Augmented Journalism

The biggest problem of media business models today is not that the revenue model is diminishing in effectiveness, but that most media companies are still trying to sell nineteenth and twentieth century products in the twenty-first century. And they are trying to do so without changing the value they provide and the relationships within which they are provided.

The Media Business: SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE MEDIA BUSINESS MODELS HAMPERED BY NARROW THINKING.

People who should know have told me there’s an aphorism glued to the wall at the Washington Post’s online desk. It says “Not Wrong For Long”. In other words: íf there is something wrong in one of the publications, it will be corrected as soon as possible. It has become the prime advantage of online journalism: if you accept that your stories are never really finished, and can always be improved thanks to the knowledge of the audience, you can reach more quality than ever before.

During the complete 20th century – the period of mass communication – we have seen a clear and simple dichotomy.  On the one hand there was the professional journalist, a know-it-all who operated from his safe castle, and gave proof of his immense wisdom once every 24 hours. On the other hand there was the consumer, who was grateful to accept all this wisdom for 6 or 7 times a week.

Now every ground for this division has disappeared. Thanks to technological and social developments literally everyone has become a publisher and as a consequence, a fertile symbiosis can arise between the two worlds that used to be so far apart. If the skills of the journalist can be combined with the endless knowledge of the (former) audience, this will automatically lead to better ways of informing and getting informed. Society will benefit.

Am I too optimistic? Time will tell. But if journalism doesn’t see the opportunities, it closes the doors that need to be opened.  And gets stuck in a world that’s doomed to collapse.

‘Not Wrong For Long‘. Indeed, thanks to the internet, thanks to weblogs like True/Slant, knowledge can spread, be shared and be improved.  If journalists understand that their role will shift from transmitter to organizer, we can expect a lot of good.

Maybe it is even time to add a new maxim to the wall at the WaPo: “What’s Right is In Site”.

So this is how they make tv-news in Italy. Arrivederci!

[youtubevid id="vztPWoI03gU"]

(From Break TV)

De Wereld Draait Door (”As the World Turns”), the most popular news show on Dutch public tv, has found the limits of live broadcasting. In an item on chatroulette, a naked, erect penis appeared on screen. Anchorman Matthijs van Nieuwkerk immediately stopped the item – and closed the show.

[youtubevid id="6gI4cVYKAdY"]

Is it really a media company or is it the Czech version of Starbucks? Either way, Nase Adresa (Our Address) is trying to turn the tables in journalism. Started last year, the hyperlocal newsoutlet now has four local newspapers (all working from company owned cafes) and a centrally based Futuroom. Fourty more will be opened this year and before the end of 2011 Nase Adresa is supposed to have 89 newscafes, covering all of the Czech Republic.

The business model is far from traditional. PPF Media, the owner company, says it gets 60% of its profit from advertisement and subscriptions to the weekly print editions. But the interesting part comes from the rest: 8% from online-activities, 18% from selling coffee and cakes in the cafes and 14% from the exploitation of the futuroom, which is designed as a state-of-the-art training and consulting centre.

As far as journalism is concerned, the editor-in-chief stresses the need for credibility. “That’s why we would never publish any user generated content without having been checked by our staff. Credibility is one of the most important pillars of this concept”, Roman Gallo says. Some of the other pillars: hire young new journalists and train them for at least 4 months before putting them on the job, be as open and interactive as possible, don’t hesitate to perform activities that are not 100% journalistic (for example: a journalist can work asn event organiser, if that would ultimately help outlets and the business).

Nase Adresa has about five professional journalists in every café, and momentarily is hiring like crazy – against all trends. By the end of next year it is supposed to have more than 400 hyperlocal journalists. The monthly costs in human resources are about 8000 dollar per café, plus about half of that for the staff that’s needed to run the bar. Gallo expects to reach break-even by the summer of 2012. Already now an average cafe has a turnover of about $8000  every month, according to Gallo.

Although its strategy is web first and Nase Adresa is active in mobile as well, the print editions are key in this model. A paper can be bought for two quarters, which is relatively cheap compared to the other Czech newspapers. For that price a reader will get 32 tabloid pages, of which maximally 30% will consist of ads. In reality, Gallo is happy (”and profitable”) with two pages of ads in every single issue.

Gallo is convinced that his ambitions will work out fine in the Czech Republic. 89 cafés, 150 weekly newspapers and more than 1000 different websites will do the job at the end of next year. He doesn’t do any predictions about the viability of the concept in other countries though. Businesswise and culturewise things might be totally different. But still, the concept is inspiring and with a few alterations, this might become part of any of the hyperlocal projects we are so fond of these days.

