Rick Burnes' Blog

News Is a Part of My Life, But Not as a Profession

Earlier this week somebody I respect asked if I ever thought about getting back into the news business -- trying to build Faneuil Media again.

The answer is unequivocally, no.

HubSpot is an extremely rewarding place to work; we are building something important, and it is filled with people I learn from.

Beyond HubSpot, there's a more fundamental reason I don't plan to go back to the news business: Today journalism is less a career path, and more something people just do. I was a photojournalist last night when I took pictures of the fireworks.  I was a trade journalist this morning when I posted video of a talk I gave last month. I was an editor yesterday when I linked to the Kremlin's video blog.

I got into the news business because I love to create content and help spread information. I can do that with my iPhone and my blog now, so there's no need to endure the spiritual and financial pain of work in a shrinking industry.

As Magdalena Georgieva, one of our many fantastic summer interns at HubSpot, put it in her job interview this spring, "news is always something that will be a part of my life, but not as a profession."

Same for me.

My Talk on Inbound Marketing in Appleton, WI

Last month the fantastic folks at Red Shoes PR in Appleton, WI, invited me out to participate in their seminar, Bottom Line: Social Media for Business. I had a great time, and enjoyed meeting everybody out there. (There's more on the event from a local tv station here.)

Here's a recording of the talk I gave, broken into two videos. (Special thanks to Ross LaRocco for sending me the files.)

Part I

Part II

Clambering on Board The Times?

This is a super video, and I'm optimistic about The Times' future, but one comment gives me the creeps.

Explaining his paper's current situation, Bill Keller says, "It's always been one of the higher aspirations in the business to work for The New York Times. Nowadays we're a little bit like the last ship afloat, so, you know, we have all these life boats floating around underneath us and people dying to clamber on board."

No, no, no!

People are not trying to clamber on board. They're not looking for an institution to save them. They're busy building their own boats, creating great content, solving problems and building small businesses on their own, independently.

(Here's the link to the video above for international folks who can't view Hulu.)

Bustling

Illustration by David Simonds

The Economist: In contrast to the doom and gloom coming from Europe’s biggest firms, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are cautiously optimistic. The main umbrella organisation for Germany’s more than 4m SMEs predicts that its members’ sales will contract by only 2% this year. The country’s renowned Mittelstand will therefore outperform the economy as a whole, which the government expects to shrink by 6%.

Why Display Advertising Is Dying

Steve Rubel: "Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it's peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways."

A Business Model for Content? Talk to Businesses.

Who will pay for content?

If you're a writer, a reporter, a film producer or some other sort of information artist, that's the billion-dollar question on your mind. The monetization schemes we've grown up with are deteriorating, and it's unclear where the next decade of pay checks will come from.

Lots of ideas are on the table (Jeff Jarvis recently summarized many), but most media makers are ignoring one strategy that is actually working: creating content for businesses.

I'm not talking about infomercials. I'm talking about content used as inbound marketing -- high-quality blogs, research and video that is useful and interesting to a business' customers. Businesses are finding that this type of media is an effective way of attracting potential customers to their web sites.

Consider the world of inside sales content. Ten years ago, the best way to monetize inside sales content was to publish it in a print magazine with advertising next to it. Today, companies that operate in this world have a huge incentive to create and publish content on their own. That's why some of the best sales content you'll find is on the blog of The Bridge Group, an inside sales services business.

This type of content has real business value. The HubSpot blog is currently generating about 400 or 500 leads a week for HubSpot's paid software package. Assuming we pay $10/lead for blog leads (and that's low, because the blog leads are very, very high quality), the blog is generating $4,000 to $5,000 in value for us a week. That's a model that works.

Of course, traditional media turns its nose up at content produced by business. Business content is biased and low quality, they assume.

But that's no longer true. Businesses now have an incentive to create high-quality content where bias is minimized and transparent. Businesses like HubSpot and The Bridge Group can generate lots of leads and traffic from content -- but only if readers embrace their content by linking and sharing.

I see this firsthand editing the HubSpot blog. The posts I'm not happy about (the ones I know will be less useful to our target customers) generate less traffic, links, leads and -- ultimately -- customers. That gives me a strong incentive to keep quality high.

Content produced by businesses isn't going to fill the gap left when newspapers disappear, but it will be part of the solution. If you're a content consumer, businesses will become an increasingly reliable source of information. If you're a content producer, businesses will become an increasingly reliable source of income.

Not a Growth Business

Terry Heaton (via Scott Rafer): "The problem is that the distribution of content isn’t the real problem for media companies; it’s the growing ability of advertisers to reach people without media companies. Advertising is the disruption that should trouble media companies, not what’s happening to their content. Ad-supported content is simply not a growth business anymore; it cannot provide sustainable growth, because the disruption isn’t about content."

And Noah Brier: "Put another way, it's the ability of brands to be their own media companies."

Don't Ask How to Save the Globe, Ask How to Replace It

This morning the Boston Business Journal reported that the Boston Foundation is discussing ways to help finance The Globe if it is shut down by The New York Times. It's a little unclear what the nature of the conversations are, but they seem to reflect the gist of conversations happening in public on the web: "Quick -- the sky is falling! How can we save the Globe?!?"

This is the wrong approach.

We shouldn't be asking how to save The Globe, we should be asking how we'll build its replacement.

The Globe has served us for years, but its financial dysfunction is staggering. It doesn't work any more. Period.

Instead of trying to prop up this dying system, our community needs to come up with new ways to make information public, share it and discuss it.

We're already seeing online substitutes for some pieces of The Globe. Red Sox commentary is ubiquitous, sites like Blue Mass Group have rich political discourse and there is a fair amount of local arts coverage on the web. Of course, it's not clear what will replace The Globe's hard news and investigative journalism. I believe there will be less need for original hard news reporting as primary sources do the reporting themselves, but there will still be a big hole, without a clear way to fill it.

There is one thing we can do: Experiment.

Instead of pouring one huge chunk of money into The Globe, The Boston Foundation should fund community news experiments. They should fund people like Adam Gaffin who are highlighting local blogs, sites like Somerville Voices that are organizing community discussions and local versions of the Sunlight Foundation that are helping make government data public.

The Knight Foundation's News Challenge is a great model for this approach. If the Boston Foundation started giving away grants to creative local news experiments, their inboxes would be stuffed with great ideas.

We're in the midst of a revolution. Blood is being shed. It's nasty out there.

The good news is that once we get through this rough patch, we're going to have an information ecosystem that is far richer, more diverse and more truthful than the one we have now. I'm looking forward to it.

P.S. If this issue is important to you, these recent posts by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson are required reading.

Desert to Jungle

Steven Johnson at South by Southwest: "The state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself."

The 50 Biggest Election-Season Buzz Generators

This chart, published in the March-April issue of Technology Review, is very cool. 

The image shows the 50 phrases that generated the most buzz during the last three months of the presidential campaign. The vertical axis is number of web items; the horizontal axis is date. 

This came from computer scientists at Cornell, but it seems like a harbinger of the type of text and meme analysis that will become common as the data and processing needed to do such work becomes easier to manage (see the work of Radian6, Crimson Hexagon and others).