Entrepreneurial Journalism lecture -- Jan. 31
Entrepreneurial Journalism — “Journalism in the age of disruption”
Disruption -- interruption of normal work and practices.
- If it displaces an existing business or practice.
- The economic mechanisms that have sustained quality journalism are in the process of being disrupted.
- Effected by: scandals, increased transparency via groups like Wikileaks, and, mainly, slow innovation.
- Disruption a painful process but offers opportunities for new businesses and rebirth.
- Historical context:
- In the 18th century Britain moved from an agrarian to a machine-based economy via the industrial revolution
- Britain’s trade routes and technological industry positioned the country well.
- Movement away from the era of mass production
- Historic Fatality
- Agriculture -- is obviously beneficial. Once it caught on, it caught on quickly.
- Satisfied deep human desires for settlement and consistency
- Division of power
- Gradual erosion of power for centralized sources.
- Gutenberg printing press disrupted the Catholic church’s control over the Christian faith.
- Division of power has accelerated with the web
- Near universal access to information, which can be freely shared with others
- Cuts of middlemen
- Anyone an express themselves and find an audience.
- As a result:
- Flattens hierarchical power structures
- Capital and information flows are faster, more fluid and chaotic
- Accelerating innovation
- Impulse is to both create and consume.
- Audience increasingly alienated by the mass market approach to media.
- Moore’s law specifies the speed of processors double every 18 months, but also that the cost of technology decreases, space and bandwidth increase.
- Disruptive models
- Perrato Principle:
- 80% of your profit will come from 20% of your inventory
- Amazon undermined due to Toyatan retailing
- Make more from selling misfires than hits (The Long Tail)
- Music industry -- failed to innovate because of rival subscription-based services with incomplete inventories and format wars
- Apple rejected subscription model with iTunes by charging 99c per song, required individual songs to be sold instead of just whole albums
- Google particularly disruptive
- Google’s main service is search, which is made profitable by Adwords.
- Made newspaper advertising seem incredibly expensive and unreliable
- “Prisoner’s dilemma” -- Google takes away advertising revenue and commodifies news, but to remove stories from its service is to lose traffic to rivals.
- Value of information is near zero on Internet; key is to find value in other aspects of journalism
- Fact verification, sourcing, fact aggregation, etc.
Some innovators
- Controlivest
- Portuguese company
- Gave away piece of silverware with each issue; missing an issue would mean having an incomplete set. The silverware cost a fraction of an issue/distribution.
- Bild
- “Vado” camera. Cheap video camera that allows instant transmission to the newspaper of video.
- Ushahidi
- Open source platform to collect real-time crisis information
- Overview
- AP data visualization tool -- find networks in very large data sets.
- Naseadresa
- Combined hyperlocal newsrooms with cafes. “News cafes”
- Would work together to produce 30-page tabloid weekly papers.
- Shared content and linked by a central newsroom
- Revenue gaining efforts to cafe were undermined by the revenue losing efforts of newspaper
- Struggled to find advertising revenue
- Demand Media
- Looks for high traffic terms, builds articles relevant to search queries.
- Autodesk 123D -- free 3D printing design software
- Micromanufacturing and Ponoko -- able to create things with no cost to the producer until a customer actually buys something. Movement towards zero risk business strategy.
Q&A -- Nick Newman (Created BBC Digital website; helped develop the iPlayer)