Everyone knows that newspapers are in a state of decline, in large part due to the rise of online media. So, you would think that perhaps you’d see prominent new media execs joining the ranks of old media companies to try and right the ship. But at Facebook, it’s the other way around, as Washington Post CEO Don Graham is joining the company’s board of directors.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this appointment is that Facebook has ambitions as a media company, and bringing on someone with extensive experience in that department – Graham has been CEO of the Post since 1991 – could be helpful. Graham joins other Facebook board members Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel – early investors in the company – as well as Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen.

So, what knowledge might Graham bring to the table that could be helpful? The Post – which also publishes Newsweek – has held up surprisingly well versus some of its old media counterparts, in part because of its timely adoption of new media, and Graham likely has some perspective on how Facebook can help old media transition into the digital age.

With Facebook moving outside its own social network with products like Facebook Connect, having a media veteran like Graham on the team could certainly help them navigate the old media world and design solutions that they’ll adopt. So, while on the surface the appointment might seem odd, it actually makes a lot of sense given where Facebook appears to be headed.

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.

read more…

by Bryan Murley, November 19, 2008

With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it’s easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind.

I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas, editor of the Vassar Miscellany News.

Farkas writes:

With our new Web site, http://miscellanynews.com/, we have now entered into the next generation of online journalism. And, for better or worse, we have become one of the few colleges in the country to do so. On our new site, reporters can contribute live blogs, attach videos and other multimedia to their articles, and display high-resolution photography in a way that our print publication never could. Best of all, The Miscellany’s site is flexible, no longer burdened with the stagnant design so common among news sites in the 1990s. We have become one of only a handful of college newspapers in the country, along with The Yale Daily News and The Swarthmore Phoenix, to adopt a Web 2.0 approach and craft our site using up-to-date CSS and XML standards.

Farkas’ description is overly pessimistic. Despite his negative outlook, college newspapers across the country are still moving forward with online content. Their innovations have been visible over the past few years — especially when you consider how difficult it is for them to change.

Resistance to Change

When I first began blogging about online college media three years ago, most websites were little more than shovelware, with print editors and some advisers reluctant to invest time and energy in developing a robust web presence.

Some of that resistance was based in tradition: It’s hard to steer a 100-year-old institution in a new direction. Production workflows had developed and been set like clockwork. Each new generation of editors and reporters walked in the footsteps of the previous generation, and learned their ways. The website was appended to the end of the workflow, after pages were sent to the press. Blowing up that workflow is not easy.

Still more resistance was cultural. Print journalists saw themselves as newspaper journalists first. The battles over whether blogging could be journalism were still being fought. Copy editor Greg Finley of the Orion at California State-Chico argued in 2006 that newspapers should keep their content offline, saying “No other medium can match newspapers’ depth.”

And another hurdle was technological: Inexpensive, easy-to-use tools for online storytelling were just coming into widespread use, and broadband Internet access was not nearly as widespread as it is today.

That resistance has faded over time, especially as the news industry has struggled to reinvent itself.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Even now, I find community college newspapers that still have no web presence. Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University, found that 36% of a random sample of college newspapers had no web presence at all. (Bergland’s findings are not yet available online, but I’ll update this post as soon as they are available.)

Large daily university papers struggle to make money from their websites, and campus readership of the printed product remains high compared to industry standards, which leads to a conundrum: whether to devote resources to a website when the print product is still so popular.

And online efforts ebb and flow with staff changes as student journalists graduate and new ones take their place. One year, a paper hires a whiz-bang web designer who beefs up their online offerings. The next year, that designer is gone, and a less-savvy replacement can’t keep up the pace. One year’s multimedia journalist gives way to the next year’s more traditional print journalist.

Blazing New Trails

Despite all these obstacles, many college newspapers have moved forward with innovative online offerings. Here are a few examples of sites that have paved the way in blogging, video, audio slideshows, and other forms of interactivity:

Xpress Flash-based map of campus

San Francisco State University Xpress — Former SFSU journalism professor Andrew DeVigal, now multimedia editor for the New York Times, helped lead the Xpress staff in producing a multimedia-rich web site using Movable Type blogging software. Flash-based maps and audio slideshows (like this package that illustrates favorite student hangouts at SFSU) began on the Xpress site in 2006.

