Jayhawk from lobby of Lawrence Journal-World

I just returned from a  conference that brought some things into sharper focus for me about the future of journalism, particularly digital publishing.

Last week’s event was an invitation-only conference hosted by Mediaphormedia, the interactive division of the World Company in Lawrence, Kansas. The World is the publisher of the Lawrence Journal-World (LJWorld.com) and owner of several successful spin-off sites, including Lawrence.com and KUsports.com.

The World Company and some of its former employees (such as Adrian Holovaty, @adrianholovaty, who later founded EveryBlock.com) are also creators of the wonderful open-source platform Django. Another creator of the platform, Jacob Kaplan-Moss (@jacobian), still hangs out in Lawrence and was part of a World Company team that created a commercial version of the platform known as Ellington CMS.

It was my role as an implementer and user of Ellington that brought me to a “Summit” in Lawrence, a town that doesn’t know it’s small (which has also been said about the World company). The event was first-class and attracted a broad spectrum of publishers, Web editors, advertising managers, and Web developers. The room represented the types of stakeholders in the publishing industry who will have a big say in how journalism survives and thrives in a digital world.

The Summit was inspiring on a lot of fronts, but the financial success stories of several digital publishing efforts were most encouraging. In geographically diverse markets of all shapes and sizes, publishing companies are pushing innovation on both the content and revenue fronts. Their efforts are paying off with returns on investment that (in some cases) are well into seven figures of new revenue.  That’s impressive when one considers the relatively small size of some of those markets.

It should go without saying that great journalism (not just “news”) underlies those efforts in every successful market. Those companies succeeding on the revenue side are also the most connected with their communities on the content side. The best have also broken down the internal walls that have traditionally held back “newspaper companies” from making the transition to digital.  The old paradigms have shifted, rapidly, to new ones and these companies “get it.”

Some of the ideas are uncomfortable for those who are more traditional about “newspaper” operations. The digital world forces publishing companies to reinvent themselves in a more strategic way: advertising, IT, and the newsroom need to make plans cooperatively but execute in a way that maintains journalistic integrity.  Those in the room were encouraged to push forward.

One speaker at the event addressed those in the audience who might be risk-averse to being cutting edge or “bleeding edge,” as it’s sometimes called, saying: “That’s okay; you want to be in front of everything!”

One needs only look to the LJWorld model to find living proof of the idea. The company restructured its chain of command to reflect its digital focus: newsrooms were reshaped; advertising strategies refined; IT infrastructure was funded to support it all. The result has been continual growth of its offerings without a significant erosion in its print circulation.

Lawrence is an isolated market in the middle of the U.S. and the World has a daily circulation of just 16,889, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, yet its family of sites generate millions of pageviews every month.  Quantcast.com reveals LJWorld has demographics much broader than those of traditional “newspaper” sites. Its audience is equally split between the demographic age groups of 18-34, 35-49, and 50-plus. Quantcast ranks it in the top 7,500 Web sites (for audience size) in the United States.

The hallmarks of all the efforts by LJWorld and Mediaphormedia are innovation and dedication to quality.  Mediaphormedia is also highly customer-centric, continually asking for feedback on how they can improve their Ellington CMS and Marketplace products. They are never content and never bound by conventional thinking; qualities for all of us to emulate.

The new game is about audience and revenue development of all kinds: It’s about print readers and online viewers; display ads in print and online; on-site and Web search; and interactive products that deliver relevant information to customers where they spend time (especially on mobile and social media). It’s about niche content and niche revenues, the sum of which will equal a new, sustainable model for digital publishing.

tbd.com logo

There has been a lot of talk lately about who is going to “save journalism.” There is a clear consensus developing that it will be saved (i.e. transformed) by journalists, not news aggregators or legacy publishing company print-centric executives.

