Just gathering together a few loose ends concerning news business models… First off, I think that Steven Johnson’s ‘news ecosystem’ idea from his SXSW speech is a pretty useful way to think about things. Here’s one of the key quotes:
But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest. My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive and well ten years from: partially supported by newspapers and magazines, partially by non-profit foundations and innovative programs like Newassignment.net, and partially by enterprising bloggers who make a name for themselves by breaking important stories.
That leaves us with something that looks like this:
Part of the innovation that we’re looking for then is how we can set up some combination of those functions into a unique model that will have some combination of free content along with a money generating mechanism. As I keep saying, in general the functions that seem to make money in these type of systems are aggregating and filtering – so I still think that the way to build such a business model is to include one or both of those functions.
Link to the video version of his talk
On a related note, Mark Coddington is compiling an extremely useful set of annotated blog posts that address these issues from the journalism angle.
One thing that I found through his site is this from Mindy McAdams – The Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Literacy. The guide includes fifteen steps to take to become prificient at generating multimedia content for the web. It is aimed at journalists, but I have to think that these are skills that anyone creating content is going to need sooner rather than later. These are the things we’ll need to know to be digitally literate – and one of the best ways to adapt to change is to have extra skills. We should all be working our way through her outline, probably with some urgency.
[…] Tim Kastelle points out that “the functions that seem to make money in these type of systems are aggregating and filtering” — and thus when we brainstorm about new business models, we need to look deeply at those functions. […]
[…] […]
Thanks for the mention, Tim. I’m really glad you’ve found my posts helpful.
I love Steven Johnson’s essay as a system for thinking about what the future of news will look like. Since I believe they came out the same week, I kind of consider it the more optimistic companion piece to Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.”
I think you could add sports news to his examples of tech news and politics as areas in which journalism has improve within the new media ecosystem. I haven’t seen the comprehensive explanation detailing why, but I think the improvement in coverage of most high-profile American sports has been exponential through the growth of the web.
[…] The only problem is that the more I’ve thought about it, the more uneasy I’ve become. I keep saying that the two ways to make money in the digital environment are aggregating and filtering, and in […]
[…] that has been put together on the New Business Models for News site. I’ve also discussed the news value network a fair bit previously, so today I would like to talk about the news value […]
[…] up posts here, here, here, here, and here. 0 people like this post. Like Share and […]
[…] essa proposta de Johnson, de um ecossistema jornalístico híbrido, Tim Kastelle escreveu no blog Innovation Leandership Network afirmou: Parte da inovação, que nós estamos procurando, é como podemos criar uma combinação […]
[…] More News Business Models: looks at Steven Johnson’s diagram of the news ecosystem and talks about how to put together a unique mix of content in a news business model. […]