Liveblog in English, by Olli Sulopuisto of Nonfiktio.fi

Twitter #jourfut

Anything else to add, in English?

Tanja Aitamurto will be delivering her opening speech in just a moment. Her reseach was funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Today’s panelists are – as per the previous enty – Helene Auramo, Jyri Engeström, Mikael Pentikäinen, and Mikael Jungner.

For the people who aren’t present: we’re looking forward to your questions, so leave comments on this entry or use the hashtag #jourfut on Twitter.

Update: Jyri has started a Buzz about the panel.

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The Discussion

Last Question: What’s the future of journalism?

Pentikäinen: Content that matters to the readers.

Jungner: Professional journalism… keep the people interested.

Engeström: Participation.

Auramo: Online video.

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16:04 – Pentikäinen: Printed paper is awesome, at least to most people.

16:03 – Audience Q from Esko Kilpi: what about better user interfaces? Printed newspapers are v clumsy, difficult. Will the innovations come from trad media or 3rd parties?

16:02 – Pentikäinen: We’ve got Sanoma Digital that generates quite a lot of revenue and has nothing to do with journalism.

16:01 – Ville Vesterinen: Classifieds subsidize a great deal of what Sanoma is doing in Finland

16:01 – Jungner: Ilkka has been quite interesting in Finland, they’ve invented things other media companies haven’t.

16:00 – Pentikäinen: In the Netherlands we do a lot of stuff with event organizing. So yes, there’s a lot of potential there.

15:56 – Audience Q, Matti Lintulahti: Yearly 80M eur in search engine advertising in Finland already; small companies want to work with local media but have they got proper services available? So will the media companies stick with what they’re doing now or will they try to expand into new areas, like event organizing and such.

15:54 – Aitamurto: HuffPo has 40–50 employees. The company has ~$40M USD in funding, so they’re pretty free to experiment with revenue models right now. They say they’re in the black already.

15:54 – Pentikäinen: Hopefully HS will not cut down on the amount of reporters in the near future.

15:54 – Audience Q from Markku Huusko, Uusisuomi.fi: Helsingin Sanomat has 300 journalists, Uusisuomi.fi has 6 and some of them part-time. What’ll happen to the number of reporters at Helsingin Sanomat in the near future? And in what shape in HuffPo on the business side?

15:54 – Jungner: Monthly payments are the key. And the material needs to be interesting: the long tail stuff but also the big stars, cos they draw people in.

15:52 – Pentikäinen: Yes, you cannot paywall generic news. Combining different media products into a saleable product is a different matter, interesting but nothing happening at Sanoma right now that I could talk about.

15:51 – Audience Q: Esa Väliverronen (Uni Helsinki): Paywalled online publshing might work for niche magazines and WSJ, but probably not for general purpose news.

15:49 – Audience comment, Markus Ossi of TarkkaMarkka

15:48 – Jungner: Everybody’s got ideas, but how do you nurture the idea into a working business? We need an ecosystem that can support it.

15:46 – Engeström: New ways of paying for editorial content will come up. Compare to what’s happened with music. Maybe people don’t want to pay for music but they might want to pay for a possibility to publish their playlists?

15:44 – Pentikäinen: Well, people paying for news they like has been done in the past. It’s known as newsstand sales and subscriptions. We just haven’t listed everybody online who bought a copy of Ilta-Sanomat.

15:43 – Jungner: Finnish journalism is like an insurance. You need an infrastructure that can be harnessed to do Important Work, say like the reporting that’s been done on the campaign financing.

15:40 – Aitamurto: Crowdsourcing and Kachingle. Allows (micro)donating money to worthy causes and telling others what you’ve donated to. Using Kachingle I could pay to read David Carr’s pieces, as I’m not that interested in the sports pages (obviously NY Times would get a cut).

15:37 – Auramo: What pulls in the biggest audiences in the fashion blogging world? Experts? Nope, relatable people. Sorta like reality tv, I think.

15:35 – Pentikäinen: Sure, see no problems with that. But the firewall between editorial and advertising stays, because that’s part of what makes Helsingin Sanomat valuable. People will pay for quality products, which is partly why I believe why the Finnish media will make it.

15:33 – Engeström: Media innovation requires technological innovation. It cannot be about content alone. Now I hope that there will be no advertorials in Helsingin Sanomat, but let’s say there’s a story about a new product – can the newspaper provide a link to a webstore (and get a commission from it) or is it eternally impossible?

