What Is an Entrepreneurial Journalist?

Since my post Saturday about funding local investigative journalism through a non-profit local ad network, a few people have pointed out other ways to accomplish the same goal. Here's a run-down of my thoughts on each of the options:

Non-Profit Online Newspapers
Dan Kennedy and Adam Gaffin pointed out The New Haven Independent and MinnPost.com -- local online news sites structured as non-profits. These are interesting projects producing high-quality work, but I think they're trying too hard to be daily newspapers. A lot of the material they publish -- human interest stories like this and this -- is already being published on blogs. I think non-profits should focus more exclusively on what isn't appearing on blogs, hard news and investigative reporting.

An Endowment for Journalism
Another approach is to create an endowment that funds local investigative journalism. A process for selecting and editing the investigative projects would need to be developed, but that's it. The only risk is that contributors to the endowment expect control over the choice of investigative projects. Maybe this risk could be mitigated and costs could be saved by wrapping the endowment into an organization like MassInc or The Boston Foundation.

A Non-Profit Local Ad Network
This would be the most self-sufficient, community-controlled means of funding investigative journalism. An ad network would have lower-startup costs than an endowment, and once it's operational, publishers in the network would control the funding decisions. The risk is that the network isn't competitive with commercial networks, and can't generate enough money to sustain itself or achieve its funding goals.

I would love to see the endowment or ad network model developed in the Boston area. The endowment model is probably the safer and more tested of the two, but I think the local ad network could be more robust. An endowment would be a top-down solution controlled by a small group of people. A local ad network would be more like an open source software project -- a messy bottom-up solution controlled by its participants.

Suppose The Boston Globe closed its newsroom tomorrow. Where would we feel the impact most severely?

Not in sports -- or breaking news, opinion, slice-of-life stories, arts or business. The web is loaded with alternatives in those areas.

The challenge for the Boston area would be to replace The Globe's investigative reporting and hard news. The sites I linked to above are great, but none are doing the type of reporting that helped expose abuse in the Catholic Church. Independent publishers can rarely justify weeks of research or coding in order to produce a single piece of content.

So if the Globe continues to shrink, how will we as a community continue to give our institutions the scrutiny they need? Some say we're already seeing what happens when public scrutiny declines.

One solution is to create a non-profit local ad network to fund local investigative journalism projects. The network would be controlled by the community, and would have a small staff to sell ads, give grants to reporters, and manage the network. It would be a self-sustaining mechanism for funding investigative journalism.

Folks I've spoken with about this idea have raised two main questions:

(1) Why does the network need to be run by a non-profit?
The goal is to generate local income to fund local investigative reporting. In a for-profit company, even one that doesn't take money from investors, that goal would be eclipsed by the need to generate income for the business' owners. Google and family-run newspapers have been able to balance wealth creation and the public good, but those are monopoly businesses. Local online news is a hyper-competitive market. Any business dallying in unprofitable work like investigative journalism will be run over.

There's at least one other reason a non-profit makes sense: Many local publishers write for non-economic reasons. These publishers are more likely to work with an ad network created to achieve non-economic goals.

(2) Would the ad network be able to generate enough income to support itself and its goals?
I don't know yet. But there's reason to believe it could improve upon the AdSense revenue many local publishers currently receive. AdSense undervalues quality local web sites. Impressions and clicks on quality sites likes Our Daily Red should be more valuable than impressions and clicks on splogs like Dailyred.com, but with AdSense there's essentially no difference. A local ad network would help quality local publishers capture the full value they offer advertisers, the same way Federated Media does for national publishers.

What do you think? What are the challenges with this approach? How can we try something like this in Boston?

Yesterday somebody asked me to explain my thoughts on the future of news in a few sentences. Here's what I sent them:

I think the news industry is a paradox right now. On one hand, there
is almost no good news coming from old media companies: Circulation is
declining (http://tinyurl.com/6j37sh) and great folks are leaving the industry
(http://tinyurl.com/6s5acj). MSM outlets will only continue to get
smaller, and many will die.

On the other hand, we as consumers are getting more and better
information than ever before. Flickr, Yelp, YouTube, Blogger, Twitter,
etc, etc. provide content that is as rich, honest, and authentic as
MSM, often more so.  Also, the networks these tools are built into now
act as filters, so it's simple to find the best, most relevant stuff.

I think there's one big unanswered question: How will communities pay
for the type of investigative journalism and hard news coverage that
needs to be done, but that bloggers don't do? My hunch is that this
problem will be solved by open source/non-profit journalism projects.

Advice from Steve Yelvington, useful not only for j-school students: "Today's J-student should understand that the task is not to get a job and draw a paycheck, but rather to build a following."

This vignette in Bill Keller's speech for The Guardian last week caught my eye:

President Kennedy was furious at [David] Halberstam's aggressive reporting from the battlefields of Vietnam, and he complained to the publisher at the time, Punch Sulzberger, the father of our current publisher. Maybe, the president suggested, the Times should send Mr Halberstam to London or Paris. Punch Sulzberger was pretty new in the job, and had never encountered an angry president before, but he firmly declined. Then, and this is the part I love, when he got back to the office Punch sent Halberstam instructions to cancel his upcoming vacation. The publisher didn't want the White House to see Halberstam heading for the airport and get the idea that the Times was giving in.

