I’m
tempted to say ‘not very much’ since no-one really knows too much about
the future of news just now. You know this is true because senior news
folk have given up on the doom and gloom stuff and are starting to get
all optimistic, talking about ‘the golden age of journalism’, and how
it’s a ‘bright dawn’ and that sort of thing. This would make sense if
there had been any structural change in the economics of news but there
hasn’t, so their optimism has the hollow twang of hope over reason.
Still, the optimists have got it half right. As Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of Caledonian Mercury, said at a #futureofnews conference a week or so back (I paraphrase):
“This is great time to do journalism. It’s just not a great time to earn your living as a journalist”
But,
in these turbulent times, as I earnestly make my way from one
#futureofnews conference to another, a few things are starting to
become clear. So this much I know:
- Even if paywalls provide
a secure financial future for news organizations – which right now
seems unlikely – they will reduce the pool of shared information, and
cut those news organizations’ content off from the openness, sharing
and linking that characterizes the web. ‘You cannot control
distribution or create scarcity’, Alan Rusbridger said in his January Hugh Cudlipp lecture, ‘without becoming isolated from this new networked world’.
- The paywall is not the only way to sustain the digital newsroom. Advertising – much maligned by many – could yet make online non-paywall newspaper content viable within 5 years. Peter Kirwan does the sums in
Wired – calculating that if Guardian News Media manages a 20%
annualized growth of digital revenues (it estimates growth will be 30%
this year) it will be able to maintain a £100m digital newsroom seven
days a week by 2015.
- There are other revenue models
for online news. Ones that allow you to keep your news open, linked and
shared, and make money. For example, what I call the ‘carrier pidgeon’
model. In this model you let people share, link to,
recommend, search, aggregate, and even re-use you content – you just
make sure it’s properly marked up and credited first, so you can keep
track of it, and develop revenue models off the back of it. You do this
with – excuse the geek terminology – ‘metadata’. Embedded metadata has
all sorts of potential benefits we’re only just starting to take
advantage of (hence why we’ve spent so much time on hNews and linked data). I call it the ‘carrier pidgeon’ model because the news doesn’t just go out, it comes back.
- The cost base
is still going to have to go down. The cost of producing news will
necessarily have to be a lot lower than it has been historically. This
doesn’t have to mean cutting journalist’s jobs or getting out of print.
There are lots of ways to rethink costs in a digital world. One of the
most inventive is Roman Gallo’s Czech model.
Gallo opened cafés in the centre of towns across the Czech Republic. He
then put his news teams in the cafés. Not only does this mean they have
very low office overheads (the café covers basic costs), but it means
the journalists are working in amongst the local community and getting
readers directly involved in production.
- There will need to be accessible, re-usable public data
provided regularly and in a consistent format. Without this it will be
much harder to keeps costs low because of the amount of time it will
take to coax information out of public authorities and then to analyse
it. This is why the launch of data.gov.uk was
such an important development, and why we need to join Sir Tim
Berners-Lee’s quest for ‘raw data now’ (as he shouts in his wonderfully
quirky TED appearance).
- Whether or not paywalls work or online news makes money, there will be a public interest gap. Some newsgathering and reporting will almost certainly never again be commercially profitable in an open market. Online
news is highly unlikely ever to pay for a journalist to sit in a local
court for days on end, for example. This was one of the most important
things to come out of Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie’s report ‘The Reconstruction of American Journalism’.
Schudson and Downie could not find a market solution to some of the
news problems they were exploring, and so settled instead on a mixture
of tax breaks, subsidies, foundation grants, and donations.
- We will rely, for aspects of watchdog journalism, on a combination of journalists, NGOs, and motivated members of the public.
Note the use of the word ‘motivated’. News organisations will need to
find ways – other than money – to motivate and sustain people to help
them scour data, dig through school and healthcare records, and alert
them to corruption and injustice.
- As well as motivating people, news organizations will need to build the tools that help the non-professional journos be watchdogs – tools like whatdotheyknow.com,
a site built by MySociety that makes it relatively easy for people to
make freedom of information requests, and then share the results of
those requests to a wider community. Or the way the Guardian got the
public to search through the millions of MPs expenses claims.
- News organizations and journalists will need to form and re-form partnerships
with other organizations, journalism co-operatives, NGOs and members of
the public. We’re seeing this start to happen with sites like The Bay Citizen in San Francisco (see good post by Mallary Jean Tenore on Poynter) and OpenFile – the beta site just launched by Craig Silverman et al in Canada
Even
taking all this into account there’s a good chance that, without some
tweaking of the market; a few tax breaks here, maybe a start-up fund
there, there will be a lot of public interest news blackspots.
So
there it is. Not so bleak, but not so rosy either. And take it with a
big pinch of salt since the only ones who seem to know about profitable
business model for news just now are those running #futureofnews
conferences.
Keywords: carrier pidgeon, futureofnews, journalism, MySociety, optimism, paywalls