Thoughts on Disruptive Journalism

A while back I shared a number of ways I thought RSS could be utilized to reach the more rural, unconnected parts of the earth to spread news and information. The format seems obvious to me; as big media comes tumbling down, a million blogs and all kinds of other user generated content is blowing up all over the web. I’m excited to see that Joshua Karp, with a similar rationale, has applied the RSS to Print concept to a hyper local entertainment publication called The Printed Blog. Much like, my own idea, the Chicago start-up uses a web interface and editors to allow subscribes more granular control over what content appears in their neighborhood ‘edition’ .

Perhaps the most unique approach to reducing distribution costs and avoiding the pitfalls that are consuming bigger publications, is the idea to place commercial printers in the homes of each of his distributors. Traditionally, the cost of distributing papers from a centralized printer was a cost of doing business for publishers, they plan to put printers in every city they target, and then distribute their physical product from there. By crowd-sourcing the production of content, TPB has avoided the biggest expense of all…writing staff.

By publishing articles written by bloggers who are already diligently covering topics as varied as town politics and local fashion, Mr. Karp can slash one of the biggest expenses of a newspaper: reporters. So far, 300 bloggers have given The Printed Blog permission to publish their work for a share of the ad revenue, including small-audience bloggers in Chicago and nationally known blogs like Daily Kos.

Is This A Way Forward for Old Media?

Essentially this model, turns the old idea of a publishing house into a one man operation. You’ve got your bloggers, who’ll cover the stories they cover anyways; they aren’t on staff. You’ve got your printers and distributors who you might staff, but they could just as easily, and more cost-effectively be contracting agents. The sale of ads are automated via the web. Outside of a webmaster, an editor and a designer (all of whom could be one person), that’s virtually no overhead.

In my opinion, big media is only hurting because it’s so bloated with non-essentials. Newspapers today employ staff writers, editors, bloggers, printers, designers, directors, sales teams, photographers and more. And a small to mid-size publication, national publications often have a much higher overhead that includes several mortgages and employee pensions. Even before the recession, ad sales for print were plummeting. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that things will need to change if the industry is going to sustain itself as the following anecdote from Ethan Zuckerman illustrates:

A friend works for the local newspaper, the Berkshire Eagle, editing a weekly arts and calendar section. I visited her at her office the other day and surprised – staggered, actually – at the size of the office. While the paper relies on dozens of unpaid correspondents and pay-per-piece freelance contributors, it also has eight editors, several reporters, professional compositors/paginators, and departments for administration, circulation and ad sales. My friend guessed that, with everyone in the office, day and night shift, there were at least sixty full-time employees responsible for producing, distributing and monetizing the paper.

Hyper-Local Regains Value

In the late 19th century and the early 20th, the American news paper industry was much more of a local affair. There were tens if not hundred of small press publications that catered to specific groups with specific interests. Until the rail, and later the automobile revolutionized distribution, it was simply to expensive and too difficult for people to get print out nationally. Even the New York Times, until the 60′s, was exactly that once. The New York Times. As cities grew and the nation matured, the need and appreciation for national news exploded. This was the era where people like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner (who launched CNN at the perfect moment), Rupert Murdoch and others made their mint. Every print organization under the sun wanted to go National. However, now it seems like the industry is retracting from this state. Not entirely, but it’s becoming harder and harder for these old business models to sustain. The Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim recently gave the New York Times a much needed loan to the sum of $250 million dollars. Is it good investment? Carlos, seems reticent to even get involved with the companies operations but hopefully the NYT realizes how much they need to re-evaluate.

In Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, he talks about how the internet is driving businesses into targeting micro-markets instead of macro, niche versus broad-markets. The Philosophy is that since the internet is full of millions of people offering every possible thing to every possible person, to truly differentiate your brand, it’s better to offer a few things really extensively versus offering too much. In the case of news, this means targeting your niche…maybe that’s neighborhood content, maybe it’s city content, maybe it’s a different vertical altogether like entertainment, tech or gadgets. The Printed Blog is banking on the fact that people want their news printed, but they want more control; less editorial and more them.

What Does It Mean for Africa?

I’m excited about The Printed Blog because I want to see if the model works. It’s something I’ve long thought of doing here in Africa. Here’s what I wrote in my last piece:

In some parts of Africa the media is horribly flawed. Reporters ignore factual information in favor for what wins them government deals, protects officials or serves some other self-serving purpose and transparency is a myth. This is because unlike in many democracies, the media isn’t completely insulated from the state. That is to say that the government still has oversight over journalists and there are no sufficient protections that prevent intimidation. Until the press is decoupled from governments and there truly is ‘freedom of the press’, things won’t change. Citizen journalism provides one solution by allowing communities to write and read about the stories they care about. Spot.us, Demotix and Associated Content are all examples. But what these services don’t address is information dissemination, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Only around ten percent of the population in Africa have access to reliable electricity with only around 1% having access to the internet. Radio still rules as the primary way to get information to large groups of people at once. To truly “democratize” information, we have to think of new ways to get it into the hands of people who need it most.

My idea was to do something very similar to The Printed Blog, but with more discretion. Since the concept of a ‘neighborhood’ doesn’t really exist in quite the same way and computer penetration is so low, the publication would have to rely on some sort of editing filter like a traditional paper. Bloggers would opt-in to have their content redistributed for a share of ad revenue. The publication would have to be free, because otherwise no one would buy it. And there would have to be some sort of translated edition to cater to the dominant local language. Instead of a ‘letters to the editor’ the following issues would use the comments posted to each blog entry.   

Free publications are popular here. In Uganda there’s a publication called The Eye that probably circulates a few thousand copies here in Kampala and the same in several cities across the continent. I won’t even get into the fact that the publication is 50% advertisements, but it’s strength is that it features local writers creating local content that matters to local people. But I’d argue that there are some unpublished writers online that are doing an even better job. It’d be very cool if they had an outlet for their work.

Beyond that, if you’re a blogger in Africa, most people aren’t going to know you as a ‘blogger’. With so few people online here, the concept of what a blog is, why they are or aren’t important and what they offer beyond traditional media is often lost. The real value in this entire thing, though, is that it allows bloggers and writers to bypass the old way of reaching the masses when the local media fails them.

Any thoughts on this?