Entrepreneurial Journalism lecture -- Jan. 31

Entrepreneurial Journalism — “Journalism in the age of disruption”

Disruption -- interruption of normal work and practices.
+ If it displaces an existing business or practice.
+ The economic mechanisms that have sustained quality journalism are in the process of being disrupted.
+ Effected by: scandals, increased transparency via groups like Wikileaks, and, mainly, slow innovation.
+ Disruption a painful process but offers opportunities for new businesses and rebirth.
+ Historical context:
+ In the 18th century Britain moved from an agrarian to a machine-based economy via the industrial revolution
+ Britain’s trade routes and technological industry positioned the country well.
+ Movement away from the era of mass production
+ Historic Fatality
+ Agriculture -- is obviously beneficial. Once it caught on, it caught on quickly.
+ Satisfied deep human desires for settlement and consistency
+ Division of power
+ Gradual erosion of power for centralized sources.
+ Gutenberg printing press disrupted the Catholic church’s control over the Christian faith.
+ Division of power has accelerated with the web
+ Near universal access to information, which can be freely shared with others
+ Cuts of middlemen
+ Anyone an express themselves and find an audience.
+ As a result:
+ Flattens hierarchical power structures
+ Capital and information flows are faster, more fluid and chaotic
+ Accelerating innovation
+ Impulse is to both create and consume.
+ Audience increasingly alienated by the mass market approach to media.
+ Moore’s law specifies the speed of processors double every 18 months, but also that the cost of technology decreases, space and bandwidth increase.
+ Disruptive models
+ Perrato Principle:
+ 80% of your profit will come from 20% of your inventory
+ Amazon undermined due to Toyatan retailing
+ Make more from selling misfires than hits (The Long Tail)
+ Music industry -- failed to innovate because of rival subscription-based services with incomplete inventories and format wars
+ Apple rejected subscription model with iTunes by charging 99c per song, required individual songs to be sold instead of just whole albums
+ Google particularly disruptive
+ Google’s main service is search, which is made profitable by Adwords.
+ Made newspaper advertising seem incredibly expensive and unreliable
+ “Prisoner’s dilemma” -- Google takes away advertising revenue and commodifies news, but to remove stories from its service is to lose traffic to rivals.
+ Value of information is near zero on Internet; key is to find value in other aspects of journalism
+ Fact verification, sourcing, fact aggregation, etc.

Some innovators
+ Controlivest
+ Portuguese company
+ Gave away piece of silverware with each issue; missing an issue would mean having an incomplete set. The silverware cost a fraction of an issue/distribution.
+ Bild
+ “Vado” camera. Cheap video camera that allows instant transmission to the newspaper of video.
+ Ushahidi
+ Open source platform to collect real-time crisis information
+ Overview
+ AP data visualization tool -- find networks in very large data sets.
+ Naseadresa
+ Combined hyperlocal newsrooms with cafes. “News cafes”
+ Would work together to produce 30-page tabloid weekly papers.
+ Shared content and linked by a central newsroom
+ Revenue gaining efforts to cafe were undermined by the revenue losing efforts of newspaper
+ Struggled to find advertising revenue
+ Demand Media
+ Looks for high traffic terms, builds articles relevant to search queries.
+ Autodesk 123D -- free 3D printing design software
+ Micromanufacturing and Ponoko -- able to create things with no cost to the producer until a customer actually buys something. Movement towards zero risk business strategy.

Q&A -- Nick Newman (Created BBC Digital website; helped develop the iPlayer)