Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Brave
News
Worlds
Navigating the
New Media Landscape
Preface
For the past three years, discussions about the future of the news media have centered
on the decline of the so-called golden age of journalism and the descent into a chaos
characterised by splintered audiences, decimated balance sheets, and the muscling-in
of amateurs. Fearing that their halcyon days as the guardians of information are num-
bered, many editors and journalists have engaged in collective navel-gazing, asking
themselves: What went wrong?
But is the future really so bleak? Is the decline a global phenomenon? Are we moving
into a new ‘golden age’? And what does it mean for press freedom?
To find answers to these pressing questions, the International Press Institute teamed up
with the Poynter Institute, one of the premier journalism training centers in the world,
to set out on a global investigation assembling an international group of editors, jour-
nalists, visionaries and sceptics to discover how the future of the news is developing
around the world.
The result is that after a 10-year absence, the IPI Report series has returned, revamped
and reinvigorated with a new edition entitled “Brave News Worlds”, a report that charts
the exciting times ahead for the news media and uncovers the many different global
perspectives thereof.
Picking up where the IPI Report series left off in 2000, “Brave News Worlds” explores
what the next 10 years hold for the news and journalism industry and offers insight into
how journalists and non-journalists alike can take advantage of changes in the media
and technology to make the future of news a bright one.
Edited by Bill Mitchell, Head of the Poynter Institute’s Entrepreneurial Journalism and
International Programs, the report brings together the greatly diverse perspectives of
42 editors, journalists and media experts from over 20 countries to tackle issues such as
regulation and control, emerging forms of journalism and the power of the public,
along with the need to reframe traditional news models to better engage with audi-
ences.
With a focus on effective solutions and lessons learned, but also providing stimulus for
debate, this report is not a definitive map, but instead a compass, pointing us, the global
media, in the right direction: To a sustainable and successful future for journalism.
Lauren Dolezal
Commissioning and Production Editor
Contents
4 Introduction: Discovering New Value Along New 64 Lessons for Journalists in the Crowdsourcing of Crisis
Routes for News Bill Mitchell Information Patrick Meier
68 Social Media as a First Draft of Journalism and a Rally-
The Journey Ahead ing Cry for Democracy Endy M. Bayuni
71 Crowdsourcing Can Turn Fragmentation into Commu-
The Evolution of News nity Jeff Howe
8 News as a Service to be Sustained Rather than a Prod-
uct to be Sold Jeff Jarvis Emerging Forms of Journalism
12 Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information 74 Data and Journalism Form a Powerful Combination
Ecosystem Alan Rusbridger Paul Bradshaw
15 How Technology Turned News into a Conversation 79 The Tablet Innovates News Presentation as Color Did in
Turi Munthe 1970s Mario Garcia
18 The Shock of Inclusion and New Roles for News in the 82 From Adversaries to Allies: Professional and Citizen
Fabric of Society Clay Shirky Journalists Need Each Other Solana Larsen
22 Fifth Estate Joins the Fourth in Push for Freedom of
Expression and the Press William H. Dutton Traditional Concepts Reframed
85 How Niche Journalism Works for Politico Bill Nichols
88 Building a Cabin and a Blog Create Foundation for
The Role of Journalists Community Louis Ureneck
26 The Journalism Business and Business of Journalism 92 The Future of TV News Belongs, in Part, to Multi-Plat-
Must Align More Closely in the Future Roy Greenslade form Video Steve Herrmann
30 The Irony of Editors and Democracy Alex Jones 95 New Online Tools Usher in Golden Age of Global
33 In the New Media Rush for Instant News, Where are the Muckraking Sheila S. Coronel
Journalists? Alison Bethel McKenzie
36 Newsroom Structures and Cultures Limit Journalism Ownership
Innovation Jean-François Fogel 98 Government Support Obliges Australian Broadcasting
39 Three Tasks for Journalism: Control Costs, Embrace Corporation to Innovate and Diversify Mark Scott
New Ways, Believe in the Business Paul Tash 102 Nonprofit Ownership is No Panacea; New Models
42 Reinvention of Journalism Marked by Seven Key Needed for New Times Karen B. Dunlap
Features & Six Critical Steps Dan Gillmor
105 Conclusions from Paths with Promise: Time to ‘Skill
Up’ on 10 Promising Paths Bill Mitchell
The State of Law, Regulation and Media Freedom
45 Legal Threats to Privacy, Free Speech Appear Over the
Horizon Geoffrey Robertson Reports from the Road
49 Legislation and Libel Laws Erode Press Freedom, Jeop-
ardizing Democracy Robin Esser 106 Media Face Different Difficulties in Less Mature
52 Media Freedom in a New Media Landscape Damian Markets Fernando Samaniego
Tambini 109 From the United States: Old-School Storytelling
55 Defending Freedom of Expression on the Internet Using New-School Tools Steve Buttry
Susan Pointer 112 From China: Competition Over News Intensifies
in China, as Internet Offers Alternative Coverage
59 Conclusions from The Journey Ahead: Trends and Yuen-Ying Chan
Tips to Build the Business and Enhance the Craft 116 From Malaysia: Independent Malaysian News
Bill Mitchell Site Shores Up its Pay Wall with Innovation
Premesh Chandran
Paths with Promise 119 From South Africa: Citizen Journalism Project Offers
Case Study in Collaboration Steven Lang
The Power of the People 121 From South Africa: Telling the Stores Left Untold by
60 Providing Platforms for Community Involvement in Gaps in Wealth and Bandwidth Ferial Haffajee
Journalism as a Social Good Grzegorz Piechota
2 IPI REPORT
125 From Kenya: Telling African Stories the African Brave News Worlds
Way Salim Amin
128 From Burma: Peeking Behind Burma's Bamboo IPI Interim Director and Publisher
Curtain Soe Myint Alison Bethel McKenzie
131 From India: Media in India Poised to Grow
Rapidly Rajesh Kalra Editor in Chief
134 From Russia: Digital Publishing Empowering a Bill Mitchell
New Technology in Russia, but is it Journalism?
Andrei Soldatov Commissioning & Production Editor
137 From Colombia: La Silla Vacía Models How the Internet Lauren Dolezal
Encourages Press Freedom in Colombia Juanita León
140 From Jordan: Digital Technology Fuels both Commissioning Editor
Oppressive Governments and Media Freedom in Michael Kudlak
Arab World Daoud Kuttab
143 From Nigeria: NN24, Birth of an African Channel Managing Editor
Anthony Dara Julie Moos
146 From Japan: Tracking the New York Rangers Hockey
Team from Tokyo: A Personal Tale of Media Consump- Layout and Design Editor
tion Takashi Tanemura Stefan Fuhrer, Fuhrer Visuelle Gestaltung
149 Conclusions: 10 Waypoints Tagged to the Future of IPI Press Freedom & Publications Manager
News Bill Mitchell Anthony Mills
Producer
Lindenau Productions,1030 Vienna, Austria
Printed By
Druckerei Holzhausen, 1140 Vienna, Austria
ISBN 978-3-9503007-1-0
IPI REPORT 3
Introducing IPI’s 60th Anniversary Report:
4 IPI REPORT
income – and its relationship with mainstream journalists of the former audience. It is also being driven by new entrepreneurs, the
Fourth Estate. William Dutton and Geoffrey Robertson address the men and women who want to build new kinds of sites and services
growing importance to democratic life of the core value of each es- that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the
tate: Freedom of expression and freedom of the press. public.”
The Obstacles facing what Roy Greenslade characterizes as the “the Damian Tambini, the British expert on media law and policy, re-
journalism business and the business of journalism, in which the for- jects the notion of a Fourth and Fifth Estate, arguing that there’s
mer represents commerce and the latter represents public service.” “no real boundary between ‘the Internet’ and the press.”
The value and values of citizen journalism and its often boisterous Media freedom without media power?
cousins, crowdsourcing and social media. How do they fit with But he raises a key question: “The current crisis of the business
journalism’s ultimate purpose – as well as its bottom line? Rajesh model, and therefore of the fourth estate, itself leads to an uncom-
Kalra points out that news organizations gain not only in content fortable question: Can we have media freedom without media
but in loyalty by engaging the contributions of their customers. power?”
But several of the authors also describe the challenge of resolving
real conflict over such values as verification, fairness and inde- Gone are the days when the twin challenges of journalism’s com-
pendence. merce and craft could be addressed separately. Sustaining news as
a fuel of democratic life demands not only traditional journalistic
The challenge of sustaining, in an era of uncommon customiza- skills, but the entrepreneurial tools that Dan Gillmor lists as essen-
tion, a common presentation of news to the diverse constituents tial to creating the sort of value someone will pay for.
who populate our civic lives. How do we make good decisions
about the commonweal, in other words, if we have our noses Premesh Chandran, the human rights advocate and co-founder of
buried in the Daily Me? the leading online publication in Malaysia, Malaysiakini.com, of-
fers a case study of the site’s struggle to sustain itself with a pay wall
The central question for journalists and news organizations in that has been in place since 2002.
each of these areas: How will you engage what Clay Shirky de-
scribes as the “coordinated voluntary participation” of your read- Reconciling that approach with the increasingly open and collab-
ers, viewers, listeners and users in creating the news that civil so- orative environment of the Web has been difficult, with subscrip-
ciety requires? tion numbers stagnating since 2008.
Shirky’s seminal 2009 essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Un- “Twitter’s ability to spread breaking news fast was …a major blow
thinkable,” helped inspire part of IPI’s 60th anniversary Congress, to Malaysiakini’s positioning,” he writes. “Twitter provided news-
“Thinking the Unthinkable: Are We Losing the News?” makers, especially politicians, with a direct route to the audience,
reducing their reliance on news media.
In his essay for this report, he sketches a future that’s quite think-
able, for journalists and their audiences alike, but only if journal- “As a subscription site, Malaysiakini has also been cut off from so-
ists figure out smart ways of accommodating what he terms “the cial media. Users are more likely to share links on Facebook and
shock of inclusion” of the former audience in the enterprise of Twitter that their non-subscriber friends can read.”
news gathering, distribution and sharing.
Chandran is not giving up on the subscription model, linking its
Shirky points out that a great deal of audience participation in- rejuvenation to the sort of innovation he hopes will provide suffi-
volves voluntary efforts motivated by “human desires to do things cient new value to users to sustain the site.
that make us happy, not just things that pay us money.”
The year ahead will include significant experimentation with paid
He says the “shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, content, ranging from the sort of blunt pay wall recently imposed
driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the on all of the content of the Times of London to the more flexible
IPI REPORT 5
Right: Editors at work in
the news hub of the
Wall Street Journal in
New York, March 2010
metered approach that the New York Times says it will introduce There’s opportunity to create new value for users with that mate-
in January 2011. rial. There are also risks.
In Chapter One of the report, The Journey Ahead, you’ll find an Not all of what users share is accurate. IPI’s Alison Bethel McKenzie
essay about a more fundamental issue written by Alex Jones, au- points out the challenge of sorting out truth from rumor in the
thor of the 2009 book, “Losing the News,” that helped inspire the blizzard of social media that followed the 2009 Iranian elections.
second part of the IPI Congress title. With foreign correspondents thrown out of the country, it fell to
people on the street to document with cell phone cameras and text
Securing Coverage of the ‘Commons’ updates the stories of the uprising that ensued. In an early exam-
Jones highlights a concern also raised by South Africa’s Ferial ple of the sort of collaboration that will be required going forward,
Haffajee and others in the report: “It is easily possible to know journalists in London, the US and elsewhere stepped in to provide
in depth about your favorite sports team or an automobile acci- the fact-checking and context understandably missing from
dent in your neighborhood,” Jones writes, “but to be utterly un- reports from the streets.
aware of genocide in Africa... to know little about the broad pic-
ture that includes points of view that are foreign in every re- Along the way, journalists and their new partners will need to
spect.” wrestle with their often conflicting views of such values as verifi-
cation, transparency, accountability and fairness. Collaboration
He adds: “That is not an enhancement of democracy. The most will be key with a whole range of partners, not just the blogos-
democratic – meaning, the non-customized view of the world – is phere. News organizations are also developing new alliances with
the one that is most apt to be created with the idea of informing a NGOs, universities and even competitors.
lot of people with diverse interests and backgrounds.”
The St. Petersburg Times, owned by the Poynter Institute and the
The key to saving the news, Jones argues, is the editorial decision- largest newspaper in Florida, has merged its reporting from the
making exercised by “the old-fashioned and disparaged editor state capital with its state-wide rival, the Miami Herald.
with independent judgment...”
The pace of all this change can be overwhelming. International
The loss of such professionals has damaged journalism’s capacity media consultant Fernando Samaniego says media executives
for public service in ways that Greenslade acknowledges he un- sometimes respond to his call for urgent action by suggesting that
derestimated: “I frankly admit that I made a mistake some years the revolution can wait.
ago, while in the first throes of cheering the digital advance, of ad-
vocating the reduction in editorial jobs,” he writes “It was a reason- “I always tell them that they are dead wrong,” Samaniego writes,
able argument at the time but publishers have taken it to an un- “because their readers/clients have discovered the Internet and...
reasonable limit.” will bypass traditional media if they are not offered quality content.”
Greenslade says journalists must focus now on the construction The essays collected here suggest no reason to wait. The issues of
of “a bridge from old to new media in order to preserve the best of press freedom that moved those 34 founding editors to take action
what we have in order to enhance the good that is to come.” 60 years ago are ever more urgent. As IPI’s Bethel McKenzie notes,
there’s no let-up in powerful forces erecting barriers to the free-
Some of that “good to come” is already being created by newcom- dom of information that’s a fundamental, universal right.
ers to the world of journalism, contributors to an emerging ecosys-
tem of news who are no longer content simply to receive reports Around the globe, journalists and their collaborators are discov-
produced by others. ering the tools and tactics that can yield new routes for news and,
in the process, protect the rights common to us all.
Steve Buttry points out that journalists have long relied on com-
munity members for eye-witness accounts of news that journal- Bill Mitchell leads the Entrepreneurial Journalism and International programs
ists missed. Many people have stopped waiting for reporters to at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Florida. To
show up and are just publishing their observations on their own, contact any of the authors in this report – or to suggest follow-up discussions
a trend that enterprising news organizations are beginning to pick of any of the issues raised – send an email to bmitch@poynter.org.
up on as they incorporate some of that content.
6 IPI REPORT
IPI REPORT 7
Tags: Linked, Networked, Partnered, Sustained
News as a Service to
be Sustained Rather than
a Product to be Sold
W
By Jeff Jarvis
A new news ecosystem is e must blow up our concep- in content-and-ad networks, competing
tion of a news organization—and news. with the Washington Post and its much
forming, in which newspapers
Very soon, we had better hope that news- heavier cost burden.
are part of networks that enable papers aren’t just papers any more but are
valued members of larger networks that In Brooklyn, my colleagues and our stu-
communities to share and make
enable their communities to gather, share, dents at the City University of New York
sense of information. and make sense of the news they need. Graduate School of Journalism are running
The Local with the New York Times. We are
Communities won’t need news organiza- working together to nurture a new ecosys-
Editor’s Note: We asked Jeff tions to gather and share information; tem, training members of the community
using technology, they are starting to do in media and journalism and training citi-
Jarvis, the author, journalism
that on their own at a marginal cost of zero. zen sales forces to sell new forms of service
professor and media visionary, Journalists and publishers then must ask to local merchants.
how they can add value to that process,
to update an essay he wrote
how they can become platforms (Google- At Journal Register, a beleaguered and re-
three years ago for the World As- like) for conversation and sharing, for ask- cently bankrupt newspaper chain, new
ing questions and getting answers, for CEO John Paton decreed that his staff
sociation of Newspapers. The
pooling knowledge and holding debate, for should put digital first and print last as he
topic: “Newspapers in 2020.” adding reporting, for building new ecosys- remakes his company collaborating with
tems of news. local blog networks built by startup
Growthspur. The company (I’m among its
The journalists may offer technology and advisors) has found new efficiencies even
training as well as reporting. The publish- in print (on 4 July, all 18 of its dailies were
ers may set up networks that help sustain published using only free online tools).
their members with advertising, events,
services, and other sources of value and Yes, we see the beginnings. But we still have
revenue. One company will yield to 100 not been nearly radical enough in rethink-
companies, each smaller but—thanks to ing what a newspaper is.
the efficiencies of collaboration and spe-
cialization and the higher value of target- So what is a newspaper? That’s what young
ing—each more efficient and profitable. people may soon ask. Jeffrey Cole of the
USC Annenberg School’s Center for the
In the US, I see the first seeds of such a new Digital Future concluded from one of his
ecosystem of news emerging. surveys of Internet use a few years ago that
people 12-to-25 years old—who’ll be in the
In Washington, DC, TBD.com, started by the golden 25-to-38 demographic in 2020 –
company that owns POLITICO, will cover will “never read a newspaper.” Never is a
Washington with a few dozen journalists strong word. Phil Meyer famously pre-
collaborating with scores of local bloggers dicted in his book “The Vanishing News-
8 IPI REPORT
Below: Google News stories are
aggregated by Newsmap according to
the frequency at which the stories
appear – allowing users to quickly
identify stories with the most coverage
in a particular region.
paper” that if current trend lines continue, tages is not a viable strategy for growth—or could create a community. The famously
the last American paper will be published survival. laconic Zuckerberg’s response: “You can’t.”
in 2043 (or sooner perhaps). Let that word, Full stop.
too, sink in: last. I’ll argue that a newspaper isn’t even a
product. Journalism is a service, a process, Later, Zuckerberg explained that commu-
So get ahead of the curve for once. Kill the an organizing principle. And thanks to the nities already exist and are already doing
newspaper yourself. Pick a date in the less- technology that some think is a threat to what they want to do, so the question we
distant-than-you-think future and unplug newspapers—the Internet—that service can should ask is how we can help them do that
the press. And then ask: What’s a newspa- now expand in so many ways, turning a better. Zuckerberg’s prescription: Bring
per? What is its real value? And how does newspaper into something new and some- them “elegant organization.” When you
that value live on and grow past paper? thing more—at a lower cost. So rather than think about it, that is the essence of what
asking what a newspaper will be, I think we journalism has tried to do: It helps organize
Oh, printed products may well continue should ask what a news organization’s rela- a community’s knowledge so that a better-
and in some countries still grow. But I tionship with its community can be. informed society can accomplish the goals
wouldn’t mourn their death so long as we it sets for itself.
find ways for their journalism to live on, I am reminded of a moment at the 2007
change, and grow. For a newspaper mustn’t World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Do what you do best and link to the rest
define itself by its medium. It isn’t just In a session of the International Media So I suggest that news organizations turn
paper. Its strength and value do not come Council, a leading newspaper publisher be- themselves into service companies, en-
from controlling content or distribution. seeched Facebook founder Mark Zucker- abling and training networks of local blog-
And protecting those dwindling advan- berg for advice on how his newspaper gers and specialized news sources to sprout
IPI REPORT 9
up in their communities. They should en-
able others to succeed at creating content
so the news organizations don’t have to go
to all that expense alone, so they have
something to link to.
