value tucked away in user-creator relationships?

You do it with an idea I’ve been flogging the past couple weeks. You do it with Mitch Ratcliffe’s idea, in which users pay creators for “added convenience or increased interaction.” Note the elegant fit: increased interaction between one person and another is what fosters relationships and trust. Giving paying users otherwise exclusive twitter access to the creator could work. SMS updates could work, as could a permission only room on friendfeed. Even something as simple as a gold star on paying users’ comments—a symbol that they support the creator financially—would provide incentive for the creator to reply. Tiers of stars—bronze, silver, gold—are possible too.

Full Story: Josh Young

See also: New revenue sources for professional news media outlets

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Penny for his thoughts « BuzzMachine
• Don’t Post The Evidence Unless It Supports Your Case
• Live Blogging at Mesh – Publishing 2.0

1) Show Hearst the door
2) Assemble a local ownership group
3) Kill the print edition
4) Bring in a top technologist
5) Bring in a top Internet executive
6) Supplement salaried reporters with paid community bloggers
7) Automate the advertising process
8) Keep the globe
9) Resurrect the print edition
10) Act quickly

Sounds good, but as previously noted there’s some serious caveats. Maybe switching to a weekly paper to start with (a la the Portland Tribune) rather than killing it off and then resurrecting it would be a better approach.

But having smart tech and ‘net folks running the show is key, as is automated contextual advertising.

Here’s another idea: sell an archive of Nirvana coverage through Lulu.

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the rest of the …
• Ten steps to save the Seattle PI, and maybe the rest of the …
• Save the PI, save the industry

If they could sell several ads per page and sell every single page view they offer, they might be able to generate something on the order of $10 per page per thousand views, or $450,000 per month—$5.4 million per year. (Niche sites can charge more. My Wi-Fi site once had about an $80 CPM when you added up all the ads spots on a page; the more general you get, the far lower the ad rates.)

That’s a reasonable amount of money, but no site sells all its inventory when they have that much to offer; the current ad climate is poor; and $10 per page might be too high an estimate.

Assuming a more reasonable set of assumptions, let’s say that the P-I could pull in the equivalent of $1.5 million per year starting on its first Web-only day from all ad efforts, including sponsorships, advertorial, and other relationships.

That’s enough for a publisher, a handful of back-office folks (programmers, administrative staff), and, with middling salaries and benefits, maybe 10 actual reporters who also act as videographers and podcasters. A lot of functions, including legal, would have to be outsourced. This also sidesteps any union issues the P-I would face in the transition.

Full Story: Publicola

(via Jay Rosen)

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the rest of the …
• Publicola » Blog Archive » Microsoft Layoffs. About Time.
• Publicola » Blog Archive » State Republicans in Heaven as Dems …

As promised, here are some ideas for new business models for professional journalism. This is geared towards established companies rather than start-ups.

I’m ignoring established revenue streams. Not necessarily because I don’t think they can’t work, but because I’m trying to focus on new ideas. I don’t necessarily think the following ideas can successfully support massive newsrooms on their own – but they could certainly bring in additional revenue. Think of this as a proof of concept that there’s room for innovation in news media business models.

Leverage archives and brand

What do the established media companies have that upstart online companies and bloggers don’t? Massive archives of content – decades of material. How can this be leveraged to make more money and fund the newsrooms producing new content?

The other thing established newspapers and magazines have is a recognizable brand. More on that later.

Idea # 1: Provide business information services – compete with LexisNexis

I don’t know exactly how LexisNexis works. I assume they license archives from the New York Times and others. So this is already a revenue stream for the papers who sell content to Nexis.

But what if they fired the middleman and expanded their offerings? Gannet, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, and a few other companies could find ways to offer a lot of value. The Time’s open search API is interesting, and the possible start of “newspapers as platforms.”

They’d have to compete head-on with Google (I assume Nexis already is) to provide premium business with premium access programs and meaningful search systems. Business intelligence companies might be good acquisition targets. The key to success here will be not in just dumping tons of raw data on companies, but finding unique and useful ways to sort it and find value in it. Which is exactly what newspapers are supposed to be doing for the public.

