OJR front page archive for October 2008

The state of independent local online news, part 5: Outsourcing as a path to profitability?

James Macpherson learned a lesson last year when kicked up a journalism fuss over plans to outsource reporting on his Pasadena website to journalists in India.

"Never get talked out of your instincts," he told me in a phone interview. When he forgot that adage, he said, "I got in the hole really fast."

Macpherson, who's run the news website "Pasadena Now" for the last four years, was so shaken by the criticism he received over his outsourcing plan that he immediately hired four reporters in what he said was an attempt to prove his journalism bona fides.

Macpherson said he almost immediately began losing money. "We did a great job. But it cost $5,000 a week… There was no way I could pay for it."

So Macpherson got rid of the reporters and went back to his outsourcing plan, which he says is working. More...

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The state of independent local online news, part 4: Seeking consistency from grassroots reporting

If the future of news is ultra-local, then ChiTown Daily News is gambling in the right direction.

The operators of the three-year-old news operation are counting on interest in Chicago's 77 neighborhoods to bring readers to their nonprofit site, staffed almost entirely with citizen journalists.

The results so far are inconclusive. Traffic is building, but only recently passed the 25,000 mark on monthly unique visitors. (The Chicago Tribune's monthly audience is about 150 times larger.) And the work of the citizen journalists, while often surprisingly good, is uneven.

"Performance and longevity have varied widely, and wildly," editor and CEO Geoff Dougherty told me in an e-mail. "Some of the original crew is still with us; others drop out before writing an article." But Dougherty added: "I have been enormously surprised by the quality of work that some of our people do – we get great stories this way."

The site's work has been bankrolled mainly by a two-year, $340,000 Knight Foundation grant that saluted its pioneering attempt. "Nobody has attempted to create an organized, cohesive system that enables coverage of a large city," Knight said in announcing the grant.
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The state of independent local online news, part 3: No paper? No problem! News companies use the Web to enter new markets

In the spring of 2005, Morris Publications tried something new: It started a website in Bluffton, S.C., a town where it had no newspaper, in a bid for market share via the Internet.

Now GateHouse Media Inc. is trying something similar. Last May, GateHouse launched a community website in Batavia, N.Y., where the Batavia Daily News was firmly established as the local newspaper.

Howard Owens, GateHouse's director of digital publishing, told the International Journal of Newspaper Technology that GateHouse wasn't seeing The Batavian as a newspaper replacement.

But when I asked Owens about The Batavian's mission, he indicated that newspapers may be vulnerable because of an inability to change quickly enough. More...

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The state of independent local online news, part 2: Experience makes MinnPost a top online new startup

Take newspapers' classic strengths of in-depth reporting and high-quality writing. Convert to an online-only operation.

You've got MinnPost.

The nonprofit Minneapolis news site, written mainly by free-lancers who formerly worked for one of the big Twin Cities dailies, is the largest and one of the strongest of the startup websites focusing on local and regional news.

But like everyone else occupying the space of online-only community news, MinnPost founder and editor Joel Kramer finds the business model elusive.

The strength of the Twin Cities market – it has the country's most literate and civically engaged population – also turns into a liability, because Minneapolis/St. Paul is jam-packed with local news outlets of every stripe.

MinnPost wasn't even the first entry in the Twin Cities' online-only news space. Jeremy Iggers launched the Twin Cities Daily Planet in May 2006 as a hybrid of community news written by professional and citizen journalists. Between other online players like Minnesota Independent and dozens of other news websites, there are too many ad sales people chasing too few Web advertisers.
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The state of independent local online news, part 1: Sites on the rise; business models remain elusive

SAN DIEGO – The 10 reporters, editors and photographers working out of a small office on a former military base here represent some of journalism's brightest hopes.

The nearly four-year-old website they work for, the nonprofit Voice of San Diego, is doing some of the best and liveliest muckraking reporting of any Web-only news staff in the country.

Mostly former newspaper reporters, the Voice's staffers have rattled off a string of exposes that has grabbed the attention of the city's power structure. They think their site will prove not only that local journalism can thrive on the Web, but that their enterprise can grow many times over as mainstream media continue to decline.