10 IPI REPORT
they cannot afford to waste effort on com- The next question: Can the market meet
modity news and production. And there that demand? That’s why we are perform-
still is a citywide news organization, but it ing our research at CUNY. We believe we
is smaller and much more efficient. are seeing credible ways for the market to
Rather than asking what advance. And we are seeing entrepreneurs
There is, I believe, a future for news. It’s not seize that opportunity.
a newspaper will be, ask guaranteed. It won’t appear on its own. It
what a news organization’s must be built, if not by the incumbent in- Then the big question is, again: What can
stitutions then more likely by the entrepre- and should news be? And I don’t mean it’s
relationship with its neurial journalism students I’m training at an iPad app; thinking that way isn’t rein-
community can be. CUNY (whose best opportunity is to disrupt venting news but is more often a sad at-
the legacy players). tempt to hold onto old models of news. No,
pulling in $200,000 in ad revenue and we I mean, what relationship will news have to
believe that could reach $350,000 if they Some suggest that we are seeing a market its community? How can it open up to be-
were able to join networks – networks that failure in news. I disagree. We are seeing a come collaborative, networked, efficient,
news organizations could create. Those failure of imagination by some—only and sustainable? That is our challenge and
news organizations can make money from some—of those legacy players. They are the opportunity.
selling top-down advertising and also from ones making themselves vulnerable to new
new revenue sources: events, education, and efficient competition by not reinvent-
data, and more. ing themselves and instead by resisting in-
evitable change and hiding behind the
You can find our research at newsinnova- skirts of government, seeking to get regula-
tion.com and our models (which you are tion to grant them an uneven playing field
free to download and change) at newsinno- by expanding copyright or limiting fair use
vation.com/models. The assumptions in or enabling pricing collusion or handcuff-
these models are focused on an American ing Google.
market, to be sure: In the US we do not
have the strong and varied national media Google, by the way, is not news’ enemy. It
of European nations; we have stronger sends publishers four billion clicks a
local governments that demand stronger month, four billion opportunities to build
coverage; and we do not have the growth of a relationship with readers and find value
print readership that newspapers in some there. If they can’t, that’s not Google’s fault;
nations enjoy. Still, many of the dynamics it’s theirs. Rather than treating Google as
and opportunities presented by the Inter- the enemy, news executives should see it as
net will be universal. So it’s worth looking a model of success in a new marketplace.
at the various experiments under way in They should be asking (pardon me for
the US as a canary in the coalmine (and the plugging my book): What would Google
canary is tilting on its perch). do?
The ecosystem we envisioned in our CUNY It’s way too soon to give up on the market. Jeff Jarvis heads the Center for Entrepreneurial
research had more than 100 companies, Google certainly hasn’t. Journalism at the City University of New York Grad-
many owned by journalists, with about 250 uate School of Journalism. He writes about media
full-time-equivalent staff for content—an So the real questions are: Will there be a and technology for his blog, Buzzmachine.com, and
equivalent resource to what exists in the market demand for reporting and journal- the Guardian in the UK. He is the author of “What
newsroom of a paper in such a city today. ism? It’s a leap of faith, perhaps, but I be- Would Google Do?” and is at work on his next book,
But these journalists are much closer and lieve there will be. If not, news and in- “Public Parts.”
more accountable to their communities; formed democracies are sunk.
IPI REPORT 11
Tags: Linked, Networked
Openness, Collaboration
Key to New Information
Ecosystem
By Alan Rusbridger
12 IPI REPORT
Below: The Guardian
newsrooms, London.
14 IPI REPORT
Tags: Linked, Networked, Partnered, Sustained
IPI REPORT 15
Through social
networks & other
digital tools, citizens
are increasingly
info from CNN.com – essen- breaking, annotating it do possibly the most to marshal into a functioning business
tially means that whatever is important form of news model. Citizen journalists, which today
most popular amongst your
& distributing global reporting on its own – broadly means anyone with a Internet
friends on Facebook, or most news. that is, investigative connection and an interest in the news, are
tweeted amongst those you journalism. part of the solution, not the problem. And
follow on Twitter, or most Digged, Stum- while, of course, only a tiny fraction of
bledUpon or Reddited will be your front The trouble is, increasingly, neither can Web surfers engage with real news, their
page of the day. mainstream news. Although a handful of engagement with the news has incompa-
US news organizations still maintain ro- rably augmented the conversation, and ex-
It’s no surprise then, given the wash of in- bust foreign news operations, the once panded its reach.
formation available (and its endless repeti- mighty foreign staff of the Baltimore Sun
tion, distortion and misattribution), that has been eliminated and the consolidation As news organizations, professional jour-
the top-hit news sources on the Web con- of Tribune Co. staffing overseas has nalists and geeks figure out new and more
tinue to be the mainstream news outlets. trimmed those ranks as well. efficient ways to harness the power of mil-
Trust is a major factor, but so is that critical lions of engaged voices and opinions on the
journalistic function: editing. Not just in The latest State of the News Media report Web, the quality of global news and report-
the packaging of what is told, but in choos- found that US newsrooms lost 25 percent ing and information will explode. And that
ing what counts as news. of their staffers over the last three years. will only accelerate once the media
Professional journalism has suffered not moghuls figure out how to fix their busi-
We read the news not just to keep in- just in foreign reporting, but in domestic ness models.
formed, but to be part of a conversation – reporting and investigative journalism
regional, national, communitarian – about (which is increasingly the bailiwick of the Spare a thought for them, not for journal-
it. The news around us helps us define our nonprofit sector, see ProPublica and, in ism as we know it.
relationship to the world, and to those also the UK, the Bureau for Investigative Jour-
engaged in defining themselves. Newspa- nalism).
pers and broadcasters create communities:
just ask CNN viewers what they think If old-fashioned news reporting has been
about Fox News viewers. brutally attacked by the Web’s free-con-
tent-for-all business-model dictat, it has to
But more than building communities of look to the Web (and to its highly-in-
interest, old-fashioned journalism also formed, entrepreneurial reader-cum-ac-
speaks to an understanding of what news tivist-cum-contributors) for some of its sal-
is that ‘citizen journalism’ cannot, because vation. Yesterday’s sub-editor is today’s
most news of real interest is built painstak- commenter (get a fact wrong in an article
ingly and over time. Most news is, in fact, a online and you’re a global laughing stock).
story. Yesterday’s roving foreign correspondent is
today an army of local bloggers and local
The kind of news that can be crowd- stringers.
sourced is bitty, image-led, or data-driven:
Vide the examples above – pictures of sur- Citizen journalists, amateur photographers
prise events like 9/11 or the tsunami, acci- and others willing to join the news conver-
dental reporting of the Mayhill Flower va- sation, or supply their content for free are
riety (who caught Obama referring to dis- often blamed for the ever-more harried
enfranchised Pennsylvanians who “cling (and underfunded) lot of the professional
to guns or religion”), or the kind of (fantas- journalist. They shouldn’t be. If anything is Turi Munthe is the Founder of Demotix –
tic) work being done by a host of open- to blame for that, it is the wholesale depar- www.demotix.com – the multiple-award winning
data outfits like Ushahidi, WIkiLeaks or the ture of the classifieds market to independ- open newswire, with over 3,000 reporters in 190
Open Knowledge Network. What it can’t ent sites like Craigslist, Facebook, et al, and countries around the world. Follow him on Twitter
do is tell meaningful, full-length stories the massively smaller ad revenues of the @turimunthe or @demotix.
about that information, nor, critically, can Web that no newspaper site has been able
17
Tags: Catalyzed, Connected, Volunteered
18 IPI REPORT
The News Pipeline:
a 20th Century
metaphor
tary participation. The participation part can change the very idea of news – what it speech on his own, without institutional
comes from a medium that is implicitly is, how it is created and experienced and support; Marshall was an amateur blogger
two-way and group-oriented, a medium shared. (not yet having incorporated); and the
that makes everyone who connects to it a source contacted the news outlet, 1,500
potential producer of bits and not just a How participation has changed news miles away, rather than vice-versa. No pro-
consumer of them. Here are a few surprises in the news busi- fessionals anywhere in sight.
ness in our little corner of the 21st century,
The voluntary part comes from the stagger- courtesy of the ability of amateurs, working In 2005, the London transit system was
ing volume of free time available in the de- alone and together, to participate and not bombed. Sir Ian Blair, the head of London’s
veloped world (trillions of hours a year), just consume: Metropolitan police, went on radio and TV
coupled with human desires to do things to announce that the the cause had been an
that make us happy, not just things that In 2002, after Speaker of the House Trent electrical failure in the underground.
pay us money. Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s segrega- Within minutes of Blair’s statements, peo-
tionist 1948 campaign, the man that did ple began posting and analyzing pictures of
And the coordination comes from entre- Lott in was Ed Sebesta, an amateur histo- a bombed double-decker bus in Tavistock
preneurs of generosity, people like the rian who had been tracking racists state- Square, and in less than two hours, there
founders of Wikipedia or Flickr or Word- ments made by American politicians to were hundreds of blog posts analyzing this
press who offer us opportunities to pool segregationist groups. Shortly after Lott evidence and explicitly contradicting
our free time, using this group-oriented said his praise had been an uncharacteris- Blair’s interpretation.
medium, to make ourselves feel happy or tic slip, Sebesta contacted Josh Micah Mar-
engaged or satisfied by creating things to- shall, who ran the blog Talking Points Seeing this, and overriding the advice of his
gether we couldn't create on our own. Memo, to share recorded comments made own communications staff, Blair went on
by Lott dating back to the 1980s. air again less than two hours later to say
Taken together, this coordinated voluntary that it had indeed been a bombing, that the
participation is a new resource, a cognitive These comments help destroy Lott’s ability police didn’t have all the answers yet, and
surplus that allows us to treat the con- to characterize his comments as a slip, and that he would continue reporting as they
nected world’s free time and talents in ag- led to hims losing his position as Speaker. knew more. When he spoke to the public,
gregate, as something which, used right, Sebesta had built the database of racist Blair had the power of all the traditional
IPI REPORT 19
media behind him, but it was clear that Hanni realized that on the Web, news out- the Green Uprising, or the chemical com-
merely having a consistent message on lets could act not just as a source of infor- pany Trafigura’s inability to preserve the
every broadcast channel in existence was mation, but as a site of coordination, find- press injunction of their pollution off the
no longer the same as having control. ing the people who cared about a particular Coast of Côte d’ Ivoire, once Twitter users
story and helping them take action to- got on the case.
In 2006, Kate Hanni was stuck, for 8 hours, gether. The US airline industry had success-
on a flight that landed in Dallas during a fully fought off pressure to create any new The cognitive surplus of the former audi-
lightning storm, while the airline refused to rights for passengers for decades, but ence is increasingly driving hybrid profes-
allow passengers off the plane. She was as within three years of the launch of Hanni’s sional-amateur models that would have
furious as all the other passengers who’ve group, first New York State and then the US been both unthinkable and unworkable
ever experienced such a thing, but she de- Congress passed a Passengers Bill of Rights, even 10 years ago: ProPublica covering
cided to do something about it. She largely because Hanni had used the press to every Iowa caucus in 2008 with citizen
founded a pressure group agitating for an turn an unorganized group of angry pas- journalists, a feat that would have bank-
air passengers bill or rights, and then she sengers into an organized group of angry rupted them had they done it with
set about recruiting members by finding passengers. stringers; the reshaping of Korean presi-
online newspaper accounts of flight delays, dential politics by Ohmynews, a pro-am
and posting about her nascent group in the On and on this list goes: Tehrani protestors journalism site; the Guardian’s crowd-
comments of those articles. using their camera phones to document sourcing its tracking of the expenses of UK
20 IPI REPORT
Left: Former Speaker of the
US House of Representatives,
Senator Trent Lott announces
his retirement after allegations
of racism broken by blog
site Talking Points Memo.
IPI REPORT 21
Tags: Democratized, Distributed, Networked, Trusted
22 IPI REPORT
Protesters demonstrate against the MPs’
expenses scandal outside the Westminster
Magistrates Court in central London, 11
March, 2010. Four British MP’s appeared in
court for their allegedly shady practices
in filing their expense claims.
reflecting different views on the same against traditional media. The two-sided individuals to challenge such controls. For
news item or topic. The ability to hold nature of the Internet means that the way example, the www.herdict.org website ac-
other estates more socially accountable it opens doors to a cascading array of user- cepts and publishes reports from Internet
through the interplay between ever- generated innovations and content also al- users of inaccessible sites around the world,
changing networks of networks in the Fifth lows in techniques that can block online while the OpenNet Initiative and Reporters
Estate does not in itself mean the Internet access and comprehensively monitor and Sans Frontièrs (RSF) are among the groups
inevitably empowers all its users directly. filter Internet traffic. campaigning in this area.
Instead, it supports access to online re-
sources that both incorporate and go be- These attempts are typified by the Chinese The RSF website includes the Internet as
yond the resources of more traditional in- government’s efforts to control Internet one of its sections detailing restrictions on
stitutions (e.g. local newspaper, library, content, creating the ‘Great Firewall of freedom of expression and physical intim-
university or government office). Individ- China’. There are many other examples, in- idation of journalists and bloggers around
uals can then network with information cluding the Burmese government closing the world, which indicates similarities be-
and people in ways that can change their down the country’s Internet service during tween freedom of speech issues online and
relationships with more institutionalized political protests in 2007 and a court order offline, as stressed by the US Secretary of
centres of authority in the other estates. in Pakistan in May 2010 stopping the use of State, Hillary Clinton.
a Facebook page called ‘Everybody Draw
Fifth Estate Faces Threats to Freedom of Mohammed Day!’ as the portrayal of the However, the democratic implications of
Speech and Freedom of Information Prophet Mohammed is against Islamic the Fifth Estate are far broader than such
The enhanced communicative power of teachings. overlaps between new and traditional
networked individuals has led to many at- media. Research at the Oxford Internet In-
tempts to censor and control the Fifth Es- At the same time, as the Internet diffuses stitute (OII) has shown that Internet users
tate which are equivalent to those used worldwide it is being used by networked increasingly go online as their first port of
IPI REPORT 23
call when looking for information on all The communicative power of these net- the existence of a Fifth Estate role of net-
types of subjects. Networked individuals worked individuals crucially depends on worked individuals as a key democratic
can also mobilize political campaigns effec- open access to information and the tools to constraint on unacceptable activities, as re-
tively, as occurred to boost the election of analyse it. In 2009, for instance, the Daily flected in the subsequent coalition govern-
President Obama in 2008. Telegraph newspaper bought a disk con- ment’s announcement that “greater trans-
taining full details of the expenses of UK parency across Government is at the heart
People involved in a particular sphere, Members of Parliament, which led to the ex- of our shared commitment to enable the
such as medical professionals and patients, posure of what were generally regarded as public to hold politicians and public bodies
can also use the Internet to reach trusted many unacceptable practices. As the news- to account”. A key element in this policy is
online sources of information and services paper owned the disk, it could still act as the to publish more information online in ‘user
in their field of interest and not be limited gatekeeper in analysing and disseminating friendly’ forms, including detailed depart-
to their local practice or organization. the information according to its own prior- mental plans and all new items of central
ities. In response to the re- government spending over
Growing numbers within institutions sultant public outrage with The growing £25,000 ($38,535).
rooted in the other estates are also net- politicians, and the limita-
working beyond the boundaries of their or- tions of the press, the gov-
popularity of, Protecting the Openness of
ganizations. This has led to geographically ernment at the time legis- and trust in, the the Fifth Estate
distributed individuals coming together lated to ensure all expenses The democratizing potential
online, form collaborative network organ- would in future be pub-
Internet relative of the Fifth Estate could be lost
izations to co-produce new information lished on the Web, avail- to other media if inappropriate forms of In-
products and services. The online ency- able to all to analyse. ternet regulation are intro-
clopaedia Wikipedia and open source soft-
is one of the duced that restrict its open-
ware products such as the Firefox browser The government’s move most important ness and creativity. Yet, ten-
are examples of this phenomenon. implicitly acknowledged sions with other estates result-
developments of
24 IPI REPORT
recent years.
Left: A court-ban of Facebook’s
Everybody Draw Mohammed Day
is met with enthusiastic support
from Islamic protestors.
1st: Clergy Public intellectuals Internet as an amateurs’ space World wide research networks; sci-
without expert knowledge and ence commons; experts’ websites
analytical rigour. and blogs.
3rd: Commons Government Censorship, regulation and other Online innovations in engagements
controls that constrain and block with citizens (e-democracy;
Internet access. e-government).
