FutureTech Business

Reinventing Journalism

By Eleanor Haas

With all the sturm und drang about newspapers dying under the weight of production and distribution costs and other media also economically challenged, it’s all too easy to forget there’s a lot more to news than mere business models undergoing radical change.

The amazing societal model the Founding Fathers established for the US has since Day 1 relied on news people to keep government honest.  It was the French – at the time of their and our revolutions - who called news people “the Third Estate” – with the corrupt government of elite nobles and the oppressed common people as the other two “estates.”  But nowhere in the world but the U.S. has the press been truly free.  Nowhere else has it held government feet to the fire.  Think Pentagon Papers.  Think Watergate.  News people are key to our way of life both for keeping us informed and for enforcing accountability by those in power.  But their effectiveness has been blunted by the erosion of public trust.

Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, had some telling things to say on the subject at a recent Digital Breakfast event organized jointly by Gotham Media Ventures and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz:

“To get people to recognize the real world, to recognize facts (and not just accept information that validates their point of view), we need trusted news tellers . . . To have a democracy, you have to try to engage people where they are.  The availability of alternative sources of information allows us to check accuracy . . . The failure of the press to hold government accountable on the Iraq war led to serious mistrust of the media.

”When media produce the same kind of news they did when they were a monopoly, this causes mistrust; yet new tools are adding new power for journalists, and journalists can be way better.

”Participatory journalism – citizen journalism – occurs when the news audience uses press tools to inform one another – the Internet, digital cameras, blogging and videos,.  Since they have the power and occasionally want to alert others to an opinion or experience, they have the ability to report.  It’s all one system with lots of people collaborating on a single story.

“I hope for a powerful combination of professional journalists working with distributed networks of caring citizens in spite of all the irresponsible bloggers and elitists complaining about the open Internet.”

Mr. Rosen’s hope is clearly shared by others.  We see evidence of this in the emergence of at least two organizations.  In New York,  ProPublica, a not-for-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest by using a pro-am model of professional journalists and a distributed network of 2,500 citizen journalists.  In Vancouver, NowPublic, now part of examiner.com.  Both are citizen journalist networks being used to create local news sites on a pro-am model with a positive cost model. 

Is the hybrid pro-am model part of the answer to cost-effective news gathering?  Might it also  help restore public trust in news tellers?  Only time will tell

Will We Pay for Online Media? Will Journalism Survive?

by Eleanor Haas

Yes and yes.  But there’s a lot more to these questions than that.

“People pay for things they value. Ask people to pay for content that’s worth paying for.  Some things publications once provided no longer have value, such as daily stories on ball games just played . . . people who care about the ball game know what happened before the newspaper comes out.”  So said Richard Tofel, General Manager, ProPublica, at a recent Gotham Media Ventures panel discussion.  Richard Hofstetter, partner, Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz, was moderator.

ProPublica is a not-for-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest through an innovative pro-am model that relies on both professional journalists and a distributed network of 2,500 citizen journalists.  Stories are distributed by major media, who benefit by getting stories their readers can find worth paying for – and the media get these free of charge.  The organization deploys its amazing network to cover stories no one else has the manpower to cover, such as how stimulus money is actually being spent.  As a result, ProPublica has better data on this than the Government!

Merrill Brown, of MMB Media, a strategist who works for Journalism Online, among others, agrees about the value proposition.  “The business model will change profoundly,” he said.  “It will be successful only if the product changes.  People won’t pay for commodity news, sports scores or stock quotes.  They will pay or new products.”  Journalism Online will give newspapers tools that enable them to market their new products by providing an e-commerce platform that adds convenience for users by allowing users to register once and then click for specific subscriptions to multiple media.

Government funding for the arts or news is just not part of the American culture, the panel agreed, but the classic not-for-profit economic model of foundation grants could be.  That’s what ProPublica is testing.  “People support arts institutions.  Some kinds of journalism can be supported that way too,” added Mr. Tofel.

Beyond issues having to do with business models and even the role of journalism, however, is the fact of today’s polarization, as Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of WNET.org, pointed out.  “This is a polarized country with polarized debates.  A narrow group is gripped in its own feedback loop.”  Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, expressed concern that we have lost the common culture we once had.  “The only way to get it back is for people to want to live in the same world together,” he suggested.  “Some people can no longer be reached by fact – including one political party.  It’s up to the public, not changes in the media.”

