On his way into a brown-bag lunch to discuss his Media Cloud project Tuesday, Ethan Zuckerman said he worried that he’d have little to contribute to journalism’s hot topic: how to pay for the news.
By the time he left the building 90 minutes later, I found myself thinking the opposite — that Zuckerman’s style of innovation will be key to sustaining journalism in the public interest.
Not that Media Cloud had anything to do with that issue in the beginning.
Remember those late-night calls to the city desk from bar patrons trying to settle an argument about who won the American League batting title in 1942? Zuckerman told listeners crowded around a Shorenstein Center conference table that Media Cloud also got its start as a debate-settler between friends — this one between Zuckerman, a self-described cynic, and Berkman Center colleague Yochai Benkler, whom Zuckerman fondly characterizes as a “tech triumphalist.”
How much of a contribution are blogs making to the national debate on key issues? How much Latin America coverage is available these days in The New York Times vs. The Miami Herald vs. blogs devoted to coverage of the region?
Media Cloud is designed to answer questions like that by gathering stories from thousands of content producers and rendering all that text into a database that is subject to the kind of quantitative analysis that Ph.D. students of yore could only dream of.
Don’t get your hopes up too high just yet. Media Cloud’s public Web site provides only a glimpse of the kind of analysis that Zuckerman says will be possible there when a new version of the site is introduced next month.
Asked by Shorenstein Center director Alex Jones what impact pay walls would have on Media Cloud’s collection of news articles, Zuckerman said: “They would kill it.”
That highlighted a conflict I’m encountering in pursuit of a framework for sustaining local news in the public interest: the ways in which pay walls and other tools of the commercial side of news conflict with journalism’s civic purpose of informing as many people as possible.
So instead of walling off all those stories from Zuckerman, here’s hoping that news organizations can partner with him and other entrepreneurs to create new products and services that go beyond the basic news report — and can create revenue streams not yet imagined.
In a conversation with several brown-baggers after his presentation, Zuckerman hinted at some of the possibilities. With Media Cloud, a news organization could compare its reports with a variety of competitors and discover how much overlap there is in content.
Instead of trying to match what the others have, why not go in another direction and create niche content — and niche products — that would carry extraordinary value?
“There’s very little space for generalists in the digital world,” he said. “There’s just not a lot of space to be a one-stop shop.”