4th: Press Mass media Competition for Use of Fifth Estate spaces to com-
audiences, funding; charging for plement traditional media.
access to information.
Mob Citizens, audiences, consumers, Undermining of trust in the Internet Informed, helpful fora (e.g. on med-
Internet users through malicious (e.g. spam, ical and other specialist issues);
hacking) and accidental uses. greater democratic engagement.
ing from the Internet’s role in challenging ‘the Mob’ by Burke. Over-commercializa-
traditional institutions could lead to de- tion of the Internet and the activities of ma-
mands for such restrictions. As Table 1 il- licious users in the lay public are among
lustrates, threats emanate from each of the the key threats.
four estates. Public intellectuals, a contem-
porary equivalent of the clergy, have at- It is important therefore to formulate
tacked the Fifth Estate as amateurs, not guidelines for appropriate regulations to
worthy of serious attention. However, the protect participants in the Fifth Estate of
amateurs can complement and enlarge the the Internet realm. These should address
public agenda since they are not part of the threats to the Fifth Estate as well as support
pack. Economic elites, today’s nobility, are areas of productive and creative coopera-
generating wealth through the Internet, tion.
but place the Fifth Estate at risk in building
monopolies that will jeopardize trust in
search and information sources. Govern-
ments, representing the commons, are
placing increasing controls on freedom of
speech and information, such as out of
concern for privacy, security and consumer William H. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Inter-
protection. The Fourth Estate is emulating net Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, Univer-
aspects of the Fifth Estate, but also seeking sity of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. He is
to co-opt its users and producers. Finally, also Principal Investigator of the Oxford e-Social
among its wide base of users are malicious Science (OeSS) Project.
individuals, whom might have been called
IPI REPORT 25
Tags: Bloody, Diminished, Linked, Transition
The sometimes-uncomfortable
marriage of commerce and
public service has become
W here are we going? That
question, and variants of it, is the one I am
asked most often by practising journalists
and, most particularly, by increasingly con-
cerned students about to embark on media
I am troubled by the way in which others
who share this vision of a coming golden
age appear to be untroubled by the prob-
lems we are now facing. Unlike too many of
them, I am deeply concerned by this in-
increasingly strained for news
careers. creasingly bloody period of transition be-
organizations. As cost cutting cause we are losing journalists with valu-
My answer? I always tell them I don’t really able skills and, at the same time, failing to
on the one side has limited
know. It has the virtue of honesty, though I forge a meaningful online strategy that
journalism on the other, will note the raising of eyebrows. melds the best of “old” mainstream jour-
nalism with the emerging “new” journal-
democracy be the victim?
After all, I have called myself a digital revo- ism.
lutionary. I have espoused the panacea of a
participatory, inter-connected, linked jour- Old media is on its knees and, in the
nalism. I want to consign to the dustbin of process, is destroying journalism. Its
history the undemocratic vertical relation- owners and managers, confronted with
ship between us, the secular priests known crisis, have chosen to dispense with the
as journalists and the readers, formerly people who produce words – the informa-
known as the audience. tion-seeking, news-gathering, story-writ-
ing, headline-composing, picture-making
In its place I envisage a horizontal relation- staff.
ship, a journalism of the community, for
the community, by the community. I know I readily accept that there has been an eco-
it’s an idealistic vision but surely none the nomic crisis. The newspaper business
worse for that. Pursuing ideals is good. model has been wrecked, though there are
differences in the effect on companies from
Despite being unsure of the outcome, I am country to country. For example, several
convinced it’s the direction we should be traditional publishers in the United States
taking, and I know that the technology have been forced into bankruptcy protec-
both allows it and invites it. The danger, tion to deal with colossal debts while, in
however, is that we will neglect this historic Britain, publishers have managed to avoid
opportunity to shape a coherent journalis- falling through the insolvency trap door
tic landscape for the future. and continued to trade profitably.
26 IPI REPORT
Across Europe, there have been similar changing and will change further. What Below:
problems, again with wide variations. In al- they are doing is putting off the evil day. The golden age of revenue:
most all cases, however, the medicine to This is perfectly rational. Debts aside, This poster advertising the
cure the ills has been similar: publishers though operating profits may be dwin- classifieds section of the
Evening News circa 1956 was
have indulged in an orgy of cost-cutting. dling, they are still profits. However, the found in a disused passage-
They have employed new media technol- consequences for journalism are truly way in London’s Notting Hill
ogy to save money, not to embrace its terrifying. Underground Station.
power to advance towards a new form of
journalism. In short, they have subverted a
crucial technological breakthrough for
their own commercial ends.
IPI REPORT 27
Below: A sign of the times - a man
picks up a copy of the free Metro
newspaper across the street from the
New York Times headquarters.
I want to make a distinction here between For journalists, the commercial depart- staff who have been the backbone of news-
the journalism business and the business ments were the dark side. For managers, gathering and news processing.
of journalism, in which the former repre- journalists were an on-cost. As the late
sents commerce and the latter represents publisher, Lord Thomson, memorably I frankly admit that I made a mistake
public service. The former is about private joked: News merely fills the space between some years ago, while in the first throes of
profit, the production of newspapers on the the adverts. cheering the digital advance, of advocat-
baked bean ethos. The latter is about acting ing the reduction in editorial jobs. It was a
for and on behalf of society. Now look where the twins’ journey has reasonable argument at the time. But pub-
taken us - to an era when the siblings are lishers have taken it to an unreasonable
Throughout the 20th century the twins - becoming more and more estranged. And it limit.
fraternal, never identical - marched hand is the fate of the journalistic twin that
in hand. They knew they depended on each should concern us most. Newspapers did tend to be overstaffed or, at
other and though they occasionally fell out, least, employing people to do jobs that
as siblings tend to do, they regarded each Grotesque cost-cutting threatens to divest became genuinely unnecessary in a digital
other as a necessary evil. us of skilled, experienced and dedicated environment. Judicious editorial budget
28 IPI REPORT
savings were therefore in order. New preserve the best of what we have in order Where are we going?
media’s glittering array of innovations were to enhance the good that is to come.
seen by publishers as some sort of labour-
I envisage a horizontal
saving device. In this period of transition from old to new, relationship, a journalism
journalism is suffering. At virtually every
It hardly helped that running in parallel newspaper in Britain - national, regional
of the community, for
with a technological revolution was a and local, daily and weekly - journalists are the community, by the
banking crisis followed by a deep recession, being required to feed two platforms, print
disemboweling a business that relied on and online, and both, in their different
community.
advertising revenue. All this came against ways, are the loser.
a background of the relentless decline in
print circulations. There is precious little synergy between
them despite the building of work struc-
Publishers took measures that made finan- tures that enable editorial copy to appear as
cial sense, at least in the short term. They smoothly as possible on both. Papers such
cut costs. It is fair to say that the early cost- as the Financial Times, the Guardian and
cutting was probably justified. There were the Daily Telegraph have performed won-
too many under-used print works. Top- ders by providing 24-hour news coverage
heavy staffs needed pruning. There had to in which their journalists produce print
be some financial compensation for digital copy, online text, video and audio material,
investment. and mobile phone alerts.
Initial success with cost-savings - as pub- It is a tribute to them, their editors and ded-
lishers prefer to refer to cuts - went to their icated in-house digital pioneers that they
heads. It became the only game in town. do it so well after a steep and rapid learning
Cuts begat cuts. The management of de- curve. The situation outside of the London
cline soon spawned a language all of its nationals is altogether more depressing.
own. But, with the greatest of respect to all those
newspaper journalists who are making
Publishers justified their excesses with a valiant online efforts, almost all of it is old
range of euphemisms about rationalisation media journalism masquerading as new
in the digital age, concentration of re- media journalism.
sources, improvements to editorial effi-
ciency and so on. They jumped at the Mainstream journalists are not engaging
chance to reduce staffs still further by out- with their audience. To allow online users
sourcing a range of tasks. to comment is all very well, but if the orig-
inator of the article merely observes read-
At this point, readers may be forgiven for ers’ contributions (in many cases, they
saying: We know all that. My point in giving don’t even bother to scan the threads), then
the history lesson was to provide the con- it is a bogus exercise, without any value. Roy Greenslade, Professor of Journalism at City
text for my contention that if this process of University London, writes a daily blog about the
editorial sabotage continues then journal- What we face, though too many journalists media for the Guardian website and is the media
ism, and society, will be the loser. fail to grasp it and too many publishers re- columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has
fuse to discuss it, is a looming crisis for been a journalist for 45 years, in which time he has
At first sight, this may seem odd, given that journalism. It has the potential to eradicate worked for most of Britain’s national newspapers,
I have espoused the value of an emergent the key historic role of the media to act for culminating in the editorship of the Daily Mirror
journalistic form. The point is, however, the public good as a countervailing force from 1990-91. He has written a history of British
that we have a way to go before we reach against political and commercial power. In newspapers, “Press Gang: How Newspapers Make
that promised land. We need to construct a short, if this is not too pompous, democ- Profits From Propaganda”.
bridge from old to new media in order to racy is at risk.
IPI REPORT 29
Tags: Edited, Indepentent, Personalized
30 IPI REPORT
Glory Days: A copy of the Sunday
New York Times, 17 October 1965,
the largest edition in the paper’s
114-year history, weighed nearly eight
pounds and contained 946 pages.
Indeed, it is especially ironic that the As a veteran of small daily newspapers and as though it were his own body. He knew
much-maligned top-down editor at main- New York Times, I feel I know editing – the sensitive areas and the competing
stream news organizations from commu- which is to say the selection and shaping of yearnings, when to indulge and when to
nity dailies to The New York Times may a daily report using news judgment. discipline. He was beloved and respected,
prove to be the greatest bastion of demo- but most important, he was integral. It is a
cratic journalism in a world of editing-by- My first editor was J. Neil Ensminger and he model that every community newspaper
algorithm and customized news. could not type. But he knew his community should follow. Was it democratic? No one
IPI REPORT 31
With a vital mission,
editors still decide
had elected him to do the what appears on utterly unaware of genocide But that does not mean, as a practical mat-
job. But they trusted him in Africa. It is easily possible ter, that the job of editors is not alive and
and felt free to complain
the front page and to have a flow of news that well. Editors still decide what appears on
and criticize - a right that above the fold or is tailored to your politics or the front page and above the fold or what is
he indulged with pleasure race or narrow interests, featured on the nightly news. The impact of
by publishing letters-to-
what is featured on and therefore know little those traditional news delivery systems is
the-editor without a re- the nightly news. about the broad picture that still tremendous, in part because many of
sponse, even if the facts includes points of view that us want someone to help guide us to what
were wrong. “If you correct them, it takes are foreign in every respect. we really need to know.
the sting out, “ he told me, “and they need
their chance to sting.” A good rant was not That is not an enhancement of democracy. The most important thing for the editor of
the creation of the Web. The most democratic - meaning, the non- today is not to lose confidence in the job’s
customized view of the world - is the one power and its mission. It still has power,
At The New York Times, every afternoon that is most apt to be created with the idea and the mission has never been more vital.
the top editors of every department of the of informing a lot of people with diverse in-
paper assembled to battle for space on the terests and backgrounds. Indeed, it may be the old fashioned and dis-
front page. The foreign editor would pitch paraged editor with independent judgment
his best stories, then the national editor, the For instance, on an ordinary Saturday in who will prove to be the champion of
metro editor, and on down the line - busi- July 2010, the A section of The New York democracy in an age in which the choice is
ness, arts, culture, science - each making a Times’ national edition had 44 full stories, often news by algorithm or a flood of infor-
case like a lawyer before a jury. plus a dozen or more short summaries. mation that recognizes no constraints.
Some were updates from Iraq and Pakistan,
Then, with passionate argument and a but it is hard to imagine a customized news
sense that they were creating the best-pos- list that would include articles as diverse as
sible snapshot of the world for Times read- a piece on flawed brain research at Colum-
ers, the top editors chose what led the bia University (above the fold), obituaries
paper, what was the off-lede, what above of an African American scholar on proba-
the fold, what inside. bility and the country music song writer
who wrote Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces,”
The collective education, training, skill, ex- and a long piece about the artist Christo’s
perience, intelligence and commitment ongoing effort to drape the Colorado River.
represented by the corps of editors struck
me as staggering. Here they were, strug- It is the gatekeeper – the editor – who seeks
gling each day, to select the best fruit of all to appeal to a mass audience that assem-
the material that had been assembled by bles such a varied, rich and nourishing
the paper’s reporters, put it into form that mix of news.
was clear, and then picked over it to make
sure that the most important things got But how does the gatekeeper do that worth-
space. while job in a digital age when a quasi-out-
law organization such as WikiLeaks by-
When I pick up my Times each morning - passes gatekeepers altogether by publishing
which I do, on paper - I still marvel at what classified information that may well have
went into creating this version of the state not been reported on ethical grounds when
of the world and how valuable it is to me editors truly functioned as the arbiters of
to have editors doing that work on my be- information? Alex Jones directs the Joan Shorenstein Center on
half. the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard
The answer is a realistic recognition that in Kennedy School and is the author of “Losing the
It is easily possible to know in depth about some respects the gatekeeping role is moot News” and, with Susan Tifft, “The Trust: The Private
your favorite sports team or an automobile in a free-flowing online information envi- and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.”
accident in your neighborhood, but to be ronment.
32 IPI REPORT
Tags: Credibility, Informed, Linked
IPI REPORT 33
Left: Signs depict
missing or dead
journalists during
protests in Mexico City,
7 August 2010.
34 IPI REPORT
Right: Reports from citizen
journalists that Steve Jobs
had suffered a severe heart
attack proved to be false.
Old media newsrooms uddites are resilient. Since their quote the name of a significant piece of dig-
first rise, against the stocking frames of the ital code – a program, a tool, a mere appli-
are structured for analog
nascent textile industry in England, they cation – invented by a news organization.
publishing and create obstacles have been fighting new machines and It’s that simple: So far, old media played no
technologies. For two centuries they lost, part in the invention of the new media.
to digital publishing. A factory
again and again, while transport, agricul-
line model of production, ture, energy and the production of goods The management of their companies is still
were totally transformed all over the world. asking, over and over, the same question:
diffuse responsibilities and a
Nonetheless they kept alive their old tune What can I do with my content? Actually,
resistance to change will saying that you never change for the better. there is only one legitimate question: What
Today luddites are entrenched in old media can I do for the audience? Search, map-
challenge newsrooms trying
newsrooms. ping, aggregation, open conversation, geo-
to reinvent themselves. localization, social networking are impos-
Of course, no company would dare to pres- sible answers for people looking at the dig-
ent itself as an old media anymore. Any ital world with content ownership and ana-
media company has at least a digital busi- log business models in mind.
ness or pretends to have it. Old media have
been running news websites for years now. Nothing personal. As a consultant working
Newspapers are online; radio programs are in Europe and Latin America, I’ve met
distributed through podcasts; and watch- wonderful multi-skilled journalists in tra-
ing TV is more and more a catch-up activ- ditional media newsrooms. They’re tal-
ity. ented and efficient people, able in the same
day – sometimes on the same assignment –
Actually, the digital track record of old to commute from the old to the new media
media is an awful one. The press, especially and back. But for the most part, the news-
the printed press, missed most of its oppor- room – that structure inherited from the
tunities. It lost the classifieds market to industrial age – is so precisely designed for
Craigslist or look-alike online services; it the production of old media content that
was late to recognize the potential of blogs, we must see it as a main hurdle on the path
giving away a huge slice of to the digital future.
the news market; it The newsroom is
thought of ads mainly as a Newsrooms are the curse of
display and never tried to
a factory that feeds any news organization try-
produce news on demand; printing plants; ing to add a digital channel
and, yes, right now, it’s a of distribution to its tradi-
mere follower of the social
journalists are tional one. When such op-
media revolution. In a but the first leg erations integrate – asking
world driven by technol- journalists of a single news-
ogy, it’s impossible to
of an efficient and room to produce across two
repetitive industrial
36 IPI REPORT process.
or more platforms – radio and television at the same time, using the same technol- dozens of such newsrooms. Nowhere, have
are in a slightly better position. Thanks to ogy because it’s the only way to have a re- I found more than a third of the journalists
real time broadcasting, staffers in those sponsible cost-effective production of news actually working for both media on the
newsrooms move content quickly from old fitted into pages. To the contrary, a good – same day. Of course, in a company focused
media to new. Trapped in the beat of a daily i.e. innovative - digital media is a lab con- on a single platform – a so-called pure play
deadline, on the other hand, newspapers nected to a workshop with ever changing – each person is involved all day long with
face a rougher situation. They’re faced with tools and crafts because the digital technol- the invention of the new media, obeying a
three limitations as they struggle to get old ogy and the audience behavior move very single clock and using a single set of tools.
newsrooms producing new media. fast.