Vanderbilt University InsideVandy — Chris Carroll, Vanderbilt student media adviser and co-founder of the Center for Innovation in College Media, led InsideVandy student journalists in an effort to create a “mothership” approach to student media, akin to Steve Yelvington’s BlufftonToday in 2006. The idea was to bring all student media — TV, radio, newspaper, and magazines — into one online presence that would allow anyone in the community to contribute content.

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times — The Collegiate Times became an example of both breaking news and multimedia usage in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus. Student journalists posted breaking news updates, a blog, audio slideshows and video (see the CT archives here). More than that, other school newspapers also used online media to report on the shootings, posting video reports from their campuses and posting blog updates from Virginia (see continuing ICM coverage here).

University of Washington Daily — Just days before the VT shootings, UW’s student journalists covered the death of a student on campus, using video and live updates to tell the story (archived story here). The Daily began shooting video news on campus in the 2006-07 school year.

Spartan Daily slideshow for a boxing story

San Jose State University Spartan Daily — With Ryan Sholin as web editor, the Spartan Daily plunged into multimedia early. See this example, a 2006 story about SJSU boxing club members traveling to Berkeley to compete in a regional boxing tournament. In addition to text, the article features video and audio slideshows. The paper has continued to push the envelope, in March 2008 experimenting with live streaming TV and live blogging.

Boise State University Arbiter — The Arbiter dove headfirst into web-first publishing when the Broncos went to the Fiesta Bowl in 2006. Since the Arbiter wasn’t publishing during the Christmas break, they made the most of their online presence. Staffers from the student newspaper published web-only content from Arizona, including podcasts, video and audio slideshows (see their coverage here). They have continued to produce podcasts and other multimedia coverage since then.

Eastern Illinois University Daily Eastern News — Long before I was hired at Eastern, the DEN was producing audio slideshows using Soundslides that rivaled the best in the business. Check out this audio slideshow from the 2006 Greek Week Tugs competition. They were also early to experiment with podcasts and, in 2006, revamped their sports coverage by introducing a widget that could automatically update football scores and schedule information for readers.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that students have taken advantage of online tools since late 2005. There are numerous other schools that have also moved into multimedia and online publishing with gusto, including the Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Daily Collegian at Penn State, the Daily Pennsylvanian at Penn, the GW Hatchet at George Washington U., the Miami Hurricane, the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida, the Corsair at Pensacola Junior College, the Gargoyle at Flagler College, the Daily Mississippian at Ole Miss, and numerous others. For more examples of student journalists’ multimedia, see this database.

Recently, we saw clear evidence of this movement into online journalism on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, when student journalists across the country used tools like Mogulus, Twitter and CoverItLive to cover the historic election night. (For a sampling of coverage, see here).

To borrow a phrase, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

by Simon Owens, November 17, 2008

Every year Locus Magazine, “The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field,” publishes a year-in-review of the genre. This summation always includes a rundown of the circulation of the remaining speculative fiction magazines, sometimes referred to as the “pulps” because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they used to be printed. In their heyday there were dozens of pulps — ranging from the mystery to science fiction genres — with circulations of 100,000 or more. But the medium steeply declined through the ’80s and ’90s, with magazine circulations for all the publications plummeting to well below six figures.

By the 21st century and the advent of the web, most of these once-great magazines — Amazing Stories, Argosy, SF Age — had died off, leaving only three speculative fiction magazines struggling to stop hemorrhaging readers: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The figures displayed in this year’s Locus Magazine roundup were, as usual, not promising. Analog, the best performing of the three, had fallen to a paid circulation of 27,399, while Asimov’s dropped 5.2% to 17,581. But the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction saw the sharpest decline — 11.2% from the previous year — to a paid circulation of 16,489. Countless science fiction convention panels and online message board topics over the last decade have tried to pinpoint the cause of such catastrophic declines and learn how to stop them. Such discussions often lead to at least one person predicting the eminent death of the short fiction magazines, always seen lurking just around the corner.

