Daily Archives: April 27, 2010

04.27.10
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Comparing non-profit news org models in the US

Alan Mutter is one of those rare creatures who has both editorial and business sense and writes lucidly, analytically and rationally about the business of news. Alan says this about himself:

Alan D. Mutter is perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time, just like his hero, Benjamin Franklin.

He has a great post comparing the different funding and business models of non-profit news organisastions in the US. Several have started in the last few years to address the decline in traditional reporting capacity due to the turmoil in the US newspaper industry. Some are boot-strapped, scrappy operations that operate very leanly. Others, such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have very substantial foundation support.

The MinnPost in Minnesota is definitely in the lean and scrappy camp. Alan thinks that the MinnPost might just have a successful model for non-profits looking to operate without major foundational funding. That kind of funding can come with strings attached. How is the MinnPost succeeding:

First, by keeping costs low. Second, by raising money almost continuously through such diversified initiatives as advertising, NPR-style user contributions and even an annual gala featuring organic-vodka martinis.

From my point of view, the MinnPost as opposed to the Texas Tribune and  ProPublica are different editorial propositions, different funding models aside. The Texas Tribune is much more like a Politico for Texas.  Both the Texas Tribune and ProPublica are intended to support the high-end Porsche of public interest journalism: Investigations. Investigations are expensive,  time-intensive projects often with very little commercial return, and ProPublica currently gets “$10m a year from a single benefactor”. Investigations are the height of public service. They garner awards and attention but often are difficult to get a return on investment alone from a strictly business point of view. ProPublica is definitely doing good work and has just won its first Pulitzer.

The MinnPost is much more of a traditional news site, covering a range of issues including politics, sports and arts, just to name a few.

Alan points out a major difference between the big foundation-funded non-profit news operations and the MinnPost: Pay.

Although Kramer and his wife, Laurie (of the MinnPost), have worked tirelessly on the project since they launched it in 2007, neither ever has drawn a dime of pay. Their commitment, which includes personal donations in excess of $120,000, contrasts to the hefty six-figure salaries paid at Pro Publica, where editor Paul Steiger makes $570,000 per year; the Bay Citizen, where CEO Lisa Frazier earns $400,000 annually, and Texas Trib, where editor Evan Smith gets $315,000 a year.

Alan points out the the another foundation supported site, Bay Citizen just leased “stylish offices in downtown San Francisco” even before it publishes a single story.

Pay for journalists

Putting aside for a moment the different models at these non-profits, I have to admit that I’m really of two minds here about the pay at these large foundation funded non-profits.

I’ve never made a lot of money being a journalist. My first full-time reporting job was at a small newspaper in western Kansas, and I made $2000 less than a first year teacher in the town I lived. Fortunately, the cost of living was pretty low. Although I have written for newspapers and done radio and TV reporting and commentary, my main income has been as a digital journalist and editor. The pay has been low compared to my colleagues focused on the traditional media. I’ve managed to make a living wage, but there have been times when it took efforts to make ends meet even though I was employed full time. The idea of making six figures is just a completely foreign concept to me, as I’m sure it is for most journalists. (There is a myth that journalists make a lot of money. That’s only for TV anchors and well paid columnists. Most of the rest of us, especially those in local journalism, are paid poorly.)

When I started out as a journalist in the mid-1990s, I complained on a mailing list that I wouldn’t be able to pay my health care bills if I was injured. (I am a American, although I’ve worked for British journalism organisations for more than a decade.) I was told by senior editors and journalists on the list that ‘you didn’t get into journalism to make money’. No, I didn’t, but I also didn’t take a vow of poverty.

There is only so much foundation funding to go around, and I have applied for foundation funding in the past (largely through the Knight News Challenge). I have to say that it makes me feel more than a bit uncomfortable about some of the pay levels at these non-profits.

Whether in the non-profit or for profit world, I feel like one of the few journalists to care about costs. My view has always been that a every pound or dollar I save on travel costs, tech or accommodation is another pound or dollar we can spend on journalism. I care deeply about journalism and public engagement, and I have always sought ways to do that as inexpensively as possible while having the greatest impact.

