Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

01.18.10
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Journalists: Belittling digital staff is not acceptable

Patrick Smith, recently of paidcontent.co.uk, has a post about the economics of regional newspapers in the UK and he makes the case (again) that the challenges facing British regional newspapers come down quite simply to economics.

This is not about the quality of journalism – this is about economics: The web is simply more effective for advertisers – Google ads are more effective and have less wastage than an ad in the Oxdown Gazette, no matter how good the editorial quality of the paper is.

In the post, he quotes “Blunt, the pseudonymous author of the Playing the Game: Real Adventures in Journalism blog” who defines a “Web Manager” as:

An expert in cut and paste. Probably a journalist but not necessary.

My issue isn’t with Blunt. Let’s be honest with ourselves, this is a sadly typical comment in the industry regarding digital staff. It’s not even new. I’ve heard comments like this for most of my 16-year career. During this Great Recession, I can understand psychologically and emotionally where they come from: It’s an anxious time for journalists, all journalists, regardless of medium or platform.

The digitally focused staff are working just as hard to preserve professional journalism as those staff still focused on print. I have spent most of my career developing unique digital skills while producing content for broadcast and print. I have often felt that I had to work harder than traditional journalists to prove that I’m not just an ‘expert in cut and paste’. I work very hard to know my beats, work across platforms and produce high quality journalism that meets or exceeds the industry standards of print, broadcast and web journalism. I am not the only digital journalist who puts this sort of effort in. Yet the industry is still rife with the same anti-digital prejudice I witnessed ten years ago.

It’s long past time for senior figures in journalism to publicly state that demeaning digital staff is not acceptable. Here are a few basic facts about digital journalism:

  • I use a computer for much of my work. That doesn’t mean I’m a member of the IT staff.
  • I know about technology. That doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of writing.
  • My primary platform is digital. That doesn’t mean my professional standards are lower.

Prejudice towards digital journalists needs to stop. It sends a message to digital journalists that they are unwanted at a time when their skills are desperately needed by newspapers. Digital staff should not be the convenient whipping women and men for those angry and upset about economic uncertainty in the industry.

There is nothing totemic about print and paper that makes the journalism instantly better or more credible. Quality broadsheets are printed on paper just as sensationalist tabloids are. Let’s measure journalists not by the platform but by their output.

12.15.09
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Ushahidi and Swift River: Crowdsourcing innovations from Africa

For all the promise of user-generated content and contributions, one of the biggest challenges for journalism organisations is that such projects can quickly become victims of their own success. As contributions increase, there comes a point when you simply can’t evaluate or verify them all.

One of the most interesting projects in 2008 in terms of crowdsourcing was Ushahidi. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the platform was first developed to help citizen journalists in Kenya gather reports of violence in the wake of the contested election of late 2007. Out of that first project, it’s now been used to crowdsource information, often during elections or crises, around the world.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Considering the challenge of gathering information during a chaotic event like the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, members of the Ushahidi developer community discussed how to meet the challenge of what they called a “hot flash event“.

It was that crisis that started two members of the Ushahidi dev community (Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla) thinking about what needs to be done when you have massive amounts of information flying around. We’re at that point where the barriers for any ordinary person sharing valuable tactical and strategic information openly is at hand. How do you ferret the good data from the bad?

They focused on the first three hours of a crisis. Any working journalist knows that often during fast moving news events false information is often reported as fact before being challenged. How do you increase the volume of sources while maintaining accuracy and also sifting through all of that information to find the information that is the most relevant and important?

Enter Swift River. The project is an “attempt to use both machine algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify incoming streams of information”. Scanning the project description, the Swift River application appears to allow people to create a bundle of RSS feeds, whether those feeds are users or hashtags on Twitter, blogs or mainstream media sources. Whoever creates the RSS bundle is the administrator, allowing them to add or delete sources. Users, referred to as sweepers, can then tag information or choose the bits of information in those RSS feeds that they ‘believe’. (I might quibble with the language. Belief isn’t verification.) Analysis is done of the links, and “veracity of links is computed”.

It’s a fascinating idea and a project that I will be watching. While Ushahidi is designed to crowdsource information and reports from people, Swift River is designed to ‘crowdsource the filter’ for reports across the several networks on the internet. For those of you interested, the project code is made available under the open-source MIT Licence.