15:31 – Audience comment, Tuija Aalto: Mind you, me jumping ship (a hypothetical situation) wouldn’t do much harm to Yle as a whole, because if the network is strong, it won’t need one node.

15:29 – Jungner: What we at Yle try to do is facilitate self-expression. Right now we’re working on Kohtaus, where people get help with screenwriting, might even get published. Re: discussion – our strategy is to have people talk about Yle’s programs in existing forums, e.g. on Helsingin Sanomat’s webpages. We want to see Yle’s people participate in social media.

15:28 – Pentikäinen: Audience participation has gone way, way up in Sanoma’s newspapers. The ways vary from newspaper to newspaper. Vartti and Metro publish a lot of readers’ photos. Is Finland actually so much behind the US?

15:26 – Pentikäinen: The change is already upon as. Helsingin Sanomat has 1 million readers, and 1.5 million readers online. Ilta-Sanomat has almost 2 million readers online.

15:23 – Jungner: In Finland there are people on the bleeding edge and then there’s the rest, who I will call the ABC gas station people. The question is: when will the big, huddling masses start doing what the digital pioneers are doing now?

15:21 – Pentikäinen: Obviously stuff happening across the Atlantic will have an effect on Finland but we’re still not the same. In 5 years our business model will be pretty much the same but the distribution online/print will have changed a bit.

15:20 – Audience Q: What’s happening in the US will end up on Finnish shores sooner or later. So my question: how will Sanoma Corp make money in 5 years? Another Q: what’s happening with media timeshares?

15:16 – Ville Vesterinen, Arctic Startup: Our goal was never to build a business model but to do meaningful stuff. What we do to make money is organize events, sell our expertise.

15:13 – Jungner: The Long Tail isn’t only about the tail. Take Sanoma for example: they’ve got the name recognition, they’ve got the expertise – shouldn’t be too threatening for them. Also case Elisa Viihde – people will pay for things they find valuable.

15:11 – Pentikäinen: Trad. media spends a whole lot of time thinking about what the readers want. Journalism might change from a profession to a hobby, which is a worrisome development. Niche online publications might make some money for a few people but will not support mass media, especially in Finland.

15:10 – Engeström: www.newsmill.se seems to be working fine, one of the funders is Bonnier. Social media tends to trend towards a more personal approach, ie. from institutional bylines to branded reporters/readers/et al.

15:05 – Pentikäinen: Don’t see a lot of innovation coming out of Yle either. And I’ve never heard of a meeting where people were scheming to stop Google. We’ve thought about how to deal with Google, sure, but that’s different.

15:03 – Jungner: What has Finland contributed to the worldwide media development? Pretty much nothing. We don’t have a culture of innovations, our institutions go to a lot of trouble to stop development (how to stop Google, Apple, Kindle?). Slowly eroding the basics of our culture. We need to spread the optimism that Tanja Aitamurto shows in her report.

15:02 – Pentikäinen: Two questions here. Number 1: Business models. Number 2: What will happen to journalism, the journalistic process? Lots of possibilities there, we’ve only begun exploring #2 in Finland. But we have to take care of the business models too, otherwise independent media will die out.

15:00 – Pentikäinen: If what’s happening in the States happens here in Finland, you need to be rich, work for Yle, inherit a fortune or possibly just go beg for money.

14:59 – Engeström: Discussion, putting a face on people is what the internet does to the media.

14:58 – Engeström: We’re approaching this thing upside down, always talking about making money first. But if I were to take part in a new startup, it’d first and foremost have to create something people want to see.

14:57 – Aitamurto: FTC wants bloggers to report their endorsements, testimonials.

14:55 – Auramo: Everybody at Indiedays has committed to following ethical guidelines, that include mentioning freebies. Trying to avoid what’s happened at Sweden, the US.

14:54 – Auramo: Ad funded, looking for new revenue streams. Organizing various meetings etc. looks interesting.

14:52 – Pentikäinen: Our revenue is ads/subs 60/40, now after the recession 50/50. Developing lots of stuff re: online advertising, for example regional targeting.

How do you follow the news?

14:51 – Pentikäinen: I seem to be the one who belongs to the museum … Printed newspaper in the morning, mobile and broadcast media during the day.

14:47 – Jungner: Well… Twitter is by far the fastest, might take two to three weeks for the mainstream media to catch on. I’ve picked 400 most interesting and smartest people to follow, it’s almost like the Nobel committee is having a party inside my head.

14:45 – Auramo: On the phone with an app, follows various media on Twitter and looks at friends’ links. Haven’t subscribed to nespapers for years.

