Social & Entrepreneurial:

The paths to tomorrow’s journalism

JD Lasica
Socialmedia.biz
jd@socialmedia.biz
April 23, 2010
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the maldivian way” by
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Today’s hashtag

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What we’ll cover today
2 simple propositions
The new new news ecosystem
• Social media overview & cultural norms
• Rise of social media & impact on journalism
Social journalism
Entrepreneurial journalism
• Innovation imperatives (take a page from Facebook)
• New skills, new media forms
Geolocation: New forms of visual storytelling
Examples: Tomorrow’s news today
Fearless predictions, closing thoughts
Proposition 1
We need trustworthy news
“Information is as vital to
the healthy functioning of
communities as clean air,
safe streets, good
schools and public
health.”

Knight Commission on the Information

Needs of Communities in a Democracy,
October 2009
Proposition 2
News is undergoing its biggest,
messiest change – ever
Everything about news is changing:
The way it’s produced
The way it’s distributed
The way we consume it
Who’s a trusted news provider
Conventions of journalism (NPR
as advocate for Haiti relief efforts)
What “news” means
The new new news?
A contrast in fortunes

Daily U.S. newspaper circulation fell 10.62 percent in the most

recent 6-month period (April-September 2009).
USA Today circulation fell 17.5%, New York Times fell 7.3%,
San Francisco Chronicle fell 25.8%. (Chron: newsroom of 575
in 2000, 160 today.)
Average daily paid circulation fell to 30.39 million in Sept. 2009
from a high of 63.3 million in 1984.
Social media’s ecosystem
Almost 1 million blog posts per day; over 346 million people
globally read blogs
6 of top 10 websites in US are social sites (YouTube,
Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Blogger, Craigslist)
Twitter: 108 million registered users; 300,000 new users a day;
180 million unique visitors a month
Facebook: 400 million members
Flickr: 35 million people have posted &
tagged 3 billion-plus photos
Wikipedia: 10 million users have contributed
YouTube: 1 billion-plus videos served per day
Whenever someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for
social reasons
Cultural norms of social media
It’s not about the technology, it’s about connecting people.
Premium on sharing
Transparency
Conversation expected
Mistrust of traditional authority
figures & marketers
Instead: trust in peers, people
like ourselves — even
strangers
Trust is easily gained and easily lost.
Credit/attribution given
Collaboration
Big Media’s suicide pact
New spate of newspapers’
social media policies:
Do not engage without permission
Do not be open
Do not be personal

Creative Commons
photo by Bombardier
on Flickr

Read the policies for yourself at:

socialmedia.biz/social-media-policies
Old Media values Social Media values
News as finished product News as a process/service
Lecture, authoritative Conversation, participation
Passive consumers Empowered users
One to many Many to many
Corporate/autocratic Democratic, collaborative, messy
Closed Transparent
Exclusive Shared
Centralized Distributed
Elite professionals Grassroots, peer-focused
Institutional voice Personal voice
Heavily filtered Unfiltered/lightly filtered
News as a social experience

“ To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the

internet, is becoming a shared social experience. ...

Getting news is often an important social act.

• 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded
through email or posts on social networking sites
• 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are
also online news consumers say that on a typical day they
get news items from people they follow.
• 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of
news, commentary about it, or dissemination of news via
social media.

“Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,” Report by Pew

Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 1, 2010 ”
Social journalism
Elements of social media applied to journalism:
Blogging ... Twitter ... Facebook ... Comments ...
Widgets ... RSS ... Video sharing ... Photo sharing ...
User-created content ... Ratings ... User reviews ...
Tagging ... Social bookmarks ... Live streaming & chat ...
Presentation sharing ... Geolocation services ...
Forums ... Community membership ...
Social news sharing sites ...
Wikis ... Texting ... Meetups ...
Shared calendars
Entrepreneurial journalism
Entrepreneur (än-trə-prə-ˈnər)

A person engaged in the art or science of

innovation and risk-taking for profit in business

Creative
Commons photo
by kyz on Flickr
Entrepreneurial approach
Build things that are useful & have value

Study marketplace, define goals, write business plan

Embrace risk

Launch pilot projects

Measure results

Make tough choices

Iterate! Iterate! Iterate! Creative Commons photo by parl on Flickr

Make mistakes, forgive yourself, move on

Cost of innovation
40 Investment cost (in millions)

30

20

10

0
2002 2006 2010

Technorati: estimated $36 million investment over 8 years

Dabble: $1.7 million over 4 years
Wellness Mobile: essentially zero startup costs. Test it out,
offer shares to programmers, if it flies, you take funding.
Innovation = Iterating
Facebook in 2005

“The idea is launch early and iterate. Early on, I didn’t

just start Facebook as a company. It was a project
that I wanted to exist. It’s amazing how much stuff we
messed up.” – Mark Zuckerberg, 10/09
New skills for journalists
Storyteller, yes, but also:
Conversation facilitator &
stimulator
Multimedia guru
Evangelist
Curator
Data gatherer
Geek!
Metrics nerd
Entrepreneur/strategist
Photograph by Tristram Kenton
© The Really Useful Group Ltd.
If I were launching a news site
It would contain these elements:
Geo-targeted news
Conversation
Data-driven tools
Open APIs
Rewards & incentives
for participation
More attention to real-time Web
Lots of real-world meet-ups
Explore multiple verticals
Community brain
Tagging the
real world
The emerging mobile
marketplace will require
evergreen content from
trusted sources of vetted
information.
But you can enlist
schools, partners and
readers to help create a
digital community
encyclopedia.

