BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: norg

  • Networked journalism

    29 comments on Networked journalism
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    I think a better term for what I’ve been calling “citizen journalism” might be “networked journalism.”

    “Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

    I carry some of the blame for pushing “citizens’ media” and “citizen journalism” as terms to describe the phenomenon we are witnessing in this new era of news. Many of us were never satisfied with the terms, and for good reason. They imply that the actor defines the act and that’s not true in a time when anyone can make journalism. This also divides journalism into distinct camps, which only prolongs a problem of professional journalism — its separation from its public (as Jay Rosen points out). In addition, many professional journalists have objected that these terms imply that they are not acting as citizens themselves — and, indeed, I believe that the more that journalists behave like citizens, the stronger their journalism will be.

    In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources (see: Mark Cuban). After the story is published — online, in print, wherever — the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news.

    This came to me on the drive back from Media Giraffe with Jay Rosen: the mobile master class. Somewhere in midConnecticut, we were talking about how journalism can, should, and will work when we can all join in and it hit me like a lightning bolt: this isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network.

    : LATER: Terry Heaton points us to earlier thinking in this vein. Just to be clear: I’m by no means trying to claim any provenance in this, only indicating a shift in my own thinking.

    : LATER STILL: Chris Nolan adds in email:

    Stand-alone journalism depends on an audience of people who understand that connection. The web is a flexible medium so readers come and go quickly. So there’s a contradiction: The newsroom has left the building but no one site can really stand alone and prosper by demanding that readers come to it. The business challenge is to make that flexibility part of how we do business if we’re going to grow and keep readers, Smart guys like WashPo’s Jim Brady and Yahoo’s Neil Budde know this; that’s why they’re not demanding exclusivity. That’s also why Spot-on’s pushing the syndication part of our business ahead of everything else. We want to go to our readers wherever they are, rather than wait for them to come to us.

    Julian Sanchez of Reason said in email that he’s using “distributed journalism” and I agree with that. I use it, too, in certain company. Only problem is, when I say that in front of newspaper folks, they think trucks.

  • See: I’m not antipaper

    3 comments on See: I’m not antipaper
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    In London, two former execs from the Swedish Metro free paper started a daily freebie targeted at finance, and the Guardian reports that City AM will be distributing more copies than the paid circulation of the Financial Times by year end. The niche freebie strategy makes some sense. In New York, you could tackle the financial markets with geographic ease and advertisers will follow. A free sports daily would get audience; not sure about the advertising. There already are free entertainment weeklies; they used to be called alternative papers. I could see lifestyle weeklies with food, home, parenting, and other content and endemic ads. Unlike City AM, whose only digital outlet is a podcast, I’d have online, audio, and mobile components for each. And so, voila, you’ve created the custom newspaper company: take the sections you want, in the medium you want with lower physical costs and greater advertising efficiency and greater advertising revenue since the guys with the money still put more money into print. Of course, there’s no circulation revenue and, yes, these are smaller and liter and won’t support big newsrooms. But hey, don’t blame me. Blame the Swedes.

    : UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter, I corrected the first sentence above; they’re not now but predict they will beat FT paid circ.

  • Paper to wires to wireless

    10 comments on Paper to wires to wireless
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    Way back in the beginning of newspapers on the internet, my children, lots of companies thought they’d make their money as ISPs. It was the clearest demonstration that they thought of themselves as distribution companies rather than trust companies. One of the biggest efforts at starting a newspaper ISP was Infinet, which was offered by lots of papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, but not by the papers I worked with. I argued against it. There was no way that papers could compete at scale with giants like AOL. And I said that the economics would be a killer because of subscriber acquisition costs, churn, and big investments in both technology and customer service. This, I argued — successfully — is not what a newspaper is about. For once, I was right. Newspaper ISPs died, one by one. Note the irony that Philadelphia will now be one of the first cities to offer free and ad-supported municipal wireless across the town.

    Now Paid Content reports that The Pilot in North Carolina is going to offer wi-fi access from its headquarters and then in public places across its market. So a newspaper is in the distribution business again. But there’s a difference: This time, it’s not an effort to get the online version of circulation revenue from consumers. This will be free.

    Is it smart? Dunno yet. On the one hand, a newspaper would be damned wise to find ways to provide extra service to local users: ‘Get my free wi-fi and get my local content and take my ads.’ On the other hand, it’s just another distribution play in a world that will value distribution less and less and newspapers have tried this before. What do you think?