The Panelists

• Mikael Pentikäinen, editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat
• Mikael Jungner, CEO of Finnish Broadcasting Company
• Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku, works at Google on social services
• Helene Auramo, Indiedays

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Tanja’s Presentation

14:43 – Tanja: Thanks for listening, let’s move on to the panelists.

14:42 – Tanja: Let’s not concentrate on the failures but the success stories. Sharing good ideas hopefully results in not having to reinvent the wheel.

14:40 – Tanja: What to call many of these new players? They aren’t online publications per se, as they do much more than just publish – there’s curating, filtering etc. Maybe just simply call them ‘news organizations’.

14:38 – Tanja: Hyperlocal news. For example The NY Times has The Local where readers contribute (significant?) amounts of content.

14:35 – Tanja:: I believe online advertising has potential but it has to change. It’s not that ad revenues are down because of the economical downturn, the change is fundamental and permanent.

14:33 – Tanja: Generation gap: will the kids pay for content online or will they just look for an alternative outlet that doesn’t charge for it?

14:32 – Tanja: There’s almost an ideological war about paywalls. The New York Times has tried it once, relented, will now go for a metered access model. Wall Street Journal has a functioning paywall system.

14:30 – Tanja: Antithesis to the content factories: slow journalism, investigative journalism. There still seems to be a need for it.

14:29 – Tanja: Optimizing for advertising / reader demand, case Demand Media. Churning out a huge amount of content for a pittance.

14:26 – Tanja: Ways traditional news orgs are fighting this trend: integrated advertising (advertorials?), and advertising in social media, ie. feeding ads to readers of NY Times on Facebook or paid tweets on HuffPo. Other revenue streams: consulting, organizing conferences etc.

14:24 – Tanja: Structural changes on the business side: local media has long held a monopoly of advertising, but that’s breaking down. Also the advertisers can get direct access to consumers, so why should they pay the middleman (ie. newspaper) instead of just buying Adwords from Google et al?

14:22 – Tanja: A worrisome trend: nonprofits with an agenda, e.g. Kaiser Health News – can they be trusted?

14:20 – Tanja: San Francisco, where I mostly live, has sprung up a plenthora of alternative news organizations. Many do slow news, ie. less but more in-depth reporting.

14:19 – Tanja: Begging for donations. More and more nonprofits are taking over the task of reporting the news. Their goal isn’t to make a profit but to e.g. raise political awareness. They’re funded by donations, sponsorship, advertising.

14:16 – Tanja: Traditional advertising counts for 70–85% of the media’s income in the US. The challenge: advertising on the web isn’t as lucrative, plus most of the content is available for free, which eats away at the revenue. But there are more readers than ever before, so it would seem there’s future for the media.

14.15: Tanja takes to the stage. Thanks the funders and her professors Heikki Luostarinen and Turo Uskali.

Twitter hashtag #jourfut

The event is organized by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.

I will represent my research report about the future of journalism: 10 Statements About the End of Journalism and Why Not to Worry About Them. The Trends of American Journalism in 2009, followed by a panel discussion featuring superinteresting panelists:

Helene Auramo, Co-founder, partner of Indiedays.com, a collective of fashion blogs @heleneauramo,

Google alumn, Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström, @jyri

Mikael Pentikäinen, CEO of Sanoma News

Mikael Jungner, CEO of Finnish Broadcasting  Company, @mikaeljungner

Stay tuned!

The most recent sign of the evolving power of crowdfunding was seen in the New York Times. In the science section there was an article with a headline “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash.” The article told about the huge garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. In the bottom of the story there stood in italics: “Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.”

The story was written by a freelance journalist Lindsey Hoshaw. Her trip to examine the garbage patch was partially funded through Spot.Us, a San Francisco-based website to crowdfund journalism. This is how Spot.Us works: A journalist raises money for her or his story on the Spot.Us website. The community donates for a pitch. Often times the amounts are small. Established news organizations can buy the story and publish it, otherwise the story is published on the Spot.Us site.

Hoshaw successfully raised almost $10,000 for her story project, and over 100 people donated for the pitch. The garbage patch story was the first Spot.Us story published in the NYT

In politics, from the Howard Dean campaign to Obama’s triumph, we have seen a radical decentralization of political funding. In journalism, crowdfunding in the Spot.Us way decentralizes the editorial power. The editorial power is traditionally held inside news organizations. The editors decide what stories the writers work on and what stories are published.