The success online of elcomercio.pe, the
First and foremost, the newsroom is a fac- To ask a workforce to feed a printing plant digital branch of the old Peruvian newspa-
tory. When it feeds printing plants, journal- and a news website, simultaneously, is to per, is based on such a no-nonsense ap-
ists have no choice there but to be the first run a team with two clocks. Quite often it’s proach. The site uses a content manage-
leg of an efficient and repetitive industrial done with poorly integrated tools, even ment system designed for a tagged content
process. They do the same tasks every day, with two distinct toolboxes. I’ve visited and serviced by a team dealing with search
IPI REPORT 37
engines and communities. In other words, monopoly or an oligopoly that it can’t should you use my simple trick: I shoot pic-
it’s a traffic-driven team as opposed to the bring itself to abandon what seemed for so tures of the integrated newsroom in the
news-driven environment of the old news- long like best practices. morning at 8 am, 9 am, no later than 9.30
room. am. And then I show empty desks. By 10
It’s a classic pattern in the diffusion of new am in most digital media, the morning traf-
That makes a huge difference, impossible technology: Facing a disruptive innovation, fic is already past its peak. How can you
to evaluate unless you’ve experienced the a profession does its best to keep its old cul- fight for a news website if your troops don’t
digital revolution within a pure play env- ture, preventing or slowing down the show up at the beginning of the battle? To
iornment with no strings attached to an old process of change. The stubbornness and win the morning in order to win the day is
news organization. To quote Gary Hamel, arrogance evident in smart press people re- a basic rule for a media drawing most of its
the theorist of modern management, in the flects their uncomfortable feelings: They traffic from workplaces.
past we had only two ways to bring human know what they are giving up and they
resources together: bureaucracy and mar- can’t imagine their future. They used to The newsroom as we knew it is doomed.
ket. The digital world added a new way: the speak, but now they must listen to their au- The idea that information wants to be free,
network. Here is the second limit of the old dience. They must learn how to read data as Steward Brand said in his often mis-
newsroom: It is unable to organize itself as traffic as a marketer. They must imagine quoted statement, is still worthy of debate.
a network. Its pyramidal power structure new applications or tools as a developer. But surely journalists deserve to be free.
from the editor to the intern journalist, its That will happen only if they are released
vertical hierarchy so closely knitted with The challenge is tough but not insur- from yesterday’s newsroom.
desks, sections, and crafts along the copy mountable. Lanacion.com.ar, in Argentina,
flow, and its necessary definition of a daily the digital child of a traditional newspaper,
budget, are quite contrary to the sponta- has improved a lot in the recent years
neous, horizontal and interactive way thanks to the digital efforts of key journal-
news is produced and distributed in a digi- ists. Many have decided to upload content
tal media. and speak to their audience several times
during the day, significantly improving the
You don’t have to breathe more than a few digital density of the online offer.
minutes in lasillavacia.com, in Colombia,
or elmostrador.cl, in Chile, to catch the dis- As I commute a lot between Europe and
tinct feeling of a team interacting with its Latin America, people ask me what differ-
audience. In those two countries, histori- ences I find between cultures of the two
cally stricken by political violence, both continents. Apart from languages, there is
sites are pure players displaying a strong none. North and south news media share
flow of user comments generated by the the same endeavors. The two distinct con-
open and quick way they serve news. It’s tinents, regarding the press, are now the
like a dialogue around a cup of coffee. digital one, where journalists work within
the audience, and the traditional one,
The third limit is the biggest one: an atti- where publishing and broadcasting remain
tude problem. As individuals, journalists mainly a one-way process. Latin America
understand that they live now in a new, as a whole isn’t lagging behind the rest of
news ecosystem. Some have written mag- the press. A large chunk of its press is well
nificent stories about the digital age. Some established in the digital world, largely as Jean-François Fogel is a journalist and writer. He
are even changing the way they work and the result of individual journalists acting as worked for the Agence France-Presse, the daily Lib-
they relate to their audience. pioneers, pushing and struggling in order eration and the weekly Le Point. Beside his activity
to build their future. as a journalist, he was the advisor of Le Monde’s
But as a whole, they share an esprit de CEO from 1994 to 2002 and later ran the design and
corps, embodied in the newsroom, that To tell the management of an old media organization of lemonde.fr. He is presently advising
prevents the necessary mutation. For about the true level of their digital readi- several media organizations in Europe and Latin
decades, the press was so influential so ness isn’t the most comfortable part of a America.
profitable, so protected by its position as a consultant’s life. But it’s easier that it seems,
38 IPI REPORT
Tags: Independent, Profitable, Sustainable
IPI REPORT 39
Or is it? For much of their history, newspa- I don’t pretend to be a scholar of newspaper Bergman, is an Internet whiz in Seattle.
pers were not an especially profitable en- history, but it strikes me there are lessons Among other things, he has started a group
terprise. Nor is this the first time that great we can take from the best of our predeces- of neighborhood websites where residents
newspapers have struggled or even suc- sors, including these: can post local news that big organizations
cumbed to financial challenge. Some fine don’t cover. He says he is trying to keep the
newspapers are still published in New York, They kept costs down. Upon his death in costs of journalism low enough that it can
but Hearst’s Journal American and 1978, Nelson Poynter gave away the St. be sustained.
Pulitzer’s World are not among them. Petersburg Times to keep it independent
and out of a chain. He was a great vision- In the early days of such collective commu-
Perhaps the historic aberration was the last ary. By all accounts, he was also tight with nity efforts, I heard a Wall Street Journal
quarter of the last century, when gushing a buck. columnist sneer that citizen journalism “is
revenues indulged higher costs and en- a lot like citizen surgery.” That drew a big
couraged bold ambitions. After such a At the school that bears Poynter’s name, we laugh from a convention hall full of editors.
party, the hangover has been hideous, but periodically gather a board of advisers from But the truth is: Just about anybody can
it need not be fatal. around the country. One of them, Cory learn to do a little first aid.
40 IPI REPORT
Page 39: Chicago billionaire and owner
of the Chicago Tribune, Sam Zell, pre-
dicts the end of home-delivered
newspapers.
These days, I don’t hear any editors laugh- took a chance on quick profits. Chastened
ing at the notion that non-journalists not by experience, he now foretells the end
might provide some useful material, for of printed newspapers delivered to sub-
free. scribers.
They embraced new ways. At this year’s Truth be told, a note of pessimism – even
meeting of Florida publishers and editors, fatalism – has crept into the conversation
it was the oldest person in the room who of some longtime newspaper operators
was carrying an iPad. Old dogs can learn over the last several years. In this thinking,
new tricks, or at least adapt some tricks print is in a holding pattern against the fu- Too bad you missed
they know already. ture, and creative energy should be de-
voted to all things digital.
the ‘80s, I tell my young
At the St. Pete Times, we have retooled our colleagues. You would
political coverage by launching a website – But not, I would caution, at the expense of
PolitiFact.com – devoted not just to report- our established print business, the one with
have liked them. The
ing what politicians say, but testing a rich history and – for all its current chal- business isn’t what it
whether their statements are true. Those lenges – some enduring strengths. Like any
statements get a rating from our Truth-o- enterprise, it also needs fresh thinking and
used to be. Or is it?
Meter, with “pants on fire” for the real investment. Six years ago, our company
whoppers. launched a new newspaper – tbt* Tampa
Bay Times – a free tabloid edited for a
This takes work, leaving less room for du- younger audience. It has grown sharply and
plication of coverage we might secure from steadily, to the point that its advertising rev-
other sources. Within Florida, we have enues now exceed those of our website, and
combined forces with the Miami Herald it contributes nicely to our financial results.
for political coverage, and scoops from The most frequent complaint from readers
each paper get prominent play in the is that the boxes are empty before they can
other. Beyond Florida, we are building a find a copy. Who says print is dying?
network of PolitiFact partners, with news-
papers in Texas, Georgia, Rhode Island and In contrast to the blowhard from the
Ohio. Windy City, another media mogul bears
more attention in my book. Rupert Mur-
So far, PolitiFact’s success is mostly journal- doch recently told a conference in New
istic, including a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, but York that printed newspapers would be
broadening our scale for a bigger audience around “for decades.” Note the plural. The
creates a better climate for advertising and first step in planning for the future is to be-
commercial reward. lieve there is one.
IPI REPORT 41
Tags: Diversified, Experimented, Innovated
Reinvention of Journalism
Marked by Seven Key
Features & Six Critical Steps
By Dan Gillmor
42 IPI REPORT
BNO News morphed from a Twitter
news service with approximately 1.5
million followers into a subscription-
based newswire.
have a more diverse and vibrant media prises, but what economist Joseph A. consider Big Journalism’s role as a watch-
ecosystem. Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” dog, inconsistent though the dominant
assuming that we have fair and enforceable companies have been in serving that role.
“Ecosystem” and “diversity” are key words rules of the road for all, ensures the long- But the worriers appear to assume that we
here. The dangers of monocultures – sys- term sustainability of the economy. can’t replace what we will lose. They have
tems that have little or no diversity – are no faith in the restorative power of a
well understood, even though they still The journalistic ecosystem of the past half- diverse ecosystem, because they don’t
exist in many areas, such as modern farm- century, like the overall media ecosystem, know what it’s like to be part of one.
ing and finance. Because monocultures are was dominated by a small number of giant
inherently unstable, the results are cata- companies. Those enterprises, aided by As Clay Shirky and others have noted, the
strophic when they fail. A diverse ecosys- governmental policies and manufacturing- cost of trying new ideas is heading toward
tem, by contrast, features ongoing failure era efficiencies of scale, controlled the mar- zero in the digital media world. That
side by side with new success. Entire ketplace and grew bigger and bigger. The means lots and lots of people will be – they
species come and go, but the impact of los- collision of Internet-fueled technology and already are – testing the possibilities. What
ing a single species in a truly diverse traditional media’s advertising model was is entrepreneurship all about? Whether
ecosystem, however unfortunate for that cataclysmic for the big companies that you’re doing it inside or outside another
species, is limited. dominated. enterprise, the following are key features:
In a diverse and vibrant capitalist economy, But is it catastrophic for the communities Ownership: This doesn’t necessarily mean
the failure of enterprises is tragic only for and society they served? In the short term, owning stock in a company, though of
the specific constituencies of those enter- it’s plainly problematic, at least when we course there’s nothing wrong with that.
IPI REPORT 43
It’s about owning the process, and the out- The process of entrepreneurship differs from I hear about dozens of new startups every
come, of what you’re doing. project to project. In the digital media space, month. Most will fail, but I have to stress
however, I’d suggest the following: again: This is not a flaw in the system. It’s a
Focus: If you can’t focus, you can’t suc- feature.
ceed in a startup. I know this from experi- First, start with a good idea, and above
ence. all follow your personal passion. An en- I’m jealous of my students, and I tell them
trepreneur who doesn’t believe in their so. I’m jealous that I’m not their age, start-
Ambiguity: Startups are full of ambigui- goal with every fiber of their being has al- ing out when the slate is so blank, when the
ties and even chaos. If you’re the kind of ready started to fail. possibilities are so wide open. They, not my
person who can’t deal with this, you may generation, will invent our future.
be wrong for entrepreneurship. Under- Second, develop it quickly and collabo-
stand a rule of startups: Your ultimate ratively, using off-the-shelf tools when
product is likely to be vastly different than possible and writing code only to get the
what you originally imagined, and it’ll parts you can’t find elsewhere. Be open
keep evolving. with others about what you are doing.
“Stealth mode” projects can and do work,
Resourcefulness: Startups have to use but most ideas will find more traction with
what’s available. If you have everything on the help of others who care about what
your wish list, you’re either over-funded or you’re doing.
under-creative.
Third, launch before you think you’re
Speed: Entrepreneurs move fast. They fully ready. As my friend Reid Hoffman,
change with evolving conditions and take founder of the LinkedIn network and a pre-
advantage of opportunities that emerge scient investor in Internet companies has
and disappear in short order. They make said, “If you aren’t completely embarrassed
decisions and move forward. by your website when you launch, you
waited too long.”
Innovation: You can innovate by being
more efficient or thorough, not just by Fourth, assume you’re in beta mode for
inventing new technologies. The Googles some time. You will have bugs and prob-
are few and far between, but innovators lems. Fix what’s broken and keep iterating.
often connect dots where others can’t
imagine the connections. Fifth, if you see the project will fail, do
that quickly, too. Don’t prolong failure,
Risk: Appreciating risk is essential to the and don’t spend investors’ money after it’s
entrepreneurial process, but it doesn’t be- clear you should stop.
long at the top of the list. You minimize the
risk when you can, understanding that you Sixth, repeat. A smart failure teaches valu-
can’t eliminate it. able lessons. Internal entrepreneurship in
companies, also called “intrapreneurship,”
should be especially forgiving of failure, as- Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for
We’re heading toward suming it’s not stupid or reckless. Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State
University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism &
a great new era in media While large enterprises can innovate, they Mass Communications. This is an edited excerpt
and journalism. If we do may be better off in the digital media world from Mediactive, his new book and online project,
buying or licensing from startups. Bill Joy, and is licensed under a Creative Commons “Attri-
this right we’ll have a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, put it best bution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
more diverse and vibrant when he said, “No matter who you are, License” (see http://creativecommons.org/li-
most of the smartest people work for some- censes/by-nc-sa/3.0/).
media ecosystem. one else.”
44 IPI REPORT
Tags: Leaked, Right to Privacy, WikiLeaks
IPI REPORT 45
But this cannot be the basis of a free speech ment freedoms, has no constitutional pro- What has gone wrong with the European
principle, which must either be absolute tection for sources (the result of an ad- Convention is fairly clear and is to some ex-
(putting the onus on the military to en- verse 5:4 decision in Branzburg v Hayes), tent a question of what has gone wrong
crypt or otherwise secure information re- and it severely punishes those who blow with the calibre of judges on the ECtHR.
lating to informers and to protect them the whistle to journalists from govern-
should their cover get blown) or else to ment offices (a Sunday Times source for When the Convention was formulated,
make sensible distinctions that are based information from the US Drug Enforce- back in 1950, it was endowed with a free-
on the long-run public interest, i.e. the ment Agency’s files about UK politicians standing and quite formidable freedom of
public’s right to know the extent to which a was recently jailed for two years). expression (Article 10(1)) defeasible only if
brutal war fought in its name is killing in- “necessary in a democratic society” to serve
nocent civilians through irresponsible or il- If the implications for national security some overriding public interests including
legal targeting decisions. transparency call for more considered the rights and reputations of others.
media ethics as the basis for a common po-
If Mr. Assange is not a journalist, he is cer- sition against the new Official Secrecy laws So Article 10 set up a presumption in favor
tainly an awfully big source for journalists that are being threatened, the almost expo- of free speech - the individual’s right to pri-
and the media has a duty to protect him nential development of privacy law needs vacy and reputation were exceptions to be
and his subsidiary sources if it uses their forceful and immediate challenge, cer- narrowly construed and applied only
material. It must be remembered that the tainly in Europe where the growth is rap- where necessary to reflect an overriding
US, for all its much admired First Amend- idly turning privacy into a jungle. social need. The right to privacy in Article 8
46 IPI REPORT
Far left: Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg
outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles at
the hight of the Pentagon Papers Scandal, 1973.
IPI REPORT 47
Left: Founder and Editor of WikiLeaks,
Julian Assange, faces the media in
London 27 July 2010, following the
website’s release of 90,000 US army
and intelligence documents.
48 IPI REPORT
Tags: Democratic Deficit, Regulated, Restricted
IPI REPORT 49
Right: Front page of
The Daily Telegraph
12 October 2009
Added to that are the sinister ranks of PR, fering in domestic law, is to hear a case information the public should know but
spin doctors, agents and clever lawyers being brought by Max Mosley which de- has been hidden from them heretofore by
who are dedicated to projecting and pro- mands the establishment of a rigid “prior obsessive secrecy on the part of those who
tecting their rich clients’ reputations at the notification” requirement for all critical rule over us. However, having let the genie
expense of the truth. The use of super in- stories. out of the bottle, the government then tried
junctions and injunctions to suppress legit- to weaken the Act and protect rafts of pub-
imate stories, and the development by un- Imagine what the powerful international lic service workers from its probes. In
elected judges of a privacy law in their in- drug companies, the conglomerates, and Britain, the Society of Editors helped to
terpretation of the vague terms of the the rich and powerful would make of that ward off this backsliding.
Human Rights Act, have a chilling effect on in terms of suppression of the news!
investigative journalism. The Society recently produced a compre-
Prior notification would soon become hensive report, written by Professor Peter
As we come more and more under the in- prior restraint. Cole, Emeritus Professor of Journalism at
fluence and power of Europe, the threat of the University of Sheffield and a former na-
further restrictive regulation at the behest Society of Editors Fights to Enhance tional newspaper editor.
of the European Court of Human Rights Media Freedom
(ECtHR) is all too real. The ECtHR, criticised The last government must take credit for In writing about the so-called “democratic
by Lord Hoffman as being unable to resist the Freedom of Information Act which has deficit” in Britain today he identified the
“aggrandising its jurisdiction” and as inter- enabled so many news outlets to ferret out following problems:
50 IPI REPORT
Possible new candidates for the position of Speaker
of the House of Commons presented their manifestos
to fellow Members of Parliament and the media
in London, 15 June 2009. The position became
available following the forced resignation
of Speaker Michael Martin in the wake of the
parliamentary expenses scandal.
“One of the most significant threats to ects are more discussed than imple- We need to be constantly on the watch for
media freedom, to the public’s right to mented. attempts to get between the public and the
know, is not the result of legislation or media. So while I think our system of self-
regulation but of recession and eco- Meanwhile local communities, towns and regulation is just about acceptable in a
nomic decline. The crisis of advertising cities are under-reported and the public democracy – I would end by repeating
and circulation decline in the print service role of the local and regional media, what I said at the beginning.
media particularly, of advertising and to hold those in power to account and to
audience decline in commercial broad- represent those over whom power is exer- Better regulation is less regulation. Set the
casting and of enforced cuts in the BBC, cised, is left wanting. news media free and the future will be
all contribute to what has been called more assured.
the democratic deficit.” Adding to the concern is the emergence of a
number of council-funded newspapers,
The regional and local press has experi- supported by council tax revenue and pur-
enced this worst, with newspaper closures porting to fill the gap left by traditional local
and reductions in editorial staffs as a con- newspaper coverage. MPs and editors have
sequence of declining revenues. called for an investigation into these coun-
cil newspapers which they say threaten the
This democratic deficit is now widely survival of independent local media and
recognised, but there is little action, if that undermine democracy. The Society of Edi-
is possible, to redress it. There are sugges- tors describes such newspapers as an ‘insult
tions of public funding for local media; the to democracy.’ The papers mislead the pub-
Press Association (PA) – Britain’s premier lic by posing as independent media, and
news agency – has initiated what it calls a also damage commercial counterparts by
Public Service Reporting Project where it encroaching upon their advertising terri-
would organise a pilot for court and coun- tory. In Britain we have a very effective sys-
cil coverage with reports tem of self-regulation. While
available freely to anyone I believe that the US editors would and could
who would wish to publish
them; local websites and
public’s appetite reject such a system out of
hand, in Britain it works
new free newspapers have for news is well.
emerged; new local broad-
casting franchises are being
undiminished and A committee of editors
Robin Esser is Executive Managing Editor of the
Daily Mail. He is also the Chair of the Society of Ed-
set up. But the PA project is it is in satisfying drawn from across the in- itors’ Parliamentary and Legal Committee. He has
finding it hard to secure
funding and the other proj-
this appetite that dustry devises a code which
sets standards for newspa-
been on Fleet Street for over 50 years.
