Building the ideal newsroom for the next 50 years

New business models for the Next Newsroom

Chronicle take-away: The session raised good questions for framing the issues, even if solutions seem scarce at the moment. (See top of Bill Densmore's notes.) --The group was generally skeptical of models that require users to pay for content. --Display advertising has been a traditional way for businesses and others to get information to the community, a service they were willing to pay for. How can a media organization use new technology to provide similar services --for example, the way the Bakersfield paper created a business directory?

These are Bill Densmore's notes on a session at the Duke Next Newsroom seminar in Durham, N.C., on Friday, April 4, 2008. The session, lead by Kathleen Sullivan, posed the question: What does new media mean for the business model?"

Sullivan began by eliciting from the group of about 12 people these questions for discussion:

How do we pay for journalism?

How do we set up our organizations to find the solution -- innovate, discover, adapt?

What is the appropriate way to engage journalists in this issue?

Who will hire journalists in the future?

Does the business side have other functions than bringing in revenue?

What are the transferrable skills of journalists?

Can journalists skills lead to other services offered by the entities which hire them?

We started the discussion talking about charging for a content service. Bill Densmore mentions Clickshare Service Corp., which he started, and declares that he has a conflict of interest in discussing the topic but just wanted to put it on the table as one method for paying for journalism.

Christian Oliver said he thinks advertising is the answer for the forseable future.

Oliver also said news organizations must do more than `improve' their editorial product with new media adaptations, as so many news organizations are doing these days. He clarified by drawing a comparison to soap: People are loyal to certain brands of soap, even though one soap brand probably isn't substantially better than another. A lot boils down to packaging, branding, marketing.

Beth Lawton of the Newspaper Association of America: NAA has done some research on the cost differences between print and online advertising. "The discrepancy is too great." "Online advertising is never going to cost $1,000 per . . . "How high is online going to be and how high will online advertising going to be and how many people will it support in a newsroom and it will support a much smaller number." "The cost of paper and trucks ... most of a newspaper's revenue goes to supporting the actual newsroom operation."

Dorothy Bland, who heads the Florida A&M journalism program and is a former Gannett publisher at Fort Collins, Colo.: Over 80% of the jobs are not in the newsroom -- there is elsewhere. There are major cost savings in other areas.

Beth Lawton:

What Bakersfield did -- they launched an inside guide, starting with restuarants, that didn't have websites. They weren't advertising online. So Bakersfield built them all a really simple web page. If they wanted to post their menu or coupons they had to pay extra. They combined it with social networking capability.

A comment by a person who's name I forgot to get:

"We have to ask ourselves about how we can be credit card companies, to skim a little information off everything. If we're the ones providing this great aggregated information."

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