A Prelude to the FTC workshops. Mark Dec. 1-2, 2009

The Federal Trade Commission is holding a series of workshops titled “Can News Media Survive the Internet Age?” Competition, Consumer Protection, and First Amendment Perspectives.” The first one debuts on December 1-2, 2009.

Susan DiSanti director of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning, paid a visit to our conference and offered a brief preview of the workshops to come.

Check out the press release at http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/08/news2009.shtm

“We’re very much in favor of competition,” DiSanti says, noting that as media evolves certain topics such as consumer and identity protection will be at the forefront.

Why the workshops?

“This is really our attempt to understand what is going on and move the discussion,” she says. “W e aren’t looking for a place where answers are found.”

Stay tuned.

Breakout Session by Ann Peters: News campaigns

We are into the whirlwind break out sessions, and I am sitting at the first one.

The discussion, led by Ann Peters of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is about how to get more high school students and college students interested in international stories and coverage, particularly at a time when media outlets are cutting back on global coverage and their international bureaus.

Huffington Post’s Steve Brant says, “one of the reasons why journalism is in trouble because it’s misreporting things.” Bottom line: they cover the bad things, but what about the good news and a better balance?   

Patricia Jane Berg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, is here at the conference to get more material for her classes.

John Boyer, executive director of oneblue.org asks if anyone has seen Frontline’s story about Pakistan. “All it focused on was the Taliban, it was real brave reporting, but a real downer,” he says. “We really live in this Rashoumon world, as Americans we’re just focus on how we’re going to get out of Taliban.”

“I think the hard part is how do you fill in the other parts that the news media doesn’t cover,” Boyer says.

Amy Korzick Garmer of The Aspen Institute says, in a global society and economy the key is to connect with reporters overseas, to develop sources etc. She notes that U.S. nws outlets are “shooting themselves in the foot” when cutting back on international coverage.

Okay, am headed to breakout session #2.

Staying Alive Part II

More highlights from the panel on sustaining journalism.

• Kachingle’s Cynthia Typaldos says advertising has failed journalism and Journalism Online’s Merrill Brown doesn’t agree. Brown says  strengthening advertising is crucial.
• “If you’ve got great content, people will be going to their site. Llet the tweeters tweet,” Typaldos says. “You can have the best of both worlds.”  

Here are some highlights from the  Q&A session.

• Huffington Post columnist Steve Blunt asks Walter  Issacson and fellow panelists to consider a face lift for content, and not just technology
• Allan Hoving of PaycheckR.com asks, what is the model? “I think different models will work differently, the great thing about the Internet is we have dozens of models…We should celebrate the diversity of choice we give for content providers and for users too,” Issacson says, noting that there’s tons of room for bundling, licensing and other potential experiments
• Brown and Typaldos both agree that overall simple is better than complicated when it comes to content or business models. ”You can not make it complicated, it needs to be no thinking…” Typaldos says.
• That said, Brown suggests that Gen Y, those under 30, still care and are voracious consumers of information. They just buy and consume it differently.  “We obvciously have a reinvention to do about price points,” Brown notes. 

Staying Alive: Discussion Heats Up on Sustaining Journalism

On a gray and rainy day in Washington D.C.  some 120 participants gather to share, discuss and debate thoughts, ideas and offer solutions to staunch the blood flow in the industry.

Newspapers are headed to the graveyards, and Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon’s Kindle, have changed the ways that news and information are decimated. Bottom line: How can the news industry make money, which is crucial to the survival of the industry and journalists themselves?

A very sharp audience for the first discussion on “The Strategic Landscape for Sustaining News.”

Lots of thoughtful questions from anti-trust issues, to consumer protection, to what the business models of 21st century journalism is i.e. paywalls, content, subscription, reinventing the reader model? What is the formula, the golden key, and the answers to stop the downspiral of newspapers and journalism, which started long before the economy went south?

The panelists included a number of media/new media’s movers and shakers including Walter Issacson the former editor of Time Magazine and now the head of The Aspen Institute, Cynthia Typaldos the founder of Kachingle, Matt Mankins of In-a-Moon, Scott Karp the co-founder of Publish2 and Merrill Brown one of the partners and co-founders of Journalism Online, LLC, which includes telecom bigwig like Leo Hindery.

Here are some discussion highlights:

• Merrill Brown and his team from Journalismonline LLC are creating a product where publishers can name their own price. “When we meet publishers we make the point that, what you do and how you price is your choice, but it may not save your business,” Brown says.  
• Issacson notes that the current news downspiral is “not  about saving journalism or more the informatin,” it’s about saving journalism and more importantly digital creativity.” Most journalists can’t afford to be hobbyists, and need a salary to survive.  
• Issacson notes that a solid business model requires a variety of business streams.
• Scott Karp points out that the news industry needs to come together to build their own news aggregator, and calls it a “big untapped opportunity.”  
• Cynthia Typaldos, a serial entrepreneur, restarted Kachingle, a site that allows consumers to contribut to their favorite websites, about a year ago, describes the newsconsumer of today as such:  “It’ all about me, me, me. the user. The prodcuer doesn’t set the price anymore the user sets the price.” “Now the user is the center of the universe,” she says.
• Typaldos adds that many users are now producers themselves, and recognize the value of content and the effort that it takes to make great content.”
• Typaldos isn’t a big fan of advertisers either, and belives that it played a role in the demise of newspaers.