Citizen journalism as part of a pro-am model appears to have a major role to play in cost-effective news gathering In addition to ProPublica’s distributed network, Mr. Merrell referred to NowPublic, a Canadian enterprise, that raised $10 million for a citizen journalist network around the world and sold it to examiner.com, a citizen journalism site   It will be used to create local news sites on the pro-am model with a positive cost model.

Start-Up Secret of Success No. 1: Learn and Discover

"In the early stages of startup, focusing on ‘execution’ will put you out of business. Instead, you need a ‘learning and discovery’ process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute."   Steven Blank, The Four Steps to The Epiphany

Newspapers are Dead - Long Live Journalism!

By Eleanor Haas

"Google isn’t stealing content from newspapers and other media companies. It’s stealing their control over distribution, which has always been the engine of profits in media. Google makes more money than any other media company on the web because it has near monopoly control over content distribution (i.e. like a metro newspaper in the pre web era)." (Publishing 2.0  http://bit.ly/e4d2J )

Seeing this story was an aha moment.  Journalist friends bemoan the end of journalism as they and we have known it.  But what's over isn't journalism; it's the old business models.  Oh, yes, and any monopoly professional journalists  may once have had over content creation.  It's a brave new world based on the same old principles:  quality content desired by readers no matter who wrote it, a cost-efficient way to deliver that content to the reader and an innovative strategic vision to drive the business engine.  Entrepreneurs to the rescue!

Ten New Marketing Rules

By Eleanor Haas

New Marketing

1.      Goal is to build relationships

 2.      Segment customers by needs & interests or behavior

 3.      Market through a continuing conversation that can become viral

 4.      Messaging is a peer exchange

 5.      Products are differentiated by brand and brand stories

 6.      Brand value grows out of delivery of the brand promise and customer experience excellence

 7.      Marketers and customers interact as peers in the same space

 8.     Use online gated communities to understand the market

 9.    Speak honestly in a human voice, be substantive and deliver content directly to customers that they will value

 10. Develop sales through engagement.

Old Marketing

1.        Goal is to push product

 2.      Segment customers by demographics

 3.      Market through campaigns

 4.      Marketer commands and controls channels and content

5.      Products are differentiated by features

 6.      Marketer defines brand value in terms of name recognition and brand recall

 7.      Marketers and customers are on two sides of an impenetrable barrier

8.      Focus groups

9.      Proclaim through ad and PR intermediaries

10.  Push product in ads and email

Entrepreneurship to the Rescue?

By Eleanor Haas

Scott Heiferman, an iconic entrepreneur, tweeted something that led me to seek out and read a post by Zack Exley - http://revolutioninjesusland.com/index.php/2009/03/16/untitled. Here's a paragraph:

"During a 'crash' like the one we’re beginning to feel now, there are few jobs. When the factories, stores and offices in our communities start shutting their doors, then there is a terrible sinking feeling. Suddenly it’s perfectly clear that we don’t control our own means of making a living. Suddenly we realize that even though we worked as a part of an interdependent society of producers, we are unable to stop the destruction of our means of producing. Suddenly it’s clear that the one calling the shots is that “abstract owner” of the economy — or, as it’s called in polite society, 'the market.'”

This has bearing on a question a friend asked at lunch yesterday.  Three of us got into general conversation about the socio-economic-political situation.  My friend said some people were suggesting we need to overhaul the system.  I quickly – perhaps too quickly - said no, we just need to enforce existing regulations.  The Exley blog post goes deeper.  Although it’s written from the perspective of a Christian, it has far broader implications and seems to me to lay out fundamental issues about the “absent owner” and capitalism that go back more than 300 years to the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Two intuitive feelings of mine made this resonate with me.  One is that we as a society have lost adherence to the Golden Rule of fairness – treating others as we would like to be treated ourselves – and, as part of this, to the principles of candor and honesty..  In the absence of transparency and ethics, those who choose to abandon integrity get away with actions that harm others to varying degrees.  In the absence of candor and integrity, trust is lost.  In the absence of trust, peaceful society is in jeopardy.

