AP's chance to reinvent itself

The Associated Press, which today sent a love letter to newspaper publishers everywhere, has a curious business model. The large newspapers that provide the bulk of AP's content pay hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece to participate each year, keeping the service's newsgathering costs low and filling its coffers at the same time. Brilliant.

But the country's major newsrooms are starting to revolt, with some already walking away and others threatening. It seems only a matter of time until many form their own cooperatives or decide they can shed wire copy altogether to focus on local content.

To its credit, AP sees the writing on the wall. Unfortunately, the changes envisioned in today's announcement are too little to stem the tide. Whether it's too late to do anything about that remains to be seen.

So, AP, here goes. I have a starting point for you when it comes to a conversation about the news cooperative of the future. It's startlingly simple, really.

A la carte.

That's it. (I told you it was simple.)

Here's how it would work: News organizations, from The New York Times to a citizen blogger in Topeka, could submit their stories, videos and multimedia to a central aggregation service for a nominal processing fee. The service would then organize it and make it all searchable in a way that allows other news orgs to sift through it.

When a news Web site or newspaper finds something it wants to use, it pays a per-story fee that goes back to the creator of the story -- with another handling fee held out for the cooperative. Organizations or individuals that contribute would be rewarded based on how popular their work turned out to be.

So, to continue with our example above, a New York Times story on financial services regulation might get picked up by 9,000 outlets on a given day. Each buyer pays 50 cents for the right to re-publish the story, 40 cents of which could go to the Times and a dime of which could go back to the cooperative. The Topeka blogger might write something on state politics that gets picked up by 12 news orgs in Kansas, and makes a little less than $5 for the day. The Times, meanwhile, makes $3,600 on that story that day.

News aggregators and search engines would have to work out separate deals. Some smart person would figure out whether and how to charge the Google News and Yahoos of the world. (WSJ editor Robert Thomson, in a story today, called aggregators "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," predicting a big fight over content ownership soon. Google counters that it helps, rather than hurts, news sites by sending traffic their way.)

Taking a page from the recording industry, the cooperative would go aggressively after any Web sites or news orgs that try to circumvent the system by stealing content for free.

The primary advantage to such a system is its inherent fairness. News orgs that pay a lot to gather and create content earn more; smart individual analysts stand to make money from their insights; outlets that pay little or nothing for newsgathering would have to pay more to buy it.

It should be noted that newspapers and their behemoth newsrooms wouldn't necessarily dominate this kind of arrangement. The market would essentially decide who survives based on how many outlets pick up work on a given subject. In fact, smaller outfits and startups focused on niches might be able to put together profitable business models right away in this system. Have five reporters focused like a laser on a specific issue, churning out stories and videos nobody else is doing? You might find a profitable niche overnight, if other outlets want to use your work on their Web sites, mobile news feeds or print offerings.

AP is probably best situated to create an egalitarian system like this. But if the service decides to continue more-or-less in its current configuration, there's probably an opportunity for someone else to step into the breach. Startup, anyone?

Lunch date with Marty

Boston Globe editor Marty Baron generated some chatter with a speech he gave last night at University of Oregon. The local paper, the student paper, the Boston press, the NYT's Nick Kristof and even journo-curmudgeon Jay Rosen commented. (Full disclosure: Marty's my former boss.)

Today, Marty stopped by Portland for a lunchtime give-and-take with a group of Portland journos on much the same subject. I'm not going to dissect the conversation, which covered a lot of familiar ground by him and the assembled others. It got a little chippy between the print and broadcast folks a couple of times in the wake of Marty's assertion that most stories that appear on the air originated from print newsrooms. But the conversation didn't really lead to any "ah ha" moments that changed everybody's thinking on the problems at hand.

Most interesting were Marty's responses to a series of questions about where the most important innovations are likely to emerge. He started with the premise that traditional news orgs will continue to innovate alongside an increasing number of startups and journalism ventures. He believes some will be nonprofits, some will be spinoffs from existing companies, some will be new for-profit organizations and many will focus on narrow niches. He also said it's an open question whether the big, traditional outlets will be the ones that remain the primary distributors of news, or whether they'll be replaced by smaller, focused competitors -- even on a local level.

All that's fine, and likely true. It got sticky when Marty said the most creative thinking is likely to emerge from startups founded by venture capital money. These are people who will vet ideas and put real money behind ones they believe can work. In other industries, he pointed out, this is typically where the biggest innovative leaps are born.