There's just one thing missing: a business model. Even with a small operation like this – 10 people reporting about the nation's eighth-largest city – it's not clear whether sustained funding will materialize.
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Hunt for a new media business model: The radical is no longer so radical

As you'd expect, the gathering at CUNY's journalism school produced no Eureka! moment that announced itself as the solution for what ails most media companies. (As if on cue, newspaper companies were reporting third-quarter earnings declines of 16-19 percent throught the week.)

There was some news on the seek-it-lovingly front, however. Our host, the dynamic Jeff Jarvis, said the meeting of about 100 new and old-media folks marked significant progress because there were no head-in-the-sand protests from mainstream veterans about the need for a new business model. Nobody flinched even at prescriptions like getting rid of editors, dumping the story forum, or banishing newsrooms. (I don't mean everyone agreed with those ideas. But comfortable with the idea of radical change? Clearly.) More...

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OJR launches week-long look at the state of local online news start-ups

The absence of a replicable, sustainable business model over the past few years isn't stopping journalists and non-journalists alike from launching websites to cover their communities. From San Diego to St. Louis to Chappaqua, N.Y., budding nonprofits are seeking footholds in their local markets. A few for-profit ventures are in the mix as well, betting that further declines at traditional media businesses will create new openings for their startups.

They come in all sizes and shapes, from mom-and-pop shops focused on a single community concern, to seven-figure operations that attempt to reflect wide civic interests. While nearly all of the sites struggle to find advertising dollars, the number of communities served by online-only news operations continues to grow.

David Westphal of the USC Annenberg School for Communication begins his six-part review on Monday, with an Q&A with Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue of Voice of San Diego, a site OJR first looked at three years ago. More...

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What Doonesbury's Rick Redfern did wrong

For those not now following the strip, Redfern, a long-time WaPo veteran in Trudeau's world, was laid off earlier this autumn and is now launching his own blog, a scenario not uncommon among many "real world" journalists. Fishing for tips, he chooses to launch the blog with an anecdote about Barack Obama playing basketball with U.S. troops in the Middle East.

The beauty of fiction is what it can tell us about our real lives. Here are three things Trudeau's Rick Redfern did wrong in launching his blog, keeping him from better immediate success online (or, from losing his gig with the WaPo in the first place): More...

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Did journalism's business model distort journalism's social mission?

The famed laissez-faire economist held that business and mission don’t go together, according to Adlai Wertman, of USC’s Marshall School of Business. “And I’m not sure I disagree with him,” Wertman told students and faculty at this week’s USC Annenberg Director’s Forum. “I’m not sure I trust business with anything else.”

This throws a complex light on the collapse of the conventional economic model for journalism – which has consisted of trusting business with this mission so dear to our (and, we hope, the nation’s) hearts. That collapse feels no less catastrophic to those who are losing their jobs, nor to faithful news consumers who see shrinking newspapers and dumbed-down newscasts. And it’s still deeply worrisome when you think about who will have the power, guts and access to go up against big government and big business, so as to keep us informed about the nation and the world.

Still, it is fitting to be reminded of the ways in which the economic model has distorted the mission. More...

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Online technology can help any website use people, not pundits, to drive public debate

CNN's John King, for one, called the debate for McCain, only to have his own network's snap poll show that the viewers, resoundingly, thought Obama the winner. That got me thinking about the opinion sections that many newspapers run in print, and on their websites.

Many now run Web polls where any reader can click to vote which candidate won a debate or to show which position on an issue they support. These polls of self-selected readers can be useful in eliciting discussion, but are worthless in providing good data about the public's collective opinion on something.

But online polls don't have to be garbage. The same technology can be tweaked easily to enable a previously selected, demographically balanced, random sample of individuals to log in and record their votes on an issue, such as a local candidates' debate.

So, why not? More...

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Daily posts, perseverance make the difference in building newspaper blogs

But die-hard Indy fans endured and, for them, Curt Cavin's blog on the Indianapolis Star website has become the place to go to for daily coverage of the newly re-unified IndyCar Series. (Heck, I read it every day.) I asked Curt to share with OJR readers his experience in growing the blog. - Robert]

As a 20-year reporter for the Indianapolis Star, I had been doing a motor sports Q&A online weekly for about five years before I learned my company was tracking viewer traffic on its blogs and basing some coverage decisions on those numbers.

