05.06.09
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Government support for journalism is no panacea

Today, I had a Twitter discussion with Kevin Garber, an “African entrepreneur in Australia and founder and CEO of spellr.us” an online spellcheck service. As with Twitter conversations, this is actually from two threads that take some joining. It began based on one my response to journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen who said:

My testimony would have been: No government funding for news; culture war yahoos in Congress will just Mapplethorpe it http://tr.im/kDIb

Jay was linking to a US Senate committee meeting about The Future of Journalism. Jay is referring to the battle over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the US over support of exhibitions of homoerotic photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. The NEA became a key front in the US Culture Wars.

Journalists in the US who look to the BBC model for funding journalism or want their own government bailout would be wise to remember the Culture Wars. They’ve loved covering it, but if they took state funding, they wouldn’t be just be covering it, they would become embroiled in it, even more than they already are. As I said to Jay on Twitter, “People in US arguing for gov’t support for newspapers forget what a political football arts or public broadcast funding is.”

Kevin said:

the key question is are newspapers a public good that can’t be addressed via normal supply/demand mechanisms …

To which I replied: “No, the question is about about journalism not about newspapers. Public funding for journalism is not a panacea. (says as ex-BBC)”.

I’ll agree with Kevin who said in a follow up comment that “smart capitalism doesn’t rely on mkt for everything”, but I’m not sure that the market is failing in terms of support for professional journalism. Rather, I think we’re in the midst of changing business models and that the dominant print model has given way to a multi-platform model with much greater diversity of revenue streams than the recession sensitive over-reliance on advertising. Newspaper and broadcast journalism are capital-intensive, industrial businesses that rely on advertising rates that were under threat before the recession and are unsustainable during the recession. The market has been sending clear signals to newspapers for 30 years that their business model was under threat, and those trends have only accelerated in the last five years. However, the Great Recession is a rupture in business as usual. Assumptions, business projections and companies are now being swept away as this credit bubble bursts.

Now, like the banking and auto industry, the newspaper industry is looking for a solution, and many journalists share Kevin Garber’s view that newspaper journalism is such an important public good that it merits public funds. You hear it when journalists argue that they play a role essential to democracy.

Even non-journalists make this argument. Suw was at Social Web Foo Camp recently at O’Reilly HQ in California, and she said that many people during a “design the future newspaper” pointed to the BBC as the model that could save journalism. Public service broadcasting is a funding model for journalism, but even in the UK, it hasn’t been extended to newspapers. And I doubt it will be. I think journalists also need to realise that such a model probably couldn’t roll back the job cuts that are hitting US newspapers. This shouldn’t be seen as some full employment act for journalists. Also, let’s get real. As an American, I think it’s safe to say that we would have to be living in some Star Trek-variety parallel universe to even contemplate significant public support in the US for a $200-plus annual licence fee payment to watch live broadcast television (either other-the-air or down a cable of some description). It ain’t gonna happen. Seriously. Also, while many other state broadcasters benefit from a licence fee, the UK is unique in the level of funding, and I think a poll of senior executives at the BBC would find most of them preparing for a dramatically reduced level of public funding in the future.

But apart from the political feasibility of a publicly funded journalism institution at the level of the BBC, let’s take a look at some of the cons stemming from public funding. And I say this coming from the point of view of having worked for Auntie for eight years. I love the BBC, and I was very proud to work there. However, public funding doesn’t come without its downsides (and strings attached, just ask the banks or Chrysler for that matter).