But these publications began experiencing turbulence well before the proliferation of the web, so it’s apparent that their problems are in many ways different than the ones currently plaguing the newspaper industry — a medium that thrived until it was suddenly met with vibrant competition from the web. But science fiction magazines are struggling to stay relevant in the Internet age.

Brave New World

Gordon Van Gelder worked in book publishing before taking over as managing editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (typically referred to as F&SF) in 1997, a position he kept even after he bought the publication in 2000. F&SF began publishing in 1948, making it one of the oldest of the pulp digests (Analog launched a few years earlier, in 1930).

In a phone interview, I asked Van Gelder how editors reacted once it became obvious that the web would become a major force in publishing.

“When I was the editor and Ed Ferman was still publisher, we saw the first big webzine rolled out,” he said. “It was called Galaxy Online, I think. It came out January 1999; it was the first highly touted online zine, and I don’t even think it lasted two months. It had real money behind it, supposedly. It had real professionals, and it came and went in the blink of an eye. And I remember Ed Ferman talking to me about what we needed to do online, and it was clear that he didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

And like most print editors these days, he still doesn’t know. Speaking to him, it was evident that he felt some frustration with the subject. Unlike newspapers and most other magazines, which mostly profit by selling advertising space, the short fiction digests make most of their revenue off copies sold — think of them as miniature mass market paperbacks — and so Van Gelder is even more nervous than most editors about giving away too much content for free online.

“It’s so weird to talk about, because it’s sometimes frustrating,” he said. “The web is still so new, it’s still complicated, and I adore it. I do what I can with it, but it drives me nuts, also.”

On the F&SF blog, print mags are promoted heavily

The magazine has taken some perfunctory steps to court new media, most notably by sending review copies to selected bloggers, launching a blog on its website, and offering some of its archived fiction online for free. But Van Gelder told me he has sent review copies to bloggers only “three or four times” and that the site’s blog is barely updated even once a month. Even the free fiction is only up for a month before being removed again, thereby draining away any potential that new readers could find the magazine via a search engine.

Van Gelder explained that his approach so far to the web has been scattershot, though some authors have figured out how to harness its power.

“I’ve been watching individual authors [promote online] and the three that have been successful at it are John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross,” he said. “They immediately grasped what the Internet was about and they figured out that it makes much more sense to give stuff away and cause viral marketing than anything else. And it’s worked great for them. In all three cases, though, they’re writers whose work is very accessible to people who do spend a lot of time online. And you’re not hearing about the people who have tried these things and the attempt flopped.”

Online Forums Thrive

Sheila Williams, who has worked for Asimov’s Science Fiction for more than two decades and became editor a few years ago, claimed that the Internet “has not affected our sales in any way negatively.” Instead, she said, the downward trend can be ascribed to changes in distribution — both how and where the magazines were displayed in newsstands and book stores — which have effectively cut off the digests at the knees over the years.

Both Asimov’s and Analog (along with mystery pulps Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) are published by Dell Magazines, a company perhaps best known for its puzzle magazines. In fact, outside critics often complain that Dell has let its fiction magazines fall by the wayside because it has concentrated its focus on crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

Asimov’s online forums

One area where the remaining short fiction magazines have thrived is through their online message boards; for instance, Asimov’s has an extremely vocal forum community. But the editor said that despite this large surge in science fiction fans, very little of the discussion on the boards is about the genre or the contents of the magazine.

“The forum is great,” Williams told me. “We have one of the most active forums in existence for the science fiction publications. But mostly they get on there and argue politics; we call it the basement. There’s a section at the bottom that consists of a big chunk that’s very conservative and a big chunk that’s very liberal and they go at it tooth and nail. And they hardly ever talk about the stories. There are a handful of dedicated readers that talk about the stories, but they are the minority. What I have seen in the past in the ’70s and the ’80s, there were dozens of letters coming in a month. We don’t get the letters anymore. I think back in the ’80s we had more correspondence coming in on the stories than I see in the comments on the forum.”