I am fascinated with the discussions and moved by the amount of concern from citizens, journalists, academics, and community leaders. It may be rough waters in the industry, but it seems like we’re trying to ride out the storm together.

More to come…

The Tweeting Has Begun

The exciting discussions start on solutions, potential business models needed to sustain journalism.

LIVE Streaming of D.C. event now http://www.ustream.tv/chann… http://www.journalismtrust.org

Tweet hash #infovalet

Pre conference pasta and idea swapping…

“From Gatekeeper to Information Valet” is about to start. Let the blogging and Tweeting, and ideas begin.

Last night we had a great pre-conference gathering of about 15 participants at Notti Bianche, the Italian restaurant at George Washington University Inn.

 Had the chance to meet with Darren Burden, director of  news and sports at  Fairfax Digital Media in Sydney, Allan Hoving, founder of  PayCheckR.com and Steve Brant a columnist for The Huffington Post, who writes about media, politics and works in the Corporate Social Responsibility arena.

Over wine and pasta we chatted about everything from the usability of the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPhone, to news outlets’ struggle for the Holy Grail, a.k.a. a business model that works.

Allan is a veteran of the print world and has worked at places like Rolling Stone and New York Magazine. Allan recently launched PayCheckR.com with some partners. He promises to share some ideas on potential money-generating models for journalism.

Stay tuned.

 

Amy: Official Event Blogger Heads to D.C.

Hi folks, I am the official event blogger for “From Gatekeeper to Information Valet” conference at George Washington University.

Please check out www.journalistrust.org and stay tuned.

AUDIO: Google CEO addresses newspaper publishers in San Diego: On payments and ads

Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the closing address on Tuesday (April 7) to the Newspaper Association of America convention in San Diego. The talk was sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Click on the link below to go to and launch the audio, or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening. (54 minutes, 13MB) (The sound of keyboard clicking stops after the first few minutes)

CLICK HERE TO LAUNCH STREAMING AUDIO

The Poynter Institute website published a transcript of the Q&A portion of his appearance:
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=161441
And here’s the script of the Cover-It-Live real-time blogging of his talk:
http://www.newshare.com/ivp/google-schmidt.pdf

 The first question in San Diego at the NAA closing to Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked by RJI’s Roger Gafke. Here is the exchange:

ROGER GAFKE: You have mentioned the importance of advertising as the future but in your opening remarks you mentioned a bit about micropayments and subscriptions. Would you elaborate a bit on each of those other potentials?

ERIC SCHMIDT: I think you are going to end up with all three. An analogy I would offer is television — there is free over-the-air-television, there’s cable television and then there’s pay television. And they have smaller markets as you go from free to more highly paid. And that structure looks to use like roughly the structure of all of these businesses. Today there are very effective subscription-based models, but there are not very good micropayment systems, micropayments meaning 1-cent, 3-cent kinds of systems. They clearly need to be developed by the industry. So I think from your perspective you should assume that your information, if there is a category of information that you all produce that you’ll want to distribute free – freely – there’s a category of information that you’ll want to distribute on a per-click basis and then there’s some of it you’ll want subscription for. The reality [is] that in this new model, the vast majority of people will only deal with the free model and so you.ll be forced whether we like it or not, to have a significant advertising component as well as a micropayment and a traditional payment system. The technology around micropayments is getting to be possible now. The transaction costs were so high before that you couldn’t do the one-cent, three-cent kind of a model. It looks like the new technologies around aggregation will allow that at the payment level.

 

 

What happens to the bazaar and advertising in the InfoValet economy?

This week’s Monday Note offers data and insight about the trajectory of Google AdSense and AdWords, explaining how Google is contributing to the decline in advertising CPMs and revenues for news-based enterprises.

One notion of InfoValet is the creation of an interest-based ecosystem where you are more likely to see (perhaps at times ultimately **only** see) ads for things you have voluntarily profiled yourself as interested
in. A user-controlled system in which you can dial up or down the amount of advertising you see, how you are compensated for your attention, and whether you, at times, choose not to see ads at all. This ends the notion of “publishing” really — it’s a new world in which your InfoValet, rather than creating a mass marketplace and selling access to the bazaar, is helping you to find and “speak” directly with the vendor at his place of business. The InfoValet gets a commission for making the connection and the vendor gets the sale, or at least the user’s attention.

In such a network, the notions of advertising and news are remixed. If you find your way to a Ford Motor site, and Ford pays you 50 cents (directly or via your InfoValet) because you downloaded a brochure about a new hybrid Ford; or you find your way to Consumer Reports, and **you pay** to download a report on that hybrid Ford; what is the functional difference? Each represents a value exchange. The system must enable both. The integrity and ethics of these exchanges will be mediated by folks such as Newstrust.net, and perhaps by the system participants. This is why we need to teach news/media literacy in schools, and elsewhere.

AUDIO: The news social network — InfoValet explained in six minutes

How would a news social network work to sustain journalism, provider consumers better control over their privacy, and enable new forms of content sharing and benefits? Bill Densmore is a 2008-2009 fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. He is directing the Information Valet Project. In a six-minute excerpt from a recent conversation, Densmore explains in an audio clip how an InfoValet Service might work.  Click here to jump to a page for launching stream audio, or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening.  (6 mins., 11 seconds; 1.5 MB)