  1. What one administration giveth, another can taketh away. And the cuts might even come from an administration that you think will like you. Bill Clinton didn’t really like the press when he left, and Labour, while it might seem would have much more kinship with the BBC and public broadcasting, has not exactly been a supporter of the BBC. Just ask Director General Mark Thompson who thought he was going to get a much more generous licence fee settlement than he got.
  2. Your commercial competitors will spill tankers of ink, pay lobbyists and rant endlessly on air (cough, Fox News) to make sure that your funding will be as low as possible. Just ask the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US. (Maybe you should take a page out of NPR’s books and start subscription drives.)
  3. You’ll have to subject new ideas to a ‘public value test‘ and make sure that it doesn’t distort the commercial market. In other words, you can be successful, but not too successful.
  4. Public funding won’t insulate you from job cuts. As I said, I worked for the BBC for eight years. There were cuts four out of the eight years I worked there. One year, the cuts were 18%, which was a blessing because the Head of New Media at the time, Ashley Highfield, had asked for 25%. And the cuts continue. This year, they are looking to find £400m of savings.

There are pros, of course, and the BBC is a great journalistic institution. But it’s not in the ruddy health that most American journalists assume it is. Like much of the media, it reached a high water mark in the early part of this decade, and it’s now swimming against the tide. This is not to say that public funding shouldn’t play a role in journalism, but it already does in the US in the form of NPR and public television. Also, based on the experience of Sweden, state support might help for while, but it’s not a long-term solution.

I’ll be interested to see what if anything comes out of the US Senate hearings today, but if it’s government support you want, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE: A timely example of what I’m getting at. If journalists are anxious over a sense of powerlessness from market forces, it’s no different when the government can change your budget by fiat. See: (Conservative Party leader) Cameron to force vote to halt increase in BBC licence fee. He might not get his way now, but he might when he’s prime minister.

05.05.09
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What does the future hold for social technology?

Part of my research for Carnegie UK Trust is about trying to work out what driving forces are going to affect the way that social technology and the internet is going to evolve over the next 15 years, and what that might mean for civil society organisations that want to be a part of that landscape. We’re not trying to predict the future – I think we all know how embarrassing that can be when it doesn’t come true. Just think jetpacks and flying cars. But what we can do is try to identify the driving forces behind potential change and then put those together into possible scenarios. We can ask the question “What if…?” and get some useful information out of that exercise.

On their website, Carnegie UK Trust put it like this:

The future is uncertain. There is no single, certain forecast for ourselves, our organisations, communities, nations or for the planet as a whole. While we would like to eliminate this uncertainty, we must work to live with it effectively and creatively. Understanding trends and scenarios gives a sense of the patterns of opportunities and threats, and enhances our potential effectiveness and creativity.

While the future is uncertain and much of it beyond our control, we can control many aspects of it. We choose our future: we create it by what we do or fail to do. Visions and strategies linked to a clear sense of trends and scenarios make us better able to shape the future we would prefer.

We’re using a methodology called ‘scenarios thinking’, which focuses much more on asking questions than on trying to make forecasts, and will hopefully result in a set of scenarios that organisations can use to help them understand where we might find ourselves and, therefore, what they need to focus on in order to be able to cope with these changes. If you want to know more about scenarios thinking, Carnegie UK Trust have put together a list of useful resources.

Whilst I was in San Francisco last month, I spent some time with a number of people talking about the future, trying to find out what they thought was important to consider in this phase of the research. I went into the interviews with a list of questions that I’d like to try to answer, but with an open mind about what the answers might be. I didn’t always ask the questions directly, as you’ll hear, but I did keep them in the front of my mind at al times. Here they are for your consideration. I’d be more than happy to have feedback on them, to hear what you think about my underlying assumptions.

1. Predetermined driving forces
What forces appear to be predetermined?
What changes in the broader environment appear unavoidable?
What assumptions are these changes based upon?

2. Uncertain driving forces
What might happen over the next 15 years that would affect social technology?
If you could have any question answered about what will happen by 2025, what would it be?
How uncertain are they?
Which are becoming more certain?

3. Wildcard events
What type of unexpected developments could totally change the game?
What could undermine existing assumptions?

4. Connections and criticality
Are any of these driving forces connected?
Which are the most important?
Which small changes could have big consequences?
Which of these driving forces are critical?