Like F&SF, Asimov’s has dipped its toes into the new media pool, often releasing its non-fiction or award-nominated stories online. Williams also mentioned diving into the magazine’s decades worth of archives for content to place exclusively on the Net, and the staff has recently begun to experiment with podcasts, something that Williams said she wants to do more frequently. She asserted that the magazine has begun to expand through e-book sales, both with Fictionwise and Amazon’s Kindle. Though she didn’t offer specific sales figures, she did say that Asimov’s often ranks high within the magazine category for the Kindle.

John Scalzi’s Method

While speaking with these two editors, they both frequently cited the opinions of blogger and novelist John Scalzi. The science fiction writer is widely known for his success in using the web — most notably his popular blog, The Whatever — to promote his books. Scalzi has been outspoken on his blog about the state of science-fiction magazines, sometimes sharply criticizing their marketing strategies.

John Scalzi

Scalzi told me the web wasn’t really the main problem for the surviving pulp publications.

“The problems with the pulps — the big three — has very little to do with the advent of the web, though they could have done a much better job of positioning themselves when the web was younger,” he said. “I think the major thrust of their problem has been that all the pulps have seemed to be content to work with what they have in terms of subscribers and readers, as opposed to being very active about acquiring new readers.”

It’s this constant state of defense, he said, that made them more vulnerable once the web had matured and publications across the board began to face increased competition online. Like Williams, Scalzi attributed much of the decline in speculative fiction magazines to changes in newsstand distribution, but noted that other publications had still managed to thrive despite these changes. The sci-fi mags, he argued, did not adequately adapt to the new landscape. He compared it to America Online in the ’90s when it quickly began losing its market dominance.

“And then people started migrating to the web, and AOL started doing a bunch of me-too initiatives,” he explained. “It was member retention. They were like, ‘Look we’re doing this too, so you don’t have to leave us.’ Eventually people went ‘Yeah, there’s other stuff out here, and it’s cheaper or it’s free or it’s more interesting,’ and they leave anyway. What eventually happens with those retention efforts is that perhaps they delay the inevitable for a little while, but eventually the inevitable is inevitable. It eventually comes.”

And now that the economic recession means nearly all media outlets will have to struggle to bring in revenue, Scalzi said it may be too late to save the medium — or at least save the print magazines.

Publishing Science-Fiction Online

Over the past year, Scalzi has been involved in two projects that are attempting to profit by publishing short fiction online — Subterranean Magazine and Tor.com. Both sites fall under the umbrellas of print book publishers — Subterranean Press, an indie company, and Tor, one of the largest publishers of science fiction. They have so far used the free content on their sites as a form of branding for their book authors. By paying for and posting quality fiction and non-fiction for free (they’ve published both by Scalzi) they are essentially acting as loss leaders to attract science-fiction fans into their communities.

Though Scalzi seemed uncertain whether this strategy would ultimately work, he said that it would take a long-term investment before such an endeavor could become a success. He noted that most publishers who tried to launch profitable short fiction e-zines in the past have failed because they expected immediate returns.

“When you start a new magazine you work on the assumption that the first five to seven years you’re going to be in the red,” he said. “Because you’re building an audience, you’re building a subscription base, you’re building advertising, so that 10 years down the road you’re making money and it becomes a profit center…Now the question is, has anybody done something similar to that? Because everybody thinks that you put a website up and then suddenly it’s going to be brilliant and everyone will link to it and it’s going to make tons of money in advertising. That’s just wishful thinking.”

In this sense, he argued, if the print science-fiction magazines are going to manage to survive in the current climate, they can no longer just dip their toes into the water — it’s sink or swim.

When I brought up both Tor and Subterranean to Van Gelder, he didn’t hesitate to acknowledge that these sites may be where the industry is heading.

“It’s probably going to be a successful strategy; it’s the only strategy that’s worked in the last 10 years for launching a new magazine,” he said. “If it winds up in the future that every magazine is funded by a book publisher, then it’s not the worst thing in the world. And it could be that that’s really the future of the digest magazines, or fiction magazines in general. I don’t know, because I don’t think we’ve figured everything out yet.”