I take on board that to get the best investigative journalists you have to pay a premium, and I’m pleased that the editors at these well funded non-profits have the resources to pay themselves well and pay for talented journalists. However, I do wonder if the foundation funding cannot be sustained at these levels whether these heavy cost structures at these non-profits can be supported in any other way.

04.27.10
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links for 2010-04-27

  • Hyperlocal ad trial spreads to Guardian Local's Edinburgh and Cardiff sites
    Kevin: The Guardian (my former employer) is trialling hyperlocal advertising system Addiply on its local beatblogs, launched in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff earlier this year. Journalism.co.uk reports: "The system, which offers low cost adverts that can be sold on a weekly or monthly basis with different rates for different sized customers."
    (tags: Guardian hyperlocal advertising beatblogging)
  • What's in a Tweet?
    Kevin: PARC researcher Ed Chi has piped Twitter streams through Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) to extract meaning from tweets much as search engines extract meaning from search queries. This gets around the issue of extracting meaning from a limited message, such as a 140 character tweet. He is using this method to create a service called Eddi to help users find relevant information based on their Twitter stream.
    (tags: web3.0 semanticweb search Twitter Yahoo api)
04.27.10
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How many friends can you make in a week?

The New Scientist reports some research by Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University which seems to show that prolific bloggers are more popular, regardless of the quality or tone of their posts.

[She] studied the popularity of 75 bloggers on the site Livejournal.com. She looked at the number of friends each blogger had, the number of posts they made, the total number of words written and the overall tone of the posts. She then asked the bloggers to rate how attractive they found each of their peer’s blogs.

She found that the more words a blogger posted, the more friends they had and the higher their attractiveness rating. The tone of their posts – whether they contained mostly positive or negative comments – had no effect.

The BPS goes into a little bit more detail, explaining that the Liverjournalers were invited into a new community and then asked to rate their fellow community members after one week. I’m not sure if this falls within the bounds of Bad Science, but it’s certainly not an accurate reflection of how communities build in the real world.

My first problem is that you just can’t extrapolate from communities on LiveJournal to blogs in general. LiveJournal has always had a different demographic to, say, bloggers using Typepad or WordPress. LiveJournal has always had a gender bias towards women, for example: currently it has 62.5% female and 37.5% male, the rest unspecified. And the bulk of users are between 18 and 34 (with an impressive spike at 30), historically much younger than demographics for other tools.

Furthermore, LiveJournal is culturally different to many other blogs and blogging platforms and has traditionally been the meeting place for people who felt that other platforms were too open for them or who felt disenfranchised by mainstream tools and wanted to be with their peers. LiveJournal, for many, was where you could be yourself and enjoy the company of people like you, no matter how weird others thought you were.

LiveJournal isn’t a typical blogging community and results from studies on LiveJournal can’t be applied to other bloggers.

But furthermore, after only a week of getting to know someone, you have very little information to go on. Those who talk most will almost certainly get higher rankings than those who are quiet simply because they stand out and can easily be remembered. If you are trying to get to know 75 people in just seven days – and you have to ask if that is even possible – you’re going to rank the noisier ones higher just because they are the people you’ve had most exposure to. If you’ve had very little conversation with someone you are bound to rank them near the bottom simply because they are still strangers and humans tend to be stranger-averse.

How would this study have turned out if they had got to know each other over the course of a month? Or six months? Or a year? You know, real human friendship timescales. And how does the nature of the community change how people react to each other? The study doesn’t say what the raison d’être of the community was, and whether these people were gathered around an issue they cared deeply about or were just mooching around online, killing time.

The lesson that this study appears to be teaching is that bloggers should write more, and not worry about quality. Frankly, I call bullshit on the whole thing. The way that we form relationships through blogging is a complex and nuanced process, just like the way that we form friendships offline. We get to know people over time. We decide whether we agree with their points of view, whether we like the way they present themselves, how they interact with others and we build a picture of them that is either attractive or not.

That this study should get headlines in The Telegraph and BusinessWeek shows how poorly social media is still being covered by the mainstream press and how little understanding or critical thinking they do.

We do need a lot more research into the use of social media and particularly its use in the UK. Studies like Jamison-Powell’s, however, do not advance the debate in any useful way.