Posts tagged with 'progressive media sector'
Journalism’s Main Priorities in 2010 (And 10 Resolutions)
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By Tracy Van Slyke and Josh Stearns
Cross-Posted at SaveTheNews.org
If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward.
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What Role Will Government Play?
Lawmakers are increasingly stepping up to address the crisis in the journalism business. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter in March 2009 to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder urging the Justice Department to consider an antitrust exemption to help newspapers survive. The public benefit of saving newspapers might outweigh historical concerns about anti-competitive behavior. In Connecticut, among other places, lawmakers are also intervening to keep newspapers alive. Pelosi’s letter prompted a House Judiciary Committee hearing the following month about problems in the newspaper industry.
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen. “There is this massive behind-the-scenes, epic, political battle being waged inside the beltway, right now, between the forces that want to create this more open, distributed, participatory media and telecommunications future and those who favor a centralized, command and control regime, a reinstitution of command and control in all of these new media in telecommunications systems,” said Sascha Meinrath, Research Director for the New America Foundation, during a speech at eComm in March 2009. (more…)
What Will Commercial Media and Technology Companies Do?
Many online users and independent media-makers have taken for granted how much big companies have done for them. Independent voices have soared due to innovation in free tools, investment sophisticated platforms and much more. These companies will continue to support many new independent voices if they find profitable business models in doing so. If they pull back, it could ultimately hurt independent media.
The industry could also change if major technology companies successfully move into the content business. John Battelle of Federated Media has argued from the very beginning that Google is good for the news business. One of his primary questions about the future is whether Google will go into the content business full force. “I think that would make a lot of people think very hard about a lot of issues,” he says. Similarly, Nokia, which has a global market share larger than its three closest competitors combined, is transforming itself from a technology to a media company. (more…)
The Future?
The Big Thaw began with David Weinberger’s question: “How much more of the game needs to change, really?” In some ways, this is the future we have been waiting for. Independent media has successfully amplified independent voices and empower communities for many years. The online world has made this more possible than ever before. But in other ways, it might not be the future we had expected.
While people interviewed for The Big Thaw were optimistic about online journalism, they were uncertain regarding how it would affect quality and availability of investigative journalism, how consumers will behave, how the biggest players in the game will act, and which new strategies and business models succeed. (more…)
Will Philanthropy Adjust its Role?
Philanthropy often serves to fill the funding gap between the private and public sectors, but it is often insufficient. Philanthropists can still do a lot to advance independent media by supporting experimentation, funding issue-focused content, investing in trusteeship models and targeting areas such as distribution that can shift the system.
Many foundations dedicate much more funding to civic engagement and leadership programs than independent media. A big question is “How can they integrate these funding areas more strategically?” (more…)
Emerging Revenue Models
Regardless of making running a lean-and-mean organization, media outlets still need to find new ways to generate revenue. Philanthropy has been the most prevalent model for many independent media organizations, although this source of revenue alone is often insufficient. Other possible models include creating additional channels of distribution, combining free and premium content, tapping user subsidies, utilizing news as a “loss leader” to generate funds and sharing revenue with content producers. Increasingly, for-profit and non-profit publishers alike will grow strongest with a greater mix of these revenue streams. (more…)
Emerging Operation Models and Cost Structures
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.
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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.