But before copying the concept, it might be worthwhile to wait for Gallo’s next experience: he is planning to serve canned beer in the upcoming new cafes. “Which is a risk, because we don’t want to have our cafe filled with drunk visitors at 7 in the morning.”

Not to mention the drunk reporters.

“Hell, no! I’m not going to do that.”

Dutch gold medal winner Sven Kramer (5000 meters speed skating) is quick to respond a reporter from NBC after being asked what he just did. “She is crazy”, he added a couple of moments later on Dutch television. “She was there when it happened.”

The NBC-reporter wanted to know “if you can say your name and your country and what you just won here.” About the same kind of question a Dutch reporter could have asked the New Orleans quarterback right after winning the Super Bowl.

[youtubevid id="uIkgCbljJys"]

Proud to be Dutch!

Not everybody realises that it is thanks to the Dutch merchants’ ships, that you American folks can celebrate Black History Month. According to yesterday’s Colbert Report, without these Dutch “there wouldn’t even be African Americans. They would still be called Africans.”

So painfully true…

On all levels, we Dutch like to be mocked about. Even by foreigners in our own country. One of the best in that field is Boom Chicago’s Greg Shapiro. Since 1993, Boom Chicago has mixed sharp writing and quick thinking and to create funny shows and videos. Boom Chicago performs nightly in a theater in the center of Amsterdam. Most of its shows contain a lot of funny criticism on Dutch society, and attract American tourists as well as Dutch people.

Greg Shapiro performs outside Boom Chicago as well; he had a news show on the Dutch Comedy Central channel. Now he is covering the local elections in Amsterdam, which take place on March 3. Watch how he explains the excesses of the “vertrutting” – the feeling that nowadays there seem to be more rules than people to break them.

[youtubevid id="ZfutGynxRzc"]

The anti-Google Police seems to have entered the building. In Iceland, that is. According to Boingboing, one of Iceland’s major news outlets tries to stop people from deep linking to its articles.

Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s oldest newspaper and most-visited website (now co-edited by the former prime minister and head of the central bank) has just announced an anti “deep linking” policy saying that Icelanders aren’t allowed to link to individual pages on the site, only the front door. Which is to say, the people of Iceland can no longer talk about any news online unless it happens to still be on the front page of the newspaper.

Morgunblaðið forbids “repeated and systematic use of links, including deep links, where a certain piece of news or other material is referred to”. Of course this is supposed to stop platforms like Google News to get traffic from aggregated material.

Curious if somebody dared ask the question in what way this wil really help Morgunblaðið.

Some ideas are just a little bit more promising than others. Yesterday I strongly felt like being witness of the birth of a groundbreaking new social media tool. It’s called Tweep Like Me and it’s supposed to connect people with the same sort of twitter language.

Michiel Berger, a.k.a. @michielb, the inventor and developer of the tool, is moving fast. Yesterday he first came up with the idea, today he plans to have an active alpha-version. On his twitter-account he’s keeping all his followers updated on the process, in the meantime answering the many questions he gets from them and sharing first results.

My own enthousiasm grew after Berger’s system, still from a relatively small database, linked my account to tweeps that indeed are pretty similar to me. But hey, I know them, we already interact. Therefore I can’t wait to find out if this opens the way to tweeps that I don’t know of – and see if this leads to new, interesting connections. Ofcourse this all will be monolingual to start with, but if it works the challenge will be to make it multilingual.

Some of the thoughts @michielb shared with his followers during the last 24 hours:

Working on a nice project to find tweeps like me. Based on language similarity. Starting to work pretty good.

Most difficult steps first: integrating OAuth. With persistent cookies. Without OAuth no admission.

All the pieces of the puzzle seem to be there. Let’s do some online testing.

Hmm, first test result: a white screen. Get myself a glass of juice.

Yes! First screen shot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michielb/4337077283/

Maybe we’ll get a first alpha today.

Very curious where he is going to take us after that.

News is a parents’ thing. Even if it is offered via mobile apps, young people are not interested. At least, that’s what the WAN found out.

A study has found that Dutch youth are neither interested in receiving news via mobile applications nor taking part in citizen journalism projects. They also do not find newspaper sections aimed at young people a compelling reason to regularly pick up a paper.

Whilst initially surprising, the results of the study “Youth, news media and civic engagement,” are in line with findings of a new study by IBM’s Media and Entertainment Group, which shows that online news consumption has dropped among young adults, but risen among older consumers, calling into question the assumption that young people read more online news and older people favour printed publications.

via Study: Dutch youth not interested in mobile news or citizen journalism – Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Blog.