It's a wonderful story meant to rally the troops -- to show the power of a financially healthy, civic-minded Times Company -- the Times of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and New York Times Co. v. United States, that as Keller says, is our  "institutional bulwark against powerful forces that would tame or silence us."

There's only one problem with this vignette today. When I think of the company that's really sticking it in the eye of the powerful, fighting today's Sullivan, I don't think of the NYT. I think of Google.

Yes, as Keller points out, The Times is still fighting the Bush Administration for its disclosure in 2005 of National Security Agency wiretapping. That is a huge, important battle, but to me it feels more abstract than than the battles Google is fighting. 

Google is the one pushing for net neutrality so that 9Neighbors can germinate without getting squashed by the Comcast Bundle. Google is the one fighting to make sure Verizon doesn't control the information I read and write from my mobile devices.

Google is no replacement for newspapers. Their record in China is spotty, and they certainly aren't doing the critical dirty work of FOIA requests and lawsuits that are still routine at places like the News-Press in Forth Myers, Fla.

That said, old-liners like Keller need to respect Google's values. Google is being built on precisely the same set of assumptions that The Times was built on -- that access to information makes our society better off.

The difference is only in scale: The Times publishes information itself, while Google enables everybody to publish information.

Earlier this week I went down to New York for the Networked Journalism Summit organized by David Cohn and Jeff Jarvis. In preparation for the event, David asked all the participants to answer a few questions about their work and background.

Here are the questions and my answers.

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

I’ve spent the last year and a half bootstrapping Faneuil Media, an online news startup. Initially, my partner Theo Burry and I focused on creating content for news sites using public data and open applications like Google Maps. Last year we broadened our scope with Atlas, a mapping tool that simplified map and data work for news sites.

Last week we launched our newest project, 9 Neighbors. 9 Neighbors is a local news filtering service for several Boston-area communities. The site uses social data — primarily relationships and browsing histories — to determine which bits of content are most useful to members of a community.

What are your goals?

We have two goals:
(1) To build a healthy, growing business.
(2) To make it easier to find quality, relevant information on a local (town and neighborhood) level.

Notable achievements?

The launch of 9 Neighbors is our most significant, concrete achievement. More broadly, we are proud to have enabled and been responsible for lots of online news experiments. Our mapping and and data projects on Boston.com, NYTimes.com and other sites were some of the first of their kind published on major news sites. Atlas, our mapping tool, made it possible for dozens of major newspapers and local news sites to begin experimenting with Google Maps and data. Our business has also been an important experiment, demonstrating one more approach to independent online news.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

We’ve learned that today it is very, very hard to build an independent business when your primary product is content. Content is abundant, and therefore cheap. Attention is scarce, and therefore valuable. This is why we’re now focusing on filtering tools, which help people use their valuable attention more efficiently.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We’re earning money from advertising, right now primarily from our mapping tool, Atlas. In the future, we expect 9 Neighbors to generate additional advertising income.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We just launched 9 Neighbors, so right now our focus is on getting feedback from users in our Boston communities, then iterating on the product. We’re also beginning to look at how we can partner with local publishers.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

I’m interested in speaking with people who are producing local content.

The folks in Baristaville continue to blaze the trail for local publishers ...

A few weeks ago I posted about Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks. I’m still thinking about the book. The more it filters into my consciousness, the more I see it as a turning point in my thinking about the work I do.

I got excited about journalism because I liked the work and I thought it was important. I enjoyed chasing down stories, meeting new people and writing. I also liked the feeling that my work was constructive – that by making people more aware of the community around them, I was helping solve problems.

Over the last ten years I moved from the newsroom to the web newsroom, from the editorial side to the business side, and from New Bedford, to Moscow, to New York and to Boston. At each step, my role as a journalist changed and my underlying belief in the importance of robust, independent news institutions grew stronger.

Benkler’s book marks a shift in my thinking.

The news organizations I grew up with controlled a critical information bottleneck. Only a handful of institutions had the power to collect news and report it to their community, so it was critical that those institutions be financially independent and civic-minded.

Benkler describes a new bottleneck. Today there is no shortage of news content, but access to that content relies on a precariously small set of pipes. There are dozens of bloggers writing about Cambridge and Somerville, but most of them rely on Comcast to access their presses. There are thousands of voices covering China aggressively, but many are blocked inside China.

The old news institutions needed to be strong enough to fight battles to publish their content – battles like New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and New York Times Co. v. United States.

Today’s Sullivan is Grokster. The question is no longer the nature of content that’s published, but the openness of the platforms it’s published on. It’s a battle that the aggregator or the network operator needs to fight, not the content producers.

This is a big change for me. News is in my blood, and I’ve been shaping a career around the importance of content-producing institutions.

I think news content is as important as ever, but I’m not as clear about the role of the institutions that produce it. More and more, the institutions that matter most to our society are the ones that enable individuals to produce and consume content.