Posts about journalism

The myth of the opinionless man*

June 26, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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The problem in the cases of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal and ousted Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is not that they had opinions. Of course, they had opinions. Indeed, we should damned well want them to have opinions. If they each only accepted what they were told without doubts and complaints, without discrimination, they’d each be be very bad at their jobs, wouldn’t they?

The problem is not that those opinions were reported. Publicness — transparency, openness, authenticity, honesty — is good. It should lead to more trust. But here it didn’t. It led to public disgrace. Why?

The problem, then, is our myth of the opinionless man*.

I don’t think that is society’s myth. We all know better than to believe that men have no beliefs — because we are all merely men* with beliefs of our own.

No, the opinionless man is an institutional myth, a fiction maintained by news organizations, political organizations, governments, businesses, churches, and armies. The opinionless man is meant to be an empty vessel to do the bidding of these hierarchies. But opinions and openness about them subvert hierarchies. Or to translate that to modern times, via the Cluetrain Manifesto, links subvert hierarchies. This is the age of links. So hierarchies: beware. One opinion leaks out of the opinionless man and it is shared and linked and spread instantly. The institutions treat this revelation as a shock and scandal — as a threat — and they eject the opinionated men. That is what happened to McChrystal and Weigel.

In my thinking for my book on publicness, I keep trying to look at such fears and offenses and turn them around to ask what they say not about the scandalous but instead about the scandalized — about us and about our myths and realities.

Former Washington Post editor Len Downie was the self-drawn archetype of the opinionless man. He famously refused to vote, thinking it somehow made him immune from opinions and their corruption of his journalism. That heritage is what led to Weigel’s ejection from the Post. But as Liz Mair argues (via @jayrosen_nyu), it’s ridiculous to assume that Weigel should accept and agree with everyone and and everything he encountered on his beat covering conservatives. He should be skeptical. Isn’t that a reporter’s job? And what is the source of that skepticism but opinions? We want to know.

Mayhill Fowler wrote a superb HuffingtonPost piece — inspired by McChrystal and her own experience in the Obama campaign — about journalism as a dance of seduction and betrayal. The corrupting temptation isn’t sex or beauty or wealth or even fame but access. Her perspective is so valuable because she came to journalism and politics as an outsider and maintained that perspective.

Michael Walsh, however, speaks for the institutions as he blows his vuvuzela until he’s red-faced warning of the dangers of such openness:

But the most important thing to emerge from this mess is the notion of privacy, that there is a difference between on and off the record, and it simply must be observed unless freedom of speech — and thus of thought — is irrevocably chilled. For decades, reporters have observed the distinction between what is meant for public consumption and what is spoken of behind closed doors. The principle is not only enshrined in journalism, but in the government: “executive privilege,” however at times abused, is vital to the decision-making process, and freewheeling (if often “offensive”) conversation and characterizations are part of that process. If we have arrived at a point where we literally have to watch every word we speak, than we are no better than North Korea or the former East Germany. Somewhere, Gen. McChrystal is smiling…

Still, the days when “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail” are long gone, and in cyberspace any utterance, no matter how “private,” is now potentially public — and potentially career-ending. That’s the real lesson from the Weigel flap: in the war of ideas in cyberspace, truth is no longer the first casualty. Trust is.

Whoa, boy*. I think exactly the opposite: that privacy for government and those who cover it is exactly what we do not need, exactly what we are working to eliminate with sunshine and publicness. Journalists should have been the ones opening the drapes on those dark rooms but they didn’t because they were seduced by their invitations in. So outsiders are forcing them open. Hurrah. Privacy is what protects the tyrants of North Korea and East Germany. Transparency is what kills them.

So if we want more transparency — and I believe that we, the people, do even if they, our institutions, often do not — then we must stop going along with the myth of the opinionless man and the scandal of the opinionated man. We should celebrate openness and honesty whenever they manage to break through. We should recognize that — to reform Walsh’s bottom line — transparency leads to trust. We should remind our institutions — government and the journalists who are supposed to cover them — that we expect them to judge and we will respect their actions more if we understand their judgment.

