Newshare

Explaining the Information Valet Project

What is the Information Valet Project? In this 15-minute audio podcast, IVP researcher Bill Densmore of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute of the Missouri School of Journalism explains. This talk was recorded Oct. 10, 2008, at Univ. of South Carolina's Convergence and Society annual presentation of academic papers, subtitled: "The Participatory Web."

Click on the caret on the left of the bar below to listen to streaming audio, or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening  (14 min., 55 seconds / 14.32MB)

AUDIO: Editors roundtable on future of newspapers

How bullish are senior editors about the future of U.S. metropolitan daily newspapers? Fordham University business school Prof. Everette E. Dennis and an audience mostly of Univ. of Missouri j-school graduates listened to -- and quizzed -- seven editors and executives during a panel on Thurs., Sept. 11, 2008. The event was part of the opening of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and also marked the 100th anniversary of the Missouri School of Journalism's founding.

The panelists (all Missouri grads):

Janet E. Coats, The Tampa Tribune

Lewis W. Diuguild, The Kansas City Star

Michael Golden, The New York Times Co.

Pam Maples, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Ken Paulson, USAToday and USAToday.com

Marty Petty, St. Petersburg [Fla.] Times

Mark E. Russell, Orlando [Fla.] Sentinel

Click on the carat on the left of the bar below to launch streaming audio (78 minutes), or download MP3 audio for offline listening.

'Representative journalism' -- an experiment in local community

I'm helping with an experiment in Northfield, Minn., with a working title of "Representative Journalism." The goal: See if we can create a system for local or topical newsgathering so compelling and useful that users will help pay for it directly. Kennesaw State University's Len Witt has just obtained a $51,000 grant to start to work on this problem -- with a little bit of help from Chris Peck and me, and a lot of help upcoming on the ground in Northfield, Minn., from a citizen team led by Griff Wigley.

For now, we are calling the concept, "representative journalism" (but realize that's not nearly perfect or catchy). The idea is to create a collaborative (maybe profit, maybe nonprofit) infrastructure to which local social-networks-in-formation can turn for journalism expertise. The RepJ mothership will provide technical, business, fund-raising, financing, marketing, advertising and ethical guidance to the local RepJ organization so that it can hire one or more reporters to cover the local affinity group's issue or passion. It could be geographic like a high school or topical like "the environment." Importantly, we envision the community's journalist reporting to (as in employment) an experienced editor either on a direct or dotted-line basis. We see this as providing the assurance that the work the reporter does conforms to journalistic ethics and principles -- and provides the reporter with cover from being manipulated, as a PR person might be, by the affinity group that actually pays his/her salary or free-lance fees.

There are many issues with this experiment -- some ethical, some practical. The biggest is whether communities will be willing to sustain the cost of semi-pro journalism to cover the passions which bind them. The representative journalist must be unusually focused on engaging with citizens (online and F2F) before, during and after posting of a stories. The journalist reports to a respected, experienced editor.

See the: RepJ blog site (for updates).  (Photo: RepJ team at Northfield radio station on March 13)

Ex-LATimes editor says he broached idea of four-paper web subscription consortium -- it's now dead, he says

If Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. opens up the Wall Street Journal's website to free browsing without subscription, it will spell the end of one initiative to figure out how to finance quality news on the web, according to the former editor of the Los Angeles Times.  John Carroll was among four people on a panel, "The News Business and the Business of News," on Saturday at Boston College.

Carroll's assessment came as he describe research he conducted last year while a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.  He was on a panel organized by the Masssachusetts Foundation on the Humanities, part of a free symposium entitled: "No News is Bad News."

Carroll, who now lives in Lexington, Ky.,  said he interviewed about 50 leaders of the news industry during his post-L.A. Times research for Shorenstein. "The captains of our industry were in a state of demoralization and confusion," Carroll said he found.  He said circulation revenue which sustains newspaper report in print is "kaput" on the web because nearly all news websites are free.