Now this is a bit of a body blow to those of us who are trying to innovate from within the belly of the beast. No matter what we do, according to this line of reasoning, we aren't likely to be the source of the Big Breakthrough that starts to define the new paradigm. And he might be right, which is the most depressing part of the whole thing.

So, if you accept that argument, where does that leave us in the MSM?

I suppose it leaves us innovating, and watching, and reading, and learning and doing what we can to remain in the conversation. We might have to let go of the idea that we know and/or will dictate the direction of things, and be willing to let the market determine how things evolve. Like Microsoft in its younger days, we'll have to try to be in position to recognize smart innovations on the part of others and then capitalize on them.

Sounds feasible, on the surface. But we won't be in position to do that if we're not tinkering constantly, failing regularly and succeeding occasionally with innovations of our own. And that, as anybody knows who's trying to do it every day, is very, very hard.

Minneapolis takes the plunge.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune editor Nancy Barnes this weekend took the wraps off a plan to reserve some -- non-breaking news -- content for paying customers only. God bless her. It's an important step toward a future business model based at least partially on the precept that not all content can be free.

The STrib is going to publish enterprise, investigative and feature work as "print exclusives" and run them on dead trees only. The paper's Web site will continue to have everything else.

Truth be told, I'm not sure online readers/viewers are losing a whole lot in the deal. Breaking local news and sports have been the biggest drivers of news Web sites like the Strib's, anyway. Videos and photo galleries are playing a bigger role all the time. That stuff will still be there. What's lost will be the kind of work that translates best into print, at least given the current design of most news sites.

And the newspaper becomes more valuable in the process, giving subscribers an incentive to keep paying us to produce this content.

Ideally, the Strib will eventually take this experiment one step further. The key is having a premium level of content for customers who pay; it's not a print vs. online distinction. So if you also offer the bonus material in a premium format online for customers who prefer to buy it that way, so much the better. Either way, they're paying customers -- exactly the kind we'll need more of in the future.

Newsrooms, niches face off for future of journalism

It's repeated so often it's almost a mantra of the news-preneurs, journo-bloggers and futurists: Journalism will survive; it's the newspapers we're not sure about.

Fair enough. I agree with that sentiment, more or less. Given the relatively high (and rising) demand for news, people and organizations will increasingly compete to provide information in a crazy array of flavors and formats. And since we should all be agnostic when it comes to forms of distribution, our big, strong newsrooms should be able to keep us in the game, right?

Maybe. It's an open question whether there will continue to be a place for a general provider of news and information like us, or whether the future will be dominated by niche specialists. That's what the Web is, at some level: Like-minded people from anywhere on the planet getting together and talking amongst themselves. So news providers of the future might be the ones who cater to those groups, going deep, deep, deep on a single issue. If you're the best source of information for one of those in-groups, users will pay for your content and advertisers will go through you to reach 'em.

So what about our a-little-bit-of-everything news shops? Hard to say. Our competitive advantage is being more local than anyone else. We can't do national politics better than Politico or sports better than ESPN, but we've got everything on the latest brouhaha at city hall or the inside-the-locker-room moments for the local major league team.

We care more about what's going on in this one place than anybody else -- or should. If anything will keep us alive, that'll be it. Even at a local level, niche providers from intrepid bloggers to citizen activists to journalism startups will give us a run for our money. But that's a fight we can win, with our history and resources and people.

What we should do, then, is cultivate our beat reporters and let their expertise show even more than we have in the past. Rather than attempting to broaden their appeal, narrow it. Let them go deeper, nichier and more wonkish.

Forget being all things to all people. But on the beats we decide to cover, our reporters should be the no. 1 source of information. They should be more plugged in than anyone else in all the local organizations and issues that matter.

Our reporters, in other words, should each become niche news providers in their own right. Our niches might all be within a narrow geographic band, but you need to pay attention to them if you want to know what's going on.

Achieve that, and users will pay for our content and advertisers will go through us to reach them. And that just might be enough to keep us in the game.

Industry news, good and bad, from Beantown

As is often the case in the current environment, today has been interesting in ways both good and bad. On the bad-news front, my former colleagues at The Boston Globe (along with other NYT Co. employees) were asked to take a pay cut and furlough days. That's a grim thing, primarily because it's another reminder about just how uncertain the future has become.