The other is that we as a society have failed to accept individual responsibility and accountability as an essential corollary of a free, democratic society of equals.  GM’s Chairman/CEO and Board have both been deposed because they needed government money as an alternative to bankruptcy, failed to act with fairness and honesty, and the government made their departure a condition for survival – with the probability that the money would be no more than a bridge to bankruptcy in the end.  But shareholders could and probably should have done the same thing long ago.  Health care costs have spiraled out of control, jeopardizing not just individual life savings but the viability of the principle of universal protection against the consequences of catastrophic illness.  But most individuals accept little or no responsibility for their personal health or for the effect of their actions on the system.

So,Exley has no answers, but he may have cut a path through the jungle of complex issues by suggesting a fundamental question.  What can we do to overcome obstacles to the principle of “pursuit of happiness” by one and all promised by the Declaration of Independence – now not just for the US but for today's global community?

To this, I add three more. It was as a nation of entrepreneurs that we envisioned a society that supported "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  Entrepreneurs constitute a sector of our society that can capitalize on the crash as never before, thanks to the capabilities of the Internet.  The crash   motivates people to start their own businesses and the combination of the crash and Internet reduces the cost of starting them. 

1. Might the growing trend to entrepreneurship be a key step in the right direction?  
2. Might self-reliant entrepreneurs be more likely than "absent owners" to maintain a commitment to fairness and integrity? 
3. Might a nation of business owners be more likely than a nation that perceives itself as largely powerless to accept personal responsibility and accountability?

5 Ways for Publishers to Gain Revenue and Customer Loyalty

By Eleanor Haas

"Navigating Search” was the title the SIIA gave yesterday’s Brown Bag Lunch, moderated by Diane Burley, a digital media consultant and advisor to Nstein Technologies.  We learned about new directions being pioneered by global publishers with millions of assets.  “New Ways to Deliver Meaning – not Just Online Content” might more accurately have described the program.  The payoff for publishers is significant.  It’s all about revenue and customer loyalty.

1.     Focus on the visitor first and only then on the information and how it is presented.  Understand visitor needs, interests and learning styles. Respect three key stages through which the visitor passes - first, processing the information, then making decisions about it and then executing decisions based on it.  Understand how sensory clues can be used to guide the visitor and how the visitor’s memory and inferences can support the information-gathering process

2.     Use wayfinding principles to organize digital space.  Wayfinding, a process used for centuries by navigators, and more recently by architects and other designers, describes how people intuitively orient themselves to a space and navigate from place to place. In general, people focus on a destination and follow what appears to them to be the best path.  Architects and other designers assess wayfinding options as a basis for improving the functionality of a particular environment and making the space more comfortable for visitors.

Paths, edges, nodes, landmarks and districts – the terms used by designers to describe spatial features for this purpose – were first coined by Kevin Lynch in his book "Image of the City" (1960) to help designers describe and think about how people experience space.   The same concepts are relevant to locating online content so that users can avoid the avalanche of irrelevant information delivered by keyword search, discover what they want and move on.

3.     Think beyond the home page to treat each website page as the potential landing page it is.  Google drives more and more traffic to pages beyond the home page, and these pages have too often been neglected in the past and therefore failed to deliver a superior visitor experience by reason of their design. 

4.     Connect multiple databases in ways that speed comprehensive search.  Enable visitors to come up with closer to 100 percent of the information needed for a decision, not just the usual 40 percent to 60 percent.  This can require smart connectors that enable a federated search across 6,000 databases, for example – using technology such as that offered by MuseGlobal.  Smart connectors add value for the publisher as well as the visitor.  For the publisher, they can increase revenue by an order of magnitude by speeding time to market for new products and significantly reducing the cost of support.

5.     Use text mining to organize and categorize vast amounts of both structured and unstructured information.  This permits publishers to cross-promote use of their content by enabling people interested in Topic A to quickly find related Topic B – with the help of technology such as that offered by Nstein technologies.  Content maps, which are beginning to replace traditional site maps, facilitate this by displaying the taxonomy of concepts within each subject or theme area.  The goal is to make it easy for visitors to infer additional knowledge about a piece of initial information – an inference that, in turn, becomes a new piece of information. 

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Shifting Realms for King Content: Three Views

By Eleanor Haas

Is content still king?  Yes and no.  Depends who’s talking and how they’re defining content.  Michael Wolff, magazine columnist and best-selling-author, stated unequivocally at the recent SIIA Summit that traditional news organizations – newspapers and broadcast news alike - are finished.  He gave them 18 months at the outside.  His solution was to abandon print and to found Newser, an online news destination.  At Newser, machines aggregate news, humans edit it down to what’s important and then they present it in lively online formats with links to original sources.