52 IPI REPORT
Left: Silenced. A journalist
protests against the nationwide
violence directed at journalists
in Mexico City, 7 August 2010
IPI REPORT 53
truth, democracy and self-expression, and out some clear boundaries in the standoff protecting journalists: It is crucial that the
therefore social progress. between governments and the media. But value of media freedom is robustly de-
the current crisis of the business model, fended, particularly where freedom of ex-
Another view of the development of media and therefore of the fourth estate, itself pression is not protected, and where media
freedom is that it has been hard fought, and leads to an uncomfortable question. Can freedom is not merely the freedom of
only really gained acceptance through the we have media freedom without media media owners.
development of the brute power of the power?
‘Fourth Estate’ and the sometimes brutal But at the same time, we must be prepared
deployment of media power in the defence If media freedom requires ‘the brute power for a much more fundamental renegotia-
of media freedom and the interests of of the press,’ this has implications for how tion of the social compact between media
media owners. most effectively to work to establish media and the state in coming years. And a new
freedom around the world and how to re- framework for media freedom.
The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere spond to the current blurring of the cate-
in between. But this is not just a theoretical gories of media, journalist and press free-
exercise. Asking questions about what dom. We must draw a clear
rights and responsibilities journalists have,
and – both historically and politically – Should citizen journalists and others be ac-
distinction between
why they have these rights, is crucial at this cepted into the fold? If they are to enjoy the media freedom – which
particular moment. protection of the law, how best can self-reg-
ulation and professionalization govern
applies to the media –
This is an important question when we ask their ‘responsible’ behaviour? And in the and freedom of
about how the law and other institutions established democracies, how is responsi-
should treat bloggers, citizen journalists, ble journalism – upon which media free-
expression, which
Twitterers and the other ‘networked jour- dom depends – to be protected where the applies to everyone.
nalists’ of the Internet age. business model for news is being under-
mined?
Should amateur bloggers get the same
privileges – in terms, for example, of source Oxford Professor of Internet Studies Bill
protection – as traditional journalists? Dutton has suggested that we should think
Whether they enjoy the same privileges of of the Internet as a ‘Fifth Estate.’ (EDITOR’S
access to information is often a question for NOTE: SEE PAGE 22) I disagree, for two rea-
the sources, rather than society at large. But sons. First, the Internet has none of the de-
government information is the key source. liberate, self-conscious power that the
Should governments be able to control key press and the other estates have exercised.
announcements as they have, or should And second, there is no real boundary be-
government data and freedom of informa- tween ‘the Internet’ and the press.
tion be radically opened in order to foster
networked journalism? In my view, Fourth Estate power is indeed
faltering, but it is not in a terminal decline.
Clearly, we are at a crossroads. In the ma- The role that the media have played in so-
ture democracies of Europe and North cial progress remains crucial, but we are far
America at least, and in some other coun- enough in to the Internet age to be aware Damian Tambini was appointed as Senior Lecturer
tries to varying extents, an accommodation that the shift we are witnessing is a funda- in the Department of Media and Communications,
had been reached between state and polit- mental one. LSE, in September 2006. He is also an Associate
ical power and the power of the media. The Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research
notion of the fourth estate – a familiar one So this is a period in which debate and (IPPR) and at the Oxford Internet Institute. His
in France and the Anglo-Saxon world – re- openness is required, about how the media research interests include media law and policy,
flects the notion that the power of the are changing, and about how to foster re- and ethics and regulation in a changing media
media has a pseudo-constitutional status, sponsible journalism. Debate about the fu- environment.
and the law on freedom of expression set ture should not deflect us from the task of
54 IPI REPORT
Tags: Global, Open, Threatened
Defending Freedom of
Expression on the Internet
By Susan Pointer
56 IPI REPORT
Censorship and
What does all of this mean for Google? even though this video was This is admittedly still at a
We believe strongly in maximising access removed by the company
restrictions can very early stage of develop-
to expression and opinion, that access to upon notification of its ex- take many forms, ment but is nonetheless an
information and the ability to exchange istence (in line with the re- attempt to bring greater
ideas lies at the heart of robust knowledge, quirements of the Euro-
from the blatant transparency to the discus-
integration of different viewpoints, better pean e-commerce Direc- to the more dis- sion about government-
decision-making, transparency, accounta- tive). sought and court-order re-
bility, good governance and empowered in-
creet or indirect. movals of content from the
dividuals. Making information universally This ruling - which we are Web.
accessible and useful is what brought the appealing - sets a particularly dangerous
company into being in the first place, as precedent because it implies that any em- Let’s not take the open Internet for
Larry Page and Sergey Brin sought to make ployee of an online hosting platform - such granted
it easier for people to find what they were as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, DailyMo- There is an expression that you only appre-
looking for on the Web. tion or even blogs sections on online news- ciate what you have when it’s gone. Let
papers - can be held criminally-responsible that not be the case for the Internet. This is
Many of Google’s products are platforms for content that is uploaded unbeknown to a critical moment to get ahead of that
for retrieving information and contribut- them by a third-party. rather unfortunate timeline based on loss
ing content and views. Yes, there is Google and regret and instead to be vigilant and
Search, but also Blogger, Google Earth and consciously defend this incredible means
Google Maps, Google Books, Gmail, collab- Cooperative action and transparency on for upholding our right to seek, receive and
orative document creation in Google Apps, censorship impart information and ideas through any
YouTube etc. Three years ago, Google joined negotia- means. Our taking the open Internet for
tions with Microsoft, Yahoo, human rights granted may ultimately be one of the
But as a global company operating across groups, responsible investors and others biggest risks it faces.
more than 150 countries, all with their own in Europe and the US to see if we could ar-
cultures and cultural sensitivities, history, rive at a code of conduct for how technol-
legal environment, case-law and politics, ogy companies operating in restrictive
the role of being a provider of such com- regimes could best operate to promote
munication tools is not always a straight- freedom of expression and the privacy of
forward one. users.
Access to YouTube is banned in Turkey, for These discussions resulted in the Global
example, because YouTube has chosen to Network Initiative (GNI). The principles to
reject an order to remove on a global basis which we have all subscribed through GNI
a handful of videos that were uploaded in set out a detailed set of guidelines outlining
the US to the US-based site but which how companies and groups should re-
within Turkey are considered illegal spond to government censorship attempts
because they are critical of Kemal Ataturk. or government requests for personally-
The issue is not one of deliberate insensitiv- identifiable information of users.
ity but rather a much deeper jurisdictional
discussion about whether one country can At Google, we have also recently intro-
apply its domestic content laws on a global duced a ‘Government requests’ tool. Like
basis to content hosted on a website out- other technology and communications
side of that country. companies, we regularly receive requests
from government agencies or courts
We also have Google employees who re- around the world to remove content from
cently received suspended sentences in an our services or for information about the Susan Pointer is Google Inc.’s Director of Public
Italian Court for allegedly violating privacy users. The tool is an attempt to bring a Policy and Government Relations for Europe, Mid-
because of a video that was posted by a greater level of transparency on such re- dle East and Africa.
user to the Google Video online platform, quests.
IPI REPORT 57
58 IPI REPORT
Take-aways from Chapter One:
Jeff Jarvis argues that it’s time for news executives to “get ahead of
the curve for once” and acknowledge what he regards as print’s in-
evitable demise.
“It’s difficult to think of any information in the modern world “A note of pessimism – even fatalism – has crept into the conver-
which doesn’t acquire more meaning, power, richness, context, sation of some longtime newspaper operators…” Tash writes. “In
substance and impact by being intelligently linked to other infor- this thinking, print is in a holding pattern against the future, and
mation.” creative energy should be devoted to all things digital. But not, I
would caution, at the expense of our established print business.
Here’s the business-side consequence: Although the digital era has Like any enterprise, it also needs fresh thinking and investment.”
eroded publishers’ control over information – and much of the
profitability that accrued to such exclusivity – it has created the As evidence, he cites the free print tabloid his newspaper launched
opportunity to provide new value. six years ago that now generates greater advertising revenues than
the company’s website.
Linking opens the door to new products and services that render
the raw material of news ever more valuable to users and adver- Whether you find yourself persuaded by Jarvis or Tash, I sense no
tisers. Collaboration – with users, competitors and others – enables disagreement between the two on Tash’s guide to the future of
enhancement of value without adding big cost. news, which fits quite nicely in a mutualised world:
IPI REPORT 59
Tags: Engaged, Multiplatformed
Whether photographing a
disaster or monitoring maternity
wards, anyone can become an
T hat morning, Wroclaw, the fourth
largest city in Poland, became a stronghold.
Defenders were not soldiers, nor firefight-
ers. They were people like us armed with
their mobile phones.
One amateur video captured the river
breaking the embankment in the Kozanow
district of Wroclaw. One could see the
crowd running away and hear them swear-
ing to God.
‘accidental reporter.’ Gazeta
Wyborcza is providing platforms Michal: “Kozanow district is fighting. Watching streets under water I could not
Nine lorries with soldiers, four diggers, stop thinking about another flood that had
to channel that impulse so that
hundreds of people try to make the river hit the city in 1997. That time I was a young
community service journalism embankment higher.” reporter at a local newsroom of my news-
Marta: “They told us to evacuate the sick paper Gazeta Wyborcza.
is supported, in part, by the
and old. We are so worried and now
people it serves. we’ve run out of sand.” Our editorial office was under water as were
Kasia: “In Kozanow water is pouring the offices of the other three local newspa-
through the embankment.” pers. In the early days of the flood, I lost my
Magda: “Are you sure? What’s the source car driving through the water, so I was sail-
of this information?” ing across the city to collect information.
Ziomek: “Confirmed: water really broke
the embankment. Kozanow in panic!”. Fixed line phones were down. Mobile
phones were very rare. The Internet was
That morning, on 22 May 2010 – I was not still a toy for geeks.
there. I followed this fight with the flooding
river on the Internet blog The flood of 2010 was so different. It af-
wroclawzwyboru.blox.pl. fected a much smaller part
How does it feel of Wroclaw, destroyed
Its editor, 29-year-old Pawel many fewer houses and
Andrzejczuk, a small busi-
to be challenged brought no casualties. But it
ness owner, collaborated by our own was a bigger news event, as
with some 300 contributors professional journalists
who fed his blog with over
readers? were joined by amateurs
3,000 news items and up- Not so bad, as who dared to provide inde-
loaded 4 GB of photos and pendent, 24-hour live news
videos.
we have brought coverage on the Internet.
it upon ourselves,
60 IPI REPORT in a way.
Left: Flooding in Wroclaw. When these
citizens struggled to make the river’s
embankment higher, other residents
provided independent 24-hour live
news coverage on the Internet.
IPI REPORT 61
advertising network (AdTaily.com). This So we asked mothers for help. In 1994, we ers wrote in a letter we published on
network helps to turn visitors of blogs and got 2,000 letters by post. In 2006, thanks to Gazeta’s front page.
niche sites into advertisers and provides the Internet, we gathered 40,000 personal
funding to independent voices. It has at- accounts of childbirth. We were able to re- Computers, mobile phones and the Inter-
tracted over 13,000 amateur and profes- view 423, or 96 percent of all maternity net are rarely used during lessons other
sional online publishers so far. wards in Poland and produce the most than computer science. So now, together
comprehensive guide on hospitals ever. I with some non-governmental organiza-
Technology Should Further a Mission personally benefited from the results of tions, we want to introduce new teaching
Our successes with these technologies raise this campaign when my wife Magda was ideas to the Polish schools.
fundamental questions: What is our media pregnant and gave birth last year to our son
is for? What do we care about? And why Adam. How about asking teachers for help? Here
should people care about us? is an idea: we give them examples, access to
As Adam will start school in a few years, I experts and an online platform to share ex-
Here at Gazeta we care about the quality of am looking forward to the results of an- periences; then they develop multimedia
health-care. Since 1994 we have been re- other campaign. Last June, we sent 25 re- lesson scenarios and tools for themselves,
viewing maternity wards in Polish hospi- porters back to their schools – public and together with pupils. We start in Septem-
tals; we wished to improve passioned care private all over Poland – to check whether ber, and we plan to target 7,000 schools.
by proposing a set of standards and check- they embrace new technologies.
ing whether they are met. We could have Have you ever been on a diet? I have, and
sent 100 journalists to assess the care, but a They spent a week going to classes, doing until now I have not been very successful.
single mother – who actually gave birth in homework, talking to pupils, teachers and About 17 million or 46 percent of Poles
the hospital – can tell you more than re- parents. Sadly, we found our education was are overweight. In the spring of last year,
porters. stuck in the “chalk age,” as one of the teach- nine employees of Gazeta – editors, adver-
62 IPI REPORT
Left: New media mogul. During the
Wroclaw flooding it was Pawel
Andrzejczuk, a 29-year-old blogger
who runs a network of 300 amateur
contributors, that competed with the
TV news channels, radio newscasts and
newspaper portals.
tising reps and bookkeepers – announced Of these campaigns and community activ- assembling understanding communities,
publicly they were going on a diet and in- ities are funded by a mix of advertising, giving them tools, teaching how to use
vited readers to join them online. About sponsorships, copy-sales, brand exten- them to inspire people to bring about
21,000 people did, and now they are regis- sions, online payments and readers’ contri- change.
tered in our social network of weight- butions. By solving other people’s prob-
watchers (OdwazSie.pl). lems we probably have found a way to “We are not indifferent,” Gazeta’s slogan
solve our own. reads. I hope we prove it.
As readers followed the struggle of our em-
ployees, they could access a collection of Development of the Internet – amateur
free and paid online services. A few thou- news feeds, the wisdom of crowds, the
sand subscribed to personally designed growth of social networks – reminds me These technologies raise
diet and exercise plans priced at €10-25 per that media, or communication within a so-
month. Nearly 80,000 were buying books ciety in general is more about people than
fundamental questions:
we published. Over 300,000 were getting just a message. What is our media for?
sponsored supplements to the newspaper,
like tables of calories or cooking recipes. There is a lesson for journalism. We must
What do we care about?
After 18 months, our readers lost 12,500 kg convey news and tell stories of importance. And why should people
in total. The most successful one lost 30 kg! But the story itself must matter to the com-
I wish it was me. munity it serves. Journalism is also about
care about us?
IPI REPORT 63
Tags: Aggregated, Crowdsourced, Distributed, Mapped, Triangulated
66 IPI REPORT
Partly because
reduced revenue
has diminished
their staffs, news
organizations are
both important opportunities and real chal- whether a problem exists or sources across different
lenges. Crowdsourcing, as a methodology to not. Lastly, non-probability
turning increasingly media has happened. Fu-
collect information, is simply an example of sampling, or crowdsourcing, to crowdsourcing ture versions will also
non-probability sampling, a well-known may actually be the only ap- make use of Flickr and
and established sampling method in statis- proach available—a com-
as a journalistic YouTube to compare, for
tics. In probability sampling, every unit in mon constraint in many tool. example whether pic-
the population being sampled has a known medical studies and in hu- tures or videos of the
probability (greater than zero) of being se- manitarian crises like the 2010 earthquake same event were captured.
lected. This approach makes it possible to in Haiti and the massive floods in Pakistan.
produce unbiased estimates of population This prompted Anand Giridharadas to ask
totals, by weighting sampled units accord- One of the main challenges in crowdsourc- in a New York Times article whether the tri-
ing to their probability selection. Non-prob- ing crisis information is assessing the valid- angulated crisis map would become the
ability sampling, in contrast, describes an ity and reliability of the information being new first draft of history. While many chal-
approach in which some units of the popu- crowdsourced. There are a number of par- lenges still remain, the example of Haiti,
lation have no chance of being selected or tial solutions to this challenge. For exam- which was unplanned and ad-hoc, is per-
where the probability of selection cannot be ple, “bounded crowdsourcing” can be used haps the first sign that the humanitarian
accurately determined. An example is con- instead whereby a known and/or trusted space is about to be radically transformed
venience sampling. network of individuals – e.g. field person- in the coming months and years. By the
nel – source relevant information. In addi- same token, crowdsourcing and the near
The obvious drawback of non-probability tion, the explosion in user-generated con- real-time validation of crowdsourced crisis
sampling is that the sample may not be rep- tent means that it is increasingly possible to information may have a similar impact on
resentative of the population. Probability triangulate and cross-validate crowd- the future of news.
sampling, also known as representative sourced. For example, if three different text
sampling, also poses some important con- messages from three different numbers at
straints, however. The approach often re- three different times describe the same in-
quires considerable time and extensive re- cident, then one can assume that three dif-
sources, which makes the use of this ferent witnesses are reporting this incident.
method difficult in response to fast-paced, The rise of integrated mobile technologies
real-time operations. To this end, probabil- means that such witnesses are increasing
ity sampling is far more conducive to retro- dramatically around the world. This means
spective studies. Furthermore, non-re- that the chances that several witnesses will
sponse effects can easily turn any probabil- document the same event in any given
ity design into non-probability sampling. Of time and place is increasing. This docu-
course, the advantage of probability sam- mentation is not restricted to text-based in-
pling is that the resulting sample is repre- formation like blogs, Twitter and SMS. Wit-
sentative of the population being surveyed. nesses are increasingly sharing pictures
and video footage in near-real time.