The institutions’ myth of the opinionless man is what is behind their disdain for the internet and its inhabitants — us. Don’t you hear it all the time: Oh, the internet is filled with nothing but opinions, as if opinions — our opinions — were worthless. But opinions and the arguments about them — and, yes, the facts needed to win those arguments — are the basis of decision-making in any organization and in society itself. Opinions are the soil of democracy. Publicness is the sunshine that lets it grow. (/metaphor)

What we’re witnessing in these cases is more than a mere two-day kerfuffle. We are witnessing small evidence of a cultural shift away from the privacy, secrecy, and control that empowered and protected institutions in a centralized, mass society to new cultural norms of publicness. That publicness grants us independence from the powerful; it wrests control from their hands. That is why we are grappling so with questions of privacy and publicness. (That is some of what I am trying to grapple with in my book.)

Alan F. Westin’s influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom expresses the view of the prior era: “The greatest threat to civilized social life,” he says in his gravest possible terms, “would be a situation in which each individual was utterly candid in his communications with others, saying exactly what he knew or felt at all times.” Well, hasn’t he just described the internet? There we see our emerging social norm of publicness. There we see the war of the private and the public. It’s about more than Facebook photos.

Jürgen Habermas idealized the emergence of the (bourgeois) public sphere of rational discourse in the 18th century as a counterpoint to government authority and he lamented its eventual corruption by media and commercialization. I will argue in my book that perhaps now, in our post-institutional age, we may see his public sphere emerge after all. It’s not going to look idealized for it is built on discourse — on internet opinions — and to those accustomed to the neatness of control by government and media, that looks messy. But if we have faith in our fellow man* then we can at least hope that out of this discourse, rationality may emerge.

In such discourse, the opinionless man is silent. I’d rather hear him.

* You needn’t supply your rant about how I should not use the word “man.” I’m using it unapologetically — well, except for this footnote. I’m using it because there’s nothing wrong with the word man but moreso because if you take every instance of the word “man” in this post and replace it with “men and women” or “persons” or “humans” it would result in awkward English and lose cultural reference. Besides, in this case, we happen to be talking about two men. And I am one myself. I’m unapologetic about that.

: LATER: Matthew Yglesias on having no opinion as make-believe.

FTC protects journalism’s past

May 29, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.

If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.

If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.

The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them are as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I’ll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn’t endorse them.

Still, it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That’s something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC’s mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent.

“This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers’ survival. There’s the problem.

Among the ideas the FTC presents:

* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we’ll soon see how Murdoch’s properties do without it). The FTC doesn’t broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don’t) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears).

The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn’t begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip ‘n’ read, it’s called.

What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous.

* Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn’t that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn’t the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents’ price advantages? Not here.

* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.

* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It’snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).

* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs.

* Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that.

I’m quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”

But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn’t — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I’d argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer.

The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side.

The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It’s this: Get off our lawn.

: DISCLOSURES: This is on my disclosures page, but it can’t hurt to repeat here that I hold stock in (but am not paid by) a platform that aggregates and is used by publishers to link to more content (Daylife). I am advising the company run by the afore-linked visionary, John Paton at Journal Register. I run the project at CUNY that is researching new business models for news. And I blog.

: I cross-posted this on Business Insider and Huffington Post; see also the discussions there.

: Thanks to Scribd, the full document is after the jump….
(more…)

Future of news

May 16, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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I taped this show months ago and didn’t even know when it aired on PBS. It’s a not-bad discussion of the future of news with me, Steve Coll of the New America Foundation (ex of the Washington Post) and John Sturm of the Newspaper Association of America:

BTW, When I taped the show, I was not told that it was backed by the George W. Bush Institute. Didn’t affect the show, so far as I can see, but it would have been nice to know.

Buffett on “terrible journalism”

March 4, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis

Warren Buffett — owner of one newspaper and director of another — complains in his letter to shareholders (PDF) about his quote being mangled and misused by sound-bite journalism:

Last year we saw, in one instance, how sound-bite reporting can go wrong. Among the 12,830 words in the annual letter was this sentence: “We are certain, for example, that the economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and probably well beyond – but that conclusion does not tell us whether the market will rise or fall.” Many news organizations reported – indeed, blared – the first part of the sentence while making no mention whatsoever of its ending. I regard this as terrible journalism: Misinformed readers or viewers may well have thought that Charlie and I were forecasting bad things for the stock market, though we had not only in that sentence, but also elsewhere, made it clear we weren’t predicting the market at all. Any investors who were misled by the sensationalists paid a big price: The Dow closed the day of the letter at 7,063 and finished the year at 10,428.