I was in the front row, almost literally, two weeks ago today when I heard speaker after speaker make the argument for front-line journalists and allied executives as saviors of the profession.  I attended a smallish, but significant, publishing industry event in Las Vegas put on by Editor & Publisher dubbed the “Interactive Media Conference.” Prior quick blog post here.

The two keynotes for the conference were delivered by John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Company, and Josh Cohen of Google News. They each delivered key messages with a common theme about the future of journalism and how it might be “saved.” Both said that journalism can be preserved by its practitioners (and their bosses) transforming how it is done.

Paton’s presentation was titled “Digital First, Print Last.” He made a compelling argument that a fundamental mindset shift hasn’t occurred in the industry that will be key to its survival. Paton said the “print people” have been in charge of the industry for the last 100 years and in charge of digital news for the last 10 years. It isn’t working, he said, and the time has come to “put the digital people in charge.” It is what he has done in his company as he transforms it into a multiplatform entity.

Cohen’s speech was anticipated because there has been a perception that Google News is the nemesis of the online news industry. It has been the target of various campaigns by publishers to stop Google’s bots from crawling its news sites. Cohen pointed out that every publisher has the option to stop their sites from being  indexed. However, Google and the publishers have found mutual benefits to the traffic Google aggregates, then directs back to news sites.  He said it is the job of the industry, not companies such as Google, to “save journalism.”  Journalism doesn’t need to be “saved” just “transformed,” said Cohen.

In listening to the rest of the conference’s other panels, it is clear that working journalists will be the ones to do the transforming. There were examples of hyperlocal efforts not yet tackled, social media strategies for news organizations, and collaborative online investigative journalism projects.  The message was made clearer the following day at the Editor & Publisher online awards, known as the EPpy’s. The best in online journalism was honored, from sites such as NPR.org and LasVegasSun.com. As one of the judges, I was blown away by the work being done.

NPR sent one of its top reporters to accept; she was clearly humbled by the industry’s recognition of its outstanding (nonprofit) pursuit of journalism. LasVegasSun’s Rob Curley was emotional in collecting one of his team’s awards in honor of the laid-off multimedia producers who did the work. Afterward, his publisher spoke of the struggle to monetize award-winning journalism.

Saving the publishing industry or saving journalism?

Coincidental to the E&P Interactive Media Conference was the publication – and follow-up discussions – of The Atlantic’s article, “How to Save the News.” Article author James Fallows tried to put his piece in further perspective in a post on colleague Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the magazine’s site titled, “Will Google Help Save Journalism? Ctd:”

“If there is a point that, above all the others, I wanted most to convey in this article, it is not “everything is going to be OK” or “Google is our friend” or even “here comes a torrent of new advertising money!” Rather it is a cultural/attitudinal argument about the press and everyone who cares about it. Far from being autumnal and despairing and mournful about a supposed golden age that has passed and fatalistic about the doomed state of public information and the resulting lapsed state of society, people who care about the media should (according to me) recognize that technological upheaval, and the resulting business shifts and forced individual innovations, have been the norm rather than the exception in our enterprise. Clever and ambitious people, especially but not only young people, will find new ways to do the work a society needs of them — and to make a living while doing so. …” http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/05/will-google-help-save-journalism-c.html

There are many former journalists who are making a living as one-person Web publishing entities or smaller start-ups with teams of journalists who took buyouts or were laid off from more traditional legacy publishing companies. They are tackling the “news” in more energetic, brighter ways. One shining example is Nozzl Media of Portland, Ore., where a group of former old-school journalists are re-inventing themselves by creating real-time news stream Web applications.

