I just pledged to support David Cohn’s effort to prove that the public will pay for reporting at Spot.us. Won’t you? It’s not the only solution to the future of journalism. But it’s one.
Tag: newbiznews
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Sponsors for my book?
I’m writing the section of my book about publishing and exploring new models. Would love, as always, to get your thoughts on what I’m writing:
Rick Smolan has found another way to support his gorgeous and thus expensive collaborative photography books: sponsorship. He is best known for producing America 24/7, a book chronicling one week in the life of the U.S. with 1,000 top photojournalists. More recently, he produced America at Home, with a companion for the U.K., and it was underwritten by an obvious sponsor: Ikea. (He also had another innovative idea: You can pay to get the book with your photo on the cover.)
So here’s the question: Why shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page. Would it be any more corrupting to have ads in this book than next to a story I write in Business Week? Well, you’d have to tell me. If I were to have had a sponsor or two for this book, who would it have been and what would you have thought of my work as a result? If Dell bought an ad—because, after all, I now have nice things to say about them—would you have wondered whether I’d sold out to them? I would fear you’d think that. What about Google itself? Obviously, that wouldn’t work. Yahoo? Ha! Who might want to talk to you and associate themselves with the thinking in this book while also helping to support it? I’m not sure. Let’s discuss that for the paperback I hope gets published. Come to my blog and tell me what you think.
….So that’s what I wrote in the manuscript. But, of course, we can discuss this now. Do you think I should take a sponsor or two for the book (I’m not saying it’s an option; this is a discussion)? If so, who would make a good sponsor? Who wouldn’t? Would it affect your thinking if a sponsored book cost less? Should I then wish for a sponsor not only because it reduces the risk for the publisher and me but because it means more books could be sold at a lower price spreading the ideas in the book farther?
Thoughts?
: If we had any guts – and we likely don’t – we could auction a sponsor position on eBay. How’s this for a model: The sponsor, like a publisher, pays an advance but commits to pay a CPM based on copies sold but on a scale that’s reverse that of publisher commissions (the more copies that are sold, the lower the CPM goes).
Maybe that could be a model for news sponsorship, too: Sponsor a story and the more links it get, the more audience you get, the more you pay at a lower rate.
: LATER: Rick Smolan asked that I add this note from him responding to some of the comments:
1) I completely understand the skepticism many of your readers expressed at the mental image of a sponsored book – what comes to mind is a product dripping with logos and not so subtle product placement – an annual report disguised as journalism.
2) The truth of the matter, at least as it pertains to the books that we produce, couldn’t be further from that. Don’t think advertising – think PBS Special: “The Following program is made possible through a generous grant from X Corporation”. That’s it. Period.
3) As far as logos and credits for sponsors, if you look at AMERICA AT HOME or any one of the other books we’ve produced, the first page of the book carries the logos of the sponsors and at the end of the book is a page explaining their contribution to the project. That’s it.
4) Because of the support of our sponsors (which include Apple, Google, Ikea, HP, Fedex, Kodak, Adobe, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies) more than five million copies of our books adorn peoples coffee tables around the world.
5) Every single book we’ve produced for the past 25 years has been sponsored. Why? Because no publisher would publish our first book, “A Day in the Life of Australia” we went to the business community in Australia and self-published the book – it went on to become the #1 book in Australia and sold 200,000 copies (in a market where 10,000 was a best seller).
6) After that first success we certainly had publishers interested in being our publisher but our projects (which usually include not only a large format illustrated book, but also a TV show, website, exhibits and worldwide PR) cost millions of dollars each to produce and no publisher is willing to risk such large amounts on a single title.
7) In terms of journalistic integrity, our agreement with sponsors is that they get no editorial rights of censorship or input. In order to be able to engage the talents of photographers and editors from Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post, etc we have to ensure this editorial independence.
8) The fact that Time, Newsweek, Fortune and US News regularly feature our books on their covers (and even mention the role of the sponsors as part of the story) speaks volumes.
9) In addition to the funding our sponsors also run full fledged marketing campaigns to promote their sponsorship. Kodak for example has run full page ads in the Wall Street Journal promoting the fact that they were the sponsor. Nikon ran full page ads in Newsweek. Apple created promotional videos.
10) Ironically, a company has a much greater chance of having its products featured in one of our books if they AREN’T a sponsor. That’s because we actually remove any photo that contains a sponsors products to avoid the impression that we are doing product placement. Our current book AMERICA AT HOME is a perfect example – it was sponsored by IKEA yet there isn’t a single photo of an IKEA product in the book.
The one nod to IKEA is that when book buyers order a customized book featuring their own family or home on the cover those personalized covers carry the IKEA name (note: about 21% of the people who purchase this book are actually customizing it – an amazing trend in publishing). Not a single person has complained about this – probably because people seem to have a great deal of affection for IKEA.