Given a few experiences we’ve had like that, you can understand why I prefer that our communications with you remain as direct and unabridged as possible.

Is journalism storytelling?

December 8, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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It’s accepted wisdom in the news tribe that journalism is storytelling. They have become synonymous. Journalists are storytellers. I hear that over and over again, especially in discussions of journalism education, and when I do I see everyone’s head nod. Lately, I’m not necessarily nodding.

I’m not so sure journalism is storytelling anymore.

One reason: There are so many new forms of journalism emerging. Data is (are) journalism. Platforms that enable communities to share what they know and need to know are becoming journalism (Fred Wilson: We will cover ourselves“). Algorithms that aggregate and cluster and prioritize news are journalism. Collaboration and crowdsourcing yield journalism that doesn’t necessary end up in story form. Journalism can be a stream (see Twitter from Iran). Journalism can be a snapshot of current knowledge (see Wikipedia). Journalism is a process (which make take the form of Waves soon). But stories are products.

Another reason: By taking the role of the storyteller, journalists claim a position at the center of the story. They also claim possession: It’s my story to tell. I’ll decide what the story is. I’ll tell it my way. The storyteller is in control. Storytelling remains essentially one-way (comments and questions come after the story is told). Storytelling is about telling.

Now, of course, stories and the telling of them will still be a part of journalism; often it is the value a journalist can add. Look up storytelling and journalism on Google and you’ll find no end of effort to update storytelling in multimedia.

But if we continue to assume that our role is that of the storyteller, and to limit ourselves to that, then we risk closing ourselves off from forms of gathering and sharing information that do not end up in the form of stories, that are not structured and told. When we open ourselves up, we can think of journalists as enablers, as community organizers (not just of information but of a community’s ability to organize its own information), as teachers, as curators (how could I get through this without using the word at least once?), as filters, as tool makers, as algorithm writers.

Giving up on the news business

October 19, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Before reaching their dangerous conclusion – recommending government supported journalism in a report called the Reconstruction of American Journalism – former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie and Columbia journalism prof Michael Schudson make some basic and, I believe, profoundly mistaken assumptions, namely: “That journalism is now at risk, along with the advertising-supported economic foundations of newspapers.”

Just because newspapers put themselves at risk, it does not follow that journalism is at risk. Newspapers no longer own journalism. As too often happens in this discussion, they focus only on the revenue side of the business ledger of news – advertising falling from monopolistic heights – and not on the cost side and the efficiency new technology – and thus collaboration – that technology allows.

As Downie and Schudson themselves point out in their Washington Post op-ed, there is now a flourishing of new outlets and means of gathering and sharing news.

Journalists leaving newspapers have started online local news sites in many cities and towns. Others have started nonprofit local investigative reporting projects and community news services at nearby universities, as well as national and statewide nonprofit investigative reporting organizations. Still others are working with local residents to produce neighborhood news blogs. Newspapers themselves are collaborating with other news media, including some of the startups and bloggers, to supplement their smaller reporting staffs. The ranks of news gatherers now include not only newsroom staffers but also freelancers, university faculty and students, bloggers and citizens armed with smart phones….

That is a basis for a new ecosystem of journalism, one we begin to outline in our Knight Foundation-funded New Business Models for News Project. We believe there is a sustainable and profitable future for news and they only way to confirm that is to try to build it but that will not happen if we declare surrender and defeat in the hope that the market can support the news a community needs.

Downie and Schudson give up on news as a business and, in their consequent desperation, make this drastic proposal:

American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting — as society has, at much greater expense, for public education, health care, scientific advancement and cultural preservation, through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy and government policy.

Collective responsibility. Socialized journalism. This is the ultimate in broccoli journalism: You are not only forced to read what journalists say is good for you but you are now forced to pay for it through taxation.

They make other suggestions with which I have no complaint: Journalism students should report not just for their professors but for the ecosystem and we see that beginning. If philanthropists want to do more to support news, I’m not going to burn their checks – but they are no white knights riding in to save the day. Public broadcasting can do more local reporting and we see movement in that direction from especially NPR and also public TV – though I would be loath to think that we should have government mandate of that. And we want more transparency; I belong to that religion.

