@ jeffreyrbunch

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.

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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Jess Walter, "The Zero" and "The Financial Lives of the Poets" (images from www.jesswalter.com)

On my last post, I wanted to mention another connection to Ground Zero and the events of 9/11 which I felt, vicariously through a friend of mine.  If you haven’t heard of Edgar Award-winning author Jess Walter, you should check him out. Jess is from Spokane, Washington, and is a graduate of Eastern Washington University.

Jess was a top-notch reporter at The Spokesman-Review newspaper, where he had a chance to cover the Ruby Ridge standoff between Randy Weaver and the federal agents. Jess is a longtime friend of mine and we worked together for years.  Jess wrote a book about the Ruby Ridge standoff, it was excerpted in Newsweek, then made into a TV movie starring Randy Quaid.

Jess’ next few gigs involved ghost-writing autobiographies for Christopher Darden and a couple of other well-known people.  He then got to publish novels “Land of the Blind,” “Over Tumbled Graves,” “Citizen Vince,” and “The Zero” (a National Book Award Finalist).  Citizen Vince is waiting in the Hollywood pipeline to be produced after award-winning writer Richard Russo adapted it as a screenplay.  Jess is also working on another film project, “Born to Rock,” with David Duchovny and Tea Leoni as producers.

Jess is not only an incredibly gifted and witty writer but he’s also a great guy.  He still lives in Spokane and is still making a living as a writer.  He will be on his current book tour after its kickoff on Sept. 23rd in Spokane at Aunties Bookstore.  He will also be coming to my adopted hometown of Portland, Ore. to Powell’s Books twice in October (Oct. 7 for the Portland Noir collection – to which he is a contributor – and Oct. 29 for his new book).

So, what connection does Jess create for me with 9/11? Jess was there just a week or so after that unfortunate day for meetings and recounted the horror of what was still present as the recovery effort continued and New Yorkers (and the nation) wandered around in a state of shock.  He spent a lot more time there afterward. Thus, his book “The Zero” is set in the post-9/11 New York environment.  Then, as my wife and I honeymooned in NYC, fate brought Jess to us for his reading of “The Zero” in Manhattan.  We were able to be in the audience, along with some reflective New York residents, as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 loomed.  In looking into the eyes of a couple of policemen on hand, I could only imagine what they had seen and how they couldn’t forget it.

For more information on Jess Walter and his works, including the upcoming book “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” check out jesswalter.com.   Here is an interview he did recently with Publishers Weekly.  The books is only currently available, as a preorder, through Amazon.com.  Support your independent booksellers, though.