Non-probability sampling has some im-
portant advantages over representative This explains why the Ushahidi group has
sampling, however. First, non-probability developed another free and open source
sampling is typically a much quicker way platform called Swift River. The tool pulls Patrick Meier is director of Crisis Mapping and
to collect and analyze data in a range of set- in user-specified content from Twitter, Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi and co-founded
tings with diverse populations. The ap- SMS, online news, social media, etc. and the International Network of Crisis Mappers and the
proach is also a far more cost-efficient seeks to compare how many times a spe- International Conference on Crisis Mapping. He is a
means of greatly increasing sample size in cific event is reported on and by whom. If PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law &
real-time, thus enabling more frequent and multiple witnesses report on the same Diplomacy, the Co-Director of the Harvard Human-
up-to-date measurement. In addition, the event, then chances are that the event re- itarian Initiative’s Program on Crisis Mapping and
method is also used in exploratory re- ally did take place. So Swift River produces Early Warning and is a visiting fellow at Stanford
search, e.g. for hypothesis generation, espe- probability scores that suggest how likely it University’s Program on Liberation Technologies.
cially when attempting to determine is that an event being reported by diverse
IPI REPORT 67
Tags: Accelerated, Distributed, Petitioned
68 IPI REPORT
Below: Forensic experts go
through the ruins of the coffee
shop at the Marriott Hotel in
Jakarta in July 2009.
Journalism can
improve upon those
raw, early reports
of social media by
one of the most important elements after with constant updates by ish an organization deval-
accuracy, citizen journalists are beating the minute if not by the
scrutinizing them ued by its own behavior.
professional journalists at our own game. second. with such traditional For citizen journalists,
and some of the people
And the public is responding. There are some down-
journalistic values who follow them, speed
sides to this, however. The as accuracy and may come before accu-
With cell phones becoming affordable to nation learned about the racy.
most people, and with Internet connection death of its most famous
fairness.
costs coming down dramatically in the past composer, Gesang, one week before it hap- In this increasingly more wired world, pro-
year, more and more Indonesians have pened, and also the passing of former first fessional journalists have to share the field
come to use social media like Twitter and lady Ainun Habibie a few days too early. (and the audience) with amateurs and
Facebook as their prime sources of news their values. Each group has its place and
and information. Some overzealous Twitterers, wanting to be its role in keeping the public informed.
first to break the news, couldn’t resist the Anyone with mobile and Internet access
Even journalists find them indispensable temptation and tweeted the news before can be a journalist, or do the work that
professional tools. Gesang and Habibie were dead. Foolishly, journalists do any time they update their
some TV stations, caught in the competi- Twitter or Facebook accounts, for these are
I learned of the death of Indonesia’s former tion of reporting the news first, picked up disseminated to a large audience online.
president Abdurrahman Wahid in Decem- both false stories and broadcast them. Everybody is a journalist.
ber 2009 from Twitter only a few minutes
after he drew his last breath. The speed was Credibility should distinguish the work of Citizen journalists in Indonesia have
unbeatable. No TV or radio station – you professionals, who are trained to put accu- shown that they can be just as effective, if
can forget my own newspaper – could have racy ahead of speed. Mistakes can be fatal to not more so, at influencing public opinion.
matched the speed with which the news their integrity and to the credibility of the The wide space that the Internet is provid-
was disseminated, tweeted and re-tweeted, media they work for. The market will pun- ing has been widely used for an open pub-
lic debate on just about anything in In-
donesia as people take advantage of the
guarantees of free speech. Sometimes out
of these debates, a movement emerges and
people rally behind certain causes.
IPI REPORT 69
Below: Volunteers campaign to collect
coins for Prita Mulyasari. A massive move-
ment started by Indonesian Facebookers
raised almost $90,000 nationwide to help
Prita pay the penalty.
charges against Prita Mulyasari, who had There have been many other Facebook nalism is one of the oldest professions in
written the email, and since the crime car- movements since then, albeit on smaller the world, and for now at least, it is irre-
ries a maximum jail penalty of six years scales. But in the social media, anyone, placeable. With so many more players
under Indonesia’s new cybercrime law, the poor and rich, powerful and strong, can competing, however, the only way to sur-
police were obliged to put her under arrest find their voice. They also find that Face- vive is to improve skills and professional-
pending the investigation and trial. book, and other platforms like it, can be ism, and to practice good journalism.
more effective in airing grievances than
Under strong public pressure from Face- taking it to the streets. The next people Democracy is well served to include many
book petitioners, the police released her, power movement in Indonesia, if and more players besides professional journal-
but when the civil law trial proceeded, she when the need arises, will be conducted ists. But it is served even better if profes-
was found guilty and the court ordered her through the ‘Net. sional journalists strengthen their role in
to pay t300 million rupiah ($30,000) in keeping everyone else in check. The sur-
damages. Facebookers were quick off the In this Internet age, there continues to be a vival of journalism depends on it.
mark, and organized a collection nation- need for the kind of services that profes-
wide, called Coin for Prita, to help her pay sional journalists provide: Gather, collect Citizen journalists in In-
that sum. The response was massive and and sort information, verify, and package it
the organizers raised more than 800 mil- in a way that is easily understandable to
donesia have shown that
lion rupiah. They were about to dump the the public, using text, sound and still or they can be effective at in-
coins, which had been loaded in trucks, moving images.
outside the Omni International gate when
fluencing public opinion
the hospital decided to waive its claim. The The medium may be different, from print, as people take advantage
money has since been given to a founda- broadcasting to the digital, but the rules of
tion named after Prita to help poor people the game and the ethics that govern the
of the guarantees of free
seek justice. profession are essentially the same. Jour- speech.
70 IPI REPORT
Tags: Dispersed, Specialized, United
Crowdsourcing Can
Turn Fragmentation into
Community
By Jeff Howe
IPI REPORT 71
Below: #1b1t, the Twitter hashtag for the One Book One
Twitter project.
had the benefit of institutional support and sourcing.com: “I have a dream. An idea. A Nancy Pearl called, “What If Everyone in
publicity department pow wows to help or- maybe great notion. As Auggie March Seattle Read the Same Book?”
ganize such a gathering. Au contraire. might say, ‘I got a scheme.’ What if every-
one on Twitter read the same book at the What happens is that a lot of people with
How did I do it? First, by adapting to the same time?” I called it “One Book, One absolutely nothing in common suddenly
new rules, instead of trying to impose the Twitter,” and presented it as something of a have at least one thing in common. This
old ones. Let me explain. In March I posted lark. As it happened, other people found builds what an academic might call social
the following passage to my blog, crowd- the scheme appealing, and because I didn’t capital. Social capital is the WD-40 in our
try to impose my own rules on it, my lives, the connections that result in new
scheme metamorphasized into a move- jobs, new spouses, and new friends. It’s
ment. why George Bailey is the richest man in
town. And what social scientists call bridg-
Next, I didn’t take my inspi- ing social capital allows
ration from the “book club,” What we miss connections to form be-
a venerable institution tween people who have
rooted in the lyceums of Vic-
about the mass nothing in common. Ex-
torian-era America. I was in- audience event cept, perhaps, that they
spired instead by a more re- happen to be reading the
cent convention—what the
is the feeling that same book.
National Education Author- for a little while,
ity calls Big Reads, and what Bridging social capital is
the innovative librarian
we’re all going also the quantity produced
through some-
72 IPI REPORT thing together.
Technology is
often blamed for
dispersing the
when 36 million Ameri-
crowd, but the machine gun bursts that are The last paragraph in my book on crowd-
cans watched the finale of process was Twitter’s native form (Twitter sourcing ends with what I call a cardinal
the miniseries “Roots.” constrains each entry to 140 rule: “Ask not what your community can
Suddenly everyone at the
occurring long characters.) If someone wrote do for you, but what you can do for your
office or the plant wants to before the advent something especially witty or community.” Replace community with
talk about the same thing. incisive, it was syndicated readers, or better, customers, and you have
And it’s what, I think, we
of the Internet. (“retweeted,” in the jargon of what could be a blueprint for a publishing
miss about the mass audience event—the the technology) by others, so that it strategy.
feeling that for a little while, we’re all going reached many eyes. In this way, people
through something together. I hoped One with nothing in common had — for the What does all this have to do with journal-
Book, One Twitter might replicate that ex- eight weeks One Book, One Twitter took ism? Plenty. We butter our bread every
perience, and I’m happy to report that, for place—indeed something in common. time we reach across racial, social, and ide-
those of us who participated, it did. ological lines. As our audience grows, so
Finally, I cheerfully conceded any owner- grow our ad rates and eventually the size
People have noted, with some disdain, that ship over the project. Who started One of our newsrooms. If there was one com-
Twitter isn’t conducive to book clubs. This Book, One Twitter? Me. Who runs it? mon thread to the widely disparate, glob-
ignores that One Book, One Twitter isn’t Dunno. The people reading the book, I ally dispersed participants in One Book,
meant to act anything like a book club, in guess. That’s what this new world, which One Twitter, it was that they were eager to
which people who know each other offer Clay Shirky aptly calls an age of organizing participate in a project that would allow
lengthy, personal exegetics about a book, without organizations, looks like. And One them to connect with other people. The ap-
becoming closer to people they already Book, One Twitter is what it looks like for petite is there. We only need to learn how
know. In this case, thousands of people book publishers. A lot of people reading, a to serve it.
who’ve never met gathered to dish out in- lot of people buying books, but doing so ac-
sights, questions, and commentary in the cording to their own schedule.
IPI REPORT 73
Tags: Databased, Linked, Processed
IPI REPORT 75
or rewriting. There are a million others out deed add data to the picture through your in the clearest way possible, not just for ed-
there who can write better - large numbers own activity. The experiments of the past itorial reasons but distribution too. Info-
of them working in PR, marketing, or gov- five years will come to seem crude in com- graphics are an increasingly significant
ernment. While we will always need pro- parison. source of news site traffic.
fessional storytellers, many journalists are
simply factory line workers. A collaborative future There is a danger of ‘data churnalism’ –
I’m skeptical of the ability of established taking public statistics and visualising
So on a commercial level if nothing else, publishers to adapt to such a future but, them in a spectacular way that lacks in-
publishing will need to establish where the whether they do or not, innovative online- sight or context. Editors will need the sta-
value lies in this new environment, and only startups will. And journalists’ training tistical literacy to guard against this, or
where new efficiencies can make journal- will have to change. The profession has a they will be found out.
ism viable. Data journalism is one of those history of arts graduates who are highly lit-
areas. With a surfeit of public data being erate but not typically numerate. That has And it is not just in editorial that innova-
made available, there is a rich supply of already been the source of ongoing embar- tion will be needed. Advertising sales will
raw material. The scarcity lies in the skills rassment for the profession as expert blog- need to experience the same revolution
to locate and make sense of that - the pro- gers have highlighted basic errors in the that journalists have experienced, learning
gramming skills to scrape it and compare it way journalists cover science, health and the language of Web metrics, behavioural
with other sources, the design flair to visu- finance; it cannot continue. advertising and selling the benefits to ad-
alise it, the statistical understanding to un- vertisers.
pack it. We will need more journalists who can
write a killer Freedom of Information re- And then there is the commercial oppor-
The technological opportunity is massive. quest; more researchers with a knowledge tunity. Most publishers, after all, are in
As processing power continues to grow, the of the hidden corners of the Web where business not to sell content but to sell ad-
ability to interrogate, combine and present databases - the ‘invisible Web’ - reside. We vertising. And here also data has taken
data continues to increase. The develop- will need programmer-journalists who can on increasing importance. The mass mar-
ment of augmented reality provides a par- write a screen scraper to acquire, sort, filter ket was a hack. As the saying goes: “We
ticularly attractive publishing opportunity: and store that information, and combine or knew that only half of advertising
Imagine being able to see local data-based compare it with other sources. We will worked; the problem was, we didn’t
stories through your mobile phone, or in- need designers who can visualise that data know which half.”
76 IPI REPORT
Left: visualcomplexity.com
provides inspiration for data
presentation to scientists
and journalists alike.
But Google and others have used the meas- A new medium and a new market demand
urability of the Web to reduce the margin of new rules. The more networked and inter-
error, and publishers will soon follow suit. active form of journalism that we’ve al-
It makes sense to put data at the centre of ready seen emerge online is likely to be-
that - while you allow users to drill into the come even more conventional as publish-
data you have gathered around automotive ers move from a model that sees the story
safety, the offering to advertisers is likely to as the unit of production, to a model that
say “We can display different adverts based starts with data.
on what information the user is interested
in,” or “We can point the user to their local It is one thing for a jour-
dealership based on their location.”
nalist to look at a balance
And as publishers of data, too, executives sheet on paper; it is quite
will need to adopt the philosophies of the
open data and linked data movements and
another to be able to dig
take advantage of the efficiencies that they through those figures on
provide. The New York Times and the
Guardian have both published APIs that
a spreadsheet.
allow others to build Web services with
their content. In return they get access to
otherwise unaffordable technical, mathe-
matical and design expertise, and benefit
from new products and new audiences, as
(in the Guardian’s case) advertising is bun-
dled in with the service. As these benefits
become more widely recognised, other
publishers will follow.
IPI REPORT 79
printed newspapers, magazines, and books. Economics of the tablet are untested both at the creative and revenue levels is
As we become more aware of the need to It is still too early to tell whether – or to virtually untapped. Create partnerships
disconnect, the tablets offer us the oppor- what extent – the tablet will be the finan- and think of advertising/content synergies.
tunity to do so. cial saviour that many in the industry are
hoping it will be. However, early returns But, most importantly, create content that
Photographically, the tablets are a magnif- tell us that advertisers like the new plat- users will value. Dig into your archives for
icent platform. We know that photo gal- form, especially the fact that sponsorship material that has potential value as an app.
leries are the most popular features of any gives them top display for their products You will be surprised how much people
multimedia offerings online – more popu- and laces the contents of the advertising are interested in – and are willing to pay
lar than videos. On tablets, photos shine. more closely with editorial content, a long for – the historical and pictorial records
held wish of advertisers. that sit in so many newspaper “morgues”
This, of course, will raise the bar for the worldwide.
quality of photos we get, as well as the type When Rolex sponsors a newspaper’s iPad
of stories that we write around them. With edition, it feels as if the diamonds on the Early challenges include proper
active fingers touching every possible de- face of that watch shine a little more staffing
tail of a photo, those inquiring minds that brightly, and when United Airlines accom- Remember, tablets are in their infancy
move them will want “mini stories” to go panies the evening update of the tablet and we are the creators of their future for
where their fingers stop. If your newspa- edition, it reaches higher altitudes. The journalism. Our models will have the his-
per has coasted along with a mediocre publishers are hoping their bottom lines toric opportunity of being the first tem-
photo department, it is time to start shop- will be uplifted, too. plates, with potentially iconic longevity,
ping for new equipment, hiring star pho- and that entitles us to experiment, to
tographers, and training editors to forget Revenue potential is one of the center- learn as we go, and to make the inevitable
the boring, simplistic captions and start pieces of any tablet planning discussion, so mistakes that all learning processes in-
writing “mini stories” that enhance details develop strategies and form partnerships. volve.
of a photograph. The advertising potential for the tablet,
80 IPI REPORT
Far left: A renaissance for journalism? Tablets offer
the relaxed reading experience associated with prin-
ted newspapers, magazines and books.
If a newspaper has
coasted along with
a mediocre photo
department, it is time
to start shopping for
new equipment and
hire star photographers.
The tablet is not a newspaper, it is not a readers, extend your brand, and give your
magazine, it is definitely not an online team the laboratory it needs to take those
edition, and it is not television, although it first baby steps.
is a little of all of these. It must be given its
own identity. Your keys to early success tap into that
which your newspaper does best: Make it
To do that, tablet editors are essential. They local, personal, essential, exclusive, and
are, indeed, the next source of creativity in simple. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
the newsroom. The ideal tablet editor is a
person well versed in traditional journal- Print edition remains critical element in
ism, but also tech savvy, with an inclination multi-platform success
to consume information digitally, and most A challenge that remains at the top of the
of all, a great storyteller. list: Make your print edition relevant. Use
the grand opportunity that the planning of
Storytelling has found its next best ally in a tablet edition offers to look at your print
the tablet. We will see a need for excellent edition carefully and thoroughly.
narratives and photos, with the enhance-
ments of audio, video and interactivity. Indeed, print is eternal, and there is likely
to be a printed edition of most newspapers
But, remember, you can’t simply transfer for years to come.
the entire contents of your newspaper Mario Garcia is CEO and Founder of Garcia Media,
into a tablet edition. Instead, find that one However, it is part of the responsibility which has worked with more than 500 news organ-
unique, value-driven element of your of every innovative tablet team to identify izations from its offices in Tampa, Buenos Aires and
publication that should open the door to creative ways to take print to its next Hamburg.
the tablet. That first app will engage your stage of evolution. Remember, a stronger,
IPI REPORT 81
Tags: Blogged, Globalized, Networked
84 IPI REPORT
Tags: Deepened, Focused, Specialized
Rule No. 1 for us is bracingly simple, yet And beyond the question of staffing, there’s
revolutionary in practice: We don’t cover an equally pertinent editorial question to
IPI REPORT 85
be answered about trying to build a general Readers no longer want to consume news more detail on topics that appeal to them,
interest news site: can you do that and dif- as a single entrée – they want a buffet of be it sports, financial news, foreign news
ferentiate your work, your brand? That is sites that give them specialized, in-depth (and I think that’s an area of real possibility
the core goal all media organizations share content on topics that they are interested in the years ahead), arts and entertain-
in today’s new world order. in. ment, gossip, etc.