It’s important to remember that the driving forces that most influence the way that social technology develops may not be technological. We’re not just talking about Moore’s Law here, but trends and developments in all sorts of areas, including:

  • Demographic
  • Economic
  • Environmental
  • Resources
  • Technological
  • Social
  • Political
  • Legal

Obviously we’re focused on the UK, but some of these forces are international or global in nature, so influences may come from anywhere.

The videos (so far)
Some of the interviewees were kind enough to let me publish our discussion, so here they are. If you want to respond to any of them, or answer my questions yourself, please do so however and wherever you wish. If you post something elsewhere, please leave a comment to let me know.

Last thing to say before the videos: apologies for the quality of some of them. James and JP were filmed whilst we were at dinner, and it was a bit dark and noise, so the video isn’t great, but they’re both quite short so hopefully you can forgive the lo-fi production standards!

James Cox

JP Rangaswami

Chris Messina

Ross Mayfield

Update: If you work in the third sector or know people who do, please also take a look at this post about a survey I’m running to find out how third sector associations are using social tools at the moment.

05.02.09
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links for 2009-05-02

  • 10 lessons from a failed startup » VentureBeat
    Kevin: Ten lessons from Mark Goldenson who tried to start "an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe". One thing to note for journalists looking for new opportunities: "Content businesses suck (or: do it for love and expect to lose money)." And as many have written about, media start-ups are not job creation programmes for journalists. They are usually small on staffing and funding and big on risk.
    (tags: venture vc entrepreneurship strategy economy startup lessons)
05.01.09
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links for 2009-05-01

  • The impact of newspaper closures on independent local journalism and access to local information | Online Journalism Blog
    Kevin: Alex Lockwood looks into the future of local journalism and local government in the UK ahead of Parliamentary inquiry. Alex repeats what is becoming a more frequent call that journalism, not newspapers, needs saving. He adds: "What is important here is not the newspaper’s historical position. It is not the paper’s brand that make this local journalism worthy of the stamp ‘quality’. It is the standards of journalism itself, which can exist independent of the structures of a local paper: the fact-checking, the transparency, the reporting for the public good. And that can be done by Roy at No.53 on his own blog, or by a crowd-sourced MySociety project."
    (tags: journalism newspapers economics innovation local mysociety democracy UK)
  • cybersoc.com: revealed: groundbreaking study of user generated content use at the bbc
    Kevin: Robin Hamman talks about a major study that he is working on with several others to study the BBC's use of user-generated content. As Robin says, it is an ambitious study that that will interview BBC staff and managers as well poll the public on their views of BBC UGC.
    (tags: journalism ethnography cybersoc ugc comments research uk bbc academic)
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: A tale of two very different journalism start-ups
    Kevin: Bill Grueskin at Reflections of a Newsosaur speaks with Scott Karp of publish2 and Gordon Crovitz of Journalism Online, two journalism startups with very different models. Crovitz explains the strategy or Jornalism Online: "he outlined a four-pronged strategy, ranging from providing a commerce system for publishers to devising aggressive marketing plans to sell subscriptions across the board for multiple outlets. His group also wants to help negotiate licensing and royalty deals with aggregators, which may explain why they brought attorneys David Boies and Theodore Olson to the company’s board." For publish2, Scott talked about developing a tool that would allow news organisations to pool their reporting resources and expertise. He sees Publish2 revenue streams as "paid, commercial applications of his platform, as well as building a broader advertising network among news organizations." Two different models, and there is a good overview of them both. Well worth reading.
    (tags: journalism newspapers businessmodels media innovation paidcontent publish2)
  • Kindle users skew older; does that impact news biz’s revenue hopes? » Nieman Journalism Lab
    Kevin: The title is pretty self-explanatory on this one. Publishers Lunch, a daily paid newsletter, did some reporting and research and found based on numbers from Amazon's Kindle forum that: "over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older". Joshua Benton at Nieman says after seeing these numbers, "It’s older folks — not the gadget crowd, not the young bookloving crowd, and not the mathematical intersect of the two." If Kindle readers are older, this is not going to capture the demographic that newspapers looking for new revenue streams are hoping for.
    (tags: mobile ebooks amazon kindle books iphone newspapers revenue businessmodels)
  • BBC – Radio Labs – Introducing… BBC Feeds Hub
    Kevin: An interesting project from the BBC Audio & Music Interactive team looking to create a Feeds Hub. One thing I like about it is that they appear to be working on an open-source project rather than trying to replicate an existing commercial technology. What they want to do is help the BBC make sense of its own feeds and and also to get usage statistics on those feeds. Other features that I like are feed monitoring to know when something breaks. And they are working on a system that will allow for non-technical staff to set up and manage their feeds.
    (tags: web bbc rss semanticweb feeds)
  • Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Significance and distillation: why we need newspapers
    Kevin: Charlie has a good summary of a speech by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Betholdt Kohler. The "elitist and unashamedly so" newspaper is trying to chart a course, but Herr Kohler makes a good case for maintaining the newspaper's traditions. Much like The Guardian, the newspaper is supported by a foundation and isn't subject to some of the pressures of the market. However, some of the practices seem a bit wasteful. Production and distribution make up 60% of their costs. That seems high. But I think that weekly analysis like The Economist has a market. However, The Economist seems to be taking a more sophisticated approach than FAZ, building up an intelligent web presence and strategy rather than dismissing online news sites as tracking "the nervous twitching of news as it happens". That sounds like simple print prejudice.
    (tags: journalism newspapers germany media)
  • Flickr Hit Hard By Yahoo Layoffs
    Kevin: I'm going home to backup my Flickr photos. Om Malik looks at some of the cuts and departures from the photo sharing site. I'd have to agree with Om on this one. The cuts at Flickr seem those non-strategic cuts, mass headcount culls by a company in crisis. They had some of clearest thinking about building experiences around social objects, namely photos.
    (tags: yahoo flickr layoffs)
04.30.09
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links for 2009-04-30

  • Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday newsrooms set to be merged | Media | guardian.co.uk
    Kevin: The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday make their first loss since they were founded in 1817, but that figure masks the fact that this loss was entirely predictable. The titles have lost more than 40% of their circulation in the last decade, and their website has faltered after a redesign. The problems at the titles seem worse than at most papers but not isolated. the Scotsman group editor-in-chief, John McLellan, refused to discuss the groups financial position but dismissed as 'a myth' that parent company Johnston Press insisted on 30% profit.

    Those profit demands, even if they were once true, aren't the issue here. This is about a long-time coming loss, not unreasonable profit demands. Journalists still seem to be in a state of denial about the sorry financial state of newspapers.

    (tags: newspapers economics recession Scotland)
  • Drop in Newspaper Circulation Accelerates – NYTimes.com
    Kevin: "The rate of decline in print circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, as industry figures released Monday show a more than 7 percent drop compared with the previous year, while another recent analysis showed that newspaper Web site audiences had increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter." Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit organization that owns The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, said, "One shouldn’t be in denial that this represents people quitting newspapers to get news from the Web. But there are many other factors."
    (tags: newspapers circulation ecnomics)
  • Nick Jones: Newspapers approach to video gives them exclusive edge | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog
    Kevin: Former BBC correspondent Nick Jones looks at how British newspapers are working with video and sees great opportunities for them. He expresses concern about the journalistic standards while noting the commercial success. “Newspapers are making money out of video and audio. They are buying up exclusive material obtained in dubious circumstances – but it is getting good ratings,” he said. But he points to the Ian Tomlison video showing police hitting a man without any clear provocation. Tomlinson later died. A member of a the public, a man working for the financial services industry in New York, provided the video to the Guardian (disclosure: My employer). “The Guardian was prepared to take risks the BBC would not have contemplated,” said Jones, who claimed the BBC would have had to apply a ‘whole host’ of tests to the video evidence.
    (tags: newspapers UK video journalism)
04.29.09
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links for 2009-04-29

04.28.09
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links for 2009-04-28

