Reimagining the journalism marketplace – finding new ways to serve information consumers

January 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

American journalism today is in crisis because it has not adapted financially to digital media, yet I believe we could turn this crisis into an opportunity to make significant improvements in the industry. Journalists and entrepreneurs are searching for business models that would generate revenue to help support high-quality digital media. No matter what forms they take, the newly emerged media products always should be consumer oriented. That is, the products should either meet new, unsatisfied consumer demands, or help reduce the costs of existing products or services in the market. Specially designed online educational clubs could help provide a new and effective alternative for which many consumers would be willing to pay. There is great social value in these clubs that would help draw support from outside the journalism field as well. The project could be implemented in three steps.

First: Foreign Language Enhancement

Journalists should start by investigating ways to combine traditional studies of foreign language with news delivery to make the learning process more interesting and cost-effective. The project is meant to establish an online portal for interested consumers to learn about different cultures, languages, and international news of current relevance. This site could also be used as a complementary tool for international affairs, world geography, or other international fields of study. An emphasis on music, video, and other modern multi-media technologies would help make the learning process more interesting and diversified.

The goal at this stage is to attract paid institutional group subscriptions. These, in turn, may help attract individual and business subscriptions. Paying small fees for an online collection of existing news stories and documentations would likely help reduce the cost of labor-intensive teaching methods. In addition to accurate, in-depth, and up-to-date foreign news stories, current computer technologies would allow student consumers at different learning levels or with different career focuses to practice particular languages of their choice. The clubs also would focus on learning a language as a way to learn the values and wisdom of different cultures, to learn how other peoples make their decisions and live their lives, and to learn how they solve their problems. Therefore, these bilingual clubs potentially would provide attractive learning tools for many consumers.

Second: Global Inspiration

After the foreign language clubs are well-established at the first stage, the project would then be expanded to include clubs with a more general educational focus. These online learning clubs would offer users broad access to a large selection of cultural and professional content in English from the bilingual club archives, as well as from English language newspapers. The goal of the educational clubs is to help consumers benefit from understanding the problem-solving wisdom of other cultures, a skill that many bilingual or multilingual workers have, without having to learn a foreign language. Ideally, the realization of this goal would help save a great deal of effort in terms of time and money invested in foreign language studies.

News stories would target ordinary citizens with a high school education, rather than a highly specialized audience. Journalists are trained to simplify complicated incidents or concepts into interesting and fresh stories. This type of technique would be very helpful for attracting students who are not fully motivated by traditional academic teaching methods. Therefore, these learning clubs would likely possess strong market values since the clubs would help enrich consumers’ lives by providing inexpensive and diversified alternatives to improve their knowledge and job skills.

Journalists and editors managing these online clubs should be trained in both journalism and a specific academic field. Writers who have both interest and knowledge in a particular field will be more successful at finding and creating vivid news stories for consumers with similar interests.
One crucial step for this second stage would be to organize existing resources from the journalism field and to coordinate newspapers and freelance journalists to contribute content. Contributors would be compensated for the use of their articles. Ideally, the fees paid to journalists and newspapers by the clubs would help support and encourage high-quality journalism.

Third: Bridging the Gaps

At this stage, the website would bring together journalists, experts, and consumers, and provide a platform for exploring solutions to important issues. For example, the clubs might have been able to have organized ways to help Japan deal with the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the following tsunami and nuclear crisis in March 2011. The clubs can help bridge the gap between local communities with specific information and international organizations that could provide support. Since the clubs would have access to local news about recent developments as well as to professionals who have specialized knowledge in various fields, they would be able to facilitate bringing together these resources.

Another interesting project would be to investigate how the learning clubs could best serve students who do not perform well with traditional theory-intensive learning methods, as well as adult workers who are transitioning careers. The goal would be to examine whether these online clubs can help organizations (for example, workforce training or adult education programs) to reduce costs by providing access to more efficient and up-to-date educational methods.

At this point, the function of the clubs would be to complement news organizations or investigative journalists to better attract government funding or grants from foundations, corporations, and communities.

