Don’t fixate on J-Lab’s experiment or what dailies are doing. The goal is to create a meaningful, smart, evolving collaborative network that enhances the community’s ability to inform itself, and to talk and learn together.
Our challenge in Asheville (or anywhere) is to come up with an excellent collaborative project, an information network. Make that several projects.
Some of the networks are already emerging, because they’re self-organizing (on Twitter and Facebook, for instance); others will be formally structured (ad networks? content networks for sharing, organizing, filtering, and interaction?).
“...part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.
Jarvis asks if newspapers can/should be owned by the community. In some ways, they should. But we have to come up a way to make this work within the capitalist system—which was built on valuing bricks and mortar, not information. Maybe media is evolving away from valuable newspapers (limited supply), giving way to millions of privately held publishing operations (unlimited supply), i.e., everyone with a blog or Twitter or Facebook account, each with smaller value. Then floating ephemerally amongst the millions of “publishers” will be the collaborative enterprises, the wikis, the community databases with APIs, the twitter public timelines, etc—all held in trust, in the public commons, or perhaps by nonprofits.
We can build these things in Asheville. We are building them. Mostly, we have to imagine the possibilities.
Jarvis asks if newspapers can/should be owned by the community. In some ways, they should. But we have to come up a way to make this work within the capitalist system—which was built on valuing bricks and mortar, not information.
Right there is where the entire thing catches fire on the launch pad.
They can be a part of the same thing. I’d argue they’d need to be, as such a project would need to have some mechanism for funding itself.
But what if there is no mechanism? That is what the second piece that Jeff posted is about, the way that newspaper publishers are trying to get people to actually pay for content. Once upon a time, local newspapers used advertising revenue to run the paper. The question is: Why does this no longer work? How is directly supporting a media company through membership or subscription fees substantially better than indirectly supporting them through advertising?
Would member supported media be freer from certain corporate restrictions in what is reported?
What if no one is willing to sign up? Do newspapers just quit and leave everything to the Perez Hiltons of the world? How are they surviving if major media outlets can’t?
Oh, that’s right. They don’t have to make millions to support shareholders.
OK, so how does that tie into hyperlocal news? What good is hyperlocal news? Is it the inverse of people caring more about the nation and the world than what is in their neighborhood? Will people now be so in touch with local road projects and weddings and film festivals that they won’t notice that town council just voted for a toxic waste dump
to be built next to the elementary school and staffed by some of the inmates from the brand new maximum security detention facility?
I think part of the point of this particular dialogue, mat, is how the Xpress can perhaps better utilize their potential as a hub for a particular ‘take’ on national, regional, and Local matters. Wow, see. I’m branded. Screw the big guys. i agree,t hat’s a bad joke watching them lumber abut. But smaller, independent news sites have a much better chance of coalescing a lot of the local and regional internet news info word-junky types.
Perhaps because the big guys are clearly dying, this seems like an obvious direction to take.
Steve Shanafelt - 01 September 2009 07:40 PM
The (PFKaP) - 01 September 2009 06:45 PM
Is it really that different, though? You make money by selling ad space, right?
I was thinking the TOTALFark member model—Fark gets nearly a fifth of its funding that way—as combined with targeted and local ads.
Is it really that different, though? You make money by selling ad space, right?
I was thinking the TOTALFark member model—Fark gets nearly a fifth of its funding that way—as combined with targeted and local ads.
Yes.
But what do you get with TOTALFark membership? Not a tote bag. Not a coffee mug. You actually pay for crummier content, since it’s the full on firehose of crap submitted and not the “greenlit” links of the main page.
What’s the value of that? Bragging rights to your non-TOTALFark friends?
yes, but they also get a big chunk of their revenue from advertising, so even without a ‘membership” (agreed-lame), there is revenue potential for a site that can generate enough traffic.
yes, but they also get a big chunk of their revenue from advertising, so even without a ‘membership” (agreed-lame), there is revenue potential for a site that can generate enough traffic.