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Twitpitch
Fred Wilson asked on Twitter this morning for a good place to have a cup of coffee in New Paltz. Otherw who know the place made recommendations. I went to Google Maps to find reviews, just as a friendly favor, because I had a spare second-cycle (don’t tell my editor; I should be editing now).
And then it occurred to me that there’s a business here, which I proposed in what I hope is the first Twittered business plan and elevator pitch.
(Now that I think of it, I might require my students in my entrepreneurial journalism course this fall to pitch their entire business in 140 characters. My old boss Steve Newhouse told last year’s students how he’d bought a business he could describe in seven words. That’s tweet-length. And as much as I hammered in the need for a clear and cogent elevator pitch, the students agreed after their juried session that they hadn’t honed them enough. So I like that, the new elevator pitch: Twitpitch.)
Anyway, the idea I pitched this morning is a marketplace of knowledge and favors: I tweet a request. People who have the knowledge or a moment look up something for me because I’m too busy or too mobile. I pick one that works for me. And that person earns cycles — more favors — which can also be redeemed in cash. The primary currency, however, is cycles. Rex Hammock suggested it’s a merger of Twitter and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and I agree except that I don’t want pennies, I want favors — or a way to reward generosity. It’s perhaps a mix of Twitter and the Zivity model (more on that later).
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Elegy for the hack
Steve Smith, editor of the Spokesman-Review, writes an eloquent elegy for the newspaperman and his myth.
Something is coming, some turn in the media universe, a turn in the future of my newspaper. A turn that will mean the end of me, of us. There will be reporters. Editors. Something called online producers and multi-media coordinators. Mojos. Slojos and Nojos. Bloggers, froggers and twitters.
But there won’t be newspapermen. At 58, I am among the last of a dying race.
And what a race it was. An American archetype.
He goes on to recall the myth of the newsroom, a myth that attracted me, too: tough guys, bad dressers, smokers, drinkers, schmoozers, crusaders on a Hollywood set with a typewriter soundtrack. Ah, the romance of it.
Oh, the danger of it. I think it is the tug of that romance that has held newspapermen back from changing, from seeing new opportunities in new challenges, from realizing that they weren’t about the myth but had a job to do.
So as much as I love what Smith wrote and how he wrote it, I disagree with him at the end when he says:
No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. “Communities of interest” will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square.
No instrument? Quite to the contrary, the instrument we have in the internet is quite promising. Its potential is not yet realized and may not be realized but it is there. What we need now are not nostalgic romantics but brave doers — aren’t newspapermen supposed to be brave? — who will recognize that potential.
Democracy has found its new public square. We’re in it. The question is: What is our role there? How can we help what happens there? What do we bring to the square?
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I have seen the future and it’s in Jersey
The Star-Ledger in New Jersey just broadcast its first live, daily noon news show on the web and I’m delighted to report that it bears no resemblance to television. That was the point.
Ledger Live – 07-28-08 When my friends and former colleagues at the paper told me they wanted to create a show, the one thing I begged them to do was not emulate local TV news. Please, God, anything but that. They had the opportunity to create something new and break all the stupid conventions of TV news. But how?
This is the only contribution I made to the project: I introduced them in Michael Rosenblum and the chemistry was a thing to behold. Rosenblum sounds like Gilbert Gottfried in both accent and bluntness (which is not all that different from how the paper’s editor, Jim Willse, sounds; they bonded). The Ledger folks showed him some video they’d made. He was impressed, so far as it went; photographers are good at shooting video. Then they showed him the TV studio they had built and he growled: Why would you want this shit? No, the story is in the newsroom. That’s what a newspaper is. So do it there. So much for the nice studio.
Rosenblum and his partner Lisa Lambden came in and taught more than a dozen staffers how to make stories the Rosemblum way — that is, without its stupid conventions (no B-roll, no noddies, no stand-ups, no establishing shots; just show me and tell me the damned story). And then they worked with the paper’s digital seer, John Hassel, and editor, Jim Willse, and others to create the format of the daily show.
The idea from the start was to have somebody in and of the newsroom and after auditions they found a perfect reporter Jersey-guy host, Brian Donohue. He just talks with you and they show the stories the thing-formerly-known-as-a-paper’s new video journalists have made. In the rehearsals he has also been interviewing people in the newsroom via a TV screen; I’d rather have him just sit down with the real people and talk. But that aside, I think the tone, style, and content are great.
I like the show but what I think is more important is bringing a new video culture into the newsroom with Rosenblum playing Obama, telling them, “Yes, we can.”
Here’s Hassell’s blog post about the show. Heres Rosenblum’s.
: Later: Lost Remote and its commenters got snarky about the show and I snarked back (see comment #28). Let’s get this straight, people: Local TV news sucks. It is no model for what newspapers or anyone should do in video online. It’s cheesy. It’s unbearable. I’m delighted that local TV news priests don’t like what the Ledger did. That’s best indication of success I can imagine.