Conclusion

Instead of trying to find an investor to fund the entire project, our plan is to break it down into three manageable stages and attract funding for each stage individually. At the end of each stage, there would be concrete benefits for users. To summarize these benefits, consumers would first gain access to better tools for learning foreign languages and cultures. During the second stage, people would be able to save money on expensive education and career training. Finally, communities would be able to search for experts who are interested and qualified to help with local problems or crises. This media product would benefit both consumers and journalists. The market is ripe for this kind of innovation. Yet, the most difficult part of the whole project may be getting the public to recognize its potential market value and social benefits.

For more information, please read my previous article entitled “A New Approach for Profitable Foreign News Reporting.” I always wish to find an opportunity to thank Prof. Dan Gillmor properly. I greatly appreciate his help and support regarding this project.

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Independent online journalists should stand up to be counted by the industry

January 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

If you’ve started a news website, or left a newsroom to work for an online start-up, don’t let the journalism industry forget about you.

Keeping a high profile among your colleagues not only helps you personally, it can help drive attention and traffic to your site. But most importantly for our field, keeping track of how many journalists are working outside of traditional print and broadcast newsrooms helps journalism leaders to have a more accurate view of the state of our industry.

Last week, I got an invitation via email to participate in the American Society of News Editors’s annual newsroom employment census. That wasn’t something I’d expected, since I haven’t worked in a “traditional” newsroom since leaving the Los Angeles Times in 2004.

But I’d never stopped working in journalism. Sure, I spent some time on the staff at USC’s Annenberg School, but – along with my wife – we’ve been building an online publishing business over the past decade, too. So even though neither of us work for newspapers anymore (she spent several years on staff at the newspaper in Omaha, Neb.), we still consider ourselves full-time working journalists. (And that’s not just a vanity description, either – together, we’re making more income from our business than we ever made together working for newspapers.)

I completed the survey, noting that our company employed two journalists full-time, plus a summer intern. Then I emailed ASNE Executive Director Richard Karpel to ask why a small outfit like mine was getting a census invite.

“We invited some online-only news websites to participate in the census in 2010 and 2011, so this will be the third year we’ve done it,” Karpel replied. “The only difference is this year we’ve invited a much broader range of news websites.”

This year, Karpel wrote, ASNE added websites listed in Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database (which included my website), which is why I got onto the invite list. But you don’t have to be in that database to be counted in the ASNE census. If you work for a general-interest news website that hasn’t been invited to join the ASNE census, just email Karpel with a description of your site for an invitation. (The address is rkarpel at asne.org.)

“The Newsroom Employment Census is one of the most important and valuable services ASNE provides,” Karpel wrote. “We want to keep it that way. It will maintain its relevance and value only as long it follows the news wherever it goes. It’s obvious that including news websites will provide a much fuller picture of newsroom diversity and employment patterns.”

ASNE will break out data from online-only newsrooms, as well as traditional print one, to help researchers make apples-to-apples comparisons with previous years’ data, as well as to see emerging trends in independent and online newsroom hiring.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for journalists who move into independent online news publishing not to drop off the journalism industry’s radar. Accurate data that includes the full range of modern news publications can help counter narratives that journalism is in decline. They also can help advertisers, funders, academics and others who support the industry to see more accurately where they should be providing their support.

Journalists who start new news publications instead of dropping out of the industry when they leave a newsroom are helping strengthen journalism for the 21 century. They deserve recognition and support for those efforts. But, as with many things in life, you get recognition and support not just by deserving it, but by asking for it. Sometimes, you’ve got to ask to be counted, and this is one of those cases.

I’ve warned in the past against spending too much time hanging out with other journalists after moving into independent news publishing. You’ve got to devote the bulk of your time to your business, your beat, your readers and your customers – not your colleagues. But don’t take that to mean you should cut yourself off from your field. Keeping yourself in surveys like ASNE’s, databases such as CJR’s, and in the address books of media buyers and other journalists helps you maintain the public profile that a successful publishing business needs to draw the support that keeps it alive.