What do you think? Is there a successful way for science-fiction magazines to survive in the digital age? How? Should they transition online completely or publish in print and online together? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

You can always tell when the weekend is approaching. If it isn’t Twitter getting killed, it’s podcasting dying, death of blogs, slaughter of the record labels or one or more form of Heritage media.  It’s honestly quite difficult to top it every week. On the one hand, we bloviators have generally no compunctions re-using the same media type, but for it to really generate a respectable bitchmeme, you’ve got to really be creative.

Steve Rubel, well known for predicting economic doom and gloom due to over-investment in technology, this week predicts the death of all tangible media.

Steve says “by January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct,” including (but not limited to) software, books, video games, newspapers, CDs, and DVDs.

Once again, Steve’s penchant for hyperbole gets him in trouble. Certainly, there will be a sharp decline in the usage of a lot of the media we still purchase to this day, and for a lot of the categories of physical media he alludes to, I expect them to disappear altogether a whole lot sooner. But all tangible media eliminated? That is something that won’t happen until we’ve as a race technologically transcended the need for human bodies.

Video Games

Steve cites systems like XBox live, and the advent of their online only markeplace for UGC content as evidence the death of video games in their physical format. The problem comes in when you consider the size of your typical video game can be between 4 gigabytes and 34 gigabytes. On your base level Internet connection, the download times start at six hours, and end at three days.

Even if you have one of those brand spanking new Comcast or FiOS connections, you’re still looking at least a couple hours. None of that takes into account those cute bandwidth caps all the operators have decided were such good ideas recently.

Newspaper and Music

He doesn’t get much argument on this one from me.  Music, in physical form, is more or less dead. Physical record shops are a rarity, and the record labels continue to pursue self-destructive business models (suing your customers and their 12-year-old children is not a winning marketing move).

Similarly, newspapers around the world and across the country refuse to take drastic enough actions to adapt to life in the digital age. Those that understand that the future is online don’t do enough with organization to adapt to producing content for the web environment, and the rest of the industry is still in denial.

These are examples of industries that will not transition to digital media, but be replaced by a new guard that has the will and ambition to create viable solutions in this arena

Books

As dozens of Rubel’s commentors noted, there might be a transformation of the book business to a mostly online model, but it will never make the full transition. Books in many of their various forms and genres are considered collectible. Some commentors had other protests:

“I like having the artifacts of my reading around me to decorate the house. I’m in my 40s, though, so perhaps future generations will have no such nostalgia for tangible media artifacts.”

“I like being able to flip through an atlas and a few large picture books, something I can’t do on Kindle. These provide very different experiences than Google Maps and a Flickr photo album.”

I think that innovations in eBook technology will make the format so popular that this will be a moot point, but it’s almost impossible to put a date on when this will happen on a broad scale. There is so much that needs to be right about the device, from user experience on down to business model. Kindle is the closest we have at the moment, and I’m really excited about what’s promised by the PlasticLogic, but there’s no telling how the general public will receive it.

TV and Movies

We’re getting closer and closer to a world where physical media and even the traditional distribution methods are superflous, and no longer needed. The primary limitations in place that prevent a full on replacement of network TV, cable TV and the Hollywood studio and distribution system lay in monetization and, of course, bandwidth limitations.

It wouldn’t be fair to cite Blu-Ray statistics for a fair estimation of your average size, since many pundits think that Blue-Ray adoption rates indicate it won’t take hold as a standard before it become obsolete. If you take into account the standard size of a regular DVD movie, you’re still looking at average download times of five to seven hours for most broadband subscribers.

Timeshifting, media RSS, podcasting, and downsampling all can help to bridge this gap, but it will all be meaningless until someone is able to create some sort of set-top box for the living-room that people will actually want to use on a regular basis. This, in my opinion, won’t happen until the device makers in this space start to pay attention to the types of content out there and the ways that people like to consume their digital content.

I’ve been imagining this moment is just around the corner for at least the last five years.  At this point, I’m starting to give up hope they’ll ever understand.

Given these factors, we won’t see the elimination of the physical media for movies for quite a while (with the outside chance that some device maker could have an epiphany tomorrow).

So, Could It Happen? Could It Happen by 2012?

