Emerging Operation Models and Cost Structures
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While many prophets of the new era preach about the great potential of online technology for creating media more efficiently, original investigative reporting still takes time, resources and a little shoe leather to do well. “What’s worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out,” Clay Shirky wrote in a blog post.
Lean and Mean
A perception still exists that only big organizations make viable media companies. In recent years, lean and mean entrepreneurial approaches have taken off. Boing Boing only has eight staffers and other sites, such as Tech Crunch and Talking Points Memo, have a small staff as well.
A lesser-known, more dramatic example of running lean and mean is Plenty of Fish, a dating site. Although the site’s content is not news, neither were personal classified ads in a newspaper, which historically contributed a great deal to newspaper revenue. Plenty of Fish has become one of the top-10 websites in the US by monthly page views (1.6 billion in late 2008) with only four employees. In fact, founder Markus Frind claims to work only 10-20 hours per week. By comparison, dating pioneer Match has hundreds of employees and one quarter of the pageviews. In 2006, Frind posted his blueprint: “Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a ‘dead simple’ free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense.
As large journalistic institutions shrink, salaries will inevitably decline and journalists will also have to produce more and take on more than reporting multifaceted. Media organizations that figure out how to do more with less will likely win. As a result, the lean-and-mean cost structure that nonprofits have already built may have an advantage in the current news industry shakeout.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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