News organizations have substantial strengths and resources that they can put to creative use — that is, if they’re committing to thinking flexibly about their future, and to moving quickly in new directions.
This morning, by chance, I had the privilege of sitting in on a meeting of independent newspaper editors and publishers. (I’m not kidding about the “by chance” part — Gazette Communications CEO Chuck Peters, one of the meeting’s organizers, literally spotted me on the street in Boulder, Colo., last night and asked me to drop by.)
Something that struck me about this meeting is how deeply dissatisfied many newspaper publishers have become with Associated Press — almost every newspaper represented at this meeting complained about AP rates, while saying the service delivers increasingly questionable value to state and local papers.
This got me thinking… Perhaps right now (and maybe for the next couple of years) state and local news orgs still have a unique window of opportunity to develop powerful alternative models and systems that could ultimately do much more for local news and information (and their own bottom line) than existing news models ever could accomplish.
As the Daily Kos wrote in August, “In case you’re wondering why The Associated Press is so zealously defensive about people saying newspapers don’t need them, it’s because newspapers don’t need them.” For example, Kos noted that this year’s AP cancelations include the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Spokesman Review, and the Bakersfield Californian. Meanwhile, several major Ohio dailies canceled AP and pooled their resources to create the Ohio News Organization, which shares local news without submitting it to AP. “You can expect this trend to continue,” said the Kos.
The consensus among the publishers and editors in today’s meeting was that more and more of their readers no longer look to their papers as a primary source of national and international news — a trend that is also likely to continue. Whatever national and international news people will get, they won’t go to local news orgs to find it.
So if these papers don’t have to keep meeting that particular news need, and if they also produce 45 percent of AP state wire copy (which AP then tries to sell back to them), then there’s little reason to keep spending money on AP. That frees up money that they could use — along with other key resources such as their established brands and community ties — to build a new kind of news business.
The Ohio News Organization model is one option. It succeeds in fostering useful collaboration among papers that once chiefly viewed each other as competitors. But, as far as I can tell, mostly ONO is simply producing what news orgs have always produced: stories, photos, polls and other sorts of conventional packaged content.
I think the collective expertise of news orgs can do much, much more than that. Especially if, as Jeff Jarvis recently observed, we stop viewing the story as the “atomic unit” of the news.
What if a coalition of news orgs within a state teamed up with talented technologists, database architects, librarians, search optimization experts, ad networks, and maybe even print-on-demand pros to create a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product?
What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state — regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?
What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?
What if news orgs’ core offering was not a basically one-size-fits-all newspaper, but rather a statewide or regional “relevance window” service that could be tailored to meet the needs of lawyers, businesses, property owners, schools, activists, healthcare providers, parents, teens, etc.? What if news orgs became very, very structured and flexible about how they collect, collate, and distribute information? What if, as a result, citizens, organizations, and communities could easily stay better informed than was ever before possible?
This isn’t just my bright idea, of course. Remember Robin Sloan’s classic prediction EPIC 2014? My Tidbits colleague Barbara Iverson observed, “Today, when you look at Epic 2014 or the update, you can hardly tell the imagined fictions from actual fact. …And look at the list of activities of a ‘newsmaster’ in Bill French’s 2004 post From WebMaster to NewsMaster, because it is more specific than what Jarvis says, but certainly calling for the same kind of changes in how we pull together information.”
Seems to me there’s a huge potential window of business opportunity here. Temporarily.
Right now, savvy news orgs could be in the best position to build this new kind of business. I know money is tight. But the Knight News Challenge is one potential source of seed money to jump-start this kind of effort. However, if news orgs don’t act upon this window of opportunity fast, it’s pretty certain that other players (search engines, Craigslist, etc.) will — and soon.
…And by that point, whichever sub-national news orgs are left standing might not be in a position to act.
CORRECTION: The original version of this post contained inaccurate information about AP’s rates and the origins of its state coverage. The item has been corrected based on information provided by Paul Colford at the Associated Press.
