Join me for a webinar about my recent Reuters Institute report on news innovation

Since I first said it at Hacks/Hackers London last summer, I’ve become fond of saying, “If you don’t have revenue, then you don’t have a product.”

When Dr. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the research director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, started to talking to me about writing a report about journalism innovation, I mentioned my comment about revenue and products, and he asked, “Can we put that on the front page?”

Rasmus wanted to look at digitally native innovation at news organisations, and we used projects that went “Beyond the Article” as a lens to focus the project. Rasmus and I also wanted to focus not just on the coolness of innovation but also the business: How were companies managing it, and more importantly how were they monetising it.

We eventually settled on three areas to focus on:

  • Radically distributed publishing.
  • Chatbots and conversational interfaces.
  • Visual journalism and VR.

The report was supposed to be 5,000 words, and it topped out at about 11,400. To be honest, I could have written a book. There is a lot of innovation going on right now in journalism. But I think we’ve given a good sample of projects and innovation.

If you want to read a brief introduction focusing on the chabots and conversational interfaces and apps section, here is post I wrote for WAN-IFRA. For a broader overview, here is a summary that I wrote for the Nieman Lab at Harvard. If listening is more your style, I also did a podcast on the report with Chris and Esther at the Media Briefing.

Next week, 30 March at 3-4 p.m. CEST, 2-3 p.m. BST or 9-10 a.m. EDT, I’ll be doing a webinar for WAN-IFRA focusing on the chatbots and conversational interfaces section. Register here to join. I’ll do a presentation, but we’ll have plenty of time for you to ask questions. See you there!

Outlining the formula for Josh Topolsky’s Outline at #SXSW

There are a lot of lessons here for media companies, whether legacy businesses or start-ups, from The Outline. You might not have heard of The Outline, but it has pedigree. It’s founder Josh Topolsky has form with The Verge and Bloomberg. Now, he wants to launch the next-gen New Yorker or the New Yorker for millennials, as Shan Wang reported in Nieman Lab.

Simplifying their formula even further from their slide at SXSW, I would say that the key lessons are:

  • Collaborative working relationship with edit/dev/rev team.
  • Focused on a “specific, finite, meaningful audience”. And a laser focus on that audience.
  • Ad experiences as distinctive as its content.

I don’t think that everyone needs to build their own editorial tech or ad tech. That’s something that a figure like Topolsky can do at launch, but it isn’t something that every media start-up or even legacy group can or should do. Obviously, the technology focus can deliver a distinctive editorial and commercial product, but I think knowing that you’re trying to do is a necessary prerequisite to build or choose the tech.

But that’s a niggle. Overall, this tight set of bullet points is a good starting place for media companies in the 21st Century. It’s not a rigid recipe, but it’s a great starting point for companies looking for a strong digital launch.