joshuago’s journalism Bookmarks

We have created an independent newsroom, located in Manhattan and led by some of the nation’s most distinguished editors, and staffed at levels unprecedented for a non-profit organization. Indeed, we believe, this is the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.

An overview of the major problems facing journalism today, and an exploration of potential funding models.

Journalism students must understand how to build audiences by propagating their work on the Internet. They will have to be sufficiently entrepreneurial to leverage the openness of interactive publishing to ensure that they can build remunerative and satisfying careers. This means they'll have to establish themselves as experts in one or more specialties to build identifiable personal brands. They will be on their own to monetize those brands.

If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

The default startup business model for 2010 and beyond will be subscriptions and transactions -- not growth/acquisition and advertising.

The appeal of bundling is partly that it reduces transaction costs: instead of having to figure out how much each part of a package is worth to you, you can make a blanket judgment. Bundling eliminates the problem of fretting about small expenditures, which may be one reason that flat-rate pricing is very common in the vacation industry. It also offers what economists call option value: you may never watch those sixty other channels, but the fact that you could if you wanted to is worth something. Many consumers also perceive bundles as bargains; getting a bunch of things for one price feels like a deal, even when it’s not.

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

The money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

One considerable advantage to building a paywall is that it forces newspapers to think hard about what their customers (as opposed to their advertisers) might really want.