Wikitude AR Travel Guide for Android G1

The Web is a database
But it needs curating!
Local news pubs’
competitive advantage:
Data!
The new newsrooms need
more coders
Value in building structured
evergreen data — need a
city guides 2.0
Journalists can bring
meaning to info-jungle
Enlist local citizens to
maintain the living database
The power of open APIs
Give the public access to public records
Open APIs = enlist
community to hack &
contextualize content
YourMapper.com has
licensed its mapping
technology to news
publications & waged a
battle to open up public
records in Ky.
YourMapper founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle
News organizations are
logical hub of community
data around schools, Don’t know APIs? Go to:
hospitals, prisons & more. http://socialbrite.org/glossary
New tools for new needs
Resources
to explore
OpenStreetMap.org:
Open source “Wikipedia of
maps”; community builds
own using GPS traces and
donated satellite imagery.
Creative Commons
Google Earth has an API
News orgs can layer
photos over Google Maps
Online visualization tools

The Decline: The

Geography of a
Recession by
LaToya Egwuekwe
Check-ins at SXSWi

SimpleGeo.com
Who does tomorrow’s news?
Traditional media
Professional journalists at
newspapers, TV & radio
stations
Reimagined media
Citizen publishers
Alternative & community
news publications
Twitterers, Facebookers
Bloggers
Podcasters
Advocacy groups
Nonprofits
Corporations
Early trailblazers
seattlepi.com
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
closed print publication in
March 2009 with 170
staffers.
Relaunched as online-only
site with 40 staffers, 20 in
editorial.
Early trailblazers
chicagonow.com
Initiative from Chicago
Tribune.
Aggregates over 300
local blogs.
10,000 registered users
and 3.2 million page
views per month (Oct.
2009).
Early trailblazers
texastribune.com
Nonprofit, nonpartisan
public media organization
Produced by veterans of
Texas Monthly & Texas
Weekly
Twitter & blog widgets
Not just a publication:
They put on public events,
sponsor & record a
conversation series w/
elected officials, hold an
ideas festival, sponsor a
college tour
Early trailblazers
ProPublica, nonprofit investigative
journalism site, winner of 2010 Pulitzer Prize
MinnPost.com, nonprofit news site
launched in 2007. Operating loss in 2009:
$125,000 on expenses of $1.2 million; $675
in revenues from donations, ads, sponsors
VoiceofSanDiego.org, nonprofit news site
Spot.us, crowd-funded journalism
Patch.com, for-profit network of sites for
communities under 50,000 people, claims to
operate at 4.5% of cost of newspapers.
Huffington Post creating a nonprofit
investigative journalism arm.
Jim Brady launching a DC news site
Early trailblazers
Groundreport.com
Community builder

here’s an amazing
difference between building
an audience and building a
community. An audience
will watch you fall on a
sword. A community will fall
on a sword for you.

— Chris Brogan
Author,“Trust Agents”
Trends: Niche news + community

The Stupid
A Food Coma Spouse Buzz
Cancer Show
Predictions: Old media
500 of the 1,408 daily
U.S. newspapers will
suspend print
publication in next five
years. Most will go out
of business.
Cause of death: failure
of imagination.
The impact will be highly disruptive of communities in short
term, but new emergent journalism enterprises will sprout up.
We’ll see isolated success stories of pay walls, nonprofit
news models, crowdsourcing. But these, as well as micro-
payments & government subsidies (& blogging!), won’t
sustain in-depth/community/investigative journalism.
The iSavior? Um, no
“I’m a genius, but I’m not a
miracle worker. ... I wasn’t
put on earth to save The
New York Times. I was put
on earth to restore a sense
of childlike wonder to
people’s empty, pathetic
lives.”
— Fake Steve Jobs
Predictions: New media
Emerging from ashes of the news industry will
be a vibrant news ecosystem with smaller
players that are more social & entrepreneurial.
Blogging, crowdsourcing & nonprofit news
sites cannot take place of newspapers by
themselves — but they will be part of news
ecosystem.
We'll see hyperlocal news aggregators take
slice of local advertising pie: EveryBlock,
Outside.in, Fwix, Topix.net
But: They don’t have resources to go deep.
Legacy news publications should own
hyperlocal markets — but largely won’t.
 Prediction: Trust disruption
Reimagined media: When the rules are up for grabs:
Investigative journalism with
a catch: Mark Cuban &
Sharesleuth.com
TechCrunch: April Fools a
day early
Kontera embeds text ads as
part of your blog posts

March 31, 2010

Closing thoughts
Young people don’t read newspapers, but they’re
enormous consumers & sharers of news. The Mobile
Generation: Hire them. Observe them. Listen to them.
If every business is a media business, do what no one
else can easily replicate in your community or region.
To be relevant in the new age, create a startup culture,
practice social journalism— and innovate!
Leverage the community. Retool focus to serve as
guide, curator, data jockey & aggregator as well as
content creator.
Bring journalistic standards & values into this new
space.
Help communities tell stories in authentic ways.
Thank you! Let’s talk!
JD Lasica
Founder, Socialbrite.org
SNCR senior fellow
email: jd@socialbrite.org
Twitter: @jdlasica
jdlasica.com/about/

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/ncf10
Presentation at http://slideshare.net/jdlasica