Which is good for a large site like fark. We’re talking about the Shitizen-Times here.
There are serious issues with scalability and sustainability which are not being addressed. The J-Lab experiment is just one more way the traditional media are just another Yossarian, realizing too late that they’ve spent too long patching up the wrong wounds.
Yes. Absolutely. But the Xpress has an opportunity to be a counterpoint to that lumbering. At least, if jeff can convince the others at xpress that the newspaper industry is undergoing serious changes.
I think the Xpress could easily be a hub in a small, local/regional version of the early FARK model. Pull in enough viewers from all around the south east and even up north a bit, as well as some national and international attention for when asheville gets voted best place to be old and opulent, or when a steroid-poppin cop gets all storm-trooper-ey. I dont think this current site is too far away, really. I just think some adjustments and changes have to occur with the way its packaged and promoted.
Bragging rights, status within the user community and exclusive access to some content. It’s the same thing SomethingAwful has been selling for almost a decade, and it’s worked OK for Lowtax.
But the thing is, it also works for people like Bill O’Reilly (http://www.billoreilly.com/membership), basically selling content he already has (video from before and after his shows, a podcast, user-voting enabled, private messaging and some other crap) to people for $5 a month.
OK, so how does that tie into hyperlocal news? What good is hyperlocal news? Is it the inverse of people caring more about the nation and the world than what is in their neighborhood? Will people now be so in touch with local road projects and weddings and film festivals that they won’t notice that town council just voted for a toxic waste dump to be built next to the elementary school and staffed by some of the inmates from the brand new maximum security detention facility?
I’d argue that hyperlocal news is FAR more important to most people’s daily lives than most of the stuff in any newspaper out there, even the heavy hitters. Most news is fluff, sensationalism or pandering. But when you LIVE in the city, what happens there actually impacts your life. And, unlike national issues, almost any individual in a community can create real change, or at least influence the discussion, on a local level.
But the big media companies have had a monopoly on local content for so long, and created a form based on easy-to-reproduce wire stories, that people have forgotten that most newspapers were locally obsessed for most of history. It’s only in the last few decades as newspapers have consolidated to combat TV and radio (and now the internet) that the national-topic news has been such a focus. And local news isn’t as cheap for these companies as wire news, so even when they’re losing money, they don’t have much direct incentive to invest in local reporting.
But a web-based, hyperlocal, leanly staffed journalism project should be able to generate some kind of membership-assisted business model. WCQS and WNCW both do fund drives, and it’s basically the same idea. Actually, it’s not that far removed from a merch table for a band. I mean, what’s a band t-shirt or bumper sticker if not a status item? Give ‘em something to buy into to support something they believe in, and some percentage of people will do just that. The rest get to look at ads and feel slightly guilty.
yes, but they also get a big chunk of their revenue from advertising, so even without a ‘membership” (agreed-lame), there is revenue potential for a site that can generate enough traffic.
Which is good for a large site like fark. We’re talking about the Shitizen-Times here.
There are serious issues with scalability and sustainability which are not being addressed. The J-Lab experiment is just one more way the traditional media are just another Yossarian, realizing too late that they’ve spent too long patching up the wrong wounds.
True. Not to mention that they almost certainly don’t have the existing IT and web infrastructure to implement significant changes to their actual website without Gannett’s corporate approval. Most of that stuff is almost certainly dictated from the upper management, and I suspect they’re pretty much handcuffed when it comes to developing new initiatives.
And there’s no reason to think that the AC-T’s management even knows how to implement the blog-network model into what they do. I’d argue they really can’t, because there’s two very different content philosophies at work, not to mention two very different business models. Even if it could work in some theoretical sense, I don’t think I’d turn to a corporate chain for my proof of concept.
Say tomorrow the AC-T decided to close do the SeattlePI thing, and close down their entire print operation, keeping only a small team of reporter/editors and a skeleton crew of IT, web and ad people. As they exist now, do they have the knowledge and talent to actually make it work? I’m deeply skeptical that they do, and I think it’d likely fail as soon as the cash reserves ran out.