In crowdfunded journalism the Spot.Us way, donors hold most of the editorial power. The pitches are filtered by Spot.Us editors following certain criteria, though. For example the pitches have to be local to Spot.Us regions. So far, only few pitches have been turned away. Basically, if the community considers the topic worth covering, they’ll donate and the story will get done.

The crowdfunding phenomenon is a sign of the unraveling of the old, top-down journalism production models. In the future, the community will have more to say about the issues they want to see covered. Even though the readers don’t want to subscribe for the whole newspaper, they are willing to pay for a specific story that they see value in. That’s why they hire a journalist on Spot.Us to make sense of the world for them, to investigate important issues for them. They want to support journalism and topics that are aligned with their values.

Crowdfunding seems to change the dynamics in the journalistic process. I’ve interviewed Spot.Us donors and reporters for my study about crowdfunding for journalism.

The donors tend to feel empowered after donation. Donating seems to create a sense of belonging to the community, and the donors also feel a sense of participation in the journalistic process. As one donor put it: “I felt that I had participated, I felt I had more say about what kind of journalism is being done.”

From the reporter’s point of view, the crowdfunded process brings new elements to a journalist’s work. First of all, the reporters tend to feel a more direct connection to the readers than they do in the traditional way to produce journalism.

The reporters find the connection motivating. As one of the Spot.Us writers said: “The motivation goes beyond professional motivation. You see the faces on the website, you see that these people are willing to invest their money on your work.”

Crowdfunding also challenges the the traditional role of a journalist. On the Spot.Us model, the writer is responsible for promoting his pitch and reaching out to the community. In the traditional model, the journalist writes the story, doesn’t market it.

When interviewing Spot.Us reporters, I noticed that in general they don’t feel very comfortable asking for donations for their pitch. Like one of the reporters put it: “I’m a journalist, not a salesperson. If somebody else wants to market my pitch, I’m happy with that. But I don’t feel comfortable doing that.”

Whereas Lindsey Hoshaw, the author of the Garbage Patch-story, promoted her pitch by a video and in fundraisers. She also reached out to the community and her social networks. She branded herself as the GarbageGirl. This is something we will see more and more in journalism: journalists transforming more into entrepreneurs, feeling ownership of the whole story process including convincing the community to donate.

The success of crowdfunding in journalism might encourage thinking where charging for content online is a solution for the plummeting journalism business. It is not. The success of the Garbage Patch-project proves that people want to have quality journalism. It proves that people care about important issues. It also proves that people are willing to pay for the journalism they see valuable. Maybe readers want to target their support for certain writers, or certain topics? They might not be willing to pay for old-fashioned subscription models, which are based on the idea “get it all, even the sports pages, read it or not”.

The same logic applies initiatives similar to Spot.Us. On Kickstarter, artists, journalists and explorers can raise money for their projects. SellaBand has two ways to for fans to support projects: they can help musicians to fund their upcoming projects, or they can fund musicians whose work they already like. Also Kachingle, a system for readers to support the sites they like, raises money for work already done.

At the end, let’s discuss the Spot.Us model from the legitimacy’s standpoint. The main basis for legitimacy for a story is pure market success — if people are willing to pay, the story gets funded on Spot.Us and the story will be done.

But then, pitches that might be significant for public interest, for the public good, might not get donations. But what is the public interest? Whose interest is it? If people are not willing to pay for the content, for the pitch, is the topic really important? If the community is not interested in funding the pitch, how interested the community would be in reading the story?

The model of Spot.Us, accompanied with other crowdfunding systems, provokes a question: How much could we rely on collective intelligence, wisdom of the crowds, when choosing story topics worth investigating?

This blog post was first published on the Huffington Post.

How does the crowdfunding process affect the reporter? For example, does pitching a story in public create a new sense of engagement and connectedness to the society?

And the reader – when a reader donates for a story, does the reader feel a stronger sense of ownership in the journalistic process than he or she feels in the traditional journalistic process?

Those are some of the questions I’m looking into in my research project. I’m studying Spot.Us as a case of new ways to produce journalism. Spot.Us is crowdsourcing story topics, leads and information from the community and crowdfunding the stories by microdonations from the community.

Opening the journalistic process to the crowd creates a new level of transparency to “the making of -part” of journalism. On Spot.Us, pitching and fundraising happens in public. The reporters blog about the stories they are working on – like Lindsey Hoshaw is doing from her assignment to the Pacific Garbage Patch. Furthermore, the community gives information, names sources and other tips for the story in public on the Spot.Us platform.

A Spot.Us reporter Serena Renner says that being able to share the process from the beginning to the end with the crowd decreases the pressure to get everything said in one story.

