Scenario I
Due to the fact of diminishing revenues, and work force, news media organizations have to adjust themselves into much smaller units.
Perhaps most significantly, the role of a journalist will change from a news gatherer to news flow manager and editor. The most of the raw material will originate from the low paid freelancers, high paid experts and celebrities, voluntary contributors, and accidental witnesses
With the help of different automated tools, the tiny corps of highly-skilled and paid journalists should be able to create the most relevant real-time news streams for the not-paying-anything mass audiences and the little-paying niche customers.
The core of the journalistic profession will be to curate steady intelligent streams of headlines and links. This first scenario can be called as The Twitterization of the News.
Scenario II
By contrast to scenario I, also longer forms of journalism will survive, but only when well-written, narrated and researched. These quality stories could still be printed in paper.
This can be called as The Economist -model.
Scenario III
It can also be predicted that the future of news is mobile. Special news and other applications should be designed to help us to filter the vastness of the information flows of the Net.
Mobile news could offer one new sustainable stream of revenues for struggling news organizations. But, however, how many news organizations do you know to have a solid strategy for mobile news business.
This third scenario is called as News Goes Mobile.
---
According to Wikipedia a scenario is an account or synopsis of a projected course of action, events or situations. Scenario development is used when organisations wish to test strategies against uncertain future developments.
Showing posts with label Innovation journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Innovation journalism. Show all posts
Friday, 23 April 2010
Thursday, 25 June 2009
New innovative metaphors for the news media, please
The newspaper industry in the U.S. is in emergency mode, no doubt about it. However, new innovations in news production, business models, and advertising are hunted by thousands of professionals all over the world. New initiatives are mushrooming. But, how about stopping for a while, and starting to look answers from - the language.
I would argue that in order to understad the tectonic changes in news media landscape, new concepts are needed. Words, language, always limits our thinking. New metaphors help to build bridges between known and unknown.
But before becoming as language new metaphors are tested and challenged. A lot of time and work is still required. Later we can honor many of these inventors of new metaphors as gurus. Lets take some examples of news media oracles in digital times.
Dr. David Nordfors coined innovation journalism in 2003, and since then a dynamic network of journalists and scholars interested in communicating better about innovations and innovation ecosystems has evolved.
The newest journalistic metaphor is called "individuated news". Coined by Peter Vandevanter, vice president of targeted products for Denver-based Media News Group. Yes, the metaphor is still used with quotation marks, a weak signal of a work in progress.
According to The Washington Times Vandevanter coined the very metaphor "after years of research into a challenge threatening the entire newspaper industry". "Individuated news" can be defined as "delivering custom news products to paying customers in cost-effective ways".
Just one more example from the history of media technology. The invention of radio was first used like telegraph - only for the one-to-one messages. Telegraph was so powerful as a concept at that time that it prohibited the companies who owned the patents for the new invention to foresee the new one-to-many model.
Broadcasting as a new communication model was invented by accident by bunch of radio amateurs, who wanted to listen music via airwaves. Only after this first commercial and state-owned radio stations were build.
So, the lessons. First of all, listen always also the amateurs, and hobbyists. They still have the genuine passion to change the world. Secondly, and the most important of all. Watch your OLD language! It can prevent innovative thinking - much needed right now in the mids of news industry panic.
Image copyright: Turo Uskali
Video:
TED: Kevin Kelly tells technology's epic story (Nov. 2009;Feb.2010)
Extra Readings:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let's talk about the future of journalism.
Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don't use the word journalism.
SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.
Anderson: Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like 'horseless carriage'.
Der Spiegel Online: Chris Anderson on the Economics of 'Free' (28.7.2009)Thursday, 28 May 2009
How to add value to the news - Specialize and dig deeper
News business needs reinventing itself, especially in the U.S. and Europe. The ongoing hunt for new news business models can be a tough, long-lasting process without any clear new killer applications or solutions. Actually, I will predict that ads, subscription fees, and different kinds of broadcasting taxes, will be the dominant revenue models for the news producers also in the future.
Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf voted last week for the ads in the sixth conference on innovation journalism at Stanford University. In his opinion, Google could help with this. In the very same conference Jason Pontin from the Technology Review argued that consumers should pay more for what they read. Of course, Mr. News Corporation said this already earlier in May. It is fascinating, how Rupert Murdoch has once again acted like a first mover, and truth-teller. Indeed, free is not a good business model for news in the era of internet. But Pontin also predicted that in the long run, newspapers can be published only weekends, and magazines and newspapers will be much smaller.
Interesting to see, whether this kind of development happens all over the world, or only in countries with high broadband penetration (over 60 %). It is not a big surprise that the newspapers started to suffer first in the tech savvy Silicon Valley (the San Francisco Chronicle and the San José Mercury News, and Boston (the Boston Globe) area in the U.S. However, it could be a surprise, but as a global industry, printed audience still continued to grow last year. According to the World Association of Newspapers (27.5.2009), “Despite the global financial crisis, newspaper circulation grew 1.3 percent world-wide in 2008”.