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How Best Buy can teach you *not* to run your news business

January 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When was the last time you read something that prompted you to shout “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve seen. I’ve been waiting for someone else to notice that!”?

For me, it was last night, shortly after Rob Curley posted a link to Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, by Larry Downes on Forbes.com.

Downes just destroys the big box electronics retailer, and in doing so, lays out some important lessons for anyone who’s running a business today. (Including news publishers.) I hope you’ll take a few moments today to read Downes’ piece, and to think about how what Best Buy is doing might compare with how your publication treats its readers and customers.

Downes’ challenge to readers? “Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.”

More times than not, I can’t do it. Downes details one recent visit to Best Buy, when friend tried to buy a Blu-Ray disc, only to be waylaid by a “customer service” rep who tried instead to sell him on a pay-TV deal.

Me? Dozens of trips to various Best Buys over the years have taught me to never make eye contact with any employees in the store. Keep other customers between myself and the floor staff. If I need a clerk to get something for me, ask only someone who appears to work in the section where the item is stocked, ask for the item using the specific model number and be prepared to walk away if they don’t have it, or the clerk wants to start talking about something else.

Doesn’t this sound like an awful shopping experience?

But it’s worse to have to endure the sort of bait-and-switch that Downes describes – pitches for unrelated subscription services, incompatible additional products and interrogations about my personal life, designed to talk me into buying products Best Buy wants to push. Even if I manage to avoid all those, I’ve yet to find a way to get out of the inevitable pitch at check-out to buy an extended warranty. (Extended warranty pitches are the number one reason why I try to buy all of my electronics, software and accessories online. Two days ago, a Radio Shack employee tried to sell me an extended warranty on an iPod case.)

I don’t believe that the people who run Best Buy are intentionally sadists. Downes describes how Best Buy managers have made apparently rational business decisions that nonetheless have led to their employees creating a nasty, even hostile, shopping environment. That should cause any business managers to pause in fear for a moment.

What kind of “shopping experience” are you creating for your customers? Are you encouraging them to do business with you, and then rewarding them for that? Do your customers look forward to interacting with you, or do they dread it as an obligation they can’t wait to end?

Have you ever spoken or written the phrase “fiduciary obligation to our stockholders” to justify doing something that will frustrate your customers? Do you start using passive voice when justifying your business actions to customers (as Downes shows Best Buy doing)? Are you willing to trade customer goodwill tomorrow for extra revenue today?

In short, do you make things sometimes difficult for yourself so that they’ll always be easy for your customers, or do you place obstacles in front of your customers to make life easier for you?

If you do, you could be on the same path to oblivion as Best Buy.

Keep in mind, as always, that your customers are the people who write you a check. If someone isn’t paying you, that person is not your customer. That can make life a little confusing – if not troubling – for a journalist writing for an advertiser-supported website. Your customers aren’t your readers, after all – your real customers are those people buying the ads.

But don’t forget why those people are buying those ads. For the most part, it’s so that they can reach your readers. So anything you do to make life difficult, unpleasant or frustrating for your readers will someday make attracting and retaining advertisers more difficult for you. Free sports tickets, dinners and “thank you” presents for your biggest ad clients might delay that inevitability a bit, but if your advertisers want to stay in business, too, they can’t afford to keep advertising with a publication that’s not delivering the readers they want to reach.

So in 2012, let’s resolve to make our publications the “anti-Best Buy” – let’s make them aesthetically pleasant places to visit, sites that respond with information that engages, informs, delights and challenges readers. Hunt aggressively for input forms, navigation structures and article narratives that frustrate or confuse readers, then eliminate them from your site.

Work on customer service, as well. How easy do you make ordering and payment? Can customers do that online, over the phone and in person, whatever they prefer? How many steps does a new order or payment take? Have you tried it yourself recently?

Do you thank customers for their business? How often do you listen to your customers’ problems and challenges to get ideas for new products and services, instead of simply looking for hooks to sell them something you already offer? How willing are you to refer customers elsewhere if there’s a better place for them to find as solution they need? When customers do business with you, you should want them to feel like that’s the highlight of their day.

And not like it’s a dreaded trip to Best Buy.

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