Future of news

Here’s a startup to watch:  it’s called Patch, and it’s a company that goes into towns without a community newspaper or where the paper is struggling and starts a hyperlocal Web site.  Patch is exclusively advertising-supported.  Advertisers can either buy the traditional ad or get an ad where they pay by page views -- $15 per thousand at this point.  Check out this Forbes article – Patch and other similar ventures are showing some success, and we predict that it won’t be long before more start popping up in Texas.

So here’s the quiz: Think of a media industry that’s facing real problems. The product of this industry used to be commonplace – everybody knew about it and pretty much everybody used it. Then a new medium came along with a significant challenge – people were getting the output of this industry easily, in their own homes, quickly on demand…and it was free! The industry asked what would happen when people could access for free what they were selling. Predictions for the future were understandably dire. And here’s the kicker – this isn’t about newspapers. It’s the music industry. Read Brad King’s take on why newspapers are wrong to circle the wagons and determine that they must make the square peg that is the old business model fit into the round hole of new media.

One of the more interesting online news ventures in the nation is happening right here in Texas. It’s an online-only news site that was launched as a non-profit organization. It’s called the Texas Tribune, and it’s funded by readers who donate to keep alive what they consider a worthy cause. The editor is Evan Smith, former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly. You can check out the new site at texastribune.org. And even if you don’t go there, look at what promises to be a regular feature on that site – using animation and pop-ups to insert everything from humor to fact-checking to background information into a speech, inserted during the speech itself. Currently, the “victim” is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson. You can see the “stump interrupted” concept on the Texas Tribune site, or access it directly from YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAUUw4NrKkE.

This article summarizes the current health of community journalism, but also says that there are problems that wise publishers need to pay attention to. One of those issues is competition. The author notes that community newspapers frequently point out that they have no competition. But, he correctly notes, to say that there are no other newspapers does not mean that there is no competition. The article also has a good discussion of the decline of classified ads under competition from Craigslist. Be sure also to check out the Associated Press article that's cited several times in this article.

In less than a year, M.E. Sprengelmeyer has gone from being the Washington correspondent at the Rocky Mountain News -- covering everything from 9/11 to the war in Iraq -- to owning a community newspaper in a small New Mexico town. He writes about his experience on the Save the News blog, and about his optimism about the state of community journalism. "Think of a community newspaper as a bronze statue in the town square," he writes. "Everybody in town can look up and see that it’s there."

In this time of radical change for newspapers, you’ll find lots of folk trying to make sense of it all – especially in the blogosphere. These writers are trying to interpret the signs of the media times and to recommend what we should do next. You can’t read them all, but when I see Steve Buttry’s byline attached to something, I always take time to check it out. I hope you will read the entire blog post at the URL above. Talking about the free vs. paid content issue, Steve notes that many people see the Original Sin of newspapers as not beginning to charge for online content from the get-go. But in a typical (for Steve) flash of insight, he notes that the Original Sin was on the ad side. Here’s a brief sample: "The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers. We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.” If you agree with what Buttry is saying, you will definitely want to make plans to attend our Internet ad sales workshop on Oct. 29 with Chuck Nau. Mark your calendars now and watch for more details on the website and in your inbox soon.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has been looking at new models for online news lately, and speaking with online news operations all over the country. In doing so, they've provided a great list of ways people are monetizing online content. There is a great deal of information in here, and anyone with a website should check it out.

Shortly after the Ann Arbor News closed, AnnArbor.com went live. The site has an interesting format -- it's rather blog-like -- and it screams hyperlocal. It's definitely worth looking at if you're a community journalist. And on top of the interesting format for news, they've also rethought advertising in a unique way. Check out the articles for more information. The first link, from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, covers the reasoning behind the sites layout and delves into the ad issue as well. See the other two links for some commentary on the site from Steve Buttry and Jeff Jarvis.

It's not your father's newspaper business any more. This business is changing as radically as the buggy whip business changed around the turn of the 20th century. One of our goals in the Around the Web service we provide is to share with you some of the innovative thinking out there related to the business we know and love. This article is one you should definitely read. You may not agree with all of it, but it's a concept you should think about. Here's a sample: "20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news. A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose."

Many of you are looking for different approaches to the online product. Check out this one from Columbia, Mo., a combination of a blog-like news stream with in-depth overview pages. Columbia Tomorrow lets members of the community start their own discussions on news posts. And check out the site's video, which explains more about this project's approach.

Community-based newspapers -- in this cast, alternative newsweeklies -- are finding a place for new technologies faster than traditional media, according to a news story coming out of their annual meeting.

One publisher quoted in the article above said this: “As those big guys crumble, it’s an opportunity for us. We know that they are stuck halfway between print and the web. And now they have to figure out what to do about mobile. They have far more resources than we do, but they also are much more bureaucratic.”

At the opening session, Rob Curley of Greenspun Interactive told publishers that they needed to be "of the Web" and not just "on the Web." Curley said: “It’s not about getting people to your site. It’s about getting your site to the people.”

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting take on new numbers released by The Economist. He says their latest circulation and online audience figures -- which look quite good -- are evidence that people are still willing to pay for a solid product. This may be the niche that community newspapers fall into.

Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News, talks to The Convergence Newsletter about the operation and how they're using data and citizen journalism to run what they call a local news portal. Pegasus is pretty popular here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it's worth checking out if you've never done so before. Pegasus runs on some high-end software on the back end, but there are certainly some concepts that community newspapers could employ using free online tools.