Thinking of going entrepreneurial? Then you should go to news:rewired
Journalism.co.uk’s up and coming event news:rewired in January 2010 looks like it’s going to be a promising platform to debate an entrepreneurial future for journalism.
I’ve written an article for the event, looking at three ways for journalists to find ideas for news startups, and in particular, I argue:
[idea for new businesses] must start in the market. They must start with a problem the market has, which you can fix; a service the market needs, which you can offer; a product the market wants, which you can produce.
Entrepreneur Mike Southon asks “where’s the pain?” and builds a business idea from there: is there something people moan about having to do or not being there?
If you don’t start with the market, and the pain it has, you risk peddling a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
You can read the rest of my article here. Meanwhile, the News:rewired site also has profiles of five UK journalist/entrepreneurs, and 10 tips for would-be journalism entrepreneurs; the event itself looks like it’ll be a promising hotbed of business ideas and debate.
I’ll be speaking at news:rewired on the 14th January 2010, alongside a host of interesting journalists on the front line of the digital revolution. You can get tickets from the news: rewired website.
In other news
I’ve popped up in Newsleader’s “Talkie Awards” for 2009, a great roundup of the best of radio in the last year; and the 2nd Future of News Meetup Group has been announced for London on the 20th January 2010.
A wealth of journalism inspiration from New York
I’m sure most readers of this blog also follow US new media giant Jeff Jarvis’ blog over at Buzz Machine.
Jeff was telling us the future of journalism is entrepreneurial before anyone had really considered it and Buzz Machine is a hive of interesting writing. Today Jeff posted the results of an Entrepreneurial Journalism class where his CUNY students have been pitching their own business ideas.
For obvious reasons he’s not giving much away, but what he did reveal about the pitches that won some development cash (and those that didn’t) offers some excellent inspiration and ideas to the rest of us:
The four ideas that won some money from the McCormick Foundation are (emphasis mine)
- a platform for news assignments
- a mobile sports application
- a creative, algorithmic answer to filter failure
- and ClosetTour a new media site dedicated to fashion
And those that didn’t:
- a specialised womens travel service
- a specialised local real estate (property) service
- a cool food idea
- 2 business-to-business ideas
- a hyperlocal idea
- a service for NGOs
- a commercial service for NGOs
What’s great is the huge variety of ideas – covering news, fashion, food, sport. What’s more as Jeff notes:
A few were built around the need not just to create content but to curate it. Most are highly targeted. Some saw the potential in specialised local services. Some saw the need to go mobile to service the public. Some are international. Some are multimedia. A few saw the need to make news fun, others to make news useful.
And Jeff stressed the need for every business to cut a profit in order to survive. We must be capitalist about it now.
Anyone outside of CUNY or the US should read this and take inspiration. Although Jeff’s descriptions are necessarily vague, use them to fuel your own ideas and thoughts for entrepreneurial models. Think about the importance of serving a market, having a niche, finding a gap in the market – and being able to sum up your business in an elevator pitch.
Earlier today a friend showed me plans for an exciting news business in the North of England, which I can’t say anything about at the moment. But all this adds strength to my conviction that, if 2009 was the year of “great media collapse” then 2010 will be the year it rises from the ashes.
Talking the future of news
This week we held the first Future Of News Meetup in London.
A small but interesting mix of people turned up: journalism students, academics, publishers, photojournalists, news producers and seasoned hacks: a small fraction of the 140 people who have joined the group so far.
Although it was a casual first meeting, conversation soon turned to the crisis in journalism and the digital revolution, with paywalls and citizen journalism being thrashed out by the bar.
I set the group up in November, with the idea of bringing together journalists, academics, students and entrepreneurs to a free, regular forum to talk about new ideas which will define the future of news.
You can read more about it here, and if you’d like to join and come to more formal meetings in 2010 sign up here.
Photographs: Megumi Waters
The future of the Photobook?
Photo: Sarah Foye Photography
The very smart and forward-thinking people over at Livebooks are wondering what the next 10 years hold for the photobook.
Through their RESOLVE blog they’re creating a collaborative blog post asking people to think ahead to 2019. They ask these key questions:
What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?
Click here if you want to contribute too.
Online or off?
