As pointed out in the last post, some members of the current generation of news brass aren’t managing to see the future of their business because their vision is obscured by the conventional newsroom lens. They only see the competition that’s closest to their own conventions, but the range of threats they need to recognize are much more diffuse. Here I want to take a closer look at those — maybe using some new conceptual lenses – and suggest how the industry-formerly-known-as-newspapers might grow. I ended the last post with a rough outline:
The new business models will form around, 1) national multi-media portals that combine online, TV, and mobile use, 2) community papers that consolidate all of our junk mail with puzzles and local news, 3) a few global organizations covering hard news, evolving from wire services, 4) editorials and commentary emerging from ongoing work at think tanks and research institutes, and 5) freelance intermediaries and enthusiasts like me (I mean, better than me).
The problem with most mainstream newspapers now is they try to do all of those, but do none of them well better than everyone else. We’re long past the days when everyone read (and everyone knew everyone else had read) ”the paper” every day. It was lovely while it lasted but it’s gone — not even a memory for a lot of younger people. It’s sad to see the decline of the newsroom as a vital institution (a decline depicted in season 5 of The Wire, a tribute by creator David Simon, who was a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twenty years), but it’s no different than the decline of the family farm, or the local department store, or the corner gas & garage, or Detroit automakers, or three martini lunches at Madison Avenue ad firms: the same forces are at work in every case.
And who should we turn to for help making sense of these various manifestations of decline? And who is going to reinterpret decline into opportunity, to show us how these changes can help us make things better? Journalists should be at the top of that list.
Now if journalists can’t make sense of what’s happening in their own industry, then how can we trust them to make sense of what’s happening at City Hall, Parliament Hill, Bay Street, and Main Street?
Marinate on that for a moment while I look at the business models, starting with portals. By “portal” I have something in mind that doesn’t really exist yet — at least not in the form I think it’ll eventually thrive in. The best example of what I’m getting at is AOL at its peak: if you were an AOL member, everything you did online began and ended with AOL, and you paid for it. Now think of a digital cable subscription. Now mash those two ideas together. This is a prestige business that media and tech giants have been jockeying for and trying to figure out for years (cable and phone companies, Microsoft, Apple, Rupert Murdoch, etc). Eventually one or two of them will get it right… but this is a discussion worth its own thread, for later…
I don’t have much to say about the second business model, except that as long as there’s paper and ink for printing, there will always be people motivated to run grassroots-type publications, hustling up advertisers and scratching content together for community newsletters and the like. Success here has as much to do with tenacity and connectedness of their management as anything else. And best of luck to them…
The third business model is the global information giant – content wholesaling. This is already fairly well developed, and all I need to do is point to Associated Press and Thomson Reuters to show what I mean. They face some threats from bot- and popularity-driven aggregators (e.g. Digg, any site with the word “meme” in their name), but newsgathering will always have to be organized and managed (and compensated) to some degree, and I foresee these companies becoming even more important as post-newspaper operations have less resources to gather their own news. It’s worth considering the risk that these companies could be undermined by blogosphere freeloaders cut-and-pasting content, but Thomson Reuters at least will be be profitable selling business and science information for enterprise and institutional applications.
That segues into the fourth category (“business model” doesn’t really apply here): content coming from think tanks and research institutes. Like the other categories, this one already exists, but I think will become more prominent and defined in the future. In this category, people make their living doing research, analysis, etc, – the money could be from donations and grants or it could come from consulting or project work, whatever. The people and organizations who are truly good at this will appreciate they get more out of sharing their work and ideas (and therefore getting something shared in return) than by keeping it all under wraps. (Don’t trust me, see Lawrence Lessig on ”creative commons,” John Seely Brown on “the social life of information,” and Henry Chesbrough on “open innovation.”)
Speaking of sharing knowledge for free, the fifth business model will emerge from independent enthusiasts publishing online, aka blogs. By definition, this category is difficult to define. It’s a massive, rich, diverse ecology, ranging from the inane to the brilliant, from the useless and obscene to the powerful and poignant — as different from each other as the people who produce them.
Like the current blogosphere, let’s assume that the vast majority of this category will be crap; but it will also become analogous to a fluid in which all the good stuff moves and grows and stays vital: it’s a solvent that keeps media organizations from becoming too ossified and imporous. [Is "imporous" a word? -- see that's an example of keeping things fresh and alive, playful and moving, even if the particular idea is crap.] Structure is essential, but when things become too structured, if the ground on which the structure is built, there’s hardly a damn thing anyone can do to prevent the whole thing from crumbling. And the spirited participatory nature of it ensures energy continues to circulate throughout the whole system, generating new ideas, intentions, friends, enemies, interests, challenges, opportunities, etc.
Within the Category 5 Blogosphere, as it is now, different outlets will resemble the other categories, focusing variously on news, gossip, opinion, research, ideas, etc. There’s plenty of room for storytellers, analysts, ranters, essayists, poets, pedants, philosophers, preachers, researchers, obscurantists, tattle-tales, copy-cats, know-it-alls, mavens, teachers, performers, uplifters, criticizers, reporters, guides, and more. If you love breaking news, break news. If you love narratives, compose narratives. If you love stirring the pot, stir the pot. If you love solving problems, solve problems… Out of all of this, a few attempts will ultimately become huge successes, most will not.
The key is to do what you love — or at least try to figure out what you love — and do it as best you can. If you love doing what you’re told, that’s fine too: find someone to work for. If you give it everything you’ve got but you still don’t become a huge success, the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs: you’ll find your boundaries, you’ll know and be good at a lot more than you would have otherwise. Then you can go to work for one of the lucky successes without having to wonder what you might have missed.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is what I love: trying to make sense of big, hairy problems. There isn’t really any school for it, there aren’t a lot of profitable niches for it in the current economy — or at least not in what’s left of the old one. So I keep working away at my nascent discipline, year after year, getting better, learning from my mistakes, looking for opportunities, continuing to adapt and grow with changing realities.
Maybe I’ll make something on my own. Maybe I’ll find a role in the growing field of think tanks and research institutes. Maybe I’ll keep writing on evenings (and early mornings) and weekends while paying the bills at some other day job. There’s still nothing else I’d rather do. You can’t say I get nothing useful out of it. After all, I’ve learned to write, I’ve learned to see things through many different lights and lenses, and I have all kinds of useful knowledge at my disposal.
I read something brilliant today on Bob Sutton’s blog: Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license. There’s a lot to be said for professional experience and established conventions, but every so often somebody (or a bunch of somebodies), looking way past all that, comes along and does something to undermine the old structural edifice. It’s inevitable.
And the great irony of it is that the ability to manage nascent developments is a kind of discipline all its own. It takes years of practice. Yet the people at the highest levels of established professions tend to be least qualified for it. Journalists need to step outside of their past experience and start to adopt the emerging expertise affecting their own industry.
Revised Jan 3, 2009. Last sentence used to read, “Experienced journalists need to step back and trust the experts on the changes affecting their own industry.”
