|
||
The Wiki That's Building a News Organization
Everyone says the old school newspapers are dying. Word just hit that Rocky Mountain News will blink out of existence tomorrow. Here in the Bay, our own San Francisco Chronicle has taken some heavy blows. It's down on the mat, with the ref about to finish counting.
It's a sad state of affairs, but for entrepreneurial journalists, imagining a town without a newspaper isn't necessarily a bleak vision. In fact, a zero-paper city looks like an opportunity to leap headlong into a journalistic future we've all been preparing for anyway. Imagine what you could do with a daily news organization if you subtract the paper and assume the Internet (and iPhones and Twitter and...). That's what we said to ourselves around our dinner table the
night that the Chronicle news broke. What could San Francisco look like post-Chronicle? We made a wiki, wrote down some thoughts, and released it into the world as the San Francisco Post Chronicle.
It seems to have struck a chord, spreading from our Twitter streams to dozens of journalists within and outside of the newspaper business. It was as if people were waiting for someone to say, "Ok, let's just start over. Now, what?" Within hours, some fascinating suggestions came into the wiki, like this one: "The PostChron needs to be accessible to those without smartphones, of course, but (I'd argue) it should be designed for those who do have them. The product might even be designed for the iPhone first and the web second." Or how about this revenue idea, courtesy of an anonymous reporter at a big, national paper, "My suggestion would be to launch a mini-team alongside the news desk that would develop (and raise their own cash for) a product that would build on what the newsroom's developing...find something that the Post Chronicle does that no one else can and try to build a web service or proprietary software off that."
We're not saying that these ideas couldn't come from inside a newspaper -- or that newspaper people haven't had them, too -- but maybe it's going to take some radical, citizens effort backed by Silicon Valley money and combining what we love about blogs with what we love about newspapers to actually create the change that allows news organizations to survive.
What do you think? Go to the wiki and build our future.
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
I am very worried about losing old-fashioned journalism, not old-fashioned newspapers. Who will the whistleblower contact? Who can afford to follow a story for weeks, if not months, with the influence to get people to spill their guts and provide internal documentation, to hire detectives to go through reams of public information, to dig through the trash cans, to follow people, and to follow the money. It is very expensive and time-consuming to do really good investigative work. This is not something that can easily be done on spec -- you need an institution with lots of financial and political resources.
We need a true alternative to traditional journalism that provides the muckraking we need to keep power in check. Until that happens, I'm hoping the big newspapers stay around and viable.
When you say, "OK, let's start over. Now what"? you have to start with your purpose. What is your primary goal: to make money, to entertain, to hold people accountable, and so on.
I would agree with others here that what we need is what Amy Goodman provides - to go where the silence is. DemocracyNow! is founded on the idea that democracy can only exist when all people are informed, and forewarned, of the strategies and methods of exploiters.
If your interest is to make money through entertainment, well, you don't need to be be a journalist for that. Write a video game.
The 150 year old Chronicle lost $50 million last year. If the Chronicle goes it will join the Philadelphia Enquirer which went under last week, and the soon to be shut Christian Science Monitor. Google has been eating their lunch for years, and classified ads have migrated to Craig's List. It is tough to chop down a forest to make paper, get a union to print it, and manually distribute your product, and then compete against a one man email blast on costs. There could be a ninth earning save by a surprise buyer. But moguls willing to hemorrhage money just to promote a political view are a dying breed. Rupert Murdoch has been the only recent buyer of newspapers, and something tells me that a match with the Chronicle would not exactly be one made in Heaven. In five years there will probably be only two mass circulation papers left, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the Washington Post as an outlyer. Thousands of small, local, niche publications will take up the slack. As a long time print journalist dating back to the typewriter days myself, I am sad to see newspapers go. But you can’t exactly sit like Denmark’s old King Canute and order the tide to stop rising. Journalism is degrading into an army of guys banging away at the computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts. Trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste will be the victims.
Unfortunately trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste required money. That money came from the value for value exchange in which people paid for the paper upon which the trust, objectivity, accuracy, style and taste was printed. There are no longer enough people willing to make that exchange. That army of guys banging away at their computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts don't care if they are paid or not. In an age in which information must of necessity be distributed for free this gives them a competitive advantage.
