JD Lasica Socialmedia.bizjd@socialmedia.bizApril 23, 2010

Social & Entrepreneurial:The paths to tomorrow’s journalism

Relax!

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Presentation at http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

Today’s hashtag

Tweet this talk! Hashtag: #ncf10

Creative Commons photo on Flickrby Prakhar

What we’ll cover today2 simple propositionsThe new new news ecosystem

• Social media overview & cultural norms

• Rise of social media & impact on journalism

Social journalismEntrepreneurial journalism

• Innovation imperatives (take a page from Facebook)

• New skills, new media forms

Geolocation: New forms of visual storytellingExamples: Tomorrow’s news todayFearless predictions, closing thoughts

“Information is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air,

safe streets, good schools and public

health.”

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy,

October 2009

Proposition 1

We need trustworthy news

Everything about news is changing:

The way it’s produced

The way it’s distributed

The way we consume it

Who’s a trusted news provider

Conventions of journalism (NPR as advocate for Haiti relief efforts)

What “news” means

Proposition 2News is undergoing its biggest,

messiest change – ever

The new new news?

A contrast in fortunes

Daily U.S. newspaper circulation fell 10.62 percent in the most recent 6-month period (April-September 2009). USA Today circulation fell 17.5%, New York Times fell 7.3%, San Francisco Chronicle fell 25.8%. (Chron: newsroom of 575 in 2000, 160 today.)Average daily paid circulation fell to 30.39 million in Sept. 2009 from a high of 63.3 million in 1984.

Social media’s ecosystemAlmost 1 million blog posts per day; over 346 million people globally read blogs

6 of top 10 websites in US are social sites (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Blogger, Craigslist)

Twitter: 108 million registered users; 300,000 new users a day; 180 million unique visitors a month

Facebook: 400 million members

Flickr: 35 million people have posted & tagged 3 billion-plus photos

Wikipedia: 10 million users have contributed

YouTube: 1 billion-plus videos served per day

Whenever someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for social reasons

Cultural norms of social media

Premium on sharing

Transparency

Conversation expected

Mistrust of traditional authority figures & marketers

Instead: trust in peers, people like ourselves — even strangers

It’s not about the technology, it’s about connecting people.

Trust is easily gained and easily lost.

Credit/attribution given

Collaboration

New spate of newspapers’ social media policies:

Big Media’s suicide pact

Do not engage without permission

Do not be open

Do not be personal

Read the policies for yourself at: socialmedia.biz/social-media-policies

Creative Commons photo by Bombardier

on Flickr

News as finished productLecture, authoritativePassive consumersOne to manyCorporate/autocraticClosedExclusiveCentralizedElite professionalsInstitutional voiceHeavily filtered

News as a process/serviceConversation, participationEmpowered usersMany to manyDemocratic, collaborative, messyTransparentSharedDistributedGrassroots, peer-focusedPersonal voiceUnfiltered/lightly filtered

Old Media values Social Media values

News as a social experience

To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience. ...

Getting news is often an important social act.

• 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites

• 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people they follow.

• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commentary about it, or dissemination of news via social media.

“Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” Report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 1, 2010

“

”

Social journalism

Elements of social media applied to journalism:Blogging ... Twitter ... Facebook ... Comments ... Widgets ... RSS ... Video sharing ... Photo sharing ... User-created content ... Ratings ... User reviews ... Tagging ... Social bookmarks ... Live streaming & chat ... Presentation sharing ... Geolocation services ... Forums ... Community membership ... Social news sharing sites ... Wikis ... Texting ... Meetups ... Shared calendars

Entrepreneurial journalism

Entrepreneur (än-trə-prə-ˈnər)

A person engaged in the art or science of innovation and risk-taking for profit in business

Creative Commons photo by kyz on Flickr

Entrepreneurial approach

Build things that are useful & have value

Study marketplace, define goals, write business plan

Embrace risk

Launch pilot projects

Measure results

Make tough choices

Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!

Make mistakes, forgive yourself, move on

Creative Commons photo by parl on Flickr

Cost of innovation

Technorati: estimated $36 million investment over 8 years

Dabble: $1.7 million over 4 years

Wellness Mobile: essentially zero startup costs. Test it out, offer shares to programmers, if it flies, you take funding.

0

10

20

30

40

2002 2006 2010

Investment cost (in millions)

Innovation = IteratingFacebook in 2005

“The idea is launch early and iterate. Early on, I didn’t just start Facebook as a company. It was a project that I wanted to exist. It’s amazing how much stuff we messed up.” – Mark Zuckerberg, 10/09

New skills for journalists

Conversation facilitator & stimulator

Multimedia guru

Evangelist

Curator

Data gatherer

Geek!

Metrics nerd

Entrepreneur/strategist

Storyteller, yes, but also:

Photograph by Tristram Kenton © The Really Useful Group Ltd.

If I were launching a news site

Geo-targeted news

Conversation

Data-driven tools

Open APIs

Rewards & incentives for participation

It would contain these elements:

More attention to real-time Web

Lots of real-world meet-ups

Explore multiple verticals

Community brain

Tagging thereal worldThe emerging mobile marketplace will require evergreen content from trusted sources of vetted information.