All this comes from that dire assumption that journalism is dying with newspapers. That is not and certainly need not be the case. I disagree with Downie and Schudson’s key assumption: There is no crisis. When you start there, you don’t just reconstruct the past of journalism but see the possibilities to build a new journalism.

: Even The New York Times’ David Carr is somewhat incredulous.

: Mulling over the full report on my train ride in this morning, I realized that my problem with it is this: Downie and Schudson are addressing the business problem of news without doing reporting on the business.

The report is a cogent, comprehensive, well-documented summary of broadly held conventional thinking on the history and current state of journalism in America, but it is all stated from the journalistic perspective – no surprise coming from two distinguished journalists.

If this were handed in to me as a term paper in my class, I’d give it back for more reporting and rethinking. I’d tell the students that they made huge assumptions about the business state of journalism – both on the revenue and cost sides of the P&L – without giving me reporting on that. I’d advise them to look at the true cost of the accountability journalism they cherish, at the inefficiency of the business today as it produces commodity news, at whether there is sufficient advertising revenue to cover the journalism that matters once news organizations rid themselves of their inefficiency, at verifying the public demand for the kind of journalism they think the public needs, and at the issues journalism has had with trust and quality. Then, if they still came to the same conclusions – which I doubt – I’d urge them to get more balanced reporting on the risks behind each of their recommendations, particularly involving government subsidies, direct funding, and mandates on journalism. I think they did half the story, the half we’ve already heard (and which they quite ably summarize again). They should have given us the business story since that is what they really wanted to address. I wish they had.

: Alan Mutter’s good commentary.

Journalism as capitalism: Now that’s God’s work

October 2, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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The only way that journalism is going to be sustainable is if it is profitable – and out of that market relationship comes many other benefits: accountability to the public it serves; independence from funders’ agendas; growth; innovation. This is the future for journalism we envisioned in the New Business Models for News Project.

Not-for-profit, publicly and charitably supported journalism has its place in the new ecosystem of news; that’s why we included it in our models at CUNY. I think it should fill in blanks the market doesn’t fill.

But I agree with Jack Shafer at least in part that there are dangers to relying too much on not-for-profit news. He does an admirable job listing those dangers, chief among them influence by funders and their motives. Texas Tribune funder and founder John Thornton responds here. I’ll stand halfway between them: We can use and perhaps need funded journalism but we also need to be aware of the risks and must expect transparency about them.

I see another danger, though: that not-for-profit ventures will delay or even choke off for-profit, sustainable entrepreneurship in news. I would prefer to see various of the many funders who gave funds to not-for-profit endeavors – note $5 million give to a new not-for-profit entity in the Bay area – instead had invested in for-profit companies that can build companies that support and sustain themselves rather than rely on hand-outs. That is God’s work.

Mind you, I’m not coming at this from the perspective – as some might – that journalism has to be produced only by paid professionals. I have argued that we would be wise to account for the value of volunteerism and that we must find ways to reduce the marginal cost of news and new journalism to near-zero.

But in terms of saving the functions reporters perform, I think we should find ways to support them and their work in profitable enterprises. So, in a rare moment, I disagree with Clay Shirky that we must rescue reporters as charities. This call continues the notion that journalism is in a crisis. No, its legacy owners are in a crisis because they could not and would not change; Clay’s right that their models and buildings are burning. But journalism is facing no end of opportunities (as the Knight Commission’s Ted Olson said at today’s Knight Foundation presentation of the group’s recommendations: never before in journalism has there been so much opportunity for innovation in journalism).

So let’s not save those reporters and let’s certainly not save doomed companies that refused to change. Let’s invest in the future, in creating new means of gathering and sharing a community’s news that are better than old methods and that are more efficient and thus more easily sustainable. That’s what we present in the New Business Models for News. When we presented at the Aspen Institute this summer, I pointed to a blog post I wrote (but can’t find now) a year and a half ago arguing that when the Washington Post bought out reporters, it should invest in them, setting them up with blogs and businesses and promoting and selling ads for them. That resonated. And that is one step toward a new model built on networks, profitable networks. There are many more that need building.

