E-Media Tidbits

What a chasm to overcome. One journalist tweeted that the financial spreadsheets being shown were overwhelming, that "I don't do numbers." Someone else in the room quipped that business isn't as much fun as journalism. A third admitted, while watching a spreadsheet presentation, that he didn't understand EBITDA, a key financial term being used.

All of them, if they want to run a news business, need to get to work. The gathering was the third annual "New Business Models for News" conference at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, and the goal was, well, to try to find ways that the news business can survive.

The 150 to 200 people there were a diverse audience -- local bloggers and independent journalists trying to make a living, reps from big media companies like The New York Times and Gannett, venture capitalists, foundation funders, educators, consultants, students, technologists, advertising salespeople, ad network experts. Among all those people, the most frustration seemed to come from the folks working for independent and hyperlocal news sites -- the kind of sites targeted by many presentations.

In one panel, they heard representatives from ad network Adify and ad platform PaperG say they were great solutions for local sites because they would handle the advertising so the site didn't have to. But in a panel just before, advertising sales consultant Mel Taylor said people should never let an ad network sell the choice inventory on their site. "Just tell me what to do to sell ads," someone moaned during a day-ending group session. Others said they wanted more practical advice.

Which is a good thing. Because if you're going to be an entrepreneurial journalist, or even a journalist in a small entrepreneurial environment, you had better concern yourself with the way things work on the financial side. Not only do you need to know something about the servers and the coding, but also the ad serving and how you can squeeze the best fees and the best margins out of every ad slot. You'd better know that EBITDA is a proxy for "operational income," meaning the money you make from the business that isn't weighed down by taxes and debt and the like.

You'd better take an interest in the spreadsheets that represent your income and expenses, and cash flow statements that will determine if you can meet payroll every week -- even if that payroll is just you, working alone. You may even have to consider, in the words of NYU's Jay Rosen, that "there may be no business model to replace the old business model" -- but you'll still have to find a way to pay for it all.

It's tough, in a room full of people with such a wide range of backgrounds, to come up with the one overarching fix that will have meaning for all. A venture capitalist may have forgotten more about company valuation than a wordsmith or graphic designer or computer coder will ever know. And no one should expect to learn all there is to know about making a business work at a one-day symposium.

It is a beginning, though. The CUNY project has provided some spreadsheet templates that represent potentially viable models. They're a decent start, but flawed, and I'll explore them in some depth in coming days, picking them apart and getting answers to my objections.

My fervent hope, meanwhile, is that journalists will take an interest in where their compensation comes from. This for-profit field has been an oddity in letting its practitioners, the people who create the stuff that consumers consume, be blissfully ignorant of how their businesses run.

I'm not saying that all journalism needs to produce money at some profitable ratio directly attributable to the pieces produced. But being unaware of anything having to do with the cash flows that support the news operation is a luxury we can no longer afford.