“When you can blog along the way, you can create kind of a more complete picture of a story than maybe one article with a limited wordcount can do,” she says.

“And as anyone can suggest questions or leads for the story, there is a potential to divert the story throughout the process. It is good for getting the real, honest story out,” she says.

If transparency really is the new objectivity in journalism, as technologist and author David Weinberger says, the journalistic process becomes more transparent most likely over time, even in traditional news rooms. Is transparency something that the new generation of journalists will get used to?

That’s why it is fascinating to explore how the new levels of transparency impact the reporter’s work. For example, the process of pitching and raising money in public might strengthen the connection between the community and the reporter. It might also create a different sense of responsibility for the reporter.

“You worry more about the accuracy, and you really want to invest in presenting issues correctly, because these people have really invested in you,” Serena Renner says.

A donation for a story can be seen as an investment or a vote. After “investing in the story,” the donor might want to follow the story process closely – the same way a voter follows the politician he or she votes for.

How about the sense of ownership in the journalistic process? In the traditional newsmaking, a reporter owns her or his story. The reporter finds the topic, pitches it inside the news organization, finds the sources, becomes an expert on the topic, and holds on the information until the story is published. It is rare when the traditional news organizations reveal anything about “making of-process.”

Whereas, in the Spot.Us model, the ownership is shared with the community from the beginning to the end. The reporter doesn’t need to feel pressure to become an ultimate expert on the topic, as the crowd is there with its wisdom, too.

“I admit that I’m not expert on food or school system or school food system, while I may be owning the story and to produce an honest piece about it,” Renner says.

I will blog about my research on Spot.Us. Please feel free to share your opinions on crowdsourcing in journalism – I’d love to hear them!

This post was originally published on Spot.Us, a platform for community funded reporting.

These were some of the ideas presented this week in the Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS) in Aspen, Colorado organized by the Aspen Institute. The conference focused primarily on discussing the business models for journalism as the news industry seems to be completely confused how to find a new sustainable path in the changed news ecology.

High level representatives from the traditional newspaper industry, nonprofits producing journalism, new players in news like Google and Mozilla, start ups, and venture capitalists tried to find sense in the confusion.

The combination ended up being a gathering of a variety of perspectives to journalism and its future. From one perspective, newspaper printed on paper has a prosperous future. For example Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group and the chairman of the board of directors of The Associated Press, said that business model can keep on being “charging for the printed word printed on a paper”.

From this reality comes also Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher and the co-founder of Journalism Online LLC. He even sees possibilities for raising the prices for the print product if the news sites start charging for the content online.

But Jeff Jarvis, the associate professor in City University of New York, thinks that we are entering post print era. He presented a model for new news economy, based on hyperlocal blogs supported by advertising. And for Cynthia Typaldos, a founder of news pay system Kachingle, news is something that the readers can be persuaded to pay for voluntarily.

For Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, journalistic process involves also other contributors than professional journalists. Also, she sees the role of the news is not so much anymore to “tell people stuff, but to facilitate conversation.”

Along the same lines goes Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego, a non profit that provides local news service. For him, journalism and news are only a part of the institution, which has a mission to educate people. We are not looking for eyeballs for our website, but we want to focus on service and impact on the community, he said.

Apart from different perspectives for journalism production, the participants came from a variety of consumption habits, Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of The State and former journalist, said that she reads every day several printed newspapers, with well-known brands, like the New York Times. At the other end of the consumption spectrum was a 26-year-old Jacob Colker, a co-founder of the Extraordinaries, a system for crowdsourcing on mobile. He rarely goes to newspapers websites but gets his news from his peers for example on Twitter.

Looking into the plethora of perspectives, it wasn’t surprising that the group didn’t find consensus which way to go in business models at this point in the evolution. But maybe there is not a need for consensus. News organizations can experiment several ways and thus find new, viable models suitable for their needs. If you want a good overview about different models, look at journalist Steve Outing’s presentation about the topic.

But does the industry have courage to do experiments? “There is a short-term market failure of courage”, Esther Dyson, the chairman of EDventure Holdings, described the state of the journalism industry. Is she right?

Yes, there is a lack of courage in experimenting new business models especially inside the traditional media. The discussion at the conference reflected that, too: the focus lingered around the notion whether the old subscription model could be applied at least partly to web publishing. One example of that is the freemium model, where the readers pay to get access to some of the content, but most of the content stays free at least in the beginning.

Why isn’t the legacy media trying out any new pay models? For example micropayments or donations to find out how many of the readers are willing to support good content?