One of the things that I really like about this project is that it’s drawing on talent and ideas from around the world, including some dynamic people I’ve had the good fortunte to meet. Last year when I was back in the US for the elections, I met Dave Troy of Twittervision fame who helped develop the an application to crowdsource reports of voting problems during the US elections last year, Twitter Vote Report. The project gained a lot of support including MTV’s Rock the Vote and National Public Radio. He has released the code for the Twitter Vote Report application on GitHub.

To help organise the Swift River project for Ushahidi, they have enlisted African tech investor, Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs in Uganda. They have based Appfrica Labs loosely on Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. I interviewed Jon Gosier at TEDGlobal in Oxford this summer about a mobile phone search service in Uganda. He’s a Senior TED Fellow.

There are a lot of very interesting elements in this project. First off, they have highlighted a major issue with crowdsourced reporting: Current filters and methods of verification struggle as the amount of information increases. The issue is especially problematic in the chaotic hours after an event like the attacks in Mumbai.

I’m curious to see if there is a reputation system built into it. As they say, this works based on the participation of experts and non-experts. How do you gauge the expertise of a sweeper? And I don’t mean to imply as a journalist that I think that journalists are ‘experts’ by default. For instance, I know a lot about US politics but consider myself a novice when it comes to British politics.

It’s great to see people tackling these thorny issues and testing them in real world situations. I wonder if this type of filtering can also be used to surface and filter information for ongoing news stories and not just crises and breaking news. Filters are increasingly important as the volume of information increases. Building better filters is a noble and much needed task.

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12.11.09
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Poynter asks: Are journalists giving up on newspapers?

The Poynter Institute in the US hosted an online discussion asking if journalists are giving up on newspapers after high-profile departures there including Jennifer 8. Lee, who accepted a buy out at the New York Times, and Anthony Moor, who left newspapers to become a local editor for Yahoo. Moor told the US newspaper trade magazine Editor & Publisher – which just announced it is ceasing publication after 125 years:

Part of this is recognition that newspapers have limited resources, they are saddled with legitimate legacy businesses that they have to focus on first. I am a digital guy and the digital world is evolving rapidly. I don’t want to have to wait for the traditional news industry to catch up.

This frustration has been there for a while with digital journalists, but many chose to stay with newspapers or sites tied to other legacy media because of resources, industry reputation and better job security. However, with the newspaper industry in turmoil, now the benefits of staying are less obvious.

Jim Brady, who was the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com but is now heading up a local project in Washington DC for Allbritton Communications, said on Twitter:

A few years ago, the risk of leaping from a newspaper to a digital startup was huge. Now, the risk of staying at a newspaper is also huge.

Aside from risk, Jim echoed Moor’s comments in an interview with paidContent:

Being on the digital side is where my heart is. Secondly, I think doing something that was not associated with a legacy product was important.

In speaking with other long-time digital journalists, I hear this comment frequently. Many are yearning to see what is possible in terms of digital journalism without having to think of a legacy product – radio, TV or print. There is also the sense from some digital journalists that when print and digital newsrooms merged that it was the digital journalists and editors who lost out. In a special report on the integration of print and online newsrooms for Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp writes:

Yet the convergence is happening. And as newsrooms combine online and print operations into single entities, power struggles are brewing among many in charge. More and more as these unifications occur, it’s the online side that’s losing authority.

It’s naive to think that these power struggles won’t happen, but they are a distraction that the industry can ill afford during this recession. In the Editor & Publisher report, Kinsey Wilson, former executive editor of USA Today and editor of its Web site from 2000-2005, said that during the convergence at USA Today and the New York Times:

We both had a period of a year or two when our capacity to innovate on the Web stopped, or was even set back a bit

Digital models are emerging that are successful. Most are focused and lean such as paidContent (although it has cut back during the recession, I’d consider its acquisition by The Guardian, my employer, as a mark of success) and expanding US political site Talking Points Memo. There are opportunities in the US for journalists who want to focus on the internet as their platform.

Back to the Poynter discussion, Kelly McBride of Poynter said during the live discussion:

I talk to a lot of journalists around the country. I don’t think they are giving up journalism at all. I do think some of them have been let down by newspapers. But a lot are holding out. They are committed to staying in newspapers as long as they can, because they are doing good work.

It’s well worth reading through the discussion. I am sure that many journalists have some of the same questions.

