(2008-10-23) New Biz Models For News Summit

Jeff Jarvis has organized a "New Business Model-s for News Summit" (Journalism) today. Fred Wilson is there. Various people are tweeting.

Jeff hopes to convene a working group from each of the discussions at the summit to move to the next step and build at least one concrete model.

Nov24 update:

• Jeff sums up a future scenario he expects.

• Seth Godin notes all the opportunities missed by the Ny Times.

Dave Winer thinks this all misses the point. (And see older 2006-10-19-WinerNewspaperAdvice.)

Maybe one's love of Newspaper Publishing is a Baby Boomer vs Generation X thing, as Ivan Krstic posits.

Dec9 update: Clay Shirky calls BullShit on anyone in the industry acting like a surprised victim. Caught up? That makes it sound like a tornado. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move. By the turn of the century, anyone who didn't understand that the Business Model for newspapers was a wasting asset was caught up in nothing other than willful ignorance, so secure in their faith in the permanence of their business that they assumed that those glaciers would politely swerve at the last minute, which minute is looking increasingly like now.

• Mar'2009 update: Clay again on the breakage. That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given Experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing... The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between Advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Back in September, Frederic Filloux estimated that 100 dedicated/staff journalists would be necessary for run a digital-only newsroom equivalent to the big daily papers, and that no news-site has the traffic to pay that many. (In one of Jeff's sessions, a team worked the other direction, estimating possible revenue for a site covering Philadelphia Pa, and concluding they had to cap their newsroom at 35 people. Then tried to figure out how to get maximum value from that staff.)

Feb'2009 update: Dave Winer again - he's essentially saying that Citizen Journalism can be done for almost everything. And that a key process change is to provide direct access to each "reporter's" raw materials/notes (e.g. interviews, documentation). Which reminds me of Fred Wilson's thoughts on the Nature Of Truth.