Innovation is the key at start-ups such as TBD.com

It will be interesting to watch how much of the current cutting-edge thinking comes together at TBD.com, a start-up venture in Washington, D.C., funded by the people who started Politico.com. TBD has brought some of the brightest and most innovative journalists and journalism executives to their site, which was featured recently on Techcocktail.com and described in this way:

“By aggregating heavily, utilizing geocoding for personalization and applying “the Politico mentality” (an urgency and willingness to publish incrementally) to local news, TBD intends to be a one-stop news shop for the District, Maryland, and Virginia…

While they plan to be a news hub for the area, the folks at TBD.com don’t plan to do it alone and are enlisting the help of partners who will supplement and enhance their news coverage…

For TBD.com, transparency is a big priority.  Recognizing they may not have all the answers and details about the news stories users care about, they say they’ll be counting on readers to fill in the blanks and help construct the most complete history of the news happening in our region.   Stories at TBD will always be developing, and TBD will “belong to everyone.” http://techcocktail.com/home/2010/06/12/tbd-com-aiming-to-be-dc%E2%80%99s-one-stop-news-shop/

There are some key concepts that stand out about the site’s approach: aggregation, geocoding, personalization, urgency, incremental publishing, partnership, transparency. These are trademarks of many innovative organizations, including Google. Half of the work one must do in being “saved” is admitting things aren’t working and then changing things up. Publishing companies which do that will likely continue to publish; those which don’t may perish. Journalists and journalism will survive.

Related links

John Paton’s Ben Franklin Project: http://jrcbenfranklinproject.wordpress.com/

Google News official blog: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/

Nozzl Media site: http://nozzlmedia.com/

TBD.com: http://tbd.com/

TBD’s Steve Buttry: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/

This is a post without all the answers about how to “save journalism.” There are no right ones. There are lots of relative truths.

Legacy media executives would tell you journalism-for-profit needs to be saved for people like them to continue to employ the teams of journalists who fill an important role in our society.

Independent and freelance journalists, many of them former newspaper standouts, would tell you there is a need to create a network of content producers which can distribute their work.

Entrepreneurial journalists, who run the gamut in age and experience, would tell you there is a need for scalable solutions (and revenue streams) for their new-idea products.

Citizen journalists, who seem to embrace or shun the title “blogger,” would tell you they want an outlet for the unique set of skills they possess and to be acknowledged for those qualities.

In my home media market of the Portland, Oregon DMA, cooperative groups of these stakeholders are discussing ways to save (or not) “journalism,” either as a business, a noble calling, a civic institution, or all of the foregoing.  They are looking for the answer(s) for the problem: journalism-as-we-knew-it is dead due to societal changes which have fractured markets.

All true.  All false.  It’s not that simple; neither the problem nor the solution(s). There is no one-size-fits-all for a new journalism model.  Each of the above groups of “journalists” are answering to the same calling, but are dependent on different outcomes for their situations.  Publishers have payrolls to meet; journalists (independent or not) have mortgages to pay; entrepreneurs need to show a return on investment; citizen journalists have day jobs to hold down.

Where is all this headed for each of these diverse stakeholders? Who knows?  But we do know it won’t be down one path. My friend, Nozzl Media CEO Steve Woodward, calls it “The Futures – Plural – of Journalism.” My colleague, Carol Doane, points out “Building a new model may require listening.”  There have been dozens of insightful blog posts and tweets in the wake of a gathering called We Make the Media (twitter #wmtm).”  It follows in the footsteps of Digital Journalism Camp Portland, and dozens of other gatherings around the nation. Other ideas are the droning buzz of recovering journalists throughout the Internet.

We are all talking about it, but it just needs to get done (step-by-step over a course which isn’t marked and may take some turns).  Action is the aim of the Portland group and of some less visible (but just as important) industry revenue initiatives.  All the while, technology empowers new waves of “publishers” who will also be part of the new and multifaceted state of journalism.

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Digital Journalism Camp, Portland – “Square Peg, Wrong Hole”

by jeffrey bunch 1 month ago
A panel discusses the challenges of online news content at the Digital Journalism Camp (@journopdx #journopdx) in August 2009 at Portland, Ore. “Square Peg, Wrong Hole, Why Your News Product Doesn’t Meet Consumers’ Needs.” Panelists; Carolynn Duncan, Founder, PortlandTen; Steve Woodward, CEO, Nozzl Media.