One reason may be that the media industry is used to high profits. Donations feel like a nickel to them, and it might feel humiliating to rely on donations after making a lot of money for a long time. Beyond that, as Sue Gardner of Wikimedia pointed out, the corporations are often not suited for developing innovations. The organizations might not be so eager to try innovations either, especially when they come outside of the organization.

Thus it wasn’t surprising that the most interesting idea was brought up by Marissa Mayer, the VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google. She came up with and idea of a hyper-targeted news stream, that could be done for example by Google, Twitter or Facebook.

Nevertheless, Dyson’s observation about the lack of courage doesn’t capture the whole picture. There is a lot of courage in the journalism scene. New models or old models modified to this era are being experimented. For example, technology blogs in Silicon Valley are experimenting with their event and sponsorship economies, so is non profit investigative reporting like ProPublica, and community funded reporting initiatives like Spot.us.

But courage is needed at this time. Newspapers need courage to look into where society and technology is going, not focus on reinventing news organizations. Venture capitalists need courage to invest in journalism start ups. Non profits need courage to experiment.

And, the most importantly, all the players need courage to look into readers, contributors, citizens, users – however you call them – to find out what do they value in journalism and what they are willing to pay for.

Because, at the end, the solution can also look as simple as it is for venture capitalist Fred Drasner, who saw the situation from the VC’s point of view: “We have to figure out what the consumers want, make the product and sell it.”

The post was first published on Spot.us blog, a journalism experiment for community funded reporting.

These all are topics in a news meeting on a  Wednesday morning in the Public Press office in downtown San Francisco. Is there anything new in  the topics? Anything that the leading daily in the city,  the San Francisco Chronicle, wouldn’t cover?

Not really. Regardless, the Public Press wants to create something new: a daily, local, ad-free newspaper that is run by a non-profit organization based in San Francisco.

“A reader-centric, non-commercial newspaper, not focused on serving advertisers’ needs but serving the community”, says Michael Stoll, the founder of the Public Press.

For example, the prevailing newspapers have a lot of supplements that are serving advertisers, not readers, he says. He gives some examples: “There are sections about high-end luxury goods, that ordinary people can’t afford. There is a real estate section that is almost entirely about home sales in the newspaper in San Francisco, in a city where two thirds of the people rent. Why do they concentrate on home sales, when most of the potential readers are renters?” he asks.

Newspapers do that to attract advertisers, says Stoll. But instead of focusing on advertisers’ needs, the Public Press wants to cover topics that matter to the readers.

“Public policy and social issues. Labor related topics, like prevailing wages. Price of milk. Commuting”, Stoll lists the topics that the Public Press wants to cover.

The Public Press is not interested in emotion-based or sensationalist coverage, stories for the sake of storytelling, or stories based only on individual experience.

The Public Press is one in an array of the local or hyperlocal news initiatives in the US. For example, there’s MinnPost in Minneapolis, GothamGazette in New York, Crosscut in Seattle, The New Haven Independent, and Voice of San Diego.

They are all local non-profit initiatives focused on local news, sustained by donations, grants, some of them also by advertisements, with a mission to do “journalism that matters”. Yet what the Public Press is doing might be something unique, since the goal is to start publishing a print paper. The other initiatives mentioned above are available only online.

Why a printed newspaper? Isn’t everything online these days?

“There is still a digital divide in the US. There are a lot of people who have limited or no access to digital platforms. As a result, if you are limiting journalism just to the digital realm, those people will be left without the information they need to become active and informed citizens”, Stoll says.

He lists more reasons: People want to be unplugged too, since so many things are online these days. He also believes that there is a business opportunity for selling information on paper. He points out, 50 million newspapers are still being sold a day in the US.

“If there is still life left in the newspaper do we want to abandon it to the mega corporations that have taken over almost every newspaper in this country? Or do we want to take it back as journalism community and the local community and return some semblance of an idea of accountability to the public?”

Also, Stoll believes that hyperlocal content doesn’t work online that well, and therefore a printed newspaper can be more attractive locally.

“If your goal is to create a community and provide a forum for ideas and events, the Web is not necessarily the right medium to do that. Newspaper may be a better way because it is more visible in the local level.”

The Public Press, like the other local initiatives, embrace the community as an important part in making the news. Stoll says that is not often the case with the traditional media.

Traditionally, the readers cannot suggest changes to the format or content, talk with the journalists, or have much ability to discuss or debate the news, beyond maybe writing a Web comment or a letter to the editor, he says.

