Today ends the Federal Trade Commission’s two-day, (mis)appropriately titled, “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” summit. More appropriate: How Will Journalism Evolve in the Internet Age? Don’t like that? Send in your suggestions.

David Carr’s beautiful eulogy for the old media system and acknowledgment of the new, sums up journalism’s turning point quite gracefully. But from what I’ve been following with the summit yesterday (twitter hashtag: #ftcnews), the old guard was still doing a lot of kvetching.

In tandem with speaking at the summit, Arianna Huffington had a great, no-holds barred, post yesterday on why the old media (read: old white guys) need to get over themselves, let go of the past and start assimilating the possibilities that the future offers. But I think we can take Arianna’s post a couple steps further.

Let’s go in, shall we?

The Current News Ecology+What’s Next
Arianna lays out the reasoning and strategy behind aggregation. While it’s nothing new, it’s a succinct (and fun) description.

…We love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.

Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It’s why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests — and the offshoots of a story — take them.

“That’s why I could only roll my eyes when the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson wagged his finger at Google, and complained that it “encourages promiscuity” among news consumers.

Heaven forbid! Let’s be honest, while promiscuity is not good in relationships, it’s great for those looking for news and information. Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted — and ultimately self-defeating.”

Let’s get a little naughtier. We don’t want users just hopping into our bed once. We understand that they might even jump from bed to bed, but we always want them coming back to us again and again for more. And what’s going to bring them back? A little creativity, being a full-fledged partner in the bedroom and the big O! as in “Oh! I really need/like/hate/want to share that reporting/opinion” or “Oh! I want to be/am part of the creative media making process” or “Oh! this is inspiring me to take action.”

So how do we deliver all of that and more? Robust aggregation is the first step. But that’s only solving the issue of bringing together the latest in daily reporting/news. What about what happened a week ago and how that might effect a month from now? How do we work for and with users to stitch this information together that over time will become not just a list of links, but an overarching story that contains links, additional synthesis, data, visuals, reporting and analysis. Media producers need to creatively develop formats and platforms that pull together all the daily bits of news into a long-term narrative for their users that is consistently updating, synthesizing and making sense of news and information over the long-term. This could take many shapes: timelines, wikis, linking, videos, maps or a mashup of all.

For example, it’s been widely acknowledged that Talking Points Memo was the leading journalism organization that broke and pushed the US Attorney scandal story a few years ago. But when you go to their site and search, “Gonzales” (as in former Bush appointee attorney general Alberto Gonzales) all you get is a list of disconnected links to past reporting.

What if news organizations compiled visual timelines of their reporting (as well as aggregating others) that displayed the entire narrative of one issue in one fell swoop? (TPM actually has a basic text timeline of the attorney scandal, but you have to go diffing for it.) Or a wiki that stitched together those critical reporting moments, breaking news and analysis in an easy to read and consistently updatable format? This strategy could also be opportunities to bring users into the mix. Designated members could join in on the fun in putting together the top timeline moments or participate in developing the narrative/information in the wiki and be annointed to make sure it is consistently updated. Or develop an interactive and evolving visualization(s) based on data compiled through the length of the reporting. Any of these formats individually or combined together are appropriate for both short-term news events (i.e. Copenhagen) or long-term issues (the climate crisis).

For example, take a look at the New York Times “skimmer” just launched today as an early prototype. In fact, this is probably just coincidence, bc it is such an important news story yesterday/today, but check out how the top 6 articles relate to each other around Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Now imagine a tool that included a bundle of different Afghanistan-related content organized/threaded together over the last 12 months (or 12 years) that could be searched, reorganized, tagged, constantly updated, synthesized and more.

What does this do for a media producer? Let’s play it out a bit. First, the media producer is solving “filter failure.”, a big issue that both users and media organizations are consistently facing. Second, think about the SEO opportunities which is always good for advertising. Add in the opportunities to develop a deep and committed group of members which enhances to the journalism value chain (Slideshow of The Big Thaw: See Slide 23). And maybe this is the kind of added/needed information that outlets can charge for lead to new opportunities for new revenue generation.

In other words, it could give the media maker and users the big O!