What was the verdict? Poynter discussion - Are journalists giving up on newspapers?

12.11.09
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News organisations miss opportunity to build community with online photo use

As Charlie Beckett, the director of the politics and journalism think tank POLIS at LSE, points out, the Daily Mail is getting a lot of grief for using pictures, mainly from photo-sharing site Flickr, without the permission of the users or in violation of the licencing on those pictures. Charlie’s post is worth reading in full, but here are some of the questions he poses:

At what point does material in the public domain become copyright? the people who published these images didn’t do so for financial gain. There is a genuine, if very slight, news story here which feels worthy of reporting. If I link to those photos am I also infringing people’s copyright? Might it be possible that they will actually enjoy seeing their work on the Mail’s website where it will be connected to millions of other people?

I don’t want to dwell on the copyright issue too much, apart from saying that if the newspaper industry is fuzzy on copyright on the internet, it undermines their arguments with respect aggregators, ‘parasites’ and ‘thieves‘ online. I’d rather make the case that there is a benefit to news organisations in not only respecting the copyright of others but also in being good participants in online communities like Flickr. Here’s part of the comment that I left on Charlie’s post:

Leaving (the copyright) issue aside, this is another example of the news industry missing an opportunity to build community around what they do. When I use Creative Commons photos from sites like Flickr, firstly, I honour the terms of the licence. Secondly, I drop the Flickr user a note letting them know that I’ve used a photo on our site. It’s not only a way to use nice photos, but it’s also a way to build goodwill to what we’re doing and do a little soft touch promotion of our coverage. It takes a minutes out of my day to create that email, but instead of a backlash, I often get a thank you. They let their friends know that the Guardian has used their picture. It’s brilliant for everyone. Their are benefits to being good neighbours online, rather than viewing the internet as a vast repository of free content. As a journalist, I wouldn’t use a photo on Facebook without permission. Besides, the photos on Flickr are very high quality, and with the common use of Creative Commons, I know exactly what the terms of use are. As a user of Flickr who licences most of my photos under Creative Commons licence, I also feel that whatever photos I use, I’m also giving back to the community. It’s a much more honest relationship.

Last year during the elections, I found an amazing picture of Democratic candidate John Edwards on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution licence that allows commercial use and used it on a blog post on the Guardian when he dropped out of the race. I let the photographer, Alex de Carvalho, know that I used his photo, and he responded:

Thank you, Kevin, for using this picture; I’m honored it’s in The Guardian.

Result:

  • Great picture.
  • Credit where credit is due.
  • Mutual respect for copyright. Creative Commons clearly states the rights wishes of the photographer.
  • Light touch outreach to promote our work at the Guardian.
  • Building community both on our site and on the broader internet.

That’s what we mean at the Guardian about being of the internet not just on it, and this is why I believe that social media is about creating great journalism and building an audience to support it.

12.09.09
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Landrush for local: NowPublic, Everyblock and now Outside.in

A common joke amongst journalists is that all we need is two examples to proclaim it a trend, but we’ve got much more than that when it comes to rush to build local media empires in the US. In June, AOL bought two local services, Patch, which provides news to small towns and communities, and also Going, which provides a local events listing platform. MSNBC.com bought Adrian Holovaty’s hyperlocal aggregator Everyblock in August. In September, local news network Examiner.com owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz‘s Clarity Media Group bought citizen journalism site NowPublic. Now, we have another major move in hyperlocal with CNN and others investing $7m in aggregator Outside.in. CNN will not only invest in the site, but it will also feature feeds from Outside.in.

Outside.in founder Steven Berlin Johnson called the investment and content deal:

a vote of confidence in the platform we’ve built at outside.in, but perhaps more important it’s an endorsement of hyperlocal and the ecosystem model of news that many of us have been championing for years now.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and the principal of Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Outside.in, and he makes the passionate case for people covering their own communities.

My unwavering belief is that we will cover ourselves when it comes to local news. We are at the PTA meetings, the little league games, and the rallies to save our local institutions, so who better to cover them than us? This is what hyperlocal blogging is all about and it is slowly but surely it is gaining steam.

CNN’s partnership with Outside.in can be seen as a simple response to a competitor, but with all of the deals in this space, I guarantee that 2010 will see additional deals and development. Add to this location based services and mobile, and you’ve got somethig very interesting happening.

