25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers

Tom, I think the first 2 are the most important. Newspapers should own local but they simply don't. If I were to sum up your 25 I would say that it is all about abandoning the notion of publishing and think more along the lines of being an information service.

See www.printcasting.com. I believe it is the shape of printed news of the future

Tom-

Good ideas. Isn't this essentially what the newspaper business was before the multinationals took over?

There are a few people out there with blogs who insist that journalism cannot survive without multinational corporate backing. Thank you for avoiding this myopic, self-serving view of the world.

I fear that many people at the top of the news hierarchy are like real estate agents. They don't get that the game is over.

The old ways of doing things have gone the way of the dinosaur and the best these execs can come up with is to attack Google.

Completely shilling here, but it is on topic.

Every Newspaper should be the portal to the local blogosphere giving readers the latest posts and let readers search for what the localsphere is saying about topics they care about.

Here are a few examples we've done:
http://blognetwork.knoxnews.com
http://blognetwork.expressmilwaukee.com
http://blognetnews.com/bgdailynews

Thoughtful post.

Each of those points merits a discussion. I'll tackle one, #17.

Navigation and convenience are the new pipes. A publication has to offer their audience the best way to navigate the world - which includes not just your own (ideally very unique and differentiated content, per #1 and #2), but also a way to navigate news from around the web (around your area of interest). It's better for the readers (and also otherwise, someone else will).

Another argument for #17. In any category online (not just news), what scales is either a) user-gen content, or b) some form of better navigation/aggregation. Not many example of a site which has achieved scale without some form of a) and b). So you have to do both. Trick with (a) is that it's often hard to see that ad real estate (see Facebook). But if you can do (b) well, you can still sell that inventory at premium CPMs.

(a semi-related post I did here: http://upendra.shardanand.com/2008/05/30/the-new-architecture-of-news/)

Hi Tom,
Great post. I like your first two ideas and also believe strongly in number 13 - many newspapers (often smaller papers) simply republish the print article on the web, but that misses much of the opportunity of monetizing online.

I would like to disagree with number 8 though. Ad networks are a channel sales partner for any publisher. (Full disclosure: I'm the CEO of a company that works with ad networks as partners)

In almost every mature industry (travel, retail, B2B computing equipment, financial services), there are direct sales forces and channel sales partners. Most industries have figured out how to effectively manage this.

In the online industry, the best-in-class players are able to differentiate the inventory they sell directly via their sales force from the inventory they sell via ad networks, and make both models work. They provide different ad products, different brand experiences, different access to data, etc. The fact is that the portion of inventory that most publishers are able to sell via their direct sales forces is dropping, so either publishers can monetize a shrinking portion of their inventory or figure out a multi-channel sales strategy.

- Rajeev Goel, CEO PubMatic

Thanks for everyone's comments. And yes, Jeffand Sharon, you are right, it's all about being local, newspapers could/should own that space. If they don't do it someone else will take that opportunity from them. Newspapers need to transition into news services. Just as IBM transitioned from a computer company into a computer services company to survive the PC disruption wave.

Maybe you shouldn't have been so immediately dismissive of this idea, Tom: http://is.gd/kMa5

Good list.

Interesting article. I would like to add that while all of us journalists and bloggers are discussing news business and its future for a while now, there are only a few people doing anything about it. But I guess I am digressing here.

On a related note, we have been working on a comprehensive guide for online journalists at Bighow. As a part, we have put up a list of 14 news business models.

Hope that is useful for your readers.
http://bighow.com/poll/Which-among-these-is-the-best-news-business-model-

Good list, very constructive.

I have a few ideas myself:

http://www.klintron.com/brain/archives/2009/02/10/new-revenue-sources-for-professional-news-media-outlets/

The problem with going totally local is that you might not have the story -- and thus the web traffic --- that everyone is talking about that day, like, say the presidential election, or a plane crash in the Hudson River. They can get more information elsewhere about such things if they like, but they need the basics on the newspaper site.

Michael: One doesn't have to exclude the other. You can still have coverage of big stories, that's a good use of wire services.

At our agency we have a newspaper client that has tremendous penetration in terms of readership, but we have the second oldest average population in the country. We are trying to find a way to bridge the value of the printed word with online, where it's easy to make a comment (see: this comment for example). We surmised that we could create a link between both editions (print and digital) by allowing people to make comments on editorial pieces online, then use a Digg app so that users could vote on the best comments, which would be published the next day in the printed edition.

After all, who doesn't like to see their name in the paper?

As I write in the Huffington Post Chicago today: Be a hybrid social enterprise, an L3C funded by foundation money and allowed to make a profit. Stick to your public mission.

Great article for thinking about a new way for journalism. But local should be local. If you are a local paper, then focus on local news. The other news people are getting from CNN, Fox, etc. They don't want that from you. They want local sports, government. They want local. As Tom challenges, journalist need to begin to think in very, very different ways.

I love newspapers, but increasingly think of them as a luxury when I have a lot of time - mostly Sundays and that dead time during takeoff and landing.

I have a few ideas of my own that I would like to add to this list.

I've written about 5 ways newspapers might be able to use a free tool called Lizzer to monetize their content.

There's some overlap with no. 11 on my no. 1 - but I think many of them are net new.

Check out my list at http://lizzer.com/blog.

You have to get to grips with the cost structures v say blogs, 'get' SEO, and make long-term strategic decision about the Kindle and Kindle-lookalikes e.g. this post.