Stoll believes that a mission-driven organization like the Public Press is more likely to take an approach to serve the public than a profit-driven organization.

“This sense of duty toward public accountability tends to affect the coverage and guide it toward stories the mainstream media might miss. This is because we are in communication with a broad and diverse audience”, he says.

The Public Press wants to redesign the structure of newspaper. For example, the front page should have a clear, bird’s eye view, a comprehensive index of the stories available to the reader. That way, the reader doesn’t need to browse through the whole paper in order to find what there is.

Stoll sees financial advantages in redesigning the newspaper. For example, the size of the paper can be diminished, as the ads are not there to take space. Also the printing costs can go down.

“When you can change the business model you are able to change the design, the economics, and the reader experience. Maybe you can win back some of the readers who have abandoned the printed paper because it is too inconvenient and it doesn’t fill their needs.”

The Public Press started publishing content in March this year, and the content is currently available online for free. When the Public Press turns into a daily newspaper, it will be financed by membership payments. From memberships the Public Press wants to create a sustainable business model for a newspaper.

The membership gives the reader, or member, more rights than a traditional subscription model, where the reader remains pretty passive. Members could vote, for example, for candidates for the board of directors, and get benefits such as discounts from partner organizations, for example museums and book stores.

The Public Press website had 3 800 unique visitors in July, and the content is produced mainly by volunteers. The non profit is functioning now on donations and on a grant from the San Francisco Foundation.

The concept of the Public Press sounds great: Journalism that matters to the readers, communities get involved, the city hall has its watchdog, and no annoying ads in the paper. Nevertheless, how is the Public Press going succeed? Where are they going to get the money from?

“We want to be the Howard Dean campaign for journalism, meaning aggregating a lot of small scale donations”, Stoll says.

Howard Dean, a politician, pioneered in raising campaign dollars as small scale donations when he was running for democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Barack Obama followed this practice in his campaign last year.

Yet, the business model of the Public Press has been tested in the US for decades. Its business model can be seen as a combination of National Public Radio’s local broadcasting stations and non-profit magazines’.

“The local broadcasting station gives out its product for free but relies on about 10 percent of its audience to pay a small donation, because they believe it is a unique service. In addition, the Consumer Report magazine has been non profit and advertising free for 70 years”, Stoll says.

Kachingle, a Mountain View, California-based start up, and some other similar initiatives believe so.

This is how Kachingle works: A reader voluntarily agrees to pay five dollars a month to become a Kachingler, a user of Kachingle. For the five dollars, the reader can consume as much journalistic content online as he or she wants to. When a reader agrees to pay for Kachingle, his or her name appears on the publication’s website showing that the reader has supported this content. Kachingle will be launched later this summer.

But why would anybody pay voluntarily for news, if they can get same stuff for free?

“Because the reader wants to publicly share social signals about the content they read”, Cynthia Typaldos, the president and founder of Kachingle, says.

So in other words, by using Kachingle the reader is telling the world: “This is who I am in terms of what news I consume.”

“It is about pride and about building your online persona. In the offline world people are used to building their personas by the kind of car they drive, the places they travel, the books they read, and so on. Now people are sharing their personas online, and being a Kachingler is a part of that persona.”

Typaldos points out that a share of readers are willing to pay. She cites two polls. One poll is done by Der Spiegel, a German magazine, and the poll indicates that 30 percent of the Spiegel readers are ready to pay for journalistic content online.

The other poll was done by a Norwegian newspaper, indicating that about 20 percent of readers are willing to pay by using Kachingle. If that many people are ready to pay, and they do pay, according to Typaldos, the peer pressure will make the other readers more willing to pay.

For publishers, Kachingle is free. The sites that use it have a Kachingle widget medallion posted on their sites. The first time a reader clicks on the medallion to become a Kachingler, he pays the five dollars. Thereafter a Kachingler can support any sites using Kachingle by clicking on the medallion.

Kachingle gets 20 percent of the five dollars the reader pays. The rest of the five dollars is distributed between the sites where the Kachingler decides to click the medallion, depending on the number of days they visit those sites.

Kachingle has – at least in the beginning – a flat rate of five dollars, whether the reader goes to 20 or 200 news sites a month, and whether the sites are big newspapers or local publications.

“Kachingle doesn’t have any mental transaction cost, in other words, it is extremely easy to pay. When the rate is always the same, and there are no options for payment, the reader doesn’t need to think about how much he or she wants to pay”, Typaldos says.