During his visits, he said he proposed the idea of a newspaper-industry consortium of four of what he termed the most prestigious papers for national, international and business news -- New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street -- who he said should merge access to their websites and create a common subscription to all. 

"And If you could pursuade those people, who don't like each other all that much, to form a consortium and have all of their web, all of their online material be sold through one vendor, like they would own, just like a newstand on the corner here which sells multiple papers," said Carroll, "they would reclaim something something that the newspaper business is losing, which is a quasi monopoly.

"I don't think it would be an illegal monopoly, because thousands and thousands of people are covering national, foreign and business news. But these people do it by far the best. And if you were an intelligent, if you were this audience, and you could only get those four papers through that site, I suspect we would have a 90% plus subscriber rate in this room and could recover that circulation rapidly.

"That idea, I mentioned it to people at these various papers. None of them said it was a bad idea, but they were already so absorbed  going in their own direction with their own contractual relationships and strategies and so forth that nobody  did it or even paid it that much attention I think. Now that the Wall Street Journal has gone to Murdoch and Murdoch is talking about taking it free, that's the end of it. It will never happen.  But it was kind of a last stab at preserving the idea of paid content." 

Carroll's remarks came 30 minutes into a 75-minute discussion lead by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume, who now teaches at UMass Boston, and including New York Times columnist David Carr and St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor Neil Brown.

Brown outlines efforts by the St. Petersburg paper -- which is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute -- to develop multiple means of delivering on its quality-journalism-which-benefits-democracy-mission to users non only on the web and in the traditional daily paper, but also via free-distribution weekday tabloid. He said the traditional paper's circulation is holding steady and even increasing among some younger demograhics.

Carr said he things newspapers and magazines will evolve into niche publications for the wealthy and they will be "like catnip for marketers," and hence will likely survive, although perhaps with reduced circulation and higher subscription fees.  Meanwhile, he said, "making their websites better and better [and free] is in a way building out the gallows."

The irony, said Carr, is that newspaper reporters have never had more readers, when combined print and web readership is included. But the problem is that advertisers do not consider a web reader to be as valuable as a print reader, so web ad revenue increases are not offsetting print ad revenue declines. 

To listen to an audio stream of the entire panel, click on the carat to the left of the bar below. Carroll's remarks about the four papers begins about 30 minutes in (after about 10 seconds of crowd noise and an introduction by Donald MacGillis, Boston Globe assistant editorial-page editor.  A downloadable MP3 podcast is also available (36 megs). 

(Full disclosure: The author of this post is an investor in Clickshare Service Corp., a company which has patented a system allowing users to have an account at one website and purchase or subscribe to content at multiple other websites.)

Old, new, compromise after The Times "opens up"

Yesterday The New York Times announced it would end "Times Select," its approximately-two-year-old experiment with charging for premium content. This has been a closely watched test, and one I follow closely because of my role as founder and shareholder in Clickshare Service Corp. Let's look at the situation from a old-world view, express the new view, and then suggest sort of a compromise.

Here are links to some comment by others:

Vin Crosbie: "Paid content isn't dead; just payment for one-to-many content is. The problem is most people in the industry still think in only one-to-many terms, including those pundits who are hailing TimesSelect's demise as the demise of paid content online."

Scott Rosenberg: " . . . [F]or better or worse, charging for news content online is nearly impossible."

Jay Rosen: "The Times has decided it's better off in the  bazaar." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/ )

Jimmy Guterman:  "When there is an Internet advertising dip -- however mild, however brief  -- what will happen to the publications that will be close to 100-percent dependent on advertising?"

Steve Johnson:  "But somewhere along the way, it will become apparent that advertising cannot pay for every single info-bit that's on the Web: The ratio of eyeballs to info-bits, many of which are expensive to make, becomes too small."

Jeff Jarvis:  "The relationship is what's important, not the content."

