Ge E K S B E a R in G G If T S Je F F Ja R V Is
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GEEKS BEARING GIFTS GIFTS BEARING GEEKS GEEKS BEARING GIFTS cements Jeff Jarvis’s status as an endlessly imagina- tive and relentlessly innovative guide to our brave new media world. ARIANNA HUFFINGTON Jarvis once again leads the way in crisply articulating the business challenges which if not tackled will inhibit journalism’s survival. By recognising the importance of news as a service built on relationships he paints a new and exciting picture in which sustainable business models can be found. ANDREW MILLER, CEO, GUARDIAN MEDIA GROUP Makes a compelling case that the journalist’s role is not just to inform the pub- lic but to help them inform each other. in doing so he broadens the defi nition of news and paints a provocative vision for the future of the news industry. VIVIAN SCHILLER, TWITTER, NPR, NEW YORK TIMES ‘Defi ning ourselves as content creators is a trap,’ writes Je! Jarvis in GEEKS BEARING GIFTS. He thinks journalists don’t understand their own business anymore. But he’s written a lucid and practical guide to reversing that. It’s like a novella in which the hero—public service journalism—is sprung free to compete again for business success. I learned a lot from it, and I thought I knew what Jarvis had to say. If you thought so too, you’re probably wrong. JAY ROSEN, NYU AND PRESSTHINK.ORG Technology has disrupted the news industry—its relationships, forms, and JEFF JARVIS JEFF business models—but also provides no end of opportunities for improving, expanding, reimagining, and sustaining journalism. GEEKS BEARING GIFTS is a creative, thought-provoking and entertaining exploration of the possi- ble future(s) of news by Professor Jeff Jarvis, who leads the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is one of the preeminent voices on emerging forms of journalism, news delivery, and community engagement. CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL T O W - K N I G H T OF JOURNALISM C E N T E R F O R E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L JOURNALISM GEEKS BEARING GIFTS GIFTS BEARING GEEKS GEEKS BEARING GIFTS cements Jeff Jarvis’s status as an endlessly imagina- tive and relentlessly innovative guide to our brave new media world. ARIANNA HUFFINGTON Jarvis once again leads the way in crisply articulating the business challenges which if not tackled will inhibit journalism’s survival. By recognising the importance of news as a service built on relationships he paints a new and exciting picture in which sustainable business models can be found. ANDREW MILLER, CEO, GUARDIAN MEDIA GROUP Makes a compelling case that the journalist’s role is not just to inform the pub- lic but to help them inform each other. in doing so he broadens the defi nition of news and paints a provocative vision for the future of the news industry. VIVIAN SCHILLER, TWITTER, NPR, NEW YORK TIMES ‘Defi ning ourselves as content creators is a trap,’ writes Je! Jarvis in GEEKS BEARING GIFTS. He thinks journalists don’t understand their own business anymore. But he’s written a lucid and practical guide to reversing that. It’s like a novella in which the hero—public service journalism—is sprung free to compete again for business success. I learned a lot from it, and I thought I knew what Jarvis had to say. If you thought so too, you’re probably wrong. JAY ROSEN, NYU AND PRESSTHINK.ORG Technology has disrupted the news industry—its relationships, forms, and JEFF JARVIS JEFF business models—but also provides no end of opportunities for improving, expanding, reimagining, and sustaining journalism. GEEKS BEARING GIFTS is a creative, thought-provoking and entertaining exploration of the possi- ble future(s) of news by Professor Jeff Jarvis, who leads the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is one of the preeminent voices on emerging forms of journalism, news delivery, and community engagement. CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL T O W - K N I G H T OF JOURNALISM C E N T E R F O R E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L JOURNALISM GEEKS BEARING GIFTS CUNY JOURNALISM PRESS IS THE ACADEMIC IMPRINT OF THE CUNY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, PART OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK 219 WEST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10018 WWW.PRESS.JOURNALISM.CUNY.EDU © 2014 Jeff Jarvis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. First printing 2014 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-939293-73-2 paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-74-9 e-book Cover and text design by Bathcat Ltd. Typeset by CBIGS Group, Chennai, India. Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom. For Steve Shepard — dean, editor, mentor, sounding board, supporter, friend. (It’s all his fault.) CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION: NEW RELATIONSHI P S , F ORMS, AND MODELS FOR NEWS 9 PART 1: RELATIONSHI PS 1 1 No Mas Mass Media 19 Content vs. Service 27 News as Platform 3 1 Ecosystems and Networks 39 Engagement, Collaboration, and Membership 4 5 Journalist as Organizer, Advocate, and Educator 51 PART 2: FORMS 53 The Article is Dead — Long Live the Article 59 Process Over Product: Adding Value to the Flow of News 67 Curation 71 Data as News 77 Mobile=Local=Me: Context Over Content 87 Reinventing TV News 95 Untapped Technologies 99 PART 3: MODELS 101 The Story So Far 105 Digital First — What Then? 115 Efficiency: The Final Cut 129 Beat Businesses as Building Blocks of News Ecosystems 139 Business Ecosystems 147 Advertising, the Myth of Mass Media, and the Relationship Strategy 1 5 9 Native Advertising: Fiend or Foe? 1 6 7 Paywalls 173 Patronage 1 7 7 The Pricing Paradox of Information 1 8 1 The Link Economy and Creditright 191 Metrics 197 Capital: Investment in the Future 207 A FTERWORD: A NOTE ON JOURNALI S M EDUCATION 215 ACK NOWLED GMENTS AND DISCLOSURES 219 NOTES INTRODUCTION N EW R ELATIONSHIPS, FOR M S , AND MODELS FOR N EWS These digital visionaries tell people like me that we just don’t under- stand them. They talk about the wonders of the interconnected world, about the democratization of journalism. The news, they say, is viral now — that we should be grateful. Well, I think all of us need to beware of geeks bearing gifts. Here we are in 2009 — more viral, less pro!table. Because news costs. Because quality costs. Because free sets the price too low. Because free isn’t sustainable. Because free is too expensive. —LES HINTON, THEN CEO OF DOW JONES, SPEAKING TO THE WORLD NEWSPAPER CONGRESS IN HYDERABAD, INDIA, DEC. 1, 20091 I am grateful for geeks’ gifts to news. Technology provides no end of opportunities for improving, expanding, reimagining, and sustain- ing news. Yes, technology has also disrupted the news industry — its relationships, forms, and business models. But in this essay, I will try not to dwell on the !eeting past. In their white paper, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, Bill Grueskin and his coauthors at Columbia’s School of Journalism examined how our industry arrived at where we are today.2 Also from Columbia’s Tow Center, Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present by Emily Bell, Clay Shirky, and Chris Anderson proposed 1 ways for news organizations to exploit the opportunities that technol- ogy presents today to update, expand, and improve the craft.3 I now want to look to the future. Or rather, I want to examine many possible futures. I don’t want to predict where journalism will go. But I do want to imagine where it can go next and what is possible in the future. After the invention of that great disruptive technology, the print- ing press, it took half a century for the book to take its own form. At the start, printers still mimicked scribes’ work, using fonts designed to duplicate their handwriting. Printing was initially promoted as “automated writing.” We still de"ne the future in the terms of the past. Cars were “horseless carriages” propelled by “horsepower.” Radio was named what it wasn’t: “the wireless.” Today, we still “dial” and “hang up” phones, though those words have long since lost their literal meanings. For that matter, how soon will it be before it seems absurd to call smartphones “phones” when less and less we use them to talk and more and more we use them as — what? — computers, connectors, assistants, brains. On the internet today, newspapers, magazines, books, radio, and TV are each still substantially recognizable as their own forebears. Many have moved past the "rst phase of adaptation — shovelware, or simply pouring old wine into new skins — to take advantage of online’s added functionality. There was much oohing4 and aahing5 over a New York Times story about an avalanche with slideshows, video, photographic aerial maps, and graphics embedded in the tale.6 It’s lovely. But it still does what journalists do: It tells a story. It was still possible for The Times to print the narrative in the newspaper with little lost. We have arrived at what some may consider a destina- tion but I hope is merely a way station: the ful"llment of multimedia storytelling.