That sounds smart. How many times, when making a donation, have you gotten stuck in the decision making process? Questions like “How much should I pay? Is this enough? Can I afford this?” can stifle the process.

The flat rate policy of Kachingle is changing the game in traditional payment policies.  Traditionally, subscribing to nationwide newspapers such as the New York Times has cost more to have delivered to your door than a local newspaper. Actually, Kachingle sounds like one of the principles in communism – same pay for everybody, whatever kind of work they do. In this context the idea goes: same pay, whatever kind of journalism they do.

Does Kachingle’s flat rate model really fit into the journalism industry? For example, investigative journalism is more expensive to do than some other kinds of stories, so wouldn’t it be fair to pay more for investigative journalism?

To this point, Kachingle might go towards differentiated payment options later. Kachingle’s goal is to raise the rate to 30-40 dollars a month. This would be done by communicating social signals about news consumption and payment to Kachingle readers. The readers would get messages such as “Usually people like you who read 30 news sites, pay 20 dollars a month. Will you to pay 20 dollars?”

One interesting aspect of Kachingle is that it could change the transparency of money flows to the publishing industry. On Kachingle, the amount of money the publications are making through Kachingle is going to be public too. For example, the revenue that a specific site makes through Kachingle can be discovered by viewing, and adding up, the Kachingler contributions for that site.

The increased transparency of the revenue might lead to empowerment of readers, as they want to have more say about how their money is used. The idea is similar to voting: when you vote for a politician, you want the politician to have a say inside a political party. If the mandate that you have given to the party by voting is not used the way you like, you complain, or take your vote elsewhere. With Kachingle, as each one of the publication’s sites has its own medallion, the readers can support exactly the content they value in the publication.  The opposite is the traditional and still the current “get it all, like it or not”- subscription model.

Let’s look at an example. A political blog on a news site has more Kachinglers than the entertainment site. The publisher lays off political writers and hires more entertainment writers. The readers may start to complain, and may even make demands for the publication to keep up with the political site because they have paid for that.

Kachingle is not the only payment system for journalism in the market. For example, there is Payyattention, Contenture, Inamoon and EmanciPay.

Can Kachingle, or any of the other options, offer a viable business model for journalism? Or could it provide at least one revenue model?

In order to answer that question, we should find out who will use Kachingle. Would I use Kachingle? Maybe, if my friends used it too. I wouldn’t want to feel like an outsider. That is one reason why I joined Facebook.

Nor do I want to feel like a free rider, who doesn’t bear the responsibility of supporting good journalism. That is why I pay my taxes and don’t take free rides in public transport – I want to be a good citizen.

Combining voluntary payments and pressure to be a good citizen is an interesting idea. Instead of setting up a paywall, where readers have to pay to access the content, Kachingle relies on a wall of conscience, where accessing the content without paying would insult the social norm. This may force people to pay for journalism. Nevertheless, combining good citizenship with paying for journalism requires education from the publishers, as journalist and media consultant Steve Outing points out in his article in the Editor and Publisher.

It sounds kind of unrealistic to think that a universal tip jar, as Kachingle has been called, could become a viable business model for journalism. Nevertheless, it is good to remember that donations is an old way to finance journalism in some countries, for example in the US. For example National Public Radio, a public radio network, gets part of its income from donations. In this model, the people who can afford to support NPR, do; those who can’t afford to are still able to access to the free press as democracy requires.

]]> http://savethenews.us/2009/07/28/the-economy-of-social-signals-a-source-for-a-viable-business-model/feed/ 2 http://savethenews.us/2009/07/20/hello-world/ http://savethenews.us/2009/07/20/hello-world/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:07:05 +0000 Tanja http://savethenews.us/?p=1 How do you get your news? Jyri Engestrom gets his from Twitter, Facebook, and shared links, from people whose opinions he trusts.

These new ways of sharing content in social media create a challenge for news organizations. In order to compete, they have to publish stories that are interesting enough not only to be read, but also share.

Engestrom, Google Product Manager and co-founder for the microblogging service Jaiku, predicts that the business model for the news industry will change radically. In the future, he predicts, you won’t pay for subscribing to the newspaper, but for rights to publish the content produced by a news organization. You will have to pay to share.

If Jyri’s prediction comes true, the news industry will face another challenge: how to make content that people are willing to pay to publish, not only to read, as the case has been so far. But also, this is an opportunity for struggling news industry to monetize journalism – or said in a better way, monetize the ways the content is used.

This posting is the first one in my research project about future of journalism. More about the research project here. Feel free to share your comments on the topic!