Ken Doctor:  "Times Select may not have been the best retention strategy, but retention of a half-million Times subscribers just got a bit harder.  There's an inevitability here, well-cheered on the web, and now that it's done, best to make the best of it. "

Mark Potts:   "Creating good journalism requires a sophisticated business model, with revenue from multple sources including, in some cases, paid subscriptions."
Also: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/09/timesselect-rip.html

Staci Kramer:  " . . . [T]raffic increases from search-engine optimization (SEO) and the NYT's belief that by opening millions of pages to search engines, that traffic growth will continue and with it, ad revenue."

Times own announcement

Dan Gillmor: "On topic after topic, the Times story (or stories) will move near or to the top of the search engine rankings."

The old view:

There are those such as Jay Rosen who believe charging for news-and-opinion type content is competitively impossible on the largely "free-content" web.  They see this as a hard reality. I guess they figure if that means journalism as we've known it is unsustainable in a solely web environment, so be it.

There are others -- primarily small papers, single-paper publishers and niche publishers such as The Wall Street Journal -- who regard what they do as empirically valuable and they resist making it available for free.

At The New York Times, the ad folks won the internal battle . . . and I think it is a form of death for journalism as we've known it. The competition for advertising on the web is such that it seems hard to imagine sustainable rates will ever support the amount of original reporting we have had in this nation for the last 50 years. It will take some years for this to become really obvious, and then we'll swing back to premium-content services. By then, the newsrooms of newspapers will be hollowed-out shells unless they are subsidized by things like About.com, Kaplan, other businesses, or philanthropy.

I don't know that there is any other way for The Times to have played this. We are watching an evolution that is really not under any individual's or institution's control. There is one possible scenario that could alter this -- and that is if a system evolves which allows sites to charge premium rates for personalized advertising -- because of superior demographic targetting. This is suggested in the article The Times' carried on its own decision.

The new view:

Jay and other see greater value in the "linked web" -- where search engines and cross links magnify the readership and authority of a source like The Times.  This is certainly the promise of the web -- being able to go anywhere for information, largely without restriction, a world in which information is enriched by the ability to deeply cross link.

The compromise:

So where does that leave our thinking:

• Journalism is expensive, and web advertising alone may not sustain it.
• Charging for content puts up walls which destroy the brilliant utility
  of the open web.
• Are we therefore destined to have a an open web, and unsustainable
  journalism?

I don't think so. The challenge is to develop an approach which preserves open linking but yet creates a basis to sustain quality content, whether by advertising or direct user support.

Suppose The Times were able to get paid as its users are served demographically-targetted ads from third-party sites? Then it could "monetize" the demographics of its quality-journalism-seeking audience.

Suppose, for example, The Times got a commission when it served up content to its users from other websites? Bottom line: Newspapers have to start behaving like information valets.

New York Times piece revives thinking about "micropayments"

Dan Mitchell, writing Aug. 27, 2007 in The New York Times, has revived the conversation about so-called "micropayments," noting that iTunes is working and suggesting larger small-payment aggregation networks which facilitate advertising and user exchange might be feasible. The piece ends with a quote
from Bill Densmore.

ALTERNATE LINK: http://newshare.blogspot.com/2007/08/nytimes-in-online-world-pocket-change.html

He writes:

"Bill Densmore, a founder of the payments firm Clickshare, a former newspaper publisher and now a consultant and a director of a citizens' media project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has been promoting micropayments from the beginning. He envisions Web publishers joining with one another and with producers of other content to create huge networks, sharing users and, in effect, revenue.

"For example, he said, a large newspaper could sell subscriptions that would allow its readers to download music from iTunes or Rhapsody, read articles from regional papers, and watch movies and TV shows from YouTube or Comedy Central. Some material would be sold for a fee -- with the payments managed internally by the network. Mr. Densmore acknowledged that this is all pie-in-the-sky at this point. But, he said, for newspapers in particular, the status quo is not good enough. In that business, he said, there are "enough people feeling enough pain that they need to be open to asking what models might work."

