We closed our "Who Will Pay for the News" conference at Poynter last week by posing a single question to the 35 participants: "What should happen now to maximize our chances of having robust journalism five years from now?"
I didn't necessarily expect magic-bullet consensus, but, as hoped, several common themes emerged in the responses:
1. Collaborate and partner. And this was not just a slogan. Participants bought into the case (made by Lincoln Millstein of Hearst, Art Howe of Verve Wireless and Joel Kramer of MinnPost) that individual news organizations don't have big enough audiences to make online display ads work as a business proposition.
Specifically, that means newspaper organizations (and there may be a broadcast equivalent, too) need to shed traditions of rugged commercial independence and create big, national ad networks. That is underway with the
Yahoo Partnership and similar efforts, but the horse is not in the barn yet.
More broadly, participants were thinking of content. Following the ProPublica model (or veteran Washington and foreign correspondent Jon Sawyer's
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting), philanthropically supported organizations can originate important journalism and place it in traditional media outlets. (The
New America Foundation, not represented at our conference, has been successful at generating and placing hundreds of op-eds, longer analysis pieces and books for several years now.)
For these partnerships to work, news organizations need to loosen the tradition of doing all such pieces on their own while they also maintain their standards about the journalistic chops of their partners. Ironically, the first big research project I did for Poynter nine years ago was highly critical of organizations that accepted sponsored content and the implicit agenda of those donors. But that was then and this is now.
Still, there is a caution. Can you capture the benefits of commercial and content collaboration without losing essential journalistic independence?
2. Harness the energy and learning from current experiments. Our question got a straightforward answer from Don Kimelman, who oversees media programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts. (Double disclosure: Don is a longtime friend and my boss in three paid consulting projects I've done for Pew.) What should happen, Kimelman wrote, is "what is happening. People need to try lots of different stuff."
Several participants thought a good follow-up would be a concentrated, foundation-led effort to sponsor and monitor experiments that have the potential to become self-sustaining. Such an initiative also could track all that is going on in this yeasty environment, providing a degree of coordination for funders. "Convene an international news something-or-other to aggregate real journalism" produced by the experiments, philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnisch suggested.
We're working on that one downstairs in the Poynter skunkworks lab. I think Harnisch's formulation captures the state of play. It is not exactly clear what the precise focus and scope of such a project should be. And we need to take care not to duplicate important efforts already underway like the
Knight News Challenge, which is awarding $5 million yearly to promising projects.
Everyone seems urgent about doing less thinking about alternative futures and more swinging into action. As my friend Vernon Loeb, deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, e-mailed me this week, it would be great if Poynter could "set up a Manhattan Project on new business models of all sorts. ... And I do think the Manhattan Project is an apt analogy."
3.
Target and customize. Participants were taken by my colleague Kelly McBride's presentation on "millennials" -- the huge MySpace/Facebook generation that lives to share good times, photos and sometimes information with their friends. It is an open question how news products might be tailored to their distinctive communication style, but the answer sure is not a "voice of God," one-way declaration of what's news, as Josh Benton of
Nieman Journalism Lab put it.
Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, expressed the hope that "the millennial generation may, in fact, take user-generated or user-influenced content to a level that will work for the community-at-large. (So far it hasn't.)"
Michael Novack, vice president of multimedia for El Nuevo Dia in Puerto Rico, took a shot at defining the parallel idea for selling advertising: "Become advertisers' 'strategic partners,' providing them with multichannel solutions based on contextual, targeted and measured performance."
Novack himself has brought that approach to a traditional paper. A case in point is the example in my
previous Biz Blog post of a premium-priced e-mail ad to promote a wine shop tasting.
4.Get over being jilted by the audience. Of all such conferences at Poynter, this was the best I can remember at assembling a range of players, thus avoiding the trap of having traditional media execs or new media visionaries talking to one another in separate camps. There was even a pretty good spread of ages, including a couple of bona-fide millennials.
There was no disagreement that the traditional ad-supported model that has supported newspapers and broadcast is breaking down, and I didn't hear a lot of institutional defensiveness from the baby boomer-age execs. Some of the younger participants apparently did, though.
"Acknowledge we don't cover 95 percent of what people find interesting," Benton wrote, adding that there is still too much attention to the old "megaliths" rather than the cumulative force of small sites.
Similarly, Mike Orren of Pegasus News answered briefly, "Stop thinking about how to regain what was 'lost' and focus on what can be gained. Play offense more than defense. Be opportunistic."
I will plead guilty to having said more than once or twice that the newspaper industry needs to walk the walk of urgency and invention rather than reminding itself that this is indeed a crisis. From a distance, I wonder whether events, such as the recent
American Press Institute summit led by business-school experts who specialize in enterprises in crisis, have some of the flavor of "
Scared Straight." Is being suitably frightened part of the solution or a paralyzing part of the problem?
5. Defining value, then pricing it, remains elusive. Lots of good, candid talk at the conference never quite got to the root of what high-quality news is worth to an audience of readers that is motivated to be informed. Who will pay, how much, for what? (Or at least pay attention?)
MinnPost's Kramer said that his working estimate is that only one in six adults is in the market for serious journalism.
An article out this week from CJR quotes Bob Garfield of NPR's "On the Media" posing the question of whether journalists, liked skilled physicians, can give readers some of what they want to hear along with some of what they need to know.
Investor Tom Russo suggested that journalism could use some basic marketing in the vein of the old
"Got Milk?" campaign. ("Got News?") Other participants agreed that the value of news could use lots more marketing, particularly to younger audiences, and perhaps some redefinition as well.
But we don't seem to be getting closer to having those who appreciate access to journalism actually pay for it -- in part or in whole. Actually, academics Len Witt and Bill Densmore are experimenting with mechanisms to allow end-users to fund coverage of a given topic or pay an intermediary to assemble a specified portfolio of information and analysis.
In the meantime, the caprices and shrinking budgets of advertisers will have a lot to say about what kind of journalism gets done on which platforms.
