Some weeks, you can track the evolution of journalism by topic: Micropayments, endowments, contributions. This week, you can map it by geography: Death in Denver and birth in Miami.
As more than 200 staffers of the
Rocky Mountain News got the painful news that
their paper would close Friday, a similarly sized group at the
We Media conference was listening to Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen describe some of what's emerging to replace the fading established media.
But he began with a discussion of what's being lost, and pegged it to geography: "For the first time in the history of the republic, the delivery of news and information is not happening in the same space as democracy."
Unless somebody can devise a sustainable geographic model for journalism, he argued, the United States needs to figure out "how to structure democracy in a different way not rooted in geography."
How that might happen, he acknowledged, he has no idea.
Not that geography has been completely abandoned as an organizing principle for news. Among the finalists for $25,000 investment grants at the conference was
newsdesk.org, a start-up focused on "important but overlooked news from around the world" with plans to expand from San Francisco to other communities. And David Westphal
reported on OJR Thursday that emerging local news sites "are hanging tough."
But as the decline of the old accelerates -- with possible shut-downs of papers in Seattle and San Francisco and bankruptcies in Philadelphia, Chicago and Minneapolis -- it's clear that many emerging forms of media are more focused on breaking new ground than filling old gaps.
If participation in We Media is any indication, media innovation is increasingly led by entrepreneurs outside established media. Conference co-leader Dale Peskin said the percentage of participants from news organizations has dropped from about 75 percent five years ago to about 10 percent this week. That trend tracks with differences I noticed from the
We Media I attended two years ago.
Ibargüen said the Knight Foundation is examining how changes to tax law might ease the transition from the now crumbling model of public ownership of news companies to arrangements that might enable sale of local news outfits to community organizations. As he quickly noted, however, "that doesn't solve the revenue issue" of sustaining the operation once the new ownership has been established.
Hallway conversations are among the most valuable aspects of gatherings like this, and I was struck by a quick one I had with George Brock of
The Times of London. Business models have a way of hanging on long after they're broken, he pointed out, except when dire economic circumstances bring things to a boil.
As a believer in the "creative destruction" theories of
economist Joseph Schumpeter, Brock argues that "the journalism vacuum will be filled."
Some suggestions from We Media based on how that vacuum is filling so far:
- Make way for a new establishment. Accepting a $25,000 prize for the See Click Fix project he launched with three partners, CEO Ben Berkowitz said: "We didn't know that we were going to be in this industry but it seems to be the one we fit into."
- Think of media as a path to activism. The winner of the second $25,000 prize, in the non-profit category, was Jacob Colker, co-founder of a site called The Extraordinaries. The project enables users to find ways of volunteering via their smart phones. A finalist site, Fractor.org, is fosused on helping people "act on facts" for social good.
- Imagine a smaller world. Pollster John Zogby told the conference that a key finding of his new book, The Way We'll Be, is the international focus of emerging generations, especially the 18-29 year-olds he describes as "First Globals." Whatever shape new media takes, it will need to reflect the interest of users not only in learning about the world, but having an impact on it.
- Get creative with economic models for sustaining news. Jim Kennedy, vice president for strategy of the Associated Press, said "the audience is not rejecting journalism -- they're rejecting the old products." He added: "It's all about engagement. If people are not willing to spend time with what you create, there is no business model." The trick, he said, is figuring out what users want and how they want it delivered -- and then attaching business models to it.
