Thanks to my former colleagues at the American Press Institute for allowing me to republish the 2008 Newspaper Next report I wrote for API: Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue.
Databases are a tool news organizations can use effectively (and don’t use often enough) to tell stories and provide answers for their communities, as well as to develop new revenue streams.
Some of the links in this report, which was published in December 2008, may no longer be active. But I still think the advice published here is some of the best I have ever given. I believe a news organization that follows the strategy outlined here will develop new revenue streams and profoundly deepen its relationship with its community.
I have also presented workshops on using interactive databases as described in this report. Contact me if you would like to arrange a workshop.
API also publishes other reports on issues in the news business.
[...] databases. Databases can be important storytelling tools. Be the Answer, my report on databases for the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project, details a [...]
[...] Be the Answer: Using Interactive Databases to Provide Answers and Generate Revenue [...]
[...] Be the Answer, my 2008 report on interactive databases for the American Press Institute‘s Newspaper Next project. [...]
[...] Dan Conover explains some of the opportunities for revenue from data, and my Be the Answer report for Newspaper Next explains [...]
[...] When I was at the American Press Institute in 2005, we entered a partnership with Christensen to help teach newspaper organizations how to apply his principles in developing new business models for the digital age. We called our project Newspaper Next. I read Christensen’s books, attended a symposium he led for newspaper industry leaders and a later workshop in which his associate, Scott Anthony, was teaching API staff how to teach the principles. I worked closely with Steve Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, who spent most of a year working with Christensen, Anthony and other associates on the project. For much of 2006 and 2007 and the first half of 2008, my primary job was teaching Christensen’s principles to the newspaper industry at conferences and seminars and in blogging and a report. [...]
[...] in the C3 Blueprint as well as in my 2008 Newspaper Next report on interactive databases: Be the Answer. While many news organizations are offering community business databases, I have not seen one as [...]
[...] Even before newspapers’ business model began to collapse under the force of digital disruption, we learned that many articles worked as well or better as graphics or tables, organizing those facts with a better structure for their content than the paragraph. As Dan Conover correctly notes, the answers to those W questions actually work better as structured data. And, as I’ve noted, databases have great potential economic value for news organizations. [...]
[...] I developed a reputation for understanding other aspects of digital journalism (including a good strategic understanding of the value of data), those holes in my résumé have not held me [...]
[...] in smart use of databases. (Full disclosure: My own data skills are outdated, though I wrote a 2008 report on databases for the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next [...]
[...] Leap Beyond “Newspaper Companies”, released early in 2008, though he did want to use my research on interactive databases as a third N2 report, published late in 2008 after I had left API. Neither report generated [...]
[...] Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue [...]
[...] reporters should be aggressive in seeking and using databases, either to present interactive answerbases to the community or to visualize [...]
[...] stories. We can and should tell our stories with photos, videos, audio, animation, games, maps, databases, timelines, data visualization and interactive graphics (and probably some tools I forgot to [...]
[...] noted before that news organizations need to develop multimedia directories of community businesses and organizations, a place for the community to come for information and a [...]