On Business Models/Revenue Generation
As I’ve mentioned before, looking towards the future, we’re not going to find one overall tactic that will change business models forever. Arianna takes a couple paragraphs to knock down the idea of pay walls or micro-payments (different than micro-fundraising) and then notes some of the other experimental options on the table.

Meanwhile, Stephen Brill’s Journalism Online reportedly has 16 different payment schemes that it plans to offer its member publishers. Nieman Lab recently listed six payment models that Brill has trademarked, and that news publishers can employ.

These include: High activity Pay Points (a metered model); Selected Content Pay Points (a partial paywall); Time-based Pay Points (charging for new content only); Enhanced Service Pay Points (charging for special features); Market Access Pay Points (charges based on a users location); and Preview Activity Pay Points (allowing previewing of paid content).

Sure, free news content is not a perfect system but it’s a lot like what Churchill said about democracy: it “is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” That’s the reality. Free content is not without problems. But it’s here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them.

I like to use the metaphor that revenue models are like cooking a stew.. Everyone has similar stock to start from, but will have to test and experiment with a combination of different of ingredients to create just the right flavor for their users. Or in other words, media producers will have a swath of similar and basic options to start with, but build/test out a combination of different revenue generating options that build on an organization’s strengths, capabilities, and added-values. Of course, organizations aren’t going to know what the perfect recipe is off the bat. It’s going to take some time to experiment and find just right the mix of ingredients.

In addition, when “traditional media” folks talk about business models or revenue generation, they talk about it as if it is completely separate from what’s being done in terms of journalism models, experimentation and community engagement.

In fact, how journalism organizations integrate new models of reporting and storytelling, involve and build its community in the process, respond to what users want/need, and the resulting business models are all the heart of the future evolution and survival of journalism. The Media Consortium’s recent study The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course For Journalism lays out four important questions for media producers to ask themselves:

• How is the playing field changing?
• What new capabilities needed to succeed?
• What needs can be met, problems solved or desires fulfilled?
• How to structure organizations to “capture value”?

The last two questions are key to developing the correct mix (or stew) of revenue generation opportunities.

The Future Is Network-Powered
And last but not least, Arianna starts touching on the heart of our current media environment.

News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.

Instead of “community-powered,” Jessica and I have dubbed this new environment “network-powered.” Media producers need to think about how to strategically harness and engage in both informal and formal networks to increase their audience, enhance their relevance and build their impact. (Once again, this connects to a compatible mix of revenue generation opportunities). This is going to require media producers to have new mindsets and capabilities. The user/audience member isn’t always going to come to directly to the outlet. How do you reach the user/audience member? How do you engage them to spread and use the content through their networks of peers, colleagues, etc.?

For Beyond the Echo Chamber, Jessica and I developed a list of “four networks layers” that media organizations must engage. More to come soon on those, but here’s the list and as an added bonus, short descriptions.

• Networked Users: Media makers must learn to work with users who are connected to multiple networks and can create, distribute, amplify, and serve as ambassadors for the media producer’s content.
• Self-Organized Networks: Users can work together to form ad hoc networks around unifying elements such as shared issues and/or breaking news. Media makers can tap into these networks to spread relevant content, follow breaking trends, and cover collective action
• Institutional Networks: Media makers can also harness more durable networks of users–hosted or organized by institutions–to share content, offer crowdsourcing opportunities, and develop fundraising relationshiops.
• Networks of Institutions: Media makers and outlets cna form collaborative networks to jointly report on complex issues, and structure new models for innovation and collaboration.

I have picked out three key points and their implications from this excellent post, “A Simple Model for Online Journalism” by Jonathan Weber. I know you’re just dying to read them! Here we go…..

1) Journalism is not dying along with newspapers.

“What’s equally shocking, though, is the widespread assumption that serious journalism will disappear along with newspapers, and that preventing the disappearance of journalism requires either a massive philanthropic effort, a coordinated effort by news organizations to force a return to paid subscriptions, technological breakthroughs with electronic news reader devices, new business models that have yet to be invented, or some combination of all of the above.”

