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)