Not so, countered Vivek Shah, head of the News Business Unit at Time, Inc. Print journalism lives.  Newsgathering as a way of creating value is disappearing, he said, but voice and personality matter.  It’s all about points of view.

Content lives and so do newspapers, said Arturo Duran, CEO, Impremedia Digital, a portfolio of Hispanic periodicals, at an SIIA Summit preview session on digital publishing. Newspapers have an important role to play.  But they need to redefine themselves as local; they have to own their cities’ local listings and news.  Readers trust the name. Newspapers also need to reinvent their antiquated infrastructure in terms of cost and processes and be ready to deliver content to any platform.

Tectonic Shifts in Digital Media

By Eleanor Haas

“Tectonic” – pertaining to changes in the earth’s crust.  “Tectonic shift” was something George Kliavkoff said at least three times in the course of his NYMIEG interview on December 17^th.  Probably not surprising from the Chief Digital Officer at NBC Universal at this moment in media history.  And those three were only a few of many implied. 

The first shift he mentioned was the shift of media and advertising to digital platforms as ROI becomes increasingly important to marketers.  At the moment, he commented, some pockets of advertising will slow but overall, we can expect to see a flight to quality – to premium content, such as NBC’s www.hulu.com. 

But Hulu itself seems to me to be a tectonic shift in business models.  A joint venture between NBC and FOX, the site delivers free streaming video content of hit television shows to online viewers.  Doesn’t this run the risk of cannibalizing the television shows and their revenue streams, he was asked?  No way.  To the contrary, NBC has found this drives incremental TV viewership later.  “Prime time television viewers use mobile devices and online to catch up,” he said. 

The magic sauce in the new world of content is making things convenient and easy for customers.  It’s all about making a great customer experience accessible to customers when and where they want it and giving them choice.  This is a tectonic shift Kliavkoff and others now take for granted, the shift in power from seller to buyer.

Hulu’s ad model gives viewers an amazing choice.  Viewers choose between three to five 15-second interstitials and a pre-roll of a full movie trailer.  About half choose each.  Interesting.

To distribute its great shows widely enough to make them readily accessible, Hulu made yet another radical decision:  be sure its content is where the viewers are.  Give it to Yahoo, MSN and other distribution partners but require that it be on the Hulu player with Hulu advertising, straight off the Hulu server to maintain the integrity of the business model and to protect the site from piracy.

Consistent with these shifts is the coming personalization of local online programming.  A study I conducted 12 years ago found that “everything points to personalization as probably the single most important interactive marketing trend today.”  Forrester Research at the time was alerting us to the expectation that personalization would redefine the web and was something every site must prepare for. 

Kliavkoff predicts a wave of technology soon to come that will enable web sites to personalize content quickly, making every visit more relevant because viewers no longer have to contend with 90 percent to 95 percent of irrelevant pixels.  For this, sites will have to share data and information while being polite about privacy, he explained.  Behavioral targeting and social networking are both part of this.

The iPhone, App store and Adroid represent another tectonic shift with far-reaching implications.  These break through carrier control over mobile content for the first time ever.  As phones become an open platform and marketplace for premium content, they become candidates for significant new mobile e-business models as well.  Lots more coming down the pike on this one; it’s still early days

Then and Now

By Eleanor Haas

A friend’s astrologer reported that the heavens are aligned the way they were at the time of the American and French Revolutions.

An interesting parallel:  toppling of the existing power structure and a redistribution of wealth so it reaches more people.

Then it was triggered by violent upheaval.  Now the developed world has systems in place so that we have a collapse of some financial practices and institutions with government intervention, in effect, taking power from the handful of super-beneficiaries of the old system and redistributing it more widely.  We also have an election coming up for which unprecedented numbers of underdogs - young people and ethnic minorities - have registered.  If Obama wins, we’ll have a descendant of a race that was enslaved less than 150 years ago in the highest office of the land and one of the most powerful in the world.

At the same time, we have the continuation of the Internet revolution and changes in business operations, market structure and the pace of change.  The Internet also topples the existing power structure because it redistributes information so it reaches more people.

Also the same time, we have violent upheavals in the

Middle East

, which have toppled the existing power structure.

Interesting!