After we had breakfast a week ago and talked about possible new roles for wire services in the new world, Wolfgang Büchner, who’s soon to take the top edit position at the Deutsche Presse Agentur (the German Associated Press), send me a link to this example of the agency curating and pointing to journalism at its source, which should surely be its most important job in the link economy.
Among the great benefits – yes, benefits – of the internet for newspapers are opportunities to find new efficiencies. Do what you do best and link to the rest is one. Share is another. Newspapers have always been bad at sharing. That’s why they never managed to start a consortium to work together online (RIP NCN). That’s why they each spent a fortune buying custom computer systems even though they all did the same thing – because they thought they were special.
Now they’re learning to share because they have to. The AP has a roundup of what they’re doing with a sidebar I hadn’t seen before listing their efforts so far (to which I’d add the New York area newspaper consortium): There are content-sharing networks in Ohio among eight papers, Maine among five, Florida among four, Texas among two, the Washington area among to, in addition to the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times sharing a capital bureau and Mcclatchy and the Christian Science Monitor sharing international bureau stories.
Politico’s groundbreaking use of the reverse-syndication model has now expanded with Reuters acting as a distributor and marketer.
The agreement will offer the two organization’s combined coverage to 60 newspapers and 40 broadcasters currently part of an advertising network run by Politico. Other media companies would be able to join.
In exchange for access to the news, the broadcasters and newspapers would allow Politico to sell online advertising on their sites under a revenue-sharing agreement.
So the members of the network get high-quality coverage at no cost – with revenue coming their way, even – and the reporters get support for journalism at its source.
There are new business models for news.
Following the post below on CNN trying to unseat the AP…. McClatchy and the Christian Science Monitor just announced that they’re going to share stories from foreign correspondents. No money changes hands, just stories do. We’re going to see a lot more arrangements like this in a marketplace of original journalism.
CNN is heading 180 degrees in the wrong direction with its attempt to start a wire service to compete with the Associated Press, I think. CNN is just trying to amortize the cost of its existing coverage by reselling it and it may find a few clients. But I’m dubious because newspapers and news sites are canceling every syndication contract they can (I did that six years ago when I worked on sites). Yes, CNN might undercut the AP, but since it takes two years to cancel an AP contract – and because newspapers have an ownership stake in the AP and because there is volume and quantity there – I don’t see CNN taking over a critical mass of AP business quickly.
But there’s a much, much bigger strategic mistake at play here:
The syndication model is dying. As the content economy is supplanted by the link economy, reselling the same story over and over again becomes increasingly impossible.
What’s needed instead is an infrastructure to share and link to original journalism. Newspapers in Ohio are doing that now. Newspapers in the New York area have said they’re working on something similar.
That network could have been created years ago when newspapers created the doomed New Century Network but it died because they wouldn’t give up control or get along. But today, they’re desperate, absolutely desperate, to save any penny by using someone else’s stuff. No longer complaining about aggregation, they must aggregate themselves.
Many players can create the infrastructure that enables newspapers to share and link to their original journalism. (and, full disclosure, I work with one of them, Daylife). But they don’t even need infrastructure to get started. All they need is email or links and permission. That, I believe, will undercut CNN’s effort to undercut the AP.
CNN is holding a meeting of newspapers editors in Atlanta this week to sell them on the new wire. If I were there, I’d gather my colleagues over drinks and form my own wire service, for free.