The promise of ‘pro-am’

As Fred says, people will cover their own communities, and we have seen some interesting hyperlocal projects including the pro-am projects of MyMissourian in Columbia Missouri and BlufftonToday in South Carolina or hyperlocal projects here in London like William Perrin’s Talk About Local. I personally like pro-am models where professional journalists cover the official life of the community – council meetings, crime, sports, schools and other local issues – while the site provides a platform for the community to cover itself and the full range of lived experience there. As Clyde Bentley, who set up MyMissourian, found out, readers didn’t want to write about politics as much as they wanted to write about religion, pets and the weather. Here are the lessons he learned from MyMissourian:

  • Use citizen journalism to supplement not replace.
  • UGC isn’t free.
  • Online attracts the eager, but print serves the masses.
  • Give people what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
  • Get rid of preconceptions of what journalism is.
  • Every day people are better ‘journalists’ than you think.

Lessons learned from failure and success

Despite all of this energy and experience, hyperlocal has still seen more high profile failures than successes such as Backfence and the Loudoun Extra project by the Washington Post. Even in those failures, there are lessons to be learned. Mark Potts who was behind Backfence said that one frequent mistake of hyperlocal projects is that they aren’t local enough.

He believes the key is to focus on a community of around 50,000 people. Covering a bigger area makes it harder to keep people interested. “You care less the farther it gets from home.”

The difficulty for Loudoun Extra was integration with WashingtonPost.com and a lack of community outreach, according to Rob Curley who headed up the project.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have success stories, but again, the secret to success seems to be a laser light focus on niche topics and keeping the hyper in hyperlocal. Crain’s New York just profiled Manhattan Media, which has seen revenue grow fivefold since 2005 and even more surprising is that ad revenue has continued to grow in the midst of the Great Recession. It’s a multi-platform, multi-revenue stream model with newspapers and websites, and their events business now contributes 20% of their revenue.

The lessons I take away is that newspapers trying to be all things to all people with no sense of place or focus are suffering mightily during the recession. Focus is key both in terms of topic and geography, and seeing as this is about engaging not only a virtual but very real world community, I’ll add my basic advice about blogging and social media: Be passionate and be real.

Whether we see a strong recovery in 2010 or not, local will be one growth area, and journalists looking for new opportunities should watch this space for ‘help wanted’ signs.

12.02.09
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The dangerous distraction of GWOG – the Global War on Google

Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants’ Global War on Google might make for entertaining copy for journalists who enjoy an old fashioned media war with titans going toe-to-toe, but Adam Tinworth has pointed out the danger of taking this rather noisy display of “posturing and PR” too seriously. It is distracting people in the news and information business from dealing with the real issues besetting our businesses.

But in this war of words, the true issues seem strangely absent. Where’s the discussion of how newspapers can compete for readers in the age of the attention crash? Where’s the careful analysis of the role of the general publication when their audience’s time is being slowly eaten away by a million and one niche websites that speak more directly to them than anything a national paper publishes? Who is talking about how you rebuild publishing companies to account for the new economic reality of internet publishing.

These are huge issues that are being completely ignored in the bluster of Murdoch’s posturing. These issues are critical in the development of any paid content strategy.

I would like to think that behind the public bluster that these issues are being discussed in strategy meetings across the industry, but I doubt it. I would wager that Adam and I have discussed these issues over beers more than they have been discussed in any boardroom. I feel relatively confident that I would win this wager.

While Adam highlights the scarcity of attention and abundance of content, industry leaders still boast about the indispensability and exceptional nature of their content. Too many newspaper editors still believe that their competition comes from other newspapers, not from music streamed on Spotify, TV from the BBC’s iPlayer or Apple’s iTunes or Modern Warfare 2 (which sold 4.7m copies in 24 hours). Newspaper journalism is competing for time and attention against a myriad of other choices in an over-saturated media environment. Until news organisations (and content creators of all stripes) begin to grapple with the economics of abundant content much of it of very high quality, we’re not going to take the many steps necessary to create sustainable businesses that support journalism.

12.01.09
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Print-digital paid content debates require reality

If you have any hope of solving a problem, you better have a clear sense of what the problem is and what causes it. Listening to the paid content debates in the newspaper industry, the debate has become polarised and filled with assumptions and assertions rather than clear-headed thinking informed by research and data.