Whether Photobooks will exist online or offline will be something fiercely debated as they develop. Some say, quite passionately, that the book will always survive because it is a physical, tangible product and about so much more than just the words or pictures. James Higgs for example wrote last month:
A book is a guarantee of permanence, and of ownership. There is no DRM baked into the printed word, and nothing stopping me reading a book I own whether I am in the middle of the Sahara or on my sofa. There is nothing stopping me lending it to a friend, and I don’t need to worry whether their reader device supports ePub, or whatever format.
When I buy a book, I’m buying a physical, real world object that has properties that can be appreciated beyond the words it contains. It can be beautifully bound, use attractive design elements, have respect for typography, and use the physical properties of the medium as part of the content.
But I was speaking to an innovative book publisher in London this week who’s convinced despite this books will all move online and he’s looking at new distribution models to that effect.
I think in 2019, the future belongs to both. If the Kindle and other mobile readers can keep up, they may offer an equally pleasant reading experience. A physical product will of course be so much more expensive to produce – and therefore buy.
Mobile
One thing is certain though, the future of the Photobook is mobile. Simply because the future of every other form of publishing is mobile too. By 2012, the sale of smartphones is expected to outweigh laptops as we become a society who want things on the move. Photobook publishers need to be prepared for this, and thinking towards apps which deliver high quality photographs.
Even my dear old Mum now reads most of her books on her iPhone.
The great thing about apps is you can sell the product, but then also charge (a small amount) for the app.
Multimedia
And being a multimedia journalist I also firmly believe the photobook in 2019 will be a multimedia product.
In what way? Well, we’ve already seen the power of the audio slideshow demonstrated time and time again: the combination of audio and photography is hugely potent and photographers should be looking to tool up on producing great audio to capitalise on this.
So you’ll open your photobook on a Kindle or equivalent, scroll through the electronic pages and click on an icon to hear the subject of the photograph speak, or hear natural sound.
They won’t be a slideshow as such – the great thing about photobooks is you can move through them at your own pace.
An exciting future
Does the photobook have a future, with so much other distractions? Yes. Among the cacophony of new media, social media, web 2.0 blah, blah, a solid foundation is emerging of people who want and appreciate awesome content. Attractive, well designed, well shot, well written content.
Sure, there are millions more photographs in the world than ever before, but most are bad quality, and all are seen in some small 720×526 compressed format. By 2019 people will be crying out for photographs presented in a way that sucks them into a new world. That’s always been the power of the photobook, and that power – I think – will continue.
So tool up, learn new multimedia skills, get your head around mobile…but at the end of the day go out and practice taking the most beautiful photographs ever.
Idea 004: the rise of the blogazine
In this series I’m compiling a list of creative, tangible, practical ideas for journalism which will emerge from the digital revolution. If you have any suggestions for future features, contact me. Previous entries include:
002: students as investigators
Idea: Powering a Green Planet
By: Mark Z Jacobson, Mark A Delluci & Scientific American
An apt subject as the COP15 meeting gets underway in Copenhagen this week. Powering A Green Planet, featured in the Scientific American in November, explains a radical idea on how to stop global warming, put forward by two scientists.
They reckon if we embraced renewable energy head on, we could power the planet on 100% clean energy, in just 20 years. That’s a bit better than the current targets, right?
It’s an enjoyable, interesting and convincing read. But let’s get down to the future of journalism nitty-gritty.
The Scientific American utilised multimedia platform Flyp to produce the piece. It is arranged and designed as an attractive magazine, so you can literally turn the page, with lots of video, graphics and text moving on the screen.
It is beautifully designed, with lots of space on the page. Crucially, this piece never feels too cluttered: it always feels like there’s just enough information on the page…but not too much.
It’s interactive too, with lots of buttons to click on, video to watch and audio to hear. The complicated science bit is explained in colourful graphics.
This is challenging scientific information made digestible and accessible. And there is value for the consumer in this too, perhaps one they’d pay for.
The blogazine
The idea of the interactive magazine is still in the embryonic stages. It has a blog counterpart too, the blog-azine, a small but growing trend of bloggers who chose to make every single blog entry a unique design masterpiece, tailored to the particular subject of the blog.