Don’t get me wrong. I want foundations as well as big and small donors to be paying attention and funding journalists and journalism organizations (in all their forms) at large amounts. I think there are technological breakthroughs that progressive media organizations still by in large haven’t followed up on (hi-Kindle and mobile apps!) But most of all we’re going to have to look inwards at our own business and editorial structuring. And we’re going to have to shake things up and do things we don’t like now to survive AND be relevant in the future.

2) Adapt to the tools and techniques driving the news system. Revenue might not come from your content, but an ADDED VALUE you provide for your community

“As a four-year veteran of a journalism-driven local online media start-up, I believe there’s a very viable business formula that’s actually quite simple, and here today: take advantage of new tools and techniques to cover the news creatively and efficiently; sell sophisticated digital advertising in a sophisticated fashion; keep the Web content free, and charge a high price for content and interaction that are delivered in-person via conferences and events. And don’t expect instant results.”

The added value component is crucial. We’re not going to be able to block online content until people pay for it. (Nor should we want to.) There will be a select few cases that can get away with it (i.e. The Wall Street Journal), but that is the the exception to the rule. And microfundraising while fantastic, (i.e. Kachingle ) is not going to cover all the costs. So our audiences and community expect free content. Fine. Then ask yourself, what can we provide: a service, a certain slice of highly sophisticated or organized info, networking/organizing, etc.. that they can’t get anywhere else? What can we charge for it? I don’t think it needs to be just in-person events like conferences. I think we we can get more creative than that. These are big questions to ask and answer when thinking about revenue and business models.

3) Your editorial model will need to change

“The editorial model relies on a combination of professional journalism (currently two full-time and four part-time professionals, as well as a number of freelancers); what we think of as semi-professional journalism (talented writers or subject-matter experts who do something else for their day job); and citizen journalism (bloggers and others who contribute on specific topics, sometimes for small sums of money). We don’t have copy editors, but rather copyedit each others’ stuff. We’re direct and conversational in our style, which is actually easier and quicker once you get used to it, and more appealing to readers than old-style newspaper formulas.”

Roles are going to have to change within this new media environment. Reporting will be in hybrid hands (from trained journalists to citizen journalists). Full-time reporters will have to take on different, but integrated roles. I see this is an awesome opportunity. But it’s going to take some deep breaths and some major restructuring and internal organizing to get individual media outlets on this strategic journalistic and biz model path.

Oh sure, talking to Henry Jenkins is cool and all…but is it as cool as jawing with the best feminist blog in the country? I think it’s a draw!

Check out Tracy’s thoughts on the future of journalism and the role of progressive media:

Why I love progressive media is that it focuses on those very stories that the mainstream media continues to miss or deliberately ignores. The progressive media is doing the investigations that mainstream media does not. They are listening to and reporting on the individuals and voices you won’t hear in the mainstream media. This quote by John Pilger, editor of the book Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed The World, sums up my feelings about the very essence of journalism and what I believe the progressive media fully embodies, “Without it, our sense of injustice would lose its vocabulary and people would not be armed with the information they need to fight it.”

She offers up three pieces of advice for independent media makers looking to thrive online:

1) Allow your audiences to play.
2) Provide the space for your audiences to self-organize.
3) Collaborate. Coordinate. Share resources.

“There’s so much more, but I’ve gotta save it for the book!” she writes. Amen! We are in the final push. Stay tuned, and in the coming months you’ll hear all about it.

Tags: deathof journalism, Book, progressive media

Kurt Anderson has an interesting article on the Post-Russert Era at New York Magazine today. Some of the most salient paragraphs:

Until the mid-nineties, the pages and airtime available for reporting and explaining the news were scarce and precious, and middle-of-the-road high sobriety was the default mode for American journalism; to devote more than a tiny fraction of one’s mass-media platform to explicit opinion-mongering or mischief-making was literally unthinkable. But after cable TV and the Internet mooted that scarcity, attitude-laden takes on the news were permitted to propagate madly. The blithe post–Cold War unseriousness of the nineties helped as well. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, as The Daily Show had just started to achieve serious cultural traction and Fox News was about to overtake CNN in the ratings, the new paradigm had become unstoppable. Today, the strictly humorless big-time pundits—Paul Krugman, Charles Krauthammer—are the outliers. And so, perversely, thanks to modern technology, America has returned to its nineteenth-century roots: political discourse as entertainment, and almost everybody, from know-it-alls to wiseacres, mouthing off around the cracker barrel.