But you can enlist schools, partners and readers to help create a digital community encyclopedia.

Wikitude AR Travel Guide for Android G1

The Web is a database

Local news pubs’ competitive advantage: Data!

The new newsrooms need more coders

Value in building structured evergreen data — need a city guides 2.0

Journalists can bring meaning to info-jungle

Enlist local citizens to maintain the living database

But it needs curating!

The power of open APIs

Open APIs = enlist community to hack & contextualize content

YourMapper.com has licensed its mapping technology to news publications & waged a battle to open up public records in Ky.

News organizations are logical hub of community data around schools, hospitals, prisons & more.

Give the public access to public records

YourMapper founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle

Don’t know APIs? Go to: http://socialbrite.org/glossary

New tools for new needs

OpenStreetMap.org: Open source “Wikipedia of maps”; community builds own using GPS traces and donated satellite imagery.

Creative Commons

Google Earth has an API

News orgs can layer photos over Google Maps

Resources to explore

The Decline: The Geography of a Recession by LaToya Egwuekwe

Online visualization tools

Check-ins at SXSWi

SimpleGeo.com

Traditional media

Who does tomorrow’s news?

Reimagined media

Professional journalists at newspapers, TV & radio stations

Citizen publishers

Alternative & community news publications

Twitterers, Facebookers

Bloggers

Podcasters

Advocacy groups

Nonprofits

Corporations

seattlepi.com

Early trailblazers

Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed print publication in March 2009 with 170 staffers.

Relaunched as online-only site with 40 staffers, 20 in editorial.

chicagonow.com

Early trailblazers

Initiative from Chicago Tribune.

Aggregates over 300 local blogs.

10,000 registered users and 3.2 million page views per month (Oct. 2009).

texastribune.com

Early trailblazers

Nonprofit, nonpartisan public media organization

Produced by veterans of Texas Monthly & Texas Weekly

Twitter & blog widgets

Not just a publication: They put on public events, sponsor & record a conversation series w/ elected officials, hold an ideas festival, sponsor a college tour

Early trailblazers

ProPublica, nonprofit investigative journalism site, winner of 2010 Pulitzer Prize

MinnPost.com, nonprofit news site launched in 2007. Operating loss in 2009: $125,000 on expenses of $1.2 million; $675 in revenues from donations, ads, sponsors

VoiceofSanDiego.org, nonprofit news site

Spot.us, crowd-funded journalism

Patch.com, for-profit network of sites for communities under 50,000 people, claims to operate at 4.5% of cost of newspapers.

Huffington Post creating a nonprofit investigative journalism arm.

Jim Brady launching a DC news site

Groundreport.com

Early trailblazers

Community builder

here’s an amazing difference between building an audience and building a community. An audience will watch you fall on a

sword. A community will fall on a sword for you.

— Chris BroganAuthor,“Trust Agents”

Trends: Niche news + community

A Food Coma The StupidCancer Show

Spouse Buzz

Predictions: Old media500 of the 1,408 daily U.S. newspapers will suspend print publication in next five years. Most will go out of business.

Cause of death: failure of imagination.

The impact will be highly disruptive of communities in short term, but new emergent journalism enterprises will sprout up.

We’ll see isolated success stories of pay walls, nonprofit news models, crowdsourcing. But these, as well as micro-payments & government subsidies (& blogging!), won’t sustain in-depth/community/investigative journalism.

“I’m a genius, but I’m not a miracle worker. ... I wasn’t put on earth to save The New York Times. I was put on earth to restore a sense of childlike wonder to people’s empty, pathetic lives.”— Fake Steve Jobs

The iSavior? Um, no

Predictions: New media

Emerging from ashes of the news industry will be a vibrant news ecosystem with smaller players that are more social & entrepreneurial.

Blogging, crowdsourcing & nonprofit news sites cannot take place of newspapers by themselves — but they will be part of news ecosystem.

We'll see hyperlocal news aggregators take slice of local advertising pie: EveryBlock, Outside.in, Fwix, Topix.net

But: They don’t have resources to go deep. Legacy news publications should own hyperlocal markets — but largely won’t.

Reimagined media: When the rules are up for grabs:

Prediction: Trust disruption

Investigative journalism with a catch: Mark Cuban & Sharesleuth.com

TechCrunch: April Fools a day early

Kontera embeds text ads as part of your blog posts

March 31, 2010

Closing thoughtsYoung people don’t read newspapers, but they’re enormous consumers & sharers of news. The Mobile Generation: Hire them. Observe them. Listen to them.

If every business is a media business, do what no one else can easily replicate in your community or region.

To be relevant in the new age, create a startup culture, practice social journalism— and innovate!

Leverage the community. Retool focus to serve as guide, curator, data jockey & aggregator as well as content creator.

Bring journalistic standards & values into this new space.

Help communities tell stories in authentic ways.

JD LasicaFounder, Socialbrite.orgSNCR senior fellowemail: jd@socialbrite.orgTwitter: @jdlasicajdlasica.com/about/

Thank you! Let’s talk!

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Presentation at http://slideshare.net/jdlasica