Archive for December 2009
Weekly Diaspora: Quiet Raids, Slippery ICE and Grinches
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By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
The Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is shifting its focus to silent or “quiet” raids, as Erin Rosa reports for Campus Progress. In quiet raids, ICE conducts “audits” of staff at pre-selected organizations and gives employers a chance to fire all workers who cannot produce documents of citizenship.
The Bush administration favored dramatic, SWAT-like raids, but the Obama administration is taking a non-confrontational route. As Rosa reports, ICE has announced the latest wave of audits ahead of time, though specific business are not being named “due to the ongoing, law enforcement sensitive nature” of the audits. During a phone briefing, ICE chief John Morton explained that the “over 1,000″ new audits are designed to “create a ‘culture of consequences.’” Undoubtedly, the economic consequence of tens of thousands more people losing their income will be as dramatic as a door kicked open in the middle of the night, and it will affect all of us. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Senate Prepares to Cast First Votes
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The Senate is scheduled to begin voting on proposed amendments to the health care reform bill today. It takes 60 votes to pass an amendment and most of the proposed measures for the health care bill will never pass. It’s a great opportunity to grandstand over pet issues, however. (more…)
New Business Models
How to structure media organizations to capture value?
As the sources of value and the competitive landscape have changed, so have the business models that are mostly likely to succeed. Underpinning the dissonance between old and new media is a imbalance between traditional revenue models and their ability to cover the high costs of original content production—particularly for investigative reporting. The financial crisis accelerated this shift, forcing quicker adaptation and shortening the runway for new models to prove themselves.
Organizations cannot merely create value; they must eventually capture enough value to sustain themselves, whether it is directly from those who benefit or from third parties such as philanthropists. Ventures that make a play for audience first, such as Twitter and YouTube, must eventually capture value. In fact, YouTube is still far short of making enough money: Its costs are nearly three times more than its revenue, as one analyst reported in April 2009. Furthermore, the collapse of the print industry and economic crisis cannot be blamed as the sole cause of magazines’ troubles. Some have continued to grow due to their ability to capture value. Of the 100 magazines with the highest circulations in 2005, 21 were able to increase their print advertising pages from 2005 to 2008. (more…)
From Audiences to Communities
Everyone who participated in this project said that building audiences as communities was the biggest new source of value in media. Some viewed the term “audience” as an anachronism because it still puts too much emphasis on content as the primary product.
Since communities are formed in multiple and co-existing ways, people interviewed for this project varied in their opinions about how best to build communities and capture enough value from them to run a media organization. Audiences can grow in two different directions simultaneously: Broader and deeper. (more…)
From Using Users to a Conversation Economy
“I think the idea that (journalism) organizations can go away because now everybody is a journalist is ridiculous. It takes time, it takes investment, and it adheres to certain standards for it to be credible.” – Vivian Schiller
With the proliferation of inexpensive production and publishing tools and do-it-yourself movements, everyone can consider themselves an expert. This trend gets mixed reactions from professionals, yet it will have increasing value as “net native” platforms evolve.
For more on crowdsourcing, co-creation, and citizen journalism, download Vol. 2 of The Big Thaw.
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.
Weekly Audit: Time to Audit the Fed
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
Two key lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, Reps. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Ron Paul (R-TX), are pushing to authorize a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. The plan has sparked fury from both the Fed and the corporate banking industry, but the proposal is so appealing that the controversy is almost laughable.
The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful economic institutions in the world, but most of its operations are conducted in total secrecy. The Fed’s rescue activities have dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, but without any public accounting. Some of these efforts may have been entirely appropriate, but we don’t even know who the Fed is helping. That fact is a major barrier to establishing effective and fair economic policy. (more…)