Someone once said the first rule of blogging is to do it regularly. The second is not to begin with an apology if you go silent without a heads up.
Screw the rules.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking a lot of people how news organizations can do a better job of providing and being a conduit for information and discussion while making enough money to sustain a business.
That last part is probably the most difficult question to answer. Most recently, media consultant Michael Rosenblum urged media companies to come up with a new business model for the realities of today.
Apparently, media CEOs were stymied. But there are examples out there:
David Cohn has proposed community-funded reporting and runs Spot.us, the live test. ProPublica uses the non-profit model to pay for investigative reporting. The Guardian in Britain is set up as a public trust.
So I ask you: what should we be doing to ensure there will be money to pay for the labor-intensive craft of news gathering?
Leave a comment below or send me your ideas. If the CEOs don’t know where to start, maybe we, the online collective can show the way.
I’ve been talking with people in social media, information visualization, grassroots reporting and news companies. I’ve wanted to talk with media buyers as well, but don’t have contacts. Do you?
Not related, but possibly useful to you: Thanks to the organizers of Capitolbeat, I was a conference panelist on a session about online fact checking with UNC assistant professor Andy Bechtel and staff reporter Taft Wireback of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. (You’ll find the links on my Delicious page.)
Photo: The (South Africa) Times newsroom by Gregor Rohrig/Flickr
HI Chris
there is a demand for news, information and content, but in the highly fractionalized world of the web, the ad revenues are going to be substantially lower. That’s OK, because the cost of producing content is commensurately lower. I mean, how much does it cost you to do this site? The killer is the newspaper’s now largely unnecessary overhead. That is what is killing the business. Like the photo above. Send those people home to work from their laptops. Turn off the lights. Burn the building the ground. Now, we’re getting somewhere.
I absolutely agree with Michael. First order of business is to reduce costs by going with a virtual newsroom where everybody works from home. Dismantle the unneeded infrastructure. Make more use of freelancers (cheaper than full-time employees). Encourage electronic delivery of the newspaper so that you kill fewer trees and substantially lower production costs. Study those micro-publishers and learn how to run a news operation on a shoestring. The CEOs would probably be amazed at how much money they don’t have to spend.