But even so, big and smaller news corporations are suffering alike, and the quality of journalism is in danger in many cities and rural areas in Western world. The price of the news people want to pay is close to zero, but at the same time, the production costs of original reporting remains high. Traditionally, the most expensive beats are foreign news and investigative reporting. No wonder that several new online only news ventures like Global Post and ProPublica are created to fill these news holes. They are mainly funded by non-profit foundations. (See more new news ventures on the right side of this blog.)
But maybe even this is not enough. New ideas, inventions, and radical innovations are still greatly needed. One of the worlds’s leading media economics scholars, Robert G. Picard argues in the online-only publication Christian Science Monitor (19.5.2009) that “the demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating real value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies”.
I agree with Picard. News organizations should concentrate more on original and unique reporting in order to create more value to their customers. I will advice that, first of all, all news rooms should specialize more, choose one or two topics of news, and reserve enough resources to dig very deep within these niches. Secondly, the news organizations should try to become the leaders of producing this special content, and create an interactive community. Finally, the news rooms could possibly market and sell this expertise to the whole world in many forms: in news, reports, books, and even seminars and conferences. (Of course, the news organizations can also maintain the minimum basic daily national and international news flows as well, but this can be done with the help of the newswires, or cooperating with other news producers.)
This is a new challenge to many news organizations – but they have to focus more in order to survive.
Finally, the best example of a news media success story based on quality reporting is a British magazine - The Economist. The Atlantic tried just recently figure out how did the Economist managed to grow despite the global downturn, and crises of the other news weeklies, Newsweek and Time. In conclusion, the analyses of the Atlantic did not go deep enough in order to find out the meaning of its own research unit, the Economist Business Intelligent unit.
The latest example of the importance of scoops, and quality journalism, is the Daily Telegraphs revelations about MPs expenses. According to the Guardian the paper sold a million extra copies.
(C) Photo by Turo Uskali, 20.5.2009 @ IJ6/Stanford
Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf voted last week for the ads in the sixth conference on innovation journalism at Stanford University. In his opinion, Google could help with this. In the very same conference Jason Pontin from the Technology Review argued that consumers should pay more for what they read. Of course, Mr. News Corporation said this already earlier in May. It is fascinating, how Rupert Murdoch has once again acted like a first mover, and truth-teller. Indeed, free is not a good business model for news in the era of internet. But Pontin also predicted that in the long run, newspapers can be published only weekends, and magazines and newspapers will be much smaller.
Interesting to see, whether this kind of development happens all over the world, or only in countries with high broadband penetration (over 60 %). It is not a big surprise that the newspapers started to suffer first in the tech savvy Silicon Valley (the San Francisco Chronicle and the San José Mercury News, and Boston (the Boston Globe) area in the U.S. However, it could be a surprise, but as a global industry, printed audience still continued to grow last year. According to the World Association of Newspapers (27.5.2009), “Despite the global financial crisis, newspaper circulation grew 1.3 percent world-wide in 2008”.
But even so, big and smaller news corporations are suffering alike, and the quality of journalism is in danger in many cities and rural areas in Western world. The price of the news people want to pay is close to zero, but at the same time, the production costs of original reporting remains high. Traditionally, the most expensive beats are foreign news and investigative reporting. No wonder that several new online only news ventures like Global Post and ProPublica are created to fill these news holes. They are mainly funded by non-profit foundations. (See more new news ventures on the right side of this blog.)
But maybe even this is not enough. New ideas, inventions, and radical innovations are still greatly needed. One of the worlds’s leading media economics scholars, Robert G. Picard argues in the online-only publication Christian Science Monitor (19.5.2009) that “the demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating real value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies”.
I agree with Picard. News organizations should concentrate more on original and unique reporting in order to create more value to their customers. I will advice that, first of all, all news rooms should specialize more, choose one or two topics of news, and reserve enough resources to dig very deep within these niches. Secondly, the news organizations should try to become the leaders of producing this special content, and create an interactive community. Finally, the news rooms could possibly market and sell this expertise to the whole world in many forms: in news, reports, books, and even seminars and conferences. (Of course, the news organizations can also maintain the minimum basic daily national and international news flows as well, but this can be done with the help of the newswires, or cooperating with other news producers.)
This is a new challenge to many news organizations – but they have to focus more in order to survive.
Finally, the best example of a news media success story based on quality reporting is a British magazine - The Economist. The Atlantic tried just recently figure out how did the Economist managed to grow despite the global downturn, and crises of the other news weeklies, Newsweek and Time. In conclusion, the analyses of the Atlantic did not go deep enough in order to find out the meaning of its own research unit, the Economist Business Intelligent unit.
The latest example of the importance of scoops, and quality journalism, is the Daily Telegraphs revelations about MPs expenses. According to the Guardian the paper sold a million extra copies.
(C) Photo by Turo Uskali, 20.5.2009 @ IJ6/Stanford
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)