It is not as if the market for quality news reporting will suddenly disappear. The internet distribution model hurts corporate news sources because they can't adapt. The idea to "develop...a product that would build on what the newsroom's developing...find something that the Post Chronicle does that no one else can do..." is as ridiculous as it is poorly thought out. What magical product would accomplish the stated goals and be saleable? This quote is also very telling of the mind set of corporate news organizations. To survive newspapers/news organizations must either get beyond the idea that they need to sell a product or drastically change the current internet distribution model.
In order to have a market you must have some way of forcing people to give you money for your product under penalty of not getting it unless they pay for it. The problem with the internet distribution model is lack of a way of preventing people from getting the product without paying for it.
"Imagine what you could do with a daily news organization if you subtract the paper and assume the Internet..." and you would have DemocracyNow!; one of the highest quality American news broadcasts. They are supported through viewer donations and are beholden only to their audience, thus creating a truly free press. Of course, a broadcast is not a newspaper and DemocracyNow! focuses on national and international news, not regional. But look at the success of Metro, a newspaper that releases a regionally relevant version of its publication for free at public transport hubs in over 100 cities across the world. Though they do not create revenue through the sale of newspapers they succeed with ad-revenue because of their distribution model. Beyond this, Metro has found a niche, using print to fill a gap that digital media cannot; you can't use a "smartphone" on the subway.
Newspaper are a dying breed. Not because of partisan thinking or whatever. not from a viewpoint of liberal or conservative.
its a dying breed because of cost structure. Internet is much more cost effective and efficient compared to traditional medium delivery structure.
News Broadcasts using a new paradigm would be an interesting effort for the creation and distribution of Content in a mixed Internet/Cable TV environment.
You could have reporters working as stringers with cameras and sound would create a story. The reporter would push (electronically) the news stories to the "back end" of a local "News Broadcast Server". Editors would make editorial decisions about the content, and make it either part of a local "news broadcast", further push it to a regional or national "News Broadcast Server" or post it as a news "piece of interest story" on a News Interest "Blog" to see what type of play it gets. The"piece of interest story" would give the ability for the local community to provide it's own editorial control over content (i.e. if the story got a lot of play it would then be pushed to the "news broadcast')
The Local, Regional, and National "News Broadcasts" could be viable community interest broadcasts to take place on "Public Access Channels" provided by Cable Providers. It would require an effort to reestablish "Public Access" on national cable providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner..
Local, Regional, and National "News Broadcasts" would also be available on the Internet.
The production values of any beginning enterprise should not be expected to be of the highest quality, but rather the effort will spur the next generation of effort and reach for a higher level of production perhaps bringing the effort to the commercial market.
Look around you, folks! Does HuffingtonPost ask you for money? There are opt-in ads all over the page and apparently that business model is thriving -- at least Arianna is smiling a lot when she does interviews.
The old-time San Francisco Theriot family was smart to sell off the Chronicle holdings to the bunglers at the San Francisco Examiner when they did. That's smart. If the Examiner (nee Chronicle) disappears there will be little missing--besides, even the Chronicle died a little when good old Herb Caen did (and Armistead Maupin switched to writing books instead of daily 'fiction' columns). Adapt! Adapt!
I like HuffPost, but it's not a model for a news gathering organization. It's a news and opinion dispersing organization. Most of the bloggers here are not paid, most of the news is gathered from other sources. If Hollywood actors want to come to my town and cover city hall for free, that's great. But what happens if the city is talking about replacing a crumbling highway bridge on a crucial highway and my reporter is off shooting a film in Spain?
My MacBook has yet to kill a tree. But I'm keeping an eye on it.
yet it helping produce green house gases, when your turn the light on.
As with so many of these breathtaking ideas about how the web can replace print journalism, this one fudges the primary issue: Show Me the Money.
The closest it comes is the suggestion that someone associated with the SanFran will come up with an idea for a product that can make money for the journal. Of course.
Please, somebody, specify a product.
Which means not only do you have to have something of value you have to have some means of forcing people to pay money to get that thing. This is where most web based business propositions break down. They have no way of forcing people to give value in the form of money in order to get back value. If you can't make money you don't have a business. Simple as that.
Beautiful
I hope Craig Newmark participates. (I think he lives in the SF area.) After all, it's his invention, craigslist, that is partially responsible for the demise of newspapers and their ability to fund reporters and investigative journalism. With the bulk of classified ads having moved to craigslist and other online services, that revenue no longer flows to newspapers, and they counted heavily on that money (as well as other advertising, which is drying up everywhere, including on the Web).