The commentariat has never been larger. But for all the new pundits, my hunch is that it possesses no more aggregate power than it did in the past. Instead, the same pie has been cut into smaller slices, with many more people scrambling to claim their little piece of visibility and influence. It’s a version of Warhol’s twisted insight, twisted a little more: In today’s commentariat, everyone is famous not for fifteen minutes but across fifteen micrometers of the bit of the celebrity bandwidth reserved for journalists.

What does this mean for the progressive media? Well, clearly we’re up against not only the dog-fight among the “mainstream” media to get attention, we’re up against each other as we seek to find a foothold in this new media world–from our celebrity journalists (that can be placed, linked to, talked about in the progressive, “mainstream” and conservative media world, to actually producing media that’s going to get placed, linked to, talked about–you get my picture. It’s also not just about what’s the click-through rates on our articles, how high the traffic is on our web sites (although it doesn’t hurt)–it’s about WHO is reading, watching and listening to our media. Who are we trying to mobilize/inform? Who are we trying to influence? Targeting our audience (or intended audiences) becomes harder and harder as the landscape becomes more and more saturated with more media and more systems to deliver media.

I’m just going to say it. The individual efforts of the progressive media are crucial. Everyone (well, mostly everyone) is hitting a particular sweet spot for their audience. Everyone can claim they are producing media that no one else is doing. For the most part, that’s true. But that’s not enough. The audiences are too small. The long-lasting impact is too disparate. It’s hard (I know from experience) to look beyond the daily survival of your media organization. But it’s time to get more collaborative and creative with our thinking in terms of partnerships and organized strategies.

We are not going to do this with the same old mentalities. I think we need to start applying some of the principles of grassroots organizing (ongoing campaigns, targets, strategic communiciations, alliance building, getting our hands dirty) to the media system. I think this will have have an impact on how we’re structuring and distributing the media as well as how we engage with our audiences (who now in my mind, are fellow media makers.) I think the basic tenets and principles of journalism will and should survive. In other words, while the internal organs will remain the same, the face needs some major plastic surgery. (Does that analogy make sense? I’ll keep working on it.)

Sue Cross, Senior Vice President of Global New Media and U.S. Print and Broadcast Markets The Associated Press gave a speech at Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication on Monday.  Online Journalism Review has the report.

Here are some good highlights.

Cross cited The Washington Post, The Tyee [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Tyee is one of The Media Consortium's great allies from Canada] and Hip Hop Caucus as examples of journalism’s proven appeal creativity, social media and aggregation. Ink and paper may be dying, she said, but the newspaper is not. At least not in the short-term.

“It’s allowing people to personalize the Post,” said Cross as she demonstrated the newspaper’s new Facebook widget. “It’s a light, just kind of fun application. At the same time, the Post isn’t giving up for a minute being an authoritative force of political coverage. The Post puts incredible resources and incredible dedication into very expensive, very insightful reporting…So I think this idea of in-depth reporting and text reporting, as we’ve seen from the Post, it may take different shapes, it may be mixed up, but it’s not going to go away. Still a very important piece of the future.

“You’ll see a fair amount of blogs saying people don’t care about news anymore. Young people don’t care about news. First of all, common sense says it’s nonsense. And the research also tends to say it’s nonsense. On the contrary, I would argue we’re in really the biggest media explosion in history. You can’t get in a cab without seeing a window with news on it. You cannot get in an elevator without seeing a news ticker. You can’t open your cell phone, you can’t go to your e-mail without seeing news headlines. That represents a voracious appetite. Those would not be there unless people wanted them. So I see the interest in news surging, and that’s a very good thing.”

On Advocacy and Journalism:

On Financing Journalism:

The whole article is a really good read.  I highly suggest you take a look.

Over at the Center for Social Media’s site, I’ve detailed a number of ways that striking writers and their allies are using Web 2.0 tools to make their case against the studios. Not just another “add technology and stir” story, the strike is revealing how user-generated media has begun to persistently replace some of the functions that progressive and independent media served in the past.