One assertion that I’d like to challenge right up front is the oft repeated claim that no one makes money with digital content. In the late 90s, I often heard editors say, “The internet is great, but no one has figured out how to make money with it.” The dot.com crash only reinforced this view. However, internet use continued to grow through the crash. Advertising shifted online, especially after Google introduced its search-based advertising model. Within a year or two after the crash, many large news sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post were making money. A 2008 study in the US by Borrell Associates found almost all of 3,100 news websites surveyed were profitable.

The Great Recession has hit both the print and digital businesses of the newspaper industry with a vengeance putting tremendous pressure on newspapers. As I’ve said, the economic crisis has reopened divisive debates between the print and digital sides of the newspaper business. To get through this crisis and rebuild sustainable businesses that support professional journalism, we’ve got to get real about the economic reality we face, not just in the depths of this recession but after it ends.

Steve Yelvington has more experience with digital journalism than many people have in journalism full stop. He fights bluster with data and even a graph. Most news websites exhibit a long tail with a hump, he writes.

Most of those visitors come once or twice, probably following a link
from a search engine or another website. They’re looking for something
very specific. They find it (or not) and leave.

Then the number drops like a rock. Hardly anybody comes five times in a month.

But over on the right side you have an interesting little lump.

That lump is your loyalists. You’re going to have a hard time getting people to pay who come via a search engine, look at a page and leave. However, your loyalists see value in what you do and might be willing to pay. Working to convert more users to loyalists and giving your loyalists some way to pay for the content they value might be a revenue model that begins to add a revenue stream in addition to business cycle sensitive advertising.

Steve argues for a sophisticated model that leaves visitors who only look at one or two pages “unmolested” but asks those who view several pages to register with the site. News group McClatchy used this model, and the FT uses this model as well.

Determining how many pages people should see before registering and paying and what to charge are unknowns, but with a flexible system with graduated fees and clear benefits, this is a much more sophisticated model than some of the absolutist, binary solutions being thrown around.

Rewarding and building loyalty

I think that loyal readers should be rewarded, and I believe that they will reward publications they value with not only their traffic but also their monetary support. I think that newspapers could do much more to convert some passing traffic to more loyal readers, but it’s going to take better design and more engagement from journalists, which I know will be difficult with slimmer staffs. Not all journalists want to engage with readers, but I think that those who do and do it well should be encouraged and supported.

To successful deal with the problems that we’re facing during the recession and will be facing once growth returns, we need more data, more research, more experimentation and more sophistication in our discussions about business models. There is no silver bullet, no one solution that will save journalism. We’re going to have to try a number of things and a number of ways to earn money to support professional journalism. However, one of the first steps we need to take is to get past these lazy assertions and out-dated assumptions about the business. Lots of the conventional wisdom is based in the print-digital culture wars in newspaper newsrooms, and it’s in desperate need of updating.

11.23.09
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End the culture wars in journalism (wishful thinking)

Cuts at the Washington Post, primarily on the web and multimedia side according to the Politico, have brought into public a discussion that usually happens in newsrooms and mostly after hours amongst journalists. It has also exposed the depth of the division between digital and print journalists that has existed to varying degrees for most of my career.

Matthew Ingram, blogger and communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, discusses some of the specific issues at the Washington Post, but he is right in pointing out that the web-versus-print culture clash is anything but isolated to the Post:

(This kind of us-vs-them animosity) may have been amplified at the Post by the company’s physical and corporate structure (and there has been speculation that Web staff were let go because otherwise they would have had to be unionized), but you can bet this same battle is going on at virtually every major newspaper in North America. Why? Because they are caught between two worlds.

This isn’t isolated to North America. I’ve seen it across Europe, Australia and the parts of Asia I’ve visited.

To see this animosity in its full froth, just check out the comments on the report on the cuts at Washington indy, The City Paper. A commenter only identified as Sideshow Mel says:

For many years, The Post’s website was doing nothing more than posting the print articles, and hosting some online chats. But the web operation has this huge, spacious office to place things on the Internet, while the much-despised MSM reporters and editors were crammed together into an old, crappy space while actually doing the business of obtaining information and writing it. “the most productive and innovative employees,” don’t make me piss my pants. …

Jim Brady, former executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, does not truck with such comments, writing:

It’s the attitude of Stone Age commenters like these that still pervades far too many print newsrooms. Instead of attempting to adapt to what is clearly a digital future, they complain about the world collapsing around them, yet demean anyone who tries to do anything differently.

