Duke-business-models
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These are Bill Densmore's notes on a session at the Duke Next Newsroom seminar in Durham, N.C., on Friday, April 4, 2008. The session, lead by Kathleen Sullivan, posed the question: What does new media mean for the business model?"
Sullivan began by eliciting from the group of about 12 people these questions for discussion:
- How do we pay for journalism?
- How do we set up our organizations to find the solution -- innovate, discover, adapt?
- What is the appropriate way to engage journalists in this issue?
- Who will hire journalists in the future?
- Does the business side have other functions than bringing in revenue?
- What are the transferrable skills of journalists?
- Can journalists skills lead to other services offered by the entities which hire them?
We started the discussion talking about charging for a content service. Bill Densmore mentions Clickshare Service Corp., which he started, and declares that he has a conflict of interest in discussing the topic but just wanted to put it on the table as one method for paying for journalism.
Christian Oliver said he thinks advertising is the answer for the forseable future.
Beth Lawton of the Newspaper Association of America: NAA has done some research on the cost differences between print and online advertising. "The discrepancy is too great." "Online advertising is never going to cost $1,000 per . . . "How high is online going to be and how high will online advertising going to be and how many people will it support in a newsroom and it will support a much smaller number." "The cost of paper and trucks ... most of a newspaper's revenue goes to supporting the actual newsroom operation."
Dorothy Bland, who heads the Florida A&M journalism program and is a former Gannett publisher at Fort Collins, Colo.: Over 80% of the jobs are not in the newsroom -- there is elsewhere. There are major cost savings in other areas.
Beth Lawton:
What Bakersfield did -- they launched an inside guide, starting with restuarants, that didn't have websites. They weren't advertising online. So Bakersfield built them all a really simple web page. If they wanted to post their menu or coupons they had to pay extra. They combined it with social networking capability.
A comment by a person who's name I forgot to get:
"We have to ask ourselves about how we can be credit card companies, to skim a little information off everything. If we're the ones providing this great aggregated information."
PARTICIPANTS:
Adrienne Grant adrienneg@gmail.com; SciMed Solutions christianoliver@gmail.com, Innovation Consultants beth lawton beth.lawton@naa.org Kelly Wolff kawolff@vt.edu Lynne Nennotiel lynnec@utk.edu Jigsha Desia desaij@knews.com Dorothy Bland, Forida A&M Dorothy.Bland@famu.edu Eric Larson, president, StellarMediaOnline eric@stellarmediaonline.com john Thompson thompsonj@byui.edu Gina Falcone-Rupp gfalcone-rupp@mcclatchyinteractive.com Dan Bark dbarkin@newsobserver.com In Ho Lee inholee@stanford.edu