  • Survival Strategies – The New York Times
    Kevin: The New York Times has an interesting project asking readers about their strategies to get by during the recession. They have them grouped by latest, most recommended and editors picks. It's a simple concept, but it definitely falls into the idea of user generated content as a service to users. Registered NY Times users can log in or Twitter users can submit their ideas using a unique tag.
    (tags: economics twitter tips nytimes recession tagging)
04.27.09
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Socially disrupting a major news site is trivial

Shouting LOL in a crowded theatre: trolling, griefing and Web 2.0 dickery

I originally was just going to add Chris Applegate’s discussion of trolling and griefing at Social Media Camp London last weekend (we didn’t manage to make it) into our delicious links for the day, but then I realised that Chris has highlighted a really important issue.

The social sophistication of trolls completely out-strips the social thinking behind most news sites. As a journalist who hears a lot of complaints from other editors about trolling, I can honestly say if 4Chan turned their attention to a major news website, it would be trivial to socially disrupt it. Actually, 4Chan has already done this, gaming the Time magazine most influential person poll.

The Internet has different rules. The folks at Time just learned about it in a very amusing way, as their third annual poll for the world’s most influential person was topped by moot A.K.A. Christopher Poole, founder of the legendary memebreeding forum 4chan.

The fact that it’s so easy is probably one of the reasons that really good trolls don’t bother playing silly buggers with news sites. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Chris says, quite rightly:

The barrier between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ has come down, and what happens online can now very easily spill over into offline. There is no inherent morality within Web 2.0 – tools can be used for good or evil. Trolls are now their own separate problem within themselves – they allow efforts to be distributed to many human actors over a variety of technologies, and collectivised to any particular end, over a mere matter of minutes, hours, days or months. It’s a different problem from spam (mainly bots) or hacking (mainly individuals or small groups) and as the social web gets ever more ubiquitous and less distinct from the ‘real’ world, it’s only going to be more of a concern. Successfully fighting against them is a distinct concern – but at the same time let’s not get obsessed by it; letting it stifle innovation would mean the trolls truly have won.

Anyone who has worked with social media on a news site knows that trolling isn’t a new problem. As soon as you have a forum, as sites that I worked on in the 1990s did, you will have people who enjoy poking at the other users. But there are just some folks who have a passion for more than mischief.

However, although we’ve increased the number of interactive features on our sites, news organisations mostly have failed to increase the emotional and social intelligence of their strategies. Some of this is an over-emphasis on technical solutions to what are largely social problems. Certainly, bad technology can make your job harder, but technology can only go so far in solving social issues.

A lot of the problems come from strategies that make perfect sense in the era of broadcast mass media but don’t make sense in terms of social media. And when I say broadcast, I mean uni-directional media, including print, not simply television or radio. Mass media constantly competes for attention, often by trying to shout over each other. Editors wanted to be talked about, and a lot of the strategies seem solely designed to outrage, upset or simply piss people off. Some mass media strategies aren’t social strategies. They are anti-social strategies. Journalists give sources a right to respond, but now the audience has a right to respond too. If we whip an audience into a mob, the result is predictable.

Social media journalism is about working in constructive ways with the audience to provide something of value both to the news organisation but more importantly to our co-collaborators in the audience. We have new opportunities to help people make sense of the world and make decisions in democratic socieities. If the only value that news organisations provide in terms of social media is an opportunity for people to vent their rage, that’s not a winning startegy. It’s a strategy that deserves to fail.

04.27.09
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links for 2009-04-27

04.26.09
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The long view in building news businesses

Google News Timeline

When Google Labs released their News Timeline feature, it prompted Mathew Ingram at Harvard University Nieman Journalism Lab to call for more creativity from news organisations. Mathew wrote:

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? … Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing?

In the comments, people pointed out projects that news organisations had done such as the a graphic visualisation of recent news at NineMSN in Australia. I pointed out time-based navigation at El Comercio in Peru. Mark S. Luckie who writes the excellent blog about journalism and technology, 10,000 Words wrote:

It’s kind of sad showing off innovative technologies over at 10,000 Words, knowing it will be years before most newsrooms adopt them, if at all.