For example, British web designer Gregory Wood designs each blog post individually, creating stunning pages like this:
In a recent feature, Smashing Magazine said blogazines were great because they stopped you:
“Slipping into the habit of typing up your thoughts and clicking “Post,” without thinking about the layout of each article… By taking a little extra time for the art of blogging, your creativity will increase with your efforts”
but also admitted:
“…building a custom layout requires some experience with CSS and HTML…style borrows many elements from print design, anyone who has worked only in Web design may find it difficult to change their way of thinking. Rules of typography and white space, for example, may throw you off. But practice makes perfect, and an endless supply of inspiration can be found in creative magazines.”
A business model?
This is a surprisingly new way of delivering content. It’s amazing isn’t it, that this far into the web 2.0 world, this far since the development of flash, CSS, J-Query and easy to deliver multimedia, 98% of online news is delivered just like this blog: there’s a title, some text, if you’re lucky- a picture or some video embedded. Which leads us to the big question: can making your content stand out make any money?
This has yet to be proved, but I really think it has potential….but its future lies in mobile. In the advent of the Kindle and other OLED readers these interactive experiences could really kick off, because they gain so much value from a touch screen. Imagine being able to sit on the subway with a newly downloaded copy of your favourite magazine, in exciting interactive form! You can flip the pages, click to watch video, audio and drag graphics around.
And if they’re produced as well as the Scientific American, your sleepy commuter eyes won’t skip over long drawn out paragraphs of text, because it would have been made so accessible.
In the meantime there could be room for an ambitious start-up willing to combine magazine design with innovative content. Again if it looks like nothing else on the internet it could soon grow an audience.
This technical sublime I firmly believe the consumer will pay for. But it relies on a visual sublime too – it has to look good. Style over substance? Maybe.
The sooner designers and journalists start talking to each other, the better.
Your chance to get involved in the future of news
There’s lots and lots of talk about the future of journalism at the moment.
You can read it on blogs like this one, this one and this one.
You can occasionally read something new in one of the papers, like this one.
You can even pay some money and go to conferences.
And while they are all fantastic hotbeds for debate, they’re not really regular enough to be good forums for that most crucial currency of all: new ideas.
That’s why I’ve set up a new meet-up group to get things moving.
It’s called the UK Future of News Group. If you are in the UK, or even better, in London then please think about joining and coming along to an informal meet up. It’s free, and you don’t even need to be a journalist- just interested about the future of journalism.
It’s perfect for bloggers, J-students, young journalists, J-entrepreneurs, hyper-locallers, lecturers not to mention seasoned old hacks. You could be working online, in print, on radio or with a camera.
The first meet-ups going to be in a bar near Waterloo, on the 7th December.
(hopefully avoiding any early Christmas parties)
What it isn’t, is an arena to repeatedly lament the death of print, or the end of quality journalism, or to go around saying “paywalls must be the answer, journalists have got to eat!”
What it is, is a place where people can think positively, about tangible new ideas to determine the future of journalism. I hope someone will pitch a few ideas which we can all thrash out and stew over.
And maybe one of them will come up with the next big thing.
But most of all, I want it to be a forum where we can all have a say on the future of our craft, without having to pay hundreds in conference fees.
Interested? Sign up now!
The future of journalism is out there (what’s stopping you?)
Journalism has a lot of hurdles to overcome if it’s to not only survive, but thrive for the next 100 years.
Money is a big one. So is citizen journalism. And yes, the decline of audience and the death of print are pretty massive too.
But the biggest hurdle, the one we must all overcome; the one which will guarantee a great future for news, has nothing to do with ink and paper.
I’m talking about attitude. Journalism is not going anywhere because hardly anyone’s got the right attitude.
And what attitude is that, I hear you cry?
It hasn’t got a name, but we know Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have it. And Evan Williams has it to. Jonathan Fields and Jonathan Mead definitely have it. By the looks of things journalists like David Dunkley-Gyimah, Michael Rosenblum and Jeff Jarvis possess it too.
There are some bloggers, like Lisa Williams, Hannah Waldram and Hermione Way who got some.
It’s obvious William Kamkwamba from Malawi is bursting with it.