Yeah, maybe.  Maybe if …

• eBook manufacturers absolutely nail the perfect combination of form, function and business model.  Oh, and Oprah has to keep plugging it on a regular basis…
• … the recording industry continues down it’s self-destructive business model…
• … the New York Times goes out of business …
• … device manufacturers finally read one of my articles about “the veg-factor” …
• … and the cable and telco companies decide to lift bandwidth caps and finish building out a real broadband network for America.

by Mark Glaser, November 13, 2008

Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. “It” is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.

Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.

[Full Disclosure: I am on the advisory board to RepJ and, like Spot.us, have also received a grant from the Knight Foundation.]

David Cohn

Spot.us is the brainchild of journalist David Cohn (a.k.a. Digidave), who worked on NYU professor Jay Rosen’s groundbreaking NewAssignment.net citizen journalism project and helped research the chapter on crowdfunding in Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing book. Cohn won a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for Spot.us, and writes about the project on MediaShift Idea Lab, the sister blog to MediaShift where Knight grantees write about their projects. Here’s how Spot.us works:

1. Anyone can come up with a “Tip” or story idea they’d like to see covered. People can “pledge” money toward that story.

2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.

3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).

4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.

5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.

The site officially launched last Monday, but had already funded three stories through a simple wiki set up beforehand. Cohn told me that the challenge for Spot.us isn’t so much the technology as it is the fundraising, something that is new to him as a journalist. He said that Spot.us is just one possible alternative business model for journalism.

“I never try to sell Spot.us as a silver bullet that will support a whole news organization,” Cohn said. “But I do see it helping a news organization so they can do something beyond their regular means. They can strive for excellence, but it won’t support day-to-day reporting. It has its limitations…Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that’s worth sustaining with their own money. The second shift is with reporters who have to realize they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public.”

Leonard Witt

Unlike Spot.us and its piecemeal approach to crowdfunding per story, RepJ takes a longer term outlook by hiring a full-time journalist to work for a local community or cover a specific issue. Leonard Witt, communication chair at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, came up with the idea for representative journalism and got a $51,000 grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation for the trial project in Minnesota. Witt believes that a community or interest group could raise $100 donations (or $2 per week) from 1,000 people to support a journalist who covers their locale or issue for a year.

Witt has yet to test this donation model; he’s first trying to get his initial representative journalist, Bonnie Obremski, more ingrained in the community in Northfield, Minn.

“We are dealing with a total Northfield population of just 17,000,” Witt told me via email. “We have to literally weave together an information community of members willing to pay for high quality journalism. So we have to work on three fronts: 1) we have to provide high quality journalism; 2) we have to get the community to know our journalist; and 3) the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support.”

Crowdfunding Bloggers

MoveOn.org pioneered getting small donations to pay for political advocacy campaigns, and Barack Obama raised small donations from millions of people in the ’08 campaign. And independent bloggers and online journalists have for years been asking their audience to help support their work through small donations. Political bloggers such as Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan, and tech blogger Jason Kottke have raised thousands of dollars from online fundraisers in the past. And freelance reporter/blogger Chris Allbritton financed a trip to cover the Iraq War in 2003 by raising nearly $15,000 from his readers, and wrote dispatches on his Back to Iraq blog.

Allbritton was able to finance a drastic change of beats, going from being a media and technology reporter to becoming a foreign correspondent covering war zones in the Middle East. By supporting his trip to Iraq, Allbritton’s readers helped him gain steady work as a freelance correspondent to Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. Now, he is a Knight fellow at Stanford University on a year-long quest to see if the reader-supported model can work at an institutional level.

When I contacted Allbritton for this story, he was amused at the term “crowdfunding” and noted that its advocates might not realize how expensive foreign reporting really is — especially in a war zone. Even with nearly $15,000 for his Iraq stint, Allbritton quickly went through the funds in just one month because of the high cost of being a foreign correspondent in Iraq. “There was no guarantee that more moneys would be forthcoming from an already tapped audience,” he said. “Trust me: You don’t want to suddenly find yourself broke in Iraq.”

Even so, Allbritton was amazed that he could go cover a war at the behest of his audience, without approval from any editor or news organization.