The X Prizes for news (and media)

September 25, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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A conversation with our Knight Foundation friends at Aspen inspired me to think through what an X Prize for news could accomplish. Then this week’s report in the New York Times about the awarding of the NetFlix X Prize – and the far greater value it created, not just for NetFlix, but for its participants and others – inspired me to buckle down and open that conversation here (and at the NewsInnovation site).

I’m not asking idly. With the right structure, I’d seek funding to administer such a prize at CUNY and we can hope that smart companies, organizations, and patrons will see that an X Prize could be a way to innovate aggressively and openly. Or is it?

We must start with a question: What is the core problem the prize is trying to solve? It can’t be just about getting more revenue for existing companies or thinking of another way to tell a story or, Lord knows, making something cool. The best expression of the problem will yield solutions that must be groundbreaking and new, quantum leaps undertaken on daring, hope, and hubris. Innovation won’t come from incremental changes to an existing structure. We know that too well.

Another key question is how success is measured – tangibly, metrically, from a distance, not emotionally. In something as amorphous as news, that’s going to be hard.

Next, we have to define news carefully – that is, broadly. News shouldn’t be defined as we do today, for the winners of the prize may create something we haven’t seen yet. Our definition of news is probably just about a community informing itself – better informed individuals and society (“better” as defined by them).

Finally, we have to recognize that the problems to solve are centered more on business issues than product issues – on sustainability – but that is not to say that the product should not be radically rethought as part of this process.

I see three key problems to solve for news (which I’ll make conveniently alliterative):

1. Engagement. In our most recent phase of the New Business Models for News at CUNY (funded by Knight), we used the sinfully low industry standard for engagement with newspaper sites: 12 pageviews per user per month. Facebook users have that much interaction with the service every day. Time spent online in social sites and blogs accounted for 17% of time overall – vs. 0.5% for newspaper sites, according to separate estimates (and advertising on social sites doubled while it plummeted for newspapers). For God’s sake, if news services were truly of their communities, they would have many times more interaction with many times more people in those communities and interaction would go far beyond reading.

Engagement is a core business problem. If you plug in higher numbers into our NewBizNews models – and we will, in our blow-out cases – you’d see much better businesses able to support much more news. You’d see news as a very profitable industry again.

So let’s say the first challenge is to multiply a community’s engagement with news. How is that to be done? Surprise me. Shock me. Invent entirely new ways, new platforms, means, and media to gather and share news.

How do we measure engagement? I would not measure by pageviews – in great part because I do not want contestants to just assume that it’s a site they’re inventing. See one more time Marissa Mayer on hyperpersonal news streams and me on hyperdistribution. News has to go where the community is and we no longer expect the community to come to it. It has to be of and among the community. Time is a slightly better measure of engagement but it, too, is shallow and can be manipulated with tricks.

No, engagement is more about ownership: people believing that and acting as if they owned this thing. It’s theirs – as Wikipedia’s and craigslist’s communities believe they own those properties and as each of us believes we own our Facebook pages or Twitter feeds or blogs. But an opposite danger lies there as well. One shouldn’t measure engagement by contribution (as many of us did in the early days of the web). Go to Wikipedia’s 1 percent rule.

So I’d say the measurement has to be made by a combination of metrics – say, time combined and attitudes: Take a baseline a survey of users of news sites today against certain beliefs – “My newspaper.com makes me part of the community of news”; “Newspaper.com is a member of my community of news just as I am”; “I feel a stake of ownership in newspaper.com”; “I feel a measure of control over newspaper.com”; “I feel a responsibility for newspaper.com”; “I am better informed with newspaper.com”. Then require that the new thing multiple some index of these factors by an impressive amount. If Facebook is 30 times more engaging than a newspaper site, then how about 10 times, even five times – that would make a huge difference in the business of news.

2. Effectiveness. This is effectiveness for media’s other customers, its paying customers: advertisers, or perhaps we should say marketers (to include ecommerce and not limit the business relationship).