Important people at the Times, Independent, New York Times, Telegraph, ITN, Sky and the Boston Globe don’t have it, which is why they’ll eventually fail. And across the West, in Britain, the US, Canada and Australia, not enough journalists have it. It’s why we’re getting busy going nowhere.
It can be summed up in truisms like these:
And pretty much boils down to:
It’s the attitude which gets inventors, artists…and yes, even entrepreneurs out of bed in the morning.
And it is the attitude which delivers the key to the future of journalism.
If we’re not careful the future of news, belongs to them, and not the journalists...no wait, hang on. If we ARE careful, it belongs to them. The whole point is we have to stop being careful! Take some risks, get your hands dirty!
Thinking of a journalism start-up? Here’s a checklist
If the future of journalism is indeed entrepreneurial, we have to start thinking with a business hat on.
It’s a big change in mentality for some journalists. I’ve been to several events and meetings recently where hacks have insisted people will have to pay for news “because journalists have to eat”.
This is upside-down thinking. People don’t buy iPhones because Steve Jobs needs to eat. They buy them because they are an innovative product which satisfies a demand people are willing to pay for.
And so it must be if journalists are to be entrepreneurs. I’ve put together a list of criteria a new business idea might need to satisfy to see it become successful. I don’t think a successful business will need to satisfy all of them, or maybe even 50%. But ignoring these questions means another financial failure…
News start-up checklist
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Is it a new idea?
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Does it have a defined target audience?
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Does it provide niche (i.e. hyperlocal) content?
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Does it satisfy a desire that is not being fulfilled by someone else?
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Or does it do something better (faster, cheaper, more effectively) than someone else?
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Does it actually have income potential, or will it rely on funding?
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Does it use the power of crowd-sourcing/community?
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Would it be fulfilling for journalists to work for?
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Does it publish/exist on more than one platform?
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If it has content, is it sharable?
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Does it require a lot of money to run?
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Does it have boot-strapping potential?
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Does it scale?
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Does it fulfill a public service?
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Is it a legally sound idea? What about copyright?
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Would it appeal to venture capitalists, angel investors?
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And…does it have a cool name?
That’s what I’ve come up with so far. I think if you answer these questions at the early stages, you’ll have a greater chance of your start up succeeding. What it says is a sustainable business – journalism or otherwise – begins with a solid well-defined customer base.
You need to know who these customers are, and be really clear about why you are providing something they can’t get elsewhere. Innocent Smoothies was begun by three British students in 1999 who realised there was a demand for healthy fruit smoothies, which wasn’t being satisfied by anyone else. It now has a revenue of £128m.
US start-up “incubator” Y-Combinator is looking for new media business ideas which embrace this form of thinking:
What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?
Add more to the list in the comments below if you have any. And while you’re here, read the comments of one reader on an earlier blog entry. Some interesting criticism of the notion journalism is entrepreneurial at all…
Ideas 001: the news aggregator
I’ve opened up a new category on the blog today. It’s called Ideas for the future of news and here I’m going to start collating good, tangible, positive, innovative ideas on how journalism can move forward. With ‘entrepreneurial’ the hot-word of the week in #futureofnews circles, more people are starting to put some great ideas out there.
I’ll report on as many as I can. And here is number 001:
Idea: Climate Pulse, the news aggregator
By: Headshift & evectors
I was very excited earlier to read about a new venture, currently in alpha-testing, which promises to put theories on the clash between journalism, social media and user generated content into practice.
London based developers Headshift have teamed up with Italian company Evectors, and produced a new form of content management.
It’s best left to Headshift’s Robin Hamman to explain more:
…[it] basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we’ve configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish – for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc.
In other words, content is aggregated around a single topic – but then edited by a professional. They decide what is quality and what isn’t.
They’ve created a test site, called Climate Pulse, to try this out ahead of the COP Copenhagen meeting. Check out this diagram:
What’s particularly fantastic, is their method of sharing content, through 3rd party widgets:
we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself…
They see it as a move away from the journalist as moderator of UGC, to a curator.
Pros:
- it uses the power of crowd sourcing around a topic
- it shares the results through a widget
- potential for multimedia, mashups, interactives
- has potential to satisfy niche groups
Cons:
- is it fulfilling for the ‘curating’ journalist?
- if paywalls go up, mainstream news content may be limited
- revenue generation not mentioned
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