But I think that the core of Xpress could survive that scenario—not that it wouldn’t be tough—and with far less impact on content from the web-reader’s point of view.
Bragging rights, status within the user community and exclusive access to some content. It’s the same thing SomethingAwful has been selling for almost a decade, and it’s worked OK for Lowtax.
But the thing is, it also works for people like Bill O’Reilly (http://www.billoreilly.com/membership), basically selling content he already has (video from before and after his shows, a podcast, user-voting enabled, private messaging and some other crap) to people for $5 a month.
Each of those examples is drawing from a pool of millions of users who have some irrational sense of attachment to non-local issues. None of them deals in hyperlocal stories and so the model cannot be said to work for hyperlocal unless members are asked to pay exorbitant fees. O’Really probably makes nice money from five bucks a month from half a million people but can the AC-T manage that? Probably not, they’d have to ask for a half million from their five subscribers.
I’d argue that hyperlocal news is FAR more important to most people’s daily lives than most of the stuff in any newspaper out there, even the heavy hitters. Most news is fluff, sensationalism or pandering. But when you LIVE in the city, what happens there actually impacts your life. And, unlike national issues, almost any individual in a community can create real change, or at least influence the discussion, on a local level.
But the big media companies have had a monopoly on local content for so long, and created a form based on easy-to-reproduce wire stories, that people have forgotten that most newspapers were locally obsessed for most of history. It’s only in the last few decades as newspapers have consolidated to combat TV and radio (and now the internet) that the national-topic news has been such a focus. And local news isn’t as cheap for these companies as wire news, so even when they’re losing money, they don’t have much direct incentive to invest in local reporting.
It’s far more important only if it addresses some actual issues. I agree completely with your assessment of local news as fluff and how big media companies have obfuscated local news gathering and reporting. I also think you have either recently taken a media history course or read a book (something I honestly wish I could say). Anyway, the issue is not is hyperlocal better than regulocal (see, I can coin BS words too and I am not a high-powered research group) news - that is the kind of debate that Americans have all the time and it is pointless meandering around a real issue.
The question is: How much better could hyperlocal news be? Again, will it be mired in fairly unimportant minutiae or will it present local issues to people who have, for decades, been led to believe that every burp, sneeze and fart in state houses and federal government offices is vastly more important than the insane things that happen in town and county government? After all, it was not the US Congress who gave Wal-Mart and Target such fabulous tax shelters in order to ruin the Mom and Pop stores.
But a web-based, hyperlocal, leanly staffed journalism project should be able to generate some kind of membership-assisted business model. WCQS and WNCW both do fund drives, and it’s basically the same idea. Actually, it’s not that far removed from a merch table for a band. I mean, what’s a band t-shirt or bumper sticker if not a status item? Give ‘em something to buy into to support something they believe in, and some percentage of people will do just that. The rest get to look at ads and feel slightly guilty.
I suppose I am alone in routinely editing my localhost file so that I don’t even have to see ads, and I know I must be alone in not feeling the least bit guilty for being a member of NPR or PBS. In particular, those two institutions receive funding from tax monies. Yes, I absolutely know that they do not get enough money from the government and half their funding is from listeners. Again, they are pulling from a pool of millions. I have no idea how it works for WNCW or WCQS play out (WCQS claims that a majority of their funding is from members but I cannot find a clear breakdown of their funding, you’d think they’d be more open about that).
I think the MountainX would get better support than the AC-T but the Xpress is often a better news source.
I’m not saying that member support isn’t useful but I am saying that it won’t ever come close to replacing ad revenue assuming that business models are an issue and profit is the goal (I have made my feelings on profit clear elsewhere on the forum) for making sure that the thing stays afloat.
I could be completely wrong, here (and I will admit that) - especially sense I am arguing out of a sense of wanting to cover bases. I don’t have numbers in hand. No one is putting forth a business model or income projections out here for us all to look at. It’s all conjecture so you can treat my posts as conjecture, too.