Also see: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Mit-gathering

Does law allow Dow Jones directors to consider public interest as they weigh News Corp. sale?

Does -- or should -- the law allow Dow Jones & Co. directors to consider the public interest as they weigh whether to sell to News Corp.? I'm looking for guidance and advice on this point. Can you help?

A June 21 article by Los Angeles Times writer Joseph Menn quoted Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, as saying that if the directors decide to sell the company, their legal obligation is to get the highest possible price. The law in Massachusetts at least -- where Dow Jones owns small dailies -- appears to allow other factors to be considered.

Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 156B, Section 65, reads:

"In determining what he reasonably believes to be in the best interest of the corporation, a director may consider the interests of the employees, suppliers, creditors, and customers, the economy of the state, regions and nation, community and societal considerations, and long-term and short-term inerests of the corporation and its stockholders, including the possibility that these interests may best be served by continued independence of the corporation."

READ MORE: http://www.mgp-forum.org/dowjones

QUESTION: Abandon journalism, or become smaller and charge?

BELOW EXCERPTED FROM:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Densmore_clickshare

I helped start a company a number of years ago called Clickshare Service Corp., which provides a system which some have called micropayments, that makes it easy to have an account at one website and buy from other websites. But what we've found is the advertising model has been so durable and has grown so quickly on the net that there really is not a lot of interest, frankly, in adopting even a partially paid wall.

Print revenue is shrinking must faster in real dollars than their online revenue is increasing.  And so the interesting question to me is: "Will advertising come along well enough to sustain the amount and quality of watchdog journalism that we having going on now? I don't really have any more insight than anybody else at this point. I think it's an open question. I think the trends are worrisome to me and to others. And so the question to me is at what point do folks say, "OK, I've grown my market enough with free, and I can see that even as much as I grow my market with free I'm never going to end up with enough revenue to do the kind of business I'm doing now."

Publishers are going to be faced with a decision, and the decision is going to be, "Do I abandon journalism, as I've known it, or do I become a much smaller business and a much smaller audience in order to support journalism?" Or, the other thing that has to happen is there has to be a change in the perception of the audience, or the former audience out there -- the participants -- that they are going to ante up and be willing to pay, as many have with some of the most successful public radio stations around the country.

News organizations will sell a service, not a product

I think a group might consider working on a paper -- sort of the next phase of Geneva Overholser's  "manifesto" -- a call for a new approach to ownership, and especially the management and outputs of the "convener" of news in a community. It is not going to be a newspaper -- centralized daily printing is going to become a niche product for rich people -- it is going to be a 24/7, platform-agnostic nerve center that finds, organizes, shares and makes sense of information from a vast array of paid, volunteer, independent and partisan sources -- and then serves it how you want it, when you want it.

It will be a service organization -- like a law or accounting firm -- and it will be paid accordingly. At first, it will be extremely difficult to convince people to pay for such a service. But as the years go by, it will be seen as an absolutely indispensible way to get through the day. People will become as reliant on their "newshare" as on their car, doctor, parent or colleague. Larger cities will have competing "newshares" offering the inforamtion valet service.

They will compete largely on technical grounds -- who does the better sort, who finds the real gems, and who provides premium information at the right price bundle. Advertising will be part of all this, but it will be an option -- if you are willing to receive advertising, the cost of your "newshare" will be less.

You will actually be PAID for you attention when you look at an ad, and that payment will be a credit to an account which you can then use to purchase premium information. An ebb and flow of info-currency, depending upon whether it is information you ***want*** or information someone ****wants you to have.****

Major Australian newspaper chain goes head-to-head in Brisbane -- with web-only product

Ex-WashingtonPost.com editor and BackFence.com founder Mark Potts has posted to his blog about the decision of Fairfax Digital to enter the Brisbane news market in competition with the existing print daily --  but Fairfax is doing it with a web-only product.

LINK: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/03/online_down_und.html