Today's better news also comes from Boston, where former Globie John Yemma is leading the Christian Science Monitor off the cliff by ending the daily print newspaper. I say "better" because, in this case, the Monitor is trying something that could eventually help the rest of us find a profitable way forward.

John points out, correctly, that the Monitor has a very different business model than regional dailies. It's international in scope, nonprofit and works within more of a defined niche. He fears many regional papers, faced with a different reality, will do what the Seattle P-I has done: cut to a skeleton staff and remain online with a product only vaguely resembling the old newspaper.

But project out a couple of years, and the basic plan the Monitor is putting forward might apply to the rest of us more than either we or John realize.

Like the Monitor, we could end daily print publication, and replace it with an in-depth weekly magazine or newspaper. We're still better positioned than anyone else in our markets to do a smart, deep and well-sourced weekly pub for readers who want to spend time with their news. As it is at the Monitor, the rest of our work, increasingly multi-media, will be delivered online, through mobile devices and via distribution partners. The basic news online will be free and ad supported; much of the rest -- context, commentary, enterprise, niche interest, etc. -- will go behind a pay wall.

Could that basic framework hold up? Yea, maybe. Will we be able to learn valuable lessons in the meantime watching the Monitor take the leap? That seems like a far easier question to answer.

Building a better Craigslist redux

Last week, I took up a light-hearted challenge from ReveneTwoPointZero to offer suggestions about ways to beat Craigslist at its own game. (This is critical because of the proportion of our revenue classified ads used to play, and how much we continue to want at least some of it back.) When the site came out with its proposal over the weekend, something very much like my suggestion was part of the package:

Make it the biggest and best marketplace. How? By aggregating CraigsList and every other local classified site, to provide one-stop shopping for every buyer.

And guess what? The Rev2.0'ers did me one better by including five other salient points: Make it easy to use, easy on the eyes, free, profitable and safe. Read their full post, and reader comments, here.

Nothing like a punch in the face to focus the mind

Denver, Seattle, Tucson, Detroit, San Diego. Yesterday, it was our turn in Portland. Pay cuts of 5-10% for everyone on staff (15% for the three most senior execs), four furlough days and the freezing of our traditional defined-benefit pension plan.

Worse than the announcement itself was the sense of fear and desperation it seemed to unleash through the ranks. What if the advertisers don't ever come back? What if we never get control of our digital destiny? What if it really is the beginning of the end, as the gloating MSM naysayers have been predicting?

And a deep and abiding sense of anger, of course, that the owners and managers of the company didn't see this coming and somehow head it off.

There is a best-case scenario: All that fear and loathing manifests itself as motivation to innovate quickly and comprehensively. At some level, that's already playing out. The number of unsolicited suggestions I've received in the past 24 hours about ways to generate new revenue exceeds what came my way in the past two or three months. That's certainly a good start. Let's turn all these smart and creative minds at least partially to the problem of reinventing the newsroom and the news business for the next generation.

But now comes the hard part, which is a lot of nibbling around the edges, trying things that don't work out and otherwise innovating in place. It would be so much easier if one great idea could fix everything. If we could wake up one morning, see the brilliance of some new business model or form of distribution, and laugh about how scary it was there for a while. Not gonna happen, folks. At least not anytime soon.

So we're left with dozens or hundreds of small changes we have to give a shot. We have a window of opportunity -- while we're still receiving quite a bit of print revenue -- to reinvest in myriad other forms of (mostly digital) distribution. To experiment. To learn. We should be thinking like pharmaceutical companies, in that we need to have a whole bunch of projects in the pipeline at any given time. The more the better. Most won't work out, but that's fine. We'll learn, adjust and try again. At least a handful do need to work out, some of them in fairly significant ways.

Twitter, Kindle, RSS feeds, e-editions, Facebook, micropayments, other forms of for-pay content, online stores, creative use of digital archives, CDs and DVDs, speakers' bureaus, TV and/or radio stations, reader participation and interaction, visual storytelling, documentary film, niche publications, wholesale blogging, entirely new lines of business, etc. There are no wrong suggestions at this point. Only a lack of vision and willpower that is as much of a threat to our future as any external force. Eventually, if we're lucky, some of it will begin to coalesce into a new business model.

So, colleagues here and elsewhere, I feel your frustration. But don't look askance at the small innovations that come down the tube. Embrace them and offer more ideas like them. Because it's the little things, not the one great idea, that may ultimately save us all.