In a print and broadcast world, media and labor activists would have been banging their heads against the blockade, complaining bitterly about the lack (or bias) of coverage. Alternative newsweeklies, independent magazines, community radio stations and labor publications would have picked up the slack, generally reaching only a niche audience. Now, activists just bypass those outlets, generating their own media, which in turn sparks both alternative and mainstream coverage and commentary. Nonprofits and advocacy groups serve as their own publishers and filmmakers, pumping content out on the Web that is quoted, repurposed and attached to calls for action. Buzz no longer just just jumps up or dies; it builds and cycles, sometimes resurfacing unexpectedly.

Where does this shift leave progressive media-makers? What roles can independent political projects effectively play in tandem with or addition to user-generated media? That’s what Tracy and I hope to discover as we continue our book research. Stay tuned!

She writes:

So, you may be thinking, who needs writers anyway? The truth is, no one needs any particular writer, just as no one needs any particular auto worker, stagehand, or janitor. But take us all away and TV’s funny men will be struck mute, soap opera actors will be reduced to sighing and grunting, CNN anchors will have to fill the whole hour with chit chat about the weather, all greeting cards will be blank. Newspapers will consist of advertisements and movie listings; the Web will collapse into YouTube. A sad, bewildered, silence will come over the land.

more

The recent announcement that the FCC is pushing up a vote on media ownership in local markets to mid-December has sent the media reform movement into overdrive.

A related piece from the Publish2 Blog, “The New Media Consolidation,” might explain some of the urgency of commercial media owners to grab up new outlets. It notes in part:

What Google discovered was that consolidating all of the search behavior on the web is actually a form a media consolidation. It used to be that the content and the distribution were one and the same — newspapers, magazines, TV networks, etc. — Google was the first media company to successfully arbitrage the separation of content from distribution.

But search is only half of the equation. Search has consolidated the allocation of attention for people who know, generally or specifically, what they are looking for. The other half of the attention allocation equation for media is people who don’t know what they are looking for — they just want to know what’s NEW. I may be interested in technology, or celebrity gossip, or foreign affairs, but I’m not looking for anything in particular. I just want the news.

This is why the online news market is heating up. This is why Google has started to develop the Google News product after letting it run on automatic pilot for so many years. This is why Digg has captured everyone’s imagination — it has the attention allocation power of search, but applied to news.

But there’s a problem with these two approaches to media consolidation — they remain separate.

In one corner you’ve got all of the capacity to create content, from traditional media brand networks to citizen media consolidators, all the way down the long tail to independent blog publishers.

In the other corner you have the aggregators, from search to audience-powered social news, increasingly dominating how attention gets allocated to all of this content.

It seems unlikely that the the big media players are going to be content with half the pie.

And so this separation is starting to dissolve, e.g. Conde Nast acquires Reddit, Google starts hosting news wire content, Forbes acquires Clipmarks, Digg hosts massive comment threads that dwarf what you find on the original content items.

This is where consolidation converges, where content creation meets attention allocation — new media companies are realizing that they have to do both.

This is why, as Jeff Chester notes in a recent Nation article, the idea the the Web can serve as an antidote to consolidation is naive at best. “The growing consolidation at the core of the digital media business, ultimately will result in a handful of companies controlling the revenues for all of online media–blogs, social networks, search engines, mobile communication and (especially) news and information sites. This should be of concern, especially to progressive idealists who hoped that the Internet could pose a challenge to the ‘old’ media monopoly.”

Here’s my point: both of these versions of consolidation are largely bypassing the progressive media sector. While individual progressive media projects have benefitted from traffic driven to them via search engines, digg, etc., legacy progressive media outlets have had limited success in either penetrating the ranks of consolidated commercial media or partnering with the digital powerbrokers. There’s work to be done.

Check out this month’s In These Times for my editorial contrasting this year’s YearlyKos conference to the recent Journalism That Matters gathering in DC. A snippet:

The bloggers and readers at the YearlyKos conference don’t all agree on politics or tactics—their approaches range from investigative journalism to rhetorical Molotov-throwing. They don’t always know if they’re practicing journalism—and don’t care. They do know that the public demands accountability and truth-telling from media and government alike.