News sites – like most media sites – are still selling what they used to sell in their old media: space, time, eyeballs, scarcity. Google won business away from them by selling something else: performance. Google thus takes on risk on behalf of advertisers – if Google doesn’t deliver relevance and you don’t click, it doesn’t get paid – and so its interests are now aligned with its advertisers’. And because Google created an auction marketplace that takes advantage of abundance – there is no scarcity on the internet – then prices are lower. For an advertiser, what’s not to love? That’s why I roll my eyes when old media people complain that Google stole their money. No, Google competed and saved advertisers their money.

At the same time, I believe that news and media will be supported primarily by advertising and so they had best figure out new ways to serve advertisers – even as advertising shrinks. For purposes of sustaining news, I think it’s best to concentrate on local advertising, because – in the U.S., at least – most journalistic resource is expended locally, much of government is local, there is opportunity to grow there, and the crisis in the news industry is primarily local.

The solution cannot be about increasing clickthroughs to banners. That merely extends the bullshit online media are selling. No, it has to be about much richer ways to measurably improve merchants’ businesses: to add value.

Ah, but measuring it is the tough part for that itself sets the shape of the invention: Is it more people to a web site, more people to a door, more sales of particular merchandise, better brand awareness, better relationships? Help! What do you think?

At CUNY, with additonal funding, we soon hope to do more research with local merchants for NewBizNews to get a better sense of their needs. But then again, they may not know it until they see it. I’ve spoken with advertisers who still don’t understand why a customer’s Google search matters to them.

So for the sake of discussion, let’s say that one could take a test group of merchants and used the methods and means created by a contestant to utilize a relationship with online media of some form (that is, advertising) to improve their sales by N percent over N period with at least an N return on investment. In the end, it’s simply about improving their businesses, isn’t it?

Any multiple of this effectiveness would also have a profound impact on the sustainability and profitability of news (so long as it’s a news entity that makes it possible). In our New Business Models for News, we used what we believed – though some disagree – was a conservative $12 CPM ad rate. It was also conservative to presume old ad models: i.e., banners. But then Google’s Marissa Mayer turned around and talked about hyperpersonal news streams, emphasizing the business potential: If you know that much about people to be hyperpersonal and if you are incredible good at targeting – at discerning intent and delivering relevance – then the efficiency, effectiveness, and value of marketing there would skyrocket. An X Prize winner would think this way.

3. Efficiency. This is to say cost. What does it cost to produce news, to gather and share what a community knows? The closer that marginal cost can be brought to zero, the more news we can afford. That’s good for society.

That may not sound good for professional journalists, I know. And employment of journalists has been the default measurement of the health of news. (This is why I have quibbled with BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel’s analysis, here and here.) But I’m not suggesting that there are necessarily fewer reporters (there will be fewer production people). Indeed, in our New Business Models for News, we ended up with a equivalent number of people doing journalism in our hypothetical market, only they weren’t all in a single newsroom. Most worked in entrepreneurial ventures that many of them owned, and they as a group devoted far more of their time to reporting. The net result, we believe is more journalism because it is more efficient journalism.

So I’m suggesting that journalists be made as efficient as possible and the way to do that is to make them highly collaborative and to take advantage of the work people are willing to do just because they care – the hundreds of millions of dollars people contribute to Wikipedia, adding value to it and making it both supremely efficient and incredibly valuable.

So I suggest this prize start with the goal of maximizing the journalism, finding the best ways to get the most relevant news to the most people at the lowest cost: the best way to make the most people feel well-informed from a sustainable venture. Once again, we must be cautious about the definition of news, not limiting it to the broccoli served cold currently. What do people want to know and need to know and how can we get that? What is the news that isn’t shared that has to be reported and investigated and why and how do we get that? So I might start by finding communities and having them define news and what it means to be informed, what they need to run themselves. Of course, we also need to define quality. This needs to be reliable and useful information.

How do you make a measurable contest out of that? I’m not sure. Perhaps we find a community and find out how many people want to know about, say, their school board and town board and tow events and then measure what they want to know now. Then the winners made their community better informed by the greatest margin at the lowest cost while still not losing money.

In the end, if we can find new and daring solutions to these problems of engagement (formerly known as audience), effectiveness (advertising), and efficiency (operations), we can improve news as a product (and process), its relationship with its public, its value to its customers, and its sustainability. That’s the goal. It’s going to take new thinking and experimentation to get there. An X Prize is one way to get that.

What do you think?