  • Spitting on the bonfire

    5 comments on Spitting on the bonfire
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    I’m at a session on Newspaper Next, an American Press Institute project to try to bring innovation to newspapers. They’re working with Clay Christensen, change guru, and started projects with various newspapers about such things as getting ads from smaller businesses; creating a one-stop resource for mothers; developing an organizational structure for innovation; increasing readership; getting broader audiences, and this: “rethink online effort to meet key information and community engagement needs for wider range of users, including nonconsumers of news.” I thought that last one might just be about citizens’ media. But, no, it’s more about “audiences.”

    We’re not an audience, damnit. I think this project needs to learn how to collaborate with the people formerly known as the audience. When they launched, I was cranky about it. They’re trying to reshape newspapers but I think they should be more aggressive and imagine the world after newspapers and figure out how to get news there. They need to get out there and work with the nonnewspaper people

    The project took a survey of 500 newspapers managers found that 28 percent thought their companies saw the trends and had answers; the rest didn’t. “So it’s clear that the industry has no idea what to do next,” says Steve Gray, leader of the project, who’s speaking here.

    We’re getting the Christensen disruptive innovation spiel. I hate to think that there could be anyone left in the newspaper industry who isn’t aware that they’re quite disrupted. I’m eager to see innovation and experimentation that is not afraid to disrupt itself.

    Now he’s starting to list the disrupters taking on newspapers, starting with free print dailies, then Craigslist. Oh, those are only the easy disrupters. Sit down and start listing how the internet disrupts the newspaper business and you’ll fill a page very fast. Start here: How about your readers writing as disruption?

    Will innovation happen within the industry this way? Having been in too many task forces inside and outside news companies, I am dubious.

    See, instead, how Murdoch is innovating: He’s buying MySpace. Viacom buys iFilm. Even Yahoo and Google buy the guys inventing the next things.

    I said to Gray that the project seems to be trying to move a big, old barge five degrees when we need to blow up the barge and pick up the pieces and build new boats. He shifted the metaphor and said he’s trying to big, old cows to move a bit.

    I don’t think that’s enough. In fact, I think that making small steps — hey, least we’re doing something, you say — is false comfort. It is dangerous.

  • Newspaper as open-source focus group

    5 comments on Newspaper as open-source focus group
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    Some intriguing comments on my column about the Guardian’s web-first move. Start with MrPikeBishop, aka Frank Fisher, proposing a means to augment the still-measly revenue of online news with online think tanks and reviewers:

    It’s money though isn’t it? That’s the big fat fly in the ointment. . . . And that’s probably causing quivering sphincters at every paper in the developed world. Sure, the optimists will say expanded online advertising will take up the slack, and that punters may even spring for micropayments – they might, in the end. But in the interm…. wooooohooooh. . . .

    Personally I don’t think the media have quite grasped that as well as presenting a different way of delivering the story, the web is also TWO WAY. You give to the punters, but the punters, as we see here, also give back. Don’t think that advertising, or pay for news, is the only revenue stream possible. I’ve already been conjuring with ideas of using intelligent web communities as on-demand think tanks, for project or idea review, or for brainstorming purposes, but there are more readily obvious opportunities to hand.

    Take film, music – what’s the best way to get a new movie or album to break in a big way? What gets punters through the turnstiles faster than anything else? Word o’ mouth. Who’s reviews do people trust most? NME? Time Out? Or their buddy’s? A lot of people on this site [Comment is Free, that is] love film, a lot love music – Guardian, take that. Use it. Create an intelligent and articulate panel, and SELL that service. How do you know who you can trust on ebay? Feedback ratings. Millions now accept and use this rating system – why think it would only work for items on ebay? Why won’t it work for biscuits? Pensions? Coffee shops? Throw select readers a little bone, and sell their expertise and their valued opinion. Aggregate opinons, ratings, sell the service. Sure, the punters won’t do this for nothing, but if they get streamed new movies to review, or music, or vouchers for a new bar etc etc etc. The brightest underachievers in the world hang out at GU, that’s a resource.

    There’s a lot lurking in that. It’s about capturing and giving value to the wisdom of your crowd. It’s about acting as a moderator for sharing their experience and opinions. It’s about networks of trust. It’s about beating the hell out of random focus groups with detailed and valuable research. It’s about sharing your stuff with the public and getting value in return. The discussion continues as gawain says:

    I’ve never been called a bright underachiever before! Sounds good!…..sort of. Anyhow -good post MrPB -a tried and trusted central idea. It’s why reality TV is so popular now. But as far as creating intelligent and articulate panels, they can’t be set up like CiF right? I mean you’ve got the likes of me and the Stan-thing roaring and bellowing every few days. It got to be elitist to stay classy right?