As he points out, Travis Fox, who won the first national Emmy for video journalism on the web, and fellow award-winning video journalist Pierre Kattar are reportedly two of those cut. On Twitter, Jim and Ken Sands, the executive editor for innovation at Congressional Quarterly, had a exchange that is another indication of how digital editors feel about this conflict.

jimbradysp: The most frustrating thing is that Web staffers go to work at newspapers b/c they want to help them find the way to the future…

jimbradysp: And, yet, once there, they find themselves ridiculed and demeaned by those they’re trying to help. Too much insecurity, I guess.

kensands: @jimbradysp Yes, insecurity. Find fault with anything new (blogs, twitter, etc.) instead of looking for ways it might improve journalism.

Derek Willis, a database journalist and developer formerly at the Washington Post and now with the New York Times, adds details to the internal battle that broke out when he wanted to make the switch from the paper to the website. I met Derek in the spring of 2007 as he was trying to make the transition. I wasn’t aware of the challenges he was facing in making it (Derek’s emphasis, not mine):

In a very real way, my transition was held up – I (jokingly at first, and then angrily) referred to it as a filibuster or a senatorial hold – by a few people at the paper. These people, most of whom no longer occupy the positions they held then, are not stupid. They are among the smartest folks I’ve ever worked with, and I have a high regard for their journalistic abilities. But the thinking that caused the editor of the paper to become involved in whether a mid-level staffer moved to the website was, in essence, this: this is a bad idea, because it will hurt the paper. My ego might like to think that this was really true, but I think the reality is that these people could not compare the value of my work for the website to the paper because they did not understand what it is I wanted to do.

Read Derek’s post, especially if you believe yourself to be on the print side of this divide. Derek wishes that he had done more to bridge the divide between the paper and the website.

The dangers of this continued conflict

I’m highlighting this discussion because I know it’s not isolated to the Washington Post. A couple of years ago, I thought this discussion was dying out. Digital revenues were growing by double digits at many news organisations, although in real terms revenue from print still made up the bulk of the revenues. Despite a firmly entrenched belief amongst print journalists, the digital side of many news organisations were generating profits by the early part of this decade, although again, they were small relative to the profits from the print business. Sadly the Great Recession has re-opened the discussion and amplified professional divisions as job security has ended for print and digital journalists.

In 2005, I went to the Web+10 Conference at the Poynter Institute with my manager at the time, Steve Herrmann of the BBC News website. It was an honour to spend time with digital pioneers from the US and elsewhere. In 2005, these pioneers were already asking this question: How do we create digital businesses to support quality journalism? It’s worth reading Howard Finberg’s summary of the conference:

During the next 10 years, will the economic underpinnings of the current media business collapse? What business models will support quality journalism? Is the idealism and democratic value of journalism under duress?

This was early 2005 before the industry in the US entered its current crisis. Some of the best digital minds in the industry saw the coming collapse of the business model. We weren’t dancing on grave of print. We have the same goal as print advocates and most of us, being so close to the digital business, saw 2009 coming years ago. (Few of us probably foresaw the ferocity of this recession, although Dan Gillmor blogged often about the housing bubble and bemoaned the lack of coverage of it.)

We have to end this culture war and remember that we share a common goal. Suw and I see this in a lot of industries, not just journalism. People see digital strategies as mostly about technology, but often, the biggest obstacles are cultural and territorial. Change challenges existing empires (and emperors) in organisations. Organisations without a sense of shared vision will tear themselves apart as managers compete against each other for scarce resources rather than the real competition outside of their organisation. This is not to argue for change for the sake of change. But the world has changed and we have to adapt if we hope to have thriving journalism businesses in the future that support quality reporting.

What’s at stake? I agree with Steve Buttry when he says that the ‘web-first’ wars are in many ways fighting the last war. I thought we had put this web war behind us in journalism but if we continue to fight it, we will only increase the number of casualties.

11.17.09
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Times (of London): Let’s do the time warp again

I just said on Twitter:

Times Editor Harding refers to a history he will soon be part of. http://bit.ly/47pu1o Confuses value with cost, and ignores supply.

It’s one of those times when 140 characters really over-simplifies what I’m thinking. Harding is quoted in the Guardian (my day job) as saying:

Harding said newspapers had been undervalued for years, pointing out that when the Times was founded in the 18th century it had cost more than double a coffee or a tumblerful of gin.