“I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission or check with anyone,” he said. “I was relying on my own judgment. It was an amazing sense of freedom to do stories and explore things that I thought were really interesting. That said, it also carried a great sense of responsibility. I mean, when you’re at a newspaper or magazine, you have an editor or two to answer to. Now, I had thousands of people watching me and I didn’t want to let the donors down. I took that very seriously.”

On a less serious subject — satirical political blogging — Ana Marie Cox was on the campaign trail covering John McCain for Radar Online when the magazine went belly up. She posted a Rate Card on her personal blog, asking her readers to support her coverage for the last week and a half of the campaign. For $10, you would get a personal thank-you email, and for $250, Cox would pose your question to a McCain advisor.

Cox was surprised that she raised more than $7,000 from her fans in just a few days.

“Words cannot properly convey my gratitude and amazement in the faith you people seem to have in a little Midwestern girl and her fondness for foul language, politics, and hard-luck stories — not in that order,” she wrote on her personal blog.

Still, Cox was quick to note that “due to the astronomical costs of traveling with a campaign, I am pretty sure that amount will run short of covering the trail through election day.”

Not long after the pledge drive happened, Cox was picked up by the Washington Independent to continue providing reports from the McCain campaign.

Another blogger that recently started a crowdfunding drive is Jim Hopkins, a former USA Today reporter who writes the Gannett Blog as a watchdog to the newspaper chain and media conglomerate. For the past month Hopkins has been asking for $5 subscriptions from readers via PayPal, and raised nearly $1,500. But he had one particularly vexing problem: Most of his readers want to remain anonymous because they work for Gannett, so using PayPal would reveal who they are to him. To get around that problem, Hopkins set up a post office box to accept cash from them in the mail.

Hopkins told me he is trying to make money from Google AdSense ads, and is using online video to strengthen his appeal for funds.

“I had read that video is a good way to make an appeal because it’s more emotional,” he told me. “Until recently, my readers had not heard my voice or had a sense of who I was as a person. Just last week I figured out a cheap way to produce video, and people’s reactions have been interesting. They said I might have come across as a mean, anti-management person, but the video made me seem more like a real human being. So if I used it as a fundraising tool it could result in more money coming in.”

Hopkins is interested in using Spot.us to fund other story ideas, but he is worried that if he puts his pitches online, they could be scooped up by competitors.

“I have to think about ways to present my ideas without having them taken by someone else,” he said. “That’s an issue that Profnet has wrestled with for years; [it's a site] where a journalist presents a story to [potential] sources, but they have figured out a way around it.”

Supporting Crowdfunding Operations

While an independent blogger or journalist might raise funds from readers directly, it’s not something that comes naturally to most writers, who might have a gift for words but not business. That’s where the “hub” idea makes more sense, and a platform such as Spot.us — properly marketed — could help connect writers with potential funders, and handle financial transactions. That hub model has worked at Kiva.org for funding entrepreneurs in the developing world; at DonorsChoose.org for matching charities to donors; as well as entertainment sites such as Sellaband for funding bands directly and IndieGoGo for funding films.

Slava Rubin

IndieGoGo launched at Sundance last January, and has raised more than $70,000, with more than 800 film projects posted on the site. Filmmakers pitch the public, and they can then micro-finance projects. IndieGoGo takes a 9% cut of all donations, and donors do not share in the proceeds from the film, instead getting quirky “VIP perks” such as film credits or trips to the set. IndieGoGo co-founder and head of marketing and strategy Slava Rubin told me one filmmaker who made a documentary about Iraq gave donors strips of a Persian rug that came from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

Rubin thinks the crowdfunding model could work in journalism as long as the journalists can engage the right audience.

“If someone writes [a story about] corn in our energy supply, and they try to get money from people in Iowa, that could work,” he said. “You need to be able to engage your audience. You have to be closely connected to your niche, and take advantage of the tools out there to engage that audience. There’s Sellaband for music, and there are others, but you have to make a connection with the audience.”