Also Marc Andreeson, the inventor of Netscape, which revolutionized access to the web.
In fact, they should really be thinking about investing heavily in newspapers like the NY Times and WaPo, in order to keep the best, national newspapers afloat and out of the hands of Rupert Murdoch.
As much as Craigslist is one of the best tech ideas ever, it has irrevocably hurt local newspapers. Pouring money in to keep them alive could be seen as a part of their civic duty, like giving to charity.
why keep someone who is dying on life support? If (when) I am in that state of life, please, everyone, pull the plug. And I've been easily as good for the world, while I have been alive, as have any of these newspapers.
Sometimes it's just over.
shall we dub it The Chronicles of Media - The Prince Murdoch ?
One problem with the MSM is they are NOT doing the investigative journalism they should be doing, or they do it on some topics and not others.
Another problem is two few owners of multiple media markets.
Still another is no diversity. When one identifiable group dominates the MSM we all suffer.
Not to mention the CIA and the Pentagon submiting their black propaganda, and the single group dominated MSM printing it without question!
I'm SO glad that SOMEONE is trying to find a way to keep journalism alive. The whole field is really in danger of disappearing as everyone wants free news and advertizers don't want to pay.
We are going to have to find a way to tax the internet because if given the choice between a fee-based news site and free sites, people will chose free (see the demise of AOL). The revenues from these taxes will have to be divied up based on page views, promoting quality and mass market appeal, and can be supplemented by the dwindling ad revenues.
Without an internet tax, though, fewer and fewer dollars will be coming in as the market continues to fragments and the number of content suppliers goes up, leading to a nearly infinite number of content suppliers, each one with nearly no revenue.
With an internet tax -- and tighter restrictions on fair use/copyrights -- there with be money and motivation for companies to pay journalists to do the kind of quality, in-depth reporting that is disappearing quickly.
If you live in a 1 paper town & read the local blute [paper] you know the journalism isn't alive. No tax money for papers in 1 paper towns.
Keep your eyes open, rich..., as you scan the www; you might see something resembling local news & investigative reporting in some blogs & on some sites. This activity is done by subversives called citizen journalists. They do it without tax money. This subversive activity of citizen journalism is becoming a common offense against traditional MSM. Many citizen journalists freely walk among us. They record the truth aggrivated with objective facts, compile the truth augmented with the complete facts, circulate objective truth & complete facts on the web. These subversives dare to be as thorough & objective as humanly possible as they circulate truth on the web. They don't use news rooms as old time reporters did, avoid editorial censorship & don't limit themselves with a publishers idea of which news is fit to print. These subvervisives attempt to report all of the truth about all events in their town.
I forgot to say that often citizen-journalists don't get paid. Call them lovers of truth or yentas. They seek & get the facts, interview the sources, evaluate the sources words & reliability, fully recheck the facts, compose the story &, sometimes, edit the story. They don't want money. They do all of that for the chance of getting a by-line.
You could call them truth junkies except they don't want to get paid as drug addicts do when they push drugs to support their habit.
The wiki & c-j thing are a world wide thing. It could be that the inner-Yenta in us is universal. C-j's can augment the work of paid investigative reporters. C-js would & do cover stories & beats that the paid reporters missed & never covered.
A great number of comments don't mention that, even in their prime, traditional, print on paper, for profit MSM & papers never did an all inclusive sort of investigative reporting. They missed or, most likely, ignored a lot of corruption, scandals, malfeasance & misfeasance. An unorganized body of c-js can & will get to stories which traditional, MSM ignored. There may be cases when 4 or more independent c-js will each cover the same episode. That would mean that 4 or more aspects of truth would be found & revealed on the web. Some editor, investigator or prosecutor could find the most important facts & findings of each story to present the result to the public, a client, grand jury,
Sorry, not a good idea to tax the Internet. This is not the path to good journalism, in my opinion. The Internet is now established as the people's, to use for information exchange, among other things. Some revenue is possible if people trying to sell some product pay to advertise on the same page the readers turn to. Although we try to ignore the bouncing balls, we usually have to look. Some of us might even buy! I suppose they must, or the ads wouldn't continue to appear.
But I drift from my point, which is that we have to resist all efforts to formalize the Internet, efforts to force users to comply with rules that suffocate inquiry, and efforts to charge readers for reading.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
