Journalism: What added value will add revenue?

It’s always good to hear someone of Alan Rusbridger’s stature extol the virtues of journalists collaborating with their audiences as he did last week in Australia. It was one of the benefits of working at The Guardian as blogs editor that I knew collaboration and networked journalism were high on the Editor’s agenda.

However, in speaking with journalists all over the world since I took a buyout from The Guardian in March, this isn’t the focus of conversations that I’m having. Most of the discussions I have with journalists these days are about sustainability and revenue. In 2010, I get asked how are we going to make money a lot more than I’m challenged to justify the usefulness of Twitter or the value of collaboration. After showing them examples from my work and the work of former colleagues and others, they understand how it can be useful. If you want good ideas about framing the value proposition of social news, read this recent blog post by Jonathan Stray:

Audience-journalist collaboration, blah blah blah. If the idea that professionals are no longer the only players in news is new to you, see blogging and Wikipedia. But a news organization probably has to look at this from a different angle. For me, the core idea of social news-gathering is that the audience is, or could be, an extension of the news organization’s source network.

In 2005, I referred to it as Googling for sources, but now Twitter is acting as an amazing filter not only for content but also for contacts.

However, as I said, that’s not really the focus of the conversations that I’m having right now. I don’t get challenged as much as I did in 2005 or 2006 about the value of collaboration. Instead, I am challenged about how do we make money to support professional journalism in a digital world.

I should stress that even this is not a new conversation. In 2005, I was fortunate enough to be at the Web+10 conference at the Poynter Institute. The conference brought together digital journalism pioneers and top digital editors from the US and abroad, and conversation after conversation was about how to generate enough revenue to offset declining revenue in the print business, and this was long before the business went off a cliff during the Great Recession.

Anyone in the newspaper business who thinks digital editors haven’t been concerned about revenue is flat out wrong, and I add the emphasis because I have been challenged, sometimes extremely aggressively, by senior editors and executives in the newspaper industry on this point. To suggest that the digital side has been oblivious to the revenue crisis in news couldn’t be further from the truth. This is little more than a groundless attack often intended to undermine digital editors and push them aside for political reasons. Discussions about digital revenues were happening long before integration. Hell, I started having these discussions in 1997 at my second online journalism job.

However, as the revenue crisis during the Great Recession slammed the entire business, print and digital, the discussion about business models moved from a growing concern to one of the main concerns for journalists, digital or otherwise. At the recent Online News Association conference, sustainability came up over and over in the conversations I had with journalists working in traditional businesses, journalists with start-up projects and journalists working in new non-profit organisations.

Value-added journalism

The great thing about the Online News Association conference is that people have ideas. Lots of them. Ken Sands, deputy managing editor of the new Bloomberg Government project in Washington, is building a business based on reporting from 100 journalists and analysts backed with data products and services. The intersection of business and government in the US is big business so this makes perfect sense. However, there were revenue ideas outside of business journalism at the conference. Journalism entrepreneurs are increasingly launching businesses with well thought out business models instead of launching new projects and products and thinking about revenue later.

One of the common – common to the point of cliché – recommendations for new revenues is that we need to create value-added products. I agree, but the issue has been what value added content or services can news organisations develop that would generate revenues to sustain themselves and help sustain the broader business. We’ve got an increasing number of experiments with the freemium approach, an approach where general interest news content is free but value-added premium products generate additional non-advertising based revenue. One of the biggest issues with this approach in 2010 is that journalism organisations might not have the capacity anymore to create value-added content while doing the wide range of things they have traditionally done. They are struggling to support their existing work much less consider doing anything new.

This morning, Kevin Sablan, leader of the Orange County Register’s web task force, linked to this great article by Alan Kohler on ABC’s (Australia public broadcaster) site. In it, Kohler challenges both The Guardian’s ad-supported model versus Rupert Murdoch’s paywall and other paid content strategies. (Note, I didn’t say that The Guardian’s model is a “free model”. The content might be offered for free online, but that doesn’t mean it is given away with no revenue attached. It is supported by advertising. In good times, that revenue is quite substantial, but as anyone will tell you, advertising is cyclical: Up in the good times and down during recessions.) Alan says that the product must improve. For journalism:

It doesn’t matter whether it’s free or online, to survive it must do more than just report what readers can find out for themselves but don’t have the time.

He says that journalism must “explain what events mean, not just report them”. In this instance, it’s really useful to read the comments to get a flavour of whether this is viable. My personal view is that there is a fine vein of value to mine in smart analysis that stays just this side of commentary and opinion. I say fine both in terms of its value and also in terms that it is a very fine line.

Kohler says that journalism needs to increase engagement. Valued content can increase engagement but so can social strategies.Too often journalists believe that the social in social media applies to their audience but not to them. Smart journalists are building up loyal audiences for their journalism by directly engaging with them. I do now as a freelancer, not only to promote my work, but also to answer questions that people might have. For me, it scales well and fits into my current workflow, especially seeing as much of that interaction is via Twitter and Facebook and that communication comes to me via SMS.

The key question in terms of value added journalism for major organisations has to be tactical. If strategically value-added content, products and services are the key to new revenue streams, what is the value-added content or services that organisations should develop with minimal cost and the best possibility of revenue?