Cohn told me Spot.us would try to become sustainable by asking for donations to support the overall operation at the point of sale for story donations. He said that’s been a successful strategy for Kiva.org, whose president told him that 79% of people giving money to entrepreneurs will give an extra 10% to cover the costs of Kiva.org’s operation. Cohn also would like to get money from advertisers in new ways.

“[Someone like] Macy’s could have a survey on our site, and Spot.us users can fill out a survey for them, and in return, they would get credit,” he said. “So instead of Macy’s giving money to a pitch, they would give it to users, and the users would decide where the money would go. I don’t know if it’s advertising, but it’s a win-win — the user gets real money to donate, the company gets a survey filled out. But that’s in the future.”

Jeff Howe

Wired contributing editor and “Crowdsourcing” author Jeff Howe told me that he was bullish on the crowdfunding model, because it takes much less effort to get someone to throw in a few bucks online than to do the free work of crowdsourcing. Howe thinks Spot.us has promise because of the low cost involved for freelance journalists.

“You just have to pay someone to write the piece, and as you and I know, a couple grand in our pocket will fund a week or more of reporting for us, and that’s what the Spot.us model is,” Howe said. “I’m really optimistic and hopeful for this as a model for journalism. We’re in such disarray right now, where the music industry was in ’02 or ’03, because of changing mediums and a fickle audience.”

One worry he did have was that journalism funders would expect a particular outcome from the story pitch — and would get upset if the result didn’t fit in their assumed world view.

“What you get with a newspaper is a convention to find the facts and write the story,” Howe said. “I’m not sure how that convention changes with crowdfunding. I expect that the writers will come back with stories that the funders wanted to see. There’s going to be an imperative — unconciously or not — to please the funders. And what we know of online communities is that they tend to gather around shared viewpoints and interests. Crowdfunding will work by tapping those communities and they are not disinterested, they will have an axe to grind. People who want you to investigate the local utility will already believe that the local utility is guilty of malfeasance.”

What do you think about crowdfunding efforts by Spot.us and RepJ? Do you think micro-donations can support local freelance stories or a long-term journalist covering a particular community or issue? What potential conflicts do you see with these operations and how much could they help bridge the gap in the changing business model for traditional journalism? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

October 24, 2008 – 8:59 pm PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins 9 Comments
The Grey Lady, as it’s called, might possibly be in the winter of its lifetime. `According to Henry Blodget’s calculations, the New York Times is burning cash much quicker than it’s making it, and this year might end up defaulting on their loans.  Their cash reserves sit at $46 million, and their gross income year over year is down by almost half. Additionally, according to SAI, the NY is “funding operations by rolling over short-term loans–the kind that banks worldwide are cancelling or making prohibitively expensive to save their own skins.”
Even though New Media barkers like myself have been predicting the downfall of Heritage Media for some time now, the news is no doubt going to be shocking to the public at large.
Not long ago, back in July or so, Duncan Riley wrote over at the Inquisitr that of all the failing Heritage Media formats, he saw the TV format hitting the crapper first. He wrote with a number of compelling reasons that I didn’t necessarily see as invalid, but after considering all the various trends felt the conclusion was in slight need of adjustment:
For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.
Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.
Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.
I hafta say, when I was making the prognostication, I wasn’t thinking specifically of the New York Times. After all, they’ve made significant investments into technology, have recently made themselves a real presence and participant in the blogosphere.

The problem remains, though, that they have a very top-heavy editorial structure, and need to make strategic cutbacks that will allow them to maintain the same editorial output without so much overhead. We talked about this on one of the last Mashable Conversations episodes that Sean and I put out.

I don’t think that the New York Times is un-savable, but I think that the print edition and the print-based business model is dead. If you need proof that a transition can be made, simply look to the tons of online-only publications that well into the black (like the one you’re now reading).

Clearly, the New York Times isn’t hurting for online traffic, and they’re a very monetizable brand. Very simply, they’re going to need to look at ways of producing the same type of content for less money. This likely means some segregation of the publication from it’s very top heavy corporate structure and a lot of their extraneous business units (like the Boston Red Sox) from the actual publication.
Once they’re able to re-focus on what they think their core business is (being the world’s publication of record), and doing it on time and under budget, they might be alright.