I am excited about the New Business Models for News project.
Not that I think they got it right. My first two comments on their site after they released their models and spreadsheets of financial figures for the first three years were critical. But what they do have right is the approach of openly consulting with the industry, responding collaboratively to critics and thinking differently about where the revenue for future news business models will come from. I’m hopeful that they will get it right.
I don’t like yesterday’s post, New Organizations, New Relationships, because it quoted me and linked to my blog, though I appreciated that. I like it because of the collaborative approach and the open mind. I like that it advocates new relationships with businesses that go beyond selling advertising.
Matthew Sollars and I have never met, had never exchanged emails before yesterday. I didn’t know who he was; I don’t know whether he knew who I was. But I commented on his blog post, The Assumptions Behind Our Models, which was part of the Monday release of the new models and spreadsheets by the Jeff Jarvis-led project of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
I expressed my disappointment that the proposed models relied too heavily on traditional advertising. I expressed my belief that we need a broader revenue base and need to provide more meaningful services for community businesses. Of course, I provided a link to the part of my C3 Blueprint where I discuss the new revenue approach. I didn’t do this just for self promotion (though the value there is obvious), but to make the point and make a contribution to people I thought were doing important work.
Matt responded Tuesday with a link to an earlier but undated post on Revenue Opportunities that is one of the most thoughtful, comprehensive examinations of non-advertising revenue opportunities for media companies that I have seen. I was a little disappointed to see paid content on the list; it was a fairly comprehensive list that solicited contributions, and any thinking person reading the whole list would look at it and say if you want to pursue these other ideas, you want the bigger audience of a free site. (And I grudgingly admit that paid content should be on any comprehensive list, even if the view that it’s an opportunity isn’t unanimous.)
Check the list of opportunties out and you start feeling optimistic about the possibilities for this often-gloomy business: Deals of the day, ad networks, e-commerce, memberships and more.
Then Matt sent me an email yesterday thanking me for my comment and calling attention to the Revenue Opportunities post. He also told me about a new post he was working on and invited my input on that post. And he made a bit of a personal connection, noting that he grew up in Cedar Rapids and read The Gazette as a boy, moving after finishing at Bowman Elementary School.
Well, I was busy yesterday and didn’t have time to respond. But I squeezed in time to send him a quick note, which he quoted from in his New Orgs, New Relationships post. So suddenly these two journalists who never met each other and had no relationship are collaborating in a public discussion about the most important issue facing our industry. I gave him some of the thinking behind the C3 revenue approach and elaborated some specifically on the idea of a driving vertical, which he quoted.
I really like what Matt wrote yesterday. Way too much energy in this business is focused on paid-content efforts that will limit our audience with little return or on trying to prop up a traditional advertising model that is collapsing. Matt is thinking and writing about the other ways that a media company could serve community businesses:
We also think that the advertising arm of the business should invest in training and/or consulting local businesses in online advertising and marketing. That service could bring in $480,000. Building a business-to-business marketplace where local entrepreneurs can list sales and post and reply to RFPs, could earn nearly $1.5 million in annual revenues by year three.
I think this exploration of new business models is the battle for survival of the news business. I serve as Innovation Committee co-chair (with Linda Grist Cunningham of the Rockford Register Star) for the American Society of News Editors. We’ll be presenting a live chat next week about new approaches to consider. I’ll write about that in my next post, probably later today.
The Buttry Diary 
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