There’s a conflict of interest potential here, but I’m not sure having a few big “business information service” clients is any worse a conflict than having a few big advertisers.

Idea # 2: Offer archival material – maybe personalized

Time has a publicly accessible online archive of all their articles all the way back to their beginnings in 1923, including covers. This seems really smart since they can run ads on all these millions of pages (I don’t know if they make more than way than by selling to Nexus and similar databases, or if offering everything up for free like that prohibits them from also selling to databases). They also have special collections based around particular themes or people, like World War II and Johnn Lennon.

The New Yorker sells a DVD of their complete archives. I don’t know if there’s any sort of topical sorting features on the DVD to help you find stuff based around a theme.

But here’s an idea: Couldn’t Time, The New Yorker, and any other magazine or newspaper with sufficiently deep and archives and quality content sell hard cover commemorative books and/or slipcase editions on topics of special interest to collectors (like WWII, John Lennon, JFK, Marilyn Monroe). Books of photos, stories, covers, etc.

I’m sure a few such thing already exist, but it seems there could be quite a market for such products.

When Time published their archives my friend and Buckminster Fuller historian Trevor Blake went through their archives to read everything they had ever published about Bucky. I don’t know if there would be a huge market for, say, a Harper’s Buckminster Fuller Archive but it gives me another idea: media companies could partner with print on demand services like Lulu to sell special customized archives of material from their archives. Build a simple interface to let people drag and drop text and pictures into a template and charge them a premium for a nice hardbound collection of material. Maybe even let them make their customized books available for sale and cut them in on the profit.

Idea 3: re-invent the online classified

There’s only so much leverage a small local paper or alt-weekly can get out of its archives. But they do still have their brand names. So whatever online offerings they may have will probably draw a lot of attention – the trick is to monetize it.

Papers have been complaining that Craig’s List killed their classifieds, and are therefore killing their papers. I’ve got news for them: Craig’s List is far from perfect. It’s ugly. It’s been years since there’s been any significant improvement (since the addition of RSS feeds I’d say).

There’s plenty of room for local papers to compete with Craig’s List. They just don’t want to have to give the bulk of their classifieds out for free. Why not? Craig’s List changed the game (actually, eBay did even before that), so it’s time for papers to start playing it. Simply Hired and Indeed compete with CL for job listings. OK Cupid competes with them for personals. Cars.com competes with them for auto listings. Get in the game.

Select Alternatives is making some headway here, offering online personal sites for alt. weeklies. The Portland Mercury uses ‘em and I’ve heard very good things.

Hint: there are major opportunities in geolocative services.

Conclusion

In short: papers should be acquiring and partnering with tech companies, and hiring innovative software developers. There are plenty of untapped markets that newspapers are in a unique position to take advantage of if they’re willing to experiment and innovate before it’s too late.

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• Papers considering charging for content (again) – Lost Remote TV Blog

And sure, there had to be operating costs, but running a site like PJM and an ad network is not a massive operation. The staffing model is distributed by its very nature and can easily be managed by 5 key staff and a network of part time contractors. And even if their operating costs were $500,000 a year, with the 50% capacity utilization I was talking about before they’d have a nice tidy sum of $250,000 of profit and $250,000 left over to pay out to their bloggers.

So going back to why this doesn’t add up…either Simon paid bloggers more than they actually made, which is INCREDIBLY dumb, or he’s lying and just wants to focus on PJTV, which I think is probably a lot more likely. Also, the PJM news portal will remain as is with staff to support it. So where do you think the money to start up PJTV and keep PJM going came from? It doesn’t make ANY financial sense to shut off the ad network and keep the other sites going.

Full Story: Donklephant

(via Jay Rosen)

See also: Economy Hits Pajamas Media: Pajamas Media Ad Network To Shut Down As Bigger Focus To Be On Internet TV

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• Where Did The Pajamas Media Money Go? | Northloop Neighborhoods
• Donklephant » Blog Archive » Pajamas Media Fallout Continues

Seward reasonably points out that we’d be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

Full Story: Center for Citizen Media

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