Journalism: What next?

For many news and media businesses to survive the recession and thrive after it has ended, they will have to adapt to the economics of abundance. It’s something that I’ve written about before, and Clay Shirky continues to make some of the most cogent comments about the economics of abundance and what many have been calling the attention economy for the last few years. From a keynote at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, Clay says:

Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.

Ann Michael at Scholarly Kitchen blog (which is now in my RSS feeds) for the Society of Scholarly Publishing also quotes Clay as saying:

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

I have struggled with this tension ever since I became a digital journalist in 1996. I knew that the internet would radically disrupt journalism the first time I first used a web browser at a student computer lab at the University of Illinois in August 1993.

However, I have always, always advocated and hoped for a transition that would wed the best of the old with the opportunities provided by the new. As I often say, I’m a very traditional journalist in terms of standards and ethics who uses cutting edge tools. However, it’s clear that many news organisations don’t have the resources anymore even to make strategic decisions about keeping the best of the old and combining it with the best of the new. Tough decisions will need to be made about what they stop doing. It’s sadly, no longer an option to continue doing everything they did in the past.

What is rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’?

As Adam Tinworth said recently, publishers don’t have a great track record of adapting to this disruptive development:

We, as an industry, botched the transition online. We treated the internet as, at best, the poor cousin of the print title, to be filled with the left-overs from the established product and, at worst, a mere marketing device. Then, when the invention of the single most efficient information distribution mechanism mankind has yet come up with transformed our industry and its economics, we descended into panic.

How did print botch the transition online? It wasn’t for lack of trying. Steve Yelvington, someone I consider both a friend and mentor, was one of the few people who can say he was there at the beginning in terms of the internet and print, working on digital projects in the early 1990s. In his post, “Early to the game but late to learn how to play“, he makes a key observation:

The future gets created by individuals full of fire and passion, not institutions.

Clay supports Steve’s view and experience. It wasn’t that print publishers didn’t see this coming. They tried a number of plans. Clay said:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

The focus on preserving the legacy institution continues, and if you look at most of the paid content strategies, they are largely based on monetising current activities and content. About the only exception to this is recent attempts to sell iPhone apps and apps and content for the iPad, Kindle and new media slates. However, in terms of the web, most of the talk is about different ways to get people to pay for existing content created using existing forms of organisation and existing methods of newsgathering.

The problem that Clay is pointing out is that the economics of content have shifted. What will people pay for? Journalists will instantly say distinctive writing. Most journalists think their writing distinctive, but let’s be honest and even slightly logical here. If everything is distinctive, it’s no longer distinctive is it? Distinctive writing will only work for a very small group of writers. Thinking we can all be distinctive writers is like every 5-a-side footie player thinking he or she can play in the World Cup.

To pay for great reporting and great writing and the social mission of journalism, we’re going to have to think beyond the story in the digital age. We’re going to have to think about services that deliver value to audiences. In a world of content with “more alternatives than the human brain can process” as Steve puts it, suddenly intelligent, social filters become important and useful. People now pay for ‘filters’ that distill the vast amount of information produced everyday or every week into something human scale, for instance magazines like The Week. Smart, social filters can do better.

As I was writing this, I have found an example of people ready to pay for a deeper connection to those they trust. I grew up west of Chicago, and I grew up watching the At the Movies, hosted by Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. They were famous for their thumbs up or thumbs down movie reviews. Roger Ebert has just launched a club in which he offers some extras to his loyal fans, including special private discussions, advance ticket sales to his Ebertfest and a meet-and-greet at the festival with club members. They are only charging $5 a year. Read the comments. For everyone who thinks the web is full of nothing but venom, read those comments. Granted, he is a cancer survivor who lost his voice four years ago and just had an emotional appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show, but here is someone who has created a community.

Distilled insight, intelligence and connection. Content may not be rare in a ‘world of cheap perfect copies’, but these things still are. People will support organisations that deliver this. That’s where I see my future in journalism.

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links for 2010-03-05

  • Kevin: Foundation-funded investigative journalism group ProPublica in the US is giving away its 'reporting recipe'. They explain why they are doing this: "Now we are taking this principle a step further, giving away the recipe for what has been one of our most powerful reporting efforts to date. We are doing this because we believe there are many ways to prompt change through journalism."
  • Kevin: Nathan Yau at the incredibly wonderful visualisation blog, FlowingData, gives some simple tips on how to think like a statistician. It really does depress me the innumeracy shown in a lot of journalism. What's even more galling is when this innumeracy allows journalists to be duped by spin. Nathan has some good tips, but it's probably no substitute for a good grounding in basic maths and statistics.
  • Kevin: An interesting look by Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, writes about the time spent on Facebook versus the average time spent on news sites. The figures to take away is that the average spends 20 minutes a month on the New York Times and only 8-12 minuts on most local newspaper sites. That's for an entire month. Nielsen said that in January, users spent seven hours a month on Facebook alone.
  • Kevin: I've had the pleasure of working with Aleks at the Guardian, and she brings a great thoughtfulness to tech coverage that is often obsessed with gadgets and treated like not much more than entertainment. I really like this write up on creating the four part BBC2 documentary The Virtual Revolution. She writes about the tension between creating a traditional, linear television documentary and the online community and conversation that she tried to create. She writes about the "conflict between the linear and multiplatform aspects". Well worth a read.
  • Kevin: Peter Kafka writes about the Huffington Post's growth and strategy. On the strategic side, their growth in depth, their focus on building tight verticals is a simple startegy that seems to have been lost on most newspapers. The internet rewards depth in content. Kafka also points out another secret to the site's success: "Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs."
  • Kevin: Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy has written a valuable summary on what the BBC's strategic review says about the British public broadcaster's online vision for the future. Being a former BBC News website employee, I have been reading a lot of this with great interest. In terms of halving the number of BBC websites, that is actually quite easy. At one point time in the early part of the century, there were 1800 different sites under bbc.co.uk. What that means, is quite a bit murkier.
  • Kevin: McKinsey defines that 'Internet of Things' as "sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects […] linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet." The mega-consultancy sees huge opportunities, and I'd agree. This new network of sensors will also provide opportunities to generate a lot of data and information. I would expect government agencies to invest in such sensors, and if the governments are open about their data, I think there are huge opportunities for journalism organisations.

Information flow and attention

danah boyd writes an insightful essay for UX Magazine, Streams of Content, Limited Attention, which examines the change from a broadcast information landscape to a networked one and its implications. She identifies four core issues:

  1. Democratization
  2. Stimulation
  3. Homophily
  4. Power

About democratisation, for example, she says:

Switching from a model of distribution to a model of attention is disruptive, but it is not inherently democratizing. This is a mistake we often make when talking about this shift. We may be democratizing certain types of access, but we’re not democratizing attention. Just because we’re moving towards a state where anyone has the ability to get information into the stream does not mean that attention will be divided equally. Opening up access to the structures of distribution is not democratizing when distribution is no longer the organizing function.

This is a really important essay, full of thought provoking nuggets. I don’t really want to boil it down to a soundbite, because this is a complex subject and to give you a two sentence summary would be to do it and danah a disservice. I think, though, this is going to be one of those essays I’m going to have to read and reread until its implications – which are not always obvious – have fully sunken in.