    MrPikeBishop responds with some gems (my emphases):

    “It got to be elitist to stay classy right” Stan’s elite too y’know. C’mon, you can tell he’s a bright feller – dripping with intelligently crafted lunacy.

    CiF looks like a lunatic asylum because that’s what people become online – that’s one reason why they’re so valuable: people open up. And the diversity here – nutters ‘n all – is of value too. You take the film industry; run by accountants who would rather remake the same film every 20 years because they can’t imagine what will grab people next. But the remakes are made, and then vanish – you look at films like 12 Monkeys, or Donnie Darko: those films are made by and for people who are outside the mainstream, and they are not just watched, but *loved*. They make a bit of money in the box office, and then they make film every day from that day on, in merchendise, tie-ins and DVDs – cult successes never die. Make a movie, and one day you’ll need to make another. Make a cult, and you can retire. . . . That’s one tiny aspect – what I’m talking about is utilising specialist knowledge and opinion to enhance business or service propositions – an open-source focus group, really. Wiki-reviews, kinda.

    Everyman6 chimes in on the notion of open-source focus groups:

    Utopian, but unlikely to save The Guardian. You can’t persuade punters to pay for other punters’ reviews, because they’re used to getting them for free. No added value. And online “focus groups” have to be vetted and weighted, because your random sampling of online nutcases isn’t representative of the wider public. Which gets you back to square one. How about a Farringdon Road Bring & Buy Sale, anyone? Georgina could bake a cake.

    [Translation: How about a Guardian rummage sale? CiF editor Georgina Henry could bake a cake.]

    He makes a good point but isn’t that potentially the real value of The Guardian in the end: vetting and weighing and making the internet not so random?

    cktirumalai adds (making me jealous that my commenters here don’t quote James Joyce):

    James Joyce, who had some personal experience of newspapers, wrote with ironic humour in “Ulysses”, “Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof”. Apparently that should now be amended to “Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper which has been shaped with the active assistance of bloggers”. And bloggers can indeed help, pouncing on factual and other errors and providing unusual perspectives. If newspapers chronicle today’s history–or yesterday’s– the journalist can indeed profit from the views of alert contemporaries. But I cannot somehow imagine a historian of the 1850s posting it on a website for interactive comment: he would want a more select audience. For myself, I turn to blogs as a supplement; the newspaper, on which I grew up, is my staple.

    Once more: I think that networks of trust will form. Links lead to a meritocracy and your or the Guardian can chose their links carefully. This will matter in advertising and in information as well as discussion.

    Back to the focus of my column — news stories going online first — Ulla adds an interesting question:

    The good thing about the web is that you can update and change articles pretty easily afterwards and continously. So for most of the people publishing on the web as soon as possible is not a big deal. What I find quite interesting is that yet there does not seem to be any difference yet in “writing for web” and “writing for print publication”. This will hopefully change longterm – that the advantages and disadvantages of web and print will be used to best advantage for the issues and as a news outlet. At the moment it still feels like when tv first came along and the programmes and news were presented as if it was radio.

    I think that’s right and it’s part of what I’ll be grappling with when I teach at CUNY’s j-school: We’ve spent too much time in online journalism talking about it as a new means of story-telling (read: lecuturing). The real question is how you present a constantly growing and changing story in a sane structure that lets you take advantage of constant contributions and updates and allows you to link to more details from those contributors without turning it all into a muddled mess that makes you wish for USA Today.

    : See also Georgina Henry on the finish of the Big Blogger contest and a question about what’s next. An unnamed commenter — sounds like MrPikeBisho — suggests a refinement of what’s above:

    One suggestion – and I don’t know how practical it is – but you have a great resource there: the punters. What an educated, articulate and, by definition, under-occupied bunch – that’s a hell of a thinktank sitting there, waiting to be tapped. I can imagine one thread a week that sets a task: come up with a slogan for this product, figure out why customers aren’t using a particular service, tell us what you really want from a gym, develop an effective youth crime policy…. Put the resource up for auction – “get the best brains in the world working on your business in their idle hours” – kind of a human equivalent of the SETI distributed processing project. You’ll end up with a new slogan from Heinz: “buy our fucking soup!”