Producing content that is different, exclu- Another way to put this is: Why not em- Readers revel in the inversion of the old
sive and revelatory in some way is one of the brace niche journalism, as readers are journalistic paradigm where we told them
essential ingredients for success in today’s going to demand it anyway? The days of a what news was important and when they
cluttered media landscape, and it’s self-evi- handful of newspapers and television net- should access it. Now, instead, they create
dently easier if you’re doing that covering works dominating the news business and their own news accessing experience with
topics that you bring you some advantage, offering readers a one-stop shopping expe- a smorgasbord of sites they can access
be that geographical or intellectual. rience for information are already gone. whenever and however they choose.
Successful enterprises like ESPN and CNBC,
On this score, niche journalism allows you the Food Network , Global Post, Market- POLITICO, among other newcomers on the
to increase your journalistic power by ac- watch and many others demonstrate that media scene, has proven a theory that
knowledging your limitations. A local paper readers and viewers want to use the new should have been self-evident; if you break
can’t cover the World Cup like the New York possibilities of the media and the new, al- stories, people will come to your site to read
Times or the BBC, but it can completely most unlimited freedom they have to seek them. The easiest way to do that is to flood
dominate local and statewide sports cover- out information to explore topics that in- the zone in covering a particular subject
age. The same goes for local politics or for terest them in much greater detail. area on which you can regularly stay ahead
blanketing larger topics on a national scale. of your competition.
Niche journalism means going where the Our view, at POLITICO, is that readers in-
readers are – and where the competition creasingly may use one site as a home page Niche journalism, by definition, requires a
may be more successfully engaged. base, but will graze the Web to delve into news organization to own the limited terri-
86 IPI REPORT
Far left: POLITICO Newsroom
Washington, DC.
tory it covers and also allows reporting and is key to success in this new age: If it’s not
editing resources to be deployed in a way exclusive, revelatory or unique in some
most likely to produce news. If you don’t way, we shouldn’t be doing it.
have to staff an event you know is destined
for page A13 or a distant Web subpage be- We have to fight for readership each and
cause it’s part of your mission as a general every day and prove to readers each and
interest site, you can instead focus that re- every day that we have something insight-
porter on a story that actually means some- ful to say that can’t be found in any other
thing to your audience. corner of the Web.
When John Harris and Jim VandeHei Niche journalism may seem an oxymoron
hatched the idea for POLITICO, one of the in a world of limitless possibility on the
goals they wanted to achieve was to only Web. Similarly, it is, I suppose, an admis-
do stories that were interesting, as opposed sion of at least partial defeat to acknowl-
to stories that were covered out of some edge that the days when the philosophy of
sense of obligation, even with the knowl- general content journalism ruled have
edge that few, if any, readers were clamor- come to an end for most of us. Bill Nichols has been managing editor of POLITICO
ing for them. since January 2007. He spent the previous 24 years
Our experience at POLITICO, however, is at USA Today, where he covered the White House,
While it can require significant self-control that niche journalism actually broadens State Department and was a senior Washington
and discipline – as in “Oh my God, we don’t our journalistic possibilities by allowing us correspondent. He has covered six presidential
have Lebron James going to Miami any- to break more stories, be a regular part of campaigns, 12 national conventions and emerged
where on our site!” – niche journalism, al- the national conversation on politics, lob- undefeated from two presidential golfing outings
most by definition, results in more sharply bying, Congress and the White House, and with Bill Clinton.
focused stories that meet a standard we feel allow our writers and editors to dig deeper
IPI REPORT 87
Tags: Blogged, Commented, Engaged
88 IPI REPORT
build the cabin from clearing the land to My first experiences with the Web actually Times’ editors asked me to double check
pounding the last nails. came early. As editor of the Portland names and facts, and sometimes they asked
(Maine) Press Herald, I put the paper on- me to pursue a particular angle on the
At the end of the cabin project, I not only line in 1995. It was among the first with a cabin’s construction. I was not out there on
had a pleasant writer’s retreat in the White website. But I drifted back to print, and my own. The expense involved in editing
Mountain National Forest with a wood while I was an active user of the Internet, I blogs may not be possible for every news
stove, front porch and sleeping loft. I had was not an active contributor. organization, but as the blogger who re-
learned an enormous amount about blog- ceived it, I can assure you that the result is
ging, simple audio-video production, and The cabin blog changed that. Among the better work.
the creation of a worldwide community of lessons I have learned:
like-minded people - in my case, cabin Blogging is a two-way – actually a multi-
builders and cabin dreamers. Blogging is not news writing, but accu- way – conversation, and this makes for a
racy and information remain essential. much richer report. Many of the readers
My work in narrative journalism also ben- As is a personal voice. I wanted my posts who followed my blog were far better and
efited. The blog taught me a few things to be packed with useful information about more experienced builders than I. They
about serial writing and managing the de- cabin building. I described building tech- spotted problems in the design and con-
velopment of multiple story lines that un- niques, listed the costs of materials and in- struction and were willing to post com-
folded real time. dicated the sources of products and materi- ments that offered tips and solutions. I
als. Readers wanted this information. But adopted some of them. The cabin plan ac-
The Times’ edition of the blog has now they also responded to my views and feel- tually changed as a result of reader input.
ended, but I keep the blog going, though ings as a cabin builder. Among the most In one phase of the construction, I even
with less intensity, because I enjoy the in- popular posts were those in which I talked had readers submit design plans.
teraction with the community I have built about why I wanted a cabin and how my
and the steady accretion, diary-like, of the brother and nephews were willing to pitch The conversations in the comments section
cabin’s progress. I have moved from cabin in to build it. of the blog are not just between the blogger
building to planting an apple orchard and and the audience. Several times readers
building a barn. My latest cliffhanger in- Blogging benefits from editing. I was for- began conversing with each other over the
volves a moose’s assault on my young tunate to be blogging for one of the world’s best ways to handle an element of the
apple trees and my efforts to fend him off. great newspapers. Not only was I paid a cabin’s construction. In these instances, I
It is not clear yet who will prevail. modest sum for my work, I got good editing. sat back, enjoyed the chat and learned from
IPI REPORT 89
Page 88: The cabin and the blog
begin to take shape.
90 IPI REPORT
Here are my answers
to some common questions
about blogging.
How can journalists work blogging In some cases, over time, blogging
into their schedules without sacrific- blends with the main job and become
ing the time they need to get their inseparable from it.
main jobs done?
Blogging takes time, for sure, but it can Doesn’t blogging invite journalists to
ism’s loss of confidence among young peo- also be a way for reporters to get their focus too much on themselves as op-
ple. It also is a source of much satire directed ideas written and organized ahead of posed to subjects of their coverage?
journalism’s way by people such as Jon their plunge into the longer and more This is a matter of mission and self-con-
Stewart. There is a long and serious tradition developed story they intend to compose. trol. By that, I mean the reporter and ed-
of first-person journalism for us to draw on, This is especially true on a running story itor need to agree up front on whether
in both Europe and the Americas. where there are a series of minor the blog is principally a running news
episodes that precede the main news story with a series of “new leads” (as the
The blog taught me event (such as legislative hearings in ad- wire services have been doing for
vance of a vote). decades) or whether the blog is a blend
a few things about serial of writerly voice (or opinion) and infor-
writing and managing These preliminary episodes need to be mation. If it is the latter, then the rules of
captured and synthesized by the re- column writing more or less apply. Edi-
the development of porter for him or her to eventually find tors and reporters have learned how to
multiple story lines that and convey their full significance in the manage these differences effectively in
more developed piece. Blog entries can print. They can simply transfer those
unfolded in real time. be a way of sorting out and making rules and agreements to the Web.
sense of what is happening, as it is hap-
pening. The act of writing brings coher- What are some good examples of
ence to the material, which, of course, is blogs maintained by journalists in
an aid to the writer. ways that supplement their coverage
and grow their audiences?
There also is a discipline that comes out I go to Paul Krugman’s column in the
of blogging. The writer needs to tell him- New York Times for a bold and informed
self something like this: I will give my- take on economic news. He has the in-
self 10 minutes to get down the morn- stincts of a news reporter, I think, in that
ing’s events, and I will post my blog he seems to sense the forward edge of a
entry by noon. At the same time, ironi- story, and that’s where he goes his work.
cally, the bar on writing quality is lower, In other words, he seems to know what
typically, so the writer can get words matters. Consequently, I also turn to his
down faster without the torment of try- blog for additional information and in-
ing to get the polish sometimes de- sight – all in the inimitable Krugman
manded. voice. I also have enormous respect for
the reporting and news analysis of Floyd
In time, the writing for the blog becomes Norris of the New York Times. His grasp
relaxed in the way a conversation is re- of financial reporting is an inspiration to
Louis Ureneck, recently chair of the Journalism laxed –- or perhaps more accurately, the reporters who aspire to expertise in their
Department at Boston University, is a former blog entries shape up in the same way work. His blog offers more straight
Nieman fellow at Harvard University and winner of that spoken answers might be given by analysis but also adds personal touches,
the National Outdoor Book Award for his memoir, a reporter who is being interviewed including a very moving recent entry on
“Backcast.” He was editor of the Portland Press Her- about an event or issue. In an interview, his battle with cancer.
ald and deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia a reporter does not write out his an-
Inquirer. At BU, he is also director of the graduate swers. He simply speaks them as best he
program in Business and Economics Reporting. can. So it is often with a blog entry.
IPI REPORT 91
Tags: Broadcast, Streamed, Video
92 IPI REPORT
these programs and formats even from a Minister was popular viewing on the BBC’s And any individual report could become a
fast-moving news site, though, and writing mobile browser), as does news about mo- jumping-off point for related on-demand
a story or providing a clip as a way into the bile technology, and clips which are quirky, content – more video, or text, or graphics
program can work well. Distinctive docu- funny or just plain surprising (think run- on the same topic.
mentaries and news-making programs do away bears, prophetic octopuses – or com-
best; a good example was a particularly pilations of both). So think about the depth of reporting you’ll
controversial edition of the BBC’s “Ques- need in order to sustain this on the big sto-
tion Time” programme last year, which TV-on-demand is worth thinking hard ries. In fact, the linear broadcast could be-
featured a prominent British far-right about in the context of news. Not just come a bit like a trailer for the fuller, more
politician. catch-up services like TiVo and Sky+ that detailed and potentially richer treatment of
let you record and time-delay your view- the story, which can be made available in the
On mobile, so far, video usage is small ing, but Internet-connected TV platforms space which on-demand platforms can offer.
compared with desktop PC use – for news like Project Canvas (in which the BBC is a
at least. The broader commercial market shareholder). Traditional TV news skills will, in my
for mobile video has been slow to pick up, view, still matter in the future. The ability
with slow speeds on anything less than 3G, Exactly what the right mix will be between to recognise and gather great pictures, edit
and with data charges and plans expensive news in text, short and long-form video is them skillfully, write concisely and clearly
and confusing. But the market is changing something we are still experimenting with. and tell compelling stories will be as im-
as smartphone penetration increases and One thing seems vital, editorially: Every portant as ever. But in addition, as TV news
packages get more accessible. And applica- single TV news package needs to be a piece evolves into new forms, it will require skills
tions on devices like the iPad may hasten of great storytelling because each will have like developing clear labelling and sign-
the change. to stand – or fall – on its own. There will be posting, simple navigation, concise head-
no bulletin to carry it. The navigation to it lines and summaries, balancing video and
There are already some exceptions to low has to be simple to use and the labelling text, content that can stand alone, not as
uptake of mobile news video – major crystal clear. If someone has selected to part of a linear sequence, and integration in
breaking news does well, for example watch it, the report has to be clear, strong, the right places of short, sharp, unpackaged
(David Cameron’s first speech as UK Prime and self-contained. clips. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Aenean commodo ligula eget
IPI REPORT 93
dolor. Aenean massa.
Page 93: Inside the BBC News Online of-
fices, BBC Television Centre, London.
Major video news stories on the BBC News website - story title number of plays and
date originally posted:
94 IPI REPORT
Tags: Bullied, Exposed, Investigated
Is this the dawning of a Golden Age of But elsewhere, democracy and technol-
global muckraking? ogy are prying open previously closed
IPI REPORT 95
Right: Toolkit of the
next generation of
global muckrakers.
96 IPI REPORT
Left: Alexey Dymovsky, a Russian
police officer who decried corruption
among colleagues in his video blog,
was fired and threatened with a lawsuit
by the Russian Interior Ministry in
November, 2009.
IPI REPORT 97
Tags: Funded, Independent, Public
98 IPI REPORT
Left and below: The control room
and studios of ABC News24, Australia’s
24-hour, free-to-air news channel which
was launched this year.
IPI REPORT 99
Below: The ABC News website
provided indepth analysis and coverage
of the Australian federal elections
in August, 2010 which resulted in a
hung parliament.
Finally, by focusing on continual innova- not even measured by the Australian Bu- provided it with news resources unparal-
tion, the ABC has not just kept up with but reau of Statistics. leled in commercial media.
anticipated public demand for new serv-
ices. Innovation also has strategic impor- In recent years, the ABC has been swift to No one employs more journalists. No
tance to every long established public insti- move into mobile, podcasting and vodcast- other media organisation in Australia has
tution, in that any perception that the or- ing, digital television, radio and social a more broadly based infrastructure of
ganisation is part of the past rather than the media for the same reasons it moved newsrooms at local, national and interna-
future must inevitably lead to declining swiftly with radio, television and online, tional levels.
public support and therefore, funding. when they were once “new” media. These
are new ways of making content and serv- And by combining some significant
As a public broadcaster, the ABC has con- ices available that the public would come reforms in work practices with new tech-
tinued to position itself not just where the to expect of the public broadcaster. nologies, the Corporation has been able
public is now, but where the public is head- to resource a new digital TV news chan-
ing. And this future proofing has become A burst of fresh innovation has been made nel with no additional government
part of the institutional DNA. possible in the digital age. Again, the revenue.
opportunities that have arisen also often
When the ABC started in radio, just six per- carry with them obligations. Given the opportunity now available, it is
cent of Australians had licences. When tel- quite clear that it is the ABC’s responsibility
evision began, just two percent of Aus- News and current affairs is a prime exam- - as the national public broadcaster - to
tralians had TVs. When the ABC estab- ple. There has been a substantial, long term provide such a service. News and informa-
lished itself ABC Online, Internet use was public investment in the ABC, which has tion are essential to a more meaningful
Nonprofit Ownership is
No Panacea; New Models
Needed for New Times
N
By Karen B. Dunlap
The St. Petersburg Times elson Poynter’s most quoted The St. Petersburg Times was his father’s
maxim said ownership of a publication or newspaper when Poynter began working
exemplifies independent
broadcast property is “a sacred trust and a there. The younger Poynter bought the
ownership by a nonprofit great privilege.” But in the 1960s, Poynter’s newspaper in 1947 and guided it to eco-
thoughts moved from ownership to succes- nomic and editorial strength. A change in
school. Buffered from some
sion. He wondered how to keep his news- the law in 1969 said a church, hospital or
challenges but exposed to paper independent and locally owned long school could own a newspaper. Poynter
after he was gone. Poynter rejected the gave the Times to a school that he created
others, the Florida-based
models for media ownership of his time, and called it the Modern Media Institute.
organization offers lessons in including publicly owned companies and Trustees re-named the school in his honor
chain ownership, and he had doubts about after his death.
business ownership models.
long-term family ownership.
Events in 2009 confirm the wisdom of
His lawyers explored various options and Poynter’s great experiment. During an eco-
after years of searching he made a choice: nomic downturn and while some media
He gave away his newspaper. companies collapsed, the St. Petersburg
Reasons to think twice about the non- Maintaining the system that he created Government might provide some tenta-
profit route: The nonprofit model offers calls for extraordinary levels of mutual tive relief, but concern about political
much to recommend as a form of media trust. The leaders of each organization pressure will prevent significant support.
ownership, but the structures also present must believe they are served by their own There will remain, then, a role for for-
challenges. Here are the some of the major success and the success of the other. The profit models, even though they are taking
ones. school relies on the news organization for a beating now as audiences and technolo-
dividends and the newspaper benefits gies change. The rebirth of a profit model
You may have to give away your publica- from the ownership structure. offers the possibility of a strong, steady in-
tion. Tash and his predecessors have been come stream.To the degree that commer-
regularly approached by news executives Legal ground must be tread carefully. In cial models more readily draw broad audi-
lusting after Poynter’s model until they are some cases precise wording in a will deter- ences, this could help keep the masses
told they would have to transfer ownership mined whether an ownership agreement turning to news media.
of their newspapers to a school. Even own- was upheld. Changes in law undermined
ers who are willing to take that step face other efforts. The Poynter model calls for And that leads back to Nelson Poynter’s
heirs (or stockholders) who might have clear regard to the law, including living up model, one that combines the mission
other ideas. to the precise legal requirements involved focus of a nonprofit and the marketplace
in maintaining both a school and nonprofit focus of a for-profit. Future owners would
The model still requires revenue. This is status. do well in drawing on the best of business
the most important point in light of current models and, like Mr. Poynter, create new
financial challenges. The nonprofit owner Nonprofit ownership is an important form models that fit the times.
removes the burden of market pressure, for news media ownership, but it is not a
but the for-profit news operation still re- panacea. Generally the model seems to in-
quires significant revenue to report and de- spire a keener sense of journalistic mission
liver the news and provide dividends to the and a pride of history. It allows for less
owner. The core problem of a business focus on quarterly returns and market ebb
model for news remains. and flow. But owners still face tough chal-
lenges in generating revenue and finding
It calls for trust. Nelson Poynter called new financial methods.
ownership of news media “a sacred trust.”
Future ownership models for news: We
will see more nonprofit models in the near
future. A few grants can jump-start a busi-
ness. The reduction of news staffs in the US
means a lot of journalists are looking for a
space to practice their craft, and many will
choose the nonprofit route. Owners will
continue to turn to donors and founda-
tions, as philanthropy remains strong.
“The industry will have to skill up,” argues Paul Bradshaw, who • Multimedia: Understanding what users actually appreciate and
produces the Online Journalism Blog, “or it will have nothing left spend time with is critical to a successful multimedia strategy.
to sell.” Steve Herrmann reports that “short video news clips online work
if they show something visually compelling,” as do live streams of
Bradshaw is referring to the need for newsrooms to increase their major news events.
competence in handling the torrent of raw data now available
about the ways governments spend our money, the ways our • Niches: “It’s pointless – and economically insane – to provide
economies soar and dive, the ways we live and die. news that readers can get 1,000 different places,” argues Bill
Nichols. So pick your shots.
In a world where data once was scarce but now is abundant, jour-
nalists need to get good at what’s scarce: “the skills to locate and • Personal journalism: First-person writing, suggests Lou Ureneck,
make sense of (the data) – the programming skills to scrape it and can “close the gap between writers and readers …(by) declaring
compare it with other sources, the design flair to visualize it, the that a piece of reporting is something put together by a real person
statistical understanding to unpack it.” with eyes, a mind, emotions and principles.”
But his point about “skilling up” applies equally well to the areas • Investigative reporting: Digital tools “have democratized muck-
that, combined with data journalism, make up the list of 10 prom- raking in ways previously unimagined,” writes Sheila S. Coronel.
ising paths I’ve drawn from chapter two:
• Ownership: The best funding models for journalism probably
• Crowdsourcing: Poland’s biggest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, don’t exist yet, maintains Karen Dunlap, who says it’s time to “cre-
has its roots in the popular Solidarity uprising that helped topple ate new models that fit the times.”
Communism. The paper’s Grzegorz Piechota describes how the
paper’s readers are fueling some of its most effective coverage of Which of these require the immediate attention of your news-
the democratic, but imperfect civic society of current-day Poland. room?
• Social media: Tweets from non-journalists often put speed ahead Chapter Three offers a glimpse at what’s happening on these fronts
of accuracy, notes Endy M Bayuni, reflecting values quite different in several newsrooms around the world.
from those of a professional. The trick, he argues, is recognizing
that each group “has its place in keeping the public informed.”
In developing countries, media edia companies across the Legal limbo. In some countries, lack of a
globe are encountering the same funda- clear framework for the work of editors
may be freer to adapt during a
mental issue; that is, how to map out their means uncertainty for journalists who are
time of rapid change, but they futures to adapt to the social and business thus recommended to be cautious and
transformations which have shaken the in- align closely with the established powers.
also face unique challenges in
dustry. This lack of regulatory environment also
their country’s infrastructures, discourages the creation of solid media or-
Developing markets pose specific prob- ganizations since investment is insecure
economies and capacities.
lems, in some cases derived from their lack and only recommended for those close to
of resources, notwithstanding the fact that government.
in many of them circulation and advertis-
ing revenues are growing fast. Language barriers. The main language
barrier for media development in some
The importance of tackling media short- emerging markets is illiteracy, where it can
comings in developing markets is para- reach 50 percent (there are some 60 coun-
mount if we wish to see them create well- tries beyond 20 percent). The situation is
formed and informed citizens, the premise improving fast but the obstacle remains.
of a healthy democracy. Media companies Another language barrier has to do, para-
have a role to play in providing the basis for doxically, with the linguistic richness of
good governance via adequate control of some regions. UNESCO believes that there
public life and informed debate of crucial may be 2,000 languages used in Africa
decisions, to mitigate the distorting effect of (Arabic being the largest, with just 17 per-
powerful self-interest groups which may cent of speakers) and several hundred in
collide with the common good. India; there are 250 in Nigeria alone.
Most difficulties can be traced back to their In places where languages are very frag-
environment or to internal factors. mented it can represent a barrier to growth.
On the other hand, the diversity of lan-
Environmental difficulties guages is leading to the creation of new
External censorship and internal “pre- newspaper editions in places like India.
caution.” Even in Western Europe we wit- Moreover, language barriers may protect a
ness instances of powerful individuals ex- local media industry from international
erting pressure on media. Recently, Italy competitors, or at least buy time for it to de-
passed a law that severely restricts police velop. After all, wouldn’t the Canadian
wiretapping and would fine or jail journal- media industry be stronger if it did not have
ists for publication of wiretap transcripts. If to compete with its neighbor for the atten-
this can happen in Europe, we can only tion of the local market? Would Korea’s
imagine the pressure suffered by media local Internet industry be so strong if the
wishing to avoid threats to ownership. country were an English speaking territory?
Limited mobile usage (but real creativity). from the world, but in developing markets Mimetic operations of established world
The poorest markets have a long way to go there are owners who vaguely understand players. Once I visited a client who had ac-
in deploying basic tools such as premium the challenges of the media they own or quired a sophisticated piece of software to
SMS, which is not widely available in consider them secondary to their main ob- replicate Norweigan media company
Africa and often limited to promotions by jective, be it to convey a certain public Schibsted’s experience regarding the intro-
the telecoms (e.g, Etisalat in Nigeria may image (if already in office), or to access duction of information sent by the users
ask customers to guess the winner of a power, or to gain leverage when talking to into the workflow of the newsroom. The
Champions League match, in exchange for government officials. Losing audience in problem was that the mimetic company
a prize), but it’s also true that in other de- the process is just collateral damage. was far from being able to include that so-
veloping markets things have been differ- phisticated piece of software into its own
ent, despite limitations. Take the Philip- Lack of experienced professionals. primitive CMS. It was as useless as a Fer-
pines, where phone service is overwhelm- Whether in Eastern Europe, Africa, or some rari’s steering wheel in an oxen cart. The
ingly prepaid and average revenue per user countries in South America and Asia, at- project had to be scrapped at a cost to the
(ARPUs) is low. That has not stopped inno- tracting and retaining seasoned profession- editor.
vation there, such as the transfer of credit als remains an issue. In some cases, dis-
between customers and subscription for bursing international level salaries is a Expensive and inflexible technical solu-
content access by the hour or less, a flexi- problem. In others, the cultural issues tions. I have seen companies try solutions
bility unheard of in more mature markets. make it hard for good professionals to re- which, apart from being too expensive,
ally affect the transformation of the media. ended up creating new problems. I am re-
Mobiles have managed to partially com- Language is another difficulty, even though ferring to software solutions based in West-
pensate for the lack of infrastructure to English is becoming the common tongue. ern environments and depending on West-
solve basic issues having to do with health While some jobs can be performed using a ern experts offering technical assistance
care, farming or education. For example, basic set of words, in other cases, marketing during inconvenient hours or days of the
Vodafone’s M-pesa money transfer service for instance, subtleties make a difference. week (e.g. Saudi Arabia works on Satur-
in Kenya enables migrant workers to send days and Sundays). There is nothing wrong
cash home. While Japan was experiencing Lack of talent. Some countries have been with being captivated by good products,
its successful iMode in the very early years better than others at developing their own but the solution has to be inexpensive,
of the century, many Chinese portals were skilled workforce. The case of China stands manageable locally and flexible.
facing financial ruin until the establish- out since its ability to train vast amounts of
ment of a similar revenue-sharing platform people, in foreign or local universities and Limited reach. Because of the limited ac-
for content providers, Monternet, allowed institutions, is unique and explains many cess of many media beyond the principal
them to survive and prosper. of the developments taking place there. metropolitan areas, well-meant efforts do
not reach rural zones. Apart from depriving
“Among the three top revenue generators Emerging countries which possess ex- large segments of the population from that
in 2004, the first was mobile value-added traordinary economic resources and have input, the media just focus on the issues
services, reaching as high as $763 million,” not been able to train their workforce so and problems of the large cities and ignore
according to Huawei.com. In China, there is fast have attracted expats. In fact, they find the important contribution of the rural
a before and after Monternet and its mobile themselves with many foreigners and few economy to the development of the coun-
value-added services since it helped trans- locals at the top jobs. In some cases, the try.
form the local Internet and shape new in- understandable desire to push local citi-
dustries. And all of that happened in a so- zens to control the main Chicken and egg problem.
called developing market. On the other areas of the business has Traditional media Because of the limited geo-
hand, it’s also true that older, developed been too abrupt and impor- graphical reach of media in
markets have taken the definitive lead in tant knowledge has been
are in an enviable developing markets and
fundamental mobile innovation since the lost. Making these transi- position in devel- because of its limited abil-
launch of the iPhone. tions gradually, as we have ity to reach larger audi-
seen across corporations
oping markets, ences in favor of the high-
Internal Difficulties present in less developed where reading end individuals, some con-
Owners with a different agenda. No markets, has proven the sumer industries cannot
newspaper or mass media lives isolated best way to go.
newspapers is properly reach their target
seen as a symbol
of status. IPI REPORT 107
groups, which limits the amount of Conclusion English or French mainly because their
money going into media investment and In many respects, traditional media are in needs are not met by localized content. In
development and in return also limits the an enviable position in developing mar- countries where the press has not been
ability of media to move “down” to a kets. Reading newspapers is seen as a sym- renovated or is not free enough, the Inter-
broader audience. bol of status and their distribution and ad net represents an even greater concern.
figures are growing steadily thanks to im-
Poor quality of journalism. Take the In- proved financial situations and higher lit-
dian case where newspapers are sold for a eracy rates. In contrast, the unstable politi-
couple of rupees but cost several times that, cal situation of some markets entails diffi-
and one understands the tremendous pres- culties which translate into scarcity and
sure to attract ad revenues. Not infre- failure of investments. In other cases,
quently, papers mix editorial content with though, the existing problems are typical of
advertising, which eases short term finan- the earlier stages in the maturity of a prod-
cial situations but builds hurdles for the fu- uct and media companies would do well to
ture. One should not assume that the abun- solve them and move on to the next stage
dance of new titles is improving the situa- before it’s too late.
tion since very often they do not contribute
to the flourishing of journalism. Top media managers often say, “We have
time to react; our traditional media will last
Overlooking growth possibilities. In for years because things in this country
some markets, newspapers are a recent move much slower.” I always tell them that
phenomenon and other products have they are dead wrong because their readers
been quicker at capturing classifieds, for have discovered the Internet, and despite
instance. Some dailies reacted by acquiring existing limitations of broadband, they are
these players. Others have tried launching surfing pretty much like many Westerners
their own franchises, but all too frequently and will bypass traditional media if they
newspapers are not exploiting the domi- are not offered quality content.
nant position traditional media have in de-
veloping markets to build bridges to their In fact, in some countries, users are bypass- Fernando Samaniego is the founder of Interna-
future online. And it’s a shame because ing the lack of local content by surfing in tional New Media Consulting and a specialist in
some dailies already have an established other languages, which often they barely multimedia strategy in the Middle East and Spain.
network of stores and outlets where they speak. According to the latest Arab Media He is based in Dubai, UAE.
capture ads. Outlook, 38 percent of Arab users surf in
Old-School Storytelling
Using New-School Tools
By Steve Buttry
Bottom: A successful
launch is best celebrated
with a champagne toast.
What these arguments forget or ignore is Foursquare, YouTube and Flickr, inviting nalism I learned in the 1970s: TBD re-
the value these stories have, value we have and collecting stories and visual content in porters scrambled to the scene to interview
long recognized by sending out reporters to the social media. officials and people at the wedding recep-
collect the stories of many of these same tion that evacuated but partied on.
people. TBD collects those stories more ef- The Saturday after launch, nearly the
ficiently in a variety of ways: We have re- whole TBD staff was taking it easy, relaxing But our breaking-news scramble was also
cruited a network of more than 140 local after a couple of intense weeks. After I re- new-school: collecting the tweets, blogs
blogs, covering individual neighborhoods turned from a dinner with my wife, I and photos of people who were already
and topics such as sports, dining and trans- opened Twitter and quickly saw that an un- telling the story.
portation; we host live chats and invite derground transformer fire had forced
submissions of photos and videos; we ask evacuation of two downtown Washington
people to help us fill the holes in our sto- hotels. In a lot of ways, our scramble to
ries; we engage on Twitter, Facebook, cover the fire felt like the old-school jour-
As providers of news, the commercial por- Technology the empowering force Source: 26th report of the China Internet Network
tals are in a position to challenge state news Technology is another driving force for Chi- Information Center (CNNIC), www.cnnic.net.cn.
sites by virtue of their reach and revenue nese media’s growth. By the end of June
size. Supported by revenues from non- 2010, the number of Chinese Internet users Over the years, the Internet has opened up
news activities such as online games and reached 420 million, making China the space for expression, dialogue and report-
ing for Chinese journalists and ordinary
citizens. While the Chinese Internet is one
Company Portal China Worldwide of the most controlled, it is also a most ac-
traffic rank traffic rank tive community of writers, bloggers and
citizen advocates. The Internet has offered
Tencent QQ.com 2 10 journalists a venue to post articles when
they are censored by the printed media.
In China, blogs and micro-blogs more
Sina Sina.com.cn 4 18 recently have become a prime driver of
news events. Many activists also use tools
Independent Malaysian
News Site Shores Up its Pay
Wall with Innovation
By Premesh Chandran
not grow for several reasons. Advertising tions. It was clear that Malaysiakini would card and managed to get support for a con-
did not migrate quickly online, and much have to develop a revenue base or fold. venience store chain to retail it.
of the digital ad market was dominated, in
the early days, by companies linked to the The second major challenge was to build a Launch
government – hardly ideal sponsors for the reliable and secure subscription manage- After nearly a year of preparations,
site. Malaysiakini’s political reporting did ment engine. Most such systems on the Malaysiakini launched its subscription
not help, as businesses stayed away from market then were priced at above a million service in early 2002 at the rate of RM 100
any appearance of supporting the radically dollars, built for major companies. Malaysi- ($30) per year.
independent site. akini started to build its own system, now
called Manage4me.com. Apart from sub- Subscribers trickled in at a much slower
With little advertising revenue in sight, scription management and online pay- rate than anticipated. An early mistake we
Malaysiakini was forced to consider alter- ment, the system also supports aggregation made was giving away too much of the
natives, including subscriptions. The clos- of subscription content across channels. content for free. We allowed non-sub-
est business analogy was the co-existence scribers to read up to five paragraphs of a
of free to air and paid (cable or satellite) TV. The third challenge was developing anony- story. Subscriptions improved once we re-
Examining the model, it was clear that the mous payment methods. As Malaysiakini duced the free content, but we only man-
audience would pay for some content, if it was a politically sensitive site, our sub- aged to attract 1000 subscribers in our first
was compelling and part of their daily diet scribers demanded a system that would not year.
of information or entertainment, even if require their identity to be revealed, even
something similar was on offer for free. via a payment such as credit cards. As expected, the subscribers were generally
Malaysiakini developed its own pre-paid from the higher income category, with a
Malaysiakini believed that its unique con-
tent would attract a subscription base. We
hoped that 10 percent of our 100,000 daily
unique visitors would subscribe.
Citizen Journalism
Project Offers Case Study
in Collaboration
By Steven Lang
At our newspaper we believe it is impor- fied. Following the article’s publication in ment rate estimated at over 50 percent, the
tant to maintain close contact with the Grocott’s Mail, the municipality took disci- town also has some of the most impover-
community we serve. Citizen journalism – plinary action against at least one of the ished schools in the province.
and innovative use of new media technol- three offenders.
ogy - is helping what was essentially an old Iindaba Ziyafika, which means the ‘news is
media organisation to achieve this goal. We Citizen Journalism Training coming’ in isiXhosa – is the title of the proj-
have found that by developing a citizen Iindaba Ziyafika is a citizen journalism ect defined by two major thrusts:
journalism component to our newspaper training project run by the Rhodes School
we are strengthening our relationship with of Journalism in conjunction with Gro- • Firstly, the innovative use of mobile
our readers. This is good for the commu- cott’s Mail. The project operates on the phones to democratise news and informa-
nity and naturally good for the newspaper. premises of Grocott’s Mail, a community tion within the community of Graham-
An interesting aspect of citizen journalism newspaper that celebrated 140 years of stown;
is that by publishing articles about issues business in May 2010. • And secondly, to equip media producers
that are important in the community, that in the town, and more broadly in the coun-
same community is able to put pressure on The newspaper has been owned by the try so that they can fully utilise new media
the local authorities. This works very well Rhodes School of Journalism since 2003, technology in journalism.
with respect to the municipal authorities and besides providing news and informa-
and even has significant influence on the tion for the community, Grocott’s Mail is In order to become media contributors, res-
provincial administration. also used as a platform for experiential idents needed to learn how to do this. We
journalism. therefore set up a training newsroom with
There was a specific case during a recent 10 computers on the premises of Grocott’s
municipal workers’ strike when a citizen The citizen journalism project, funded by Mail, where we can train prospective citi-
journalist took a series of photographs of the US-based Knight Foundation, is only zen journalists and also provide a space
strikers who trespassed on private property one of several experimental journalism where the students can practise what they
to collect garbage. The strikers subse- projects at Grocott’s Mail. have learned.
quently threw all the garbage onto the
town’s main street in order to disrupt traffic Grahamstown – in the Eastern Cape One of the main objectives of Iindaba
and highlight their cause. The citizen jour- Province – is renowned as an educational Ziyafika is to teach people, mainly resi-
nalist then wrote an article and demanded center because it hosts Rhodes University dents from the under-privileged sections of
that the municipality take action against and several prestigious private schools. It is our community, how to become citizen
the strikers who had been publicly identi- less well-known that with an unemploy- journalists.
By developing a citizen
journalism component we
are strengthening our
relationship with our