“We are going to rewrite the economics of the newspaper, newsgathering and delivery business,” he said. “We have to do that, we are in the fight of our lives.”

What I meant on Twitter is that referring to the media economics of the 18th century to build or justify a strategy for the 21st is clearly ludicrous. Paper in the 18th century was an expensive thing and steam presses hadn’t been invented. Information was scarce and could fetch a premium.

Cover price and revenue in terms of newspapers became de-coupled long ago. The bulk of revenues came from other services, primarily advertising-based, that we sold. I’d really like to hear a lot more honesty from the industry about the recent past of its business, not wistfulness for the 18th century.

General news and information is no longer scarce and according to recent surveys most people say they will simply find a free alternative if asked to pay. In the age of the internet, information is not scarce. Opinion isn’t scarce. People’s attention is scarce. What services can we provide that will pay for professional journalists to do the work that only they will do? We have always cross-subsidised newsgathering with other paid services. There are lots of revenue opportunities for a digital business, but up to this point, we’ve left it to others because information services don’t fit into the idea of the craft of journalism, i.e. they aren’t about writing stories.

I completely agree that paying for professional journalists to cover Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and domestic politics and our communities is important. We need to find new ways to support it. I just don’t see how hearkening to a long distant past bears any relevance to the current market. Let’s talk about the economics of content in the 21st century and how we build a business to support quality journalism in this economy rather than pine wistfully for some past bathed in sepia tones and privilege when only the upper classes could afford a paper with their tumblerful of gin. It’s become a battle cry amongst digital journalists: Tradition is not a business model.

When I say that Harding confuses value with cost, I mean that, sadly, the social value of an activity is often not directly related to the compensation for that activity. If our societies operated like that, teachers would make as much as bankers because shaping the next generation’s minds would be as important as funding the next generation of businesses.

As the Guardian piece points out, there is an irony in Murdoch’s empire making the argument that newspapers are undervalued.

Martin Newland, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and now editorial director of the Abu Dhabi paper the National, said that the Times itself had played a role in the undervaluing of newspapers by slashing its cover price to 10p in the 1990s.

The karmic wheel coming to bite you in the arse Mr Murdoch?

This probably doesn’t come through in 140 characters, but I’m not opposed to paid services online. I also believe that people will pay and, as a consumer, I do pay for value-added services. However, I tend to agree with Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer who predicted mixed models recently at the Monaco Media Forum and who said:

Readers had to be “seduced” with new offerings, not re-educated…

At the end of the day, what I see in News Corp is an attempt to ignore the media economics of the 21st century in an attempt to create a defensive position for a business model better suited when Mr Murdoch was one of a handful of media barons with the resources to bury competitors and bend the world to his will. The sun has set on that empire and it’s the dawn of another age.

Charge yes, in order to continue to support journalism. However, as Döpfner says, it’s about seduction with new services, not re-education or charging for commodity services where free alternatives exist. As to this move by News Corp, I can only say, goodbye and good luck.

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11.04.09
by

Cars: There’s an app for that

Suw and I are taking two weeks off. Most of the time, we’ll be here in London enjoying a holi-stay. I might engage in some deep-thought blogging after recovering from a really too busy 2009. In the meantime, I’ll just engage in a little light coolhunting.

Someone recently was picking my brain about the future of in-car technology. I think that one of the knock-on effects of the iPhone is that people will expect apps and add-on services in a wider range of consumer electronics. Cars will not just have on-board computers to manage the engine but also on-board computers to navigate, entertain and inform much as we would expect in our home.

Hobbyists have already been adding these kind of systems to their cars for years, and Prius drivers love to hack their hybrid cars. High-end cars have complex environmental and entertainment systems, but we’re starting to glimpse how these activities will filter into the mainstream.

Satellite radio services in the US have been using some of their surplus bandwidth to provide information services, and with 4G data services such as WiMax and LTE service expanding in the next few years, mobile data will provide the kind of bandwidth that we’ve previously thought of as restricted to DSL and cable. Faster wireless connections will bring new forms of entertainment, expand the use of web services and provide new opportunities for information providers.

GigaOm has a great post on a prototype system in a Prius.

As a journalist, the question is whether news organisations will let another opportunity slip by them.