I was discouraged that my contribution never earned a spot in the newspaper's top 10 as the Indianapolis 500 is such a captivating and historical event for our community. Then I learned that my Q&A wasn't being considered a blog because it was written weekly and not in the true spirit of a blog.

To this day, I'm perplexed by what a blog actually is. Oh, sure, I understand the term and I grasp its definition, but at its core the entry is written communication. Regardless of its label, I knew people were reading what I was writing; I just had to prove it.

That day, I vowed to answer questions from readers each morning to see if that made a difference in the blog tracking. I figured if I answered a half-dozen questions after breakfast (and sometimes before), people could get in the habit of reading when they arrived at work.

A month later, the newspaper's next tracking report was distributed to the editors, and I snared a copy. More...

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Las Vegas Sun tries innovative path toward online success

It's an interesting effort, for sure. Since 2005 the Sun has been a small daily inserted into the rival newspaper (operating under a JOA), plus a vibrantly innovative website. The print paper is innovative, too: Typically eight attractive, ad-free pages, it focuses on the interpretative, the entrepreneurial, the investigative. "We get to think the bigger thoughts," said Heikes, who at one point entertained the notion of coming to Los Angeles to do an all-Web paper to compete with the embattled Times. More...

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The secret to a successful online guerrilla marketing campaign?

Obviously, you need a guerrilla marketing campaign, one that encourages people to spread the word about your site, making it a viral sensation. But how can you motivate people to do that promotional work for you?

I'll share the secret to successful guerrilla marketing online in a moment. But first, I want to assure you that journalists can make money online by running their own websites. Reporters such as Rafat Ali and Josh Marshall have gotten plenty of notice for their successes, but I've also found many other publishers, through forums such WebmasterWorld, who are making a more modest, but still comfortable, living from their own websites.

Journalists looking to the Web as an option for extending their careers following a newsroom layoff won't get by on their reporting skills alone. Quality of content, unfortunately, does not determine who makes an adequate income online. Traffic does. And you need a lot of traffic to build a commercially successful website. More...

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Focus on 'what,' not 'where,' in planning your journalism career

Do what digital pioneer and entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder has done: "I always tried to be about what I get to do rather than where I get to do it."

But the economic models just aren't working for newspapers online, lamented one student attending USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director's Forum.

Not true, said Osder, fresh off consulting work with Tina Brown's just-launched "The Daily Beast" Plenty of people are making plenty of money online. (As if in confirmation, David Westphal, Annenberg's executive in residence, noted that McClatchy right now makes more money online than it costs to pay all the editors and publishers in the company.)

Here's how to think about it, Osder told the group: More...

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Steven Smith departs and the question arises: Who should lead newspapers' online transformation?

This was the topic of a lively conversation among some journalism faculty last week at USC Annenberg, following Steve A. Smith's decision to resign as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Smith's announcement (followed by the same-day exit of assistant managing editor Carla Savalli) was deeply felt here because of his pioneering involvement in digital transformation, here at the Knight Digital Media Center as well as at Spokane. But Smith told Michele McLellan last week that he could not stomach an additional, 25 percent cut to his news staff. “The journalism that’s important to me is no longer possible,” he told McLellan.

There can't have been too many editors who haven't wondered the same thing, and asked themselves whether it's best for them to stay or to go. More...

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Newspapers need to learn that great online communities should not be dictatorships

The what? I asked.

"Yeah, we have a standards and practices committee," he said. "We're supposed to figure out policies about managing user-generated content, hyperlinking and stuff like that."

Why don't you just crowdsource that? I asked.

He rolled his eyes, said "I know," then proceeded to detail some of the reasons why the paper's old guard had shot down his proposal to do just that. The reasons boiled down to two: 1) We don't trust outsiders to know what we ought to be doing, so 2) we're not comfortable letting "outsiders" influence decisions about internal operations.

What a wasted opportunity. What better way to help readers feel part of a community with the paper than to ask those readers to help craft the community's rules? More...

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Reading, 'riting... and revenue? Online publishing changes the 'three Rs' for college students

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