Another commenter, Dan Conover, said, “I wish it wasn’t this simple, but the truth is that the newsroom culture is, and has been for years, overtly hostile to the geek culture.”

Getting past the frustration, how do we bring more innovation to news organisations? It’s something that Suw and I write about frequently here at Strange Attractor.

  1. Journalists, editors and senior managers need to learn about the software development process.  
    I often say that journalists think that technology is like Harry Potter. Many believe that developers need only to wave a magic wand and voila, faster than an editor can drain a cup of coffee, we have a new interactive feature. Web and software development is more like the Matrix. It’s a rules-bound world. Some rules can be bent, but others cannot be broken. Also, just like in life, some choices preclude others. Web technology is not a blank canvas. A good, dedicated developer can do amazing things, but no developer can do magic. They can’t rewrite the rules, rewrite a programming language or rebuild your CMS in a day.   
    Most editors don’t need to learn how to code, but editors do need to learn the art of the possible. Some things can be done quickly, in a few hours. Other projects take more work. A basic understanding of what is possible on a daily deadline is essential.
  2. Develop a palatte of reusable digital elements
    When I first started doing online journalism, we often built one-off projects that took a lot of time and had a mixed response from our readers. We were still learning, not only how to execute digital journalism projects, but also we were learning what type of projects people found engaging. We soon learned that ‘evergreen’ projects often were best, things that had a life-span much longer than most news events. Besides, there are very few editorial projects that merit huge one-off investments, and most news orgs can’t afford this in 2009.
    At the BBC, when I started, we had a limited palette of things that we could add quickly to primarily text-based news stories. The News website was still very young. But over time, we built on that limited palette. Our Specials team built things, and they tried to determine what worked and what didn’t. The things that worked were added to the ongoing list of elements that journalists could add to their stories.
    Modular interactive elements are easier in the Web 2.0 era. For instance, we often build maps, not just locator graphics but actual maps that draw on data (for instance one could create a map using data of the H1N1, swine flu outbreak). More news organisations are using Twitter and other third party services that call external APIs and cache the results.
    If you’ve got limited resources (and who doesn’t), you must think in a joined up way. Think of elements that will add value to your entire site not just to a certain section. Think of elements that will work in many areas of coverage.
  3. Interactivity is a state a mind and doesn’t always require technical development
    Much of this isn’t even about software development. It’s about a state of mind. Interactivity isn’t just about the web. It’s still about letters and phone calls. It can be about text messages. When I worked for World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service, Americans called or sent emails. Listeners in the UK mostly called, and Africans sent text messages by the hundreds. The first and most important step isn’t about developing a technology strategy but about developing a philosophy of collaboration with your audience.
    Everything will flow from that philosophy because there are many non-technical ways to get your audience involved. One of the most powerful things on World Have Your Say was getting people around a microphone in Africa to talk to Americans who had called in. The marriage of mass media and social media can be an extremely powerful combination.
    Add to all of this no-cost of low-cost web services, and you can do many things on a daily deadline.
  4. Strategic projects require long-term vision
    When I was writing the post for the Guardian about Google News Timeline, I found out that Google had begun creating a historical archive of news content in 2006. News is ephemeral, but as news is the first draft of history, news stories put in context can be a fascinating look at history. Google decided that archiving this content might have some value.
    There are a lot of things that take a strategic decision and not only long-term development but also a long-term commitment from a news organisation. I think that geo-tagging is one example. It’s a choice that takes a bit of development but actually more commitment from editorial teams, but the addition of a small bit of structured data generated by journalists creates a lot of opportunities, some which might have revenue.

Taking a long view is difficult as news organisations face very serious short-term challenges, but the lack of long-term thinking is one of the things that got a lot of news orgs into this mess. Developing a long-term, multi-platform strategy might have goals five years out, but that doesn’t mean developing the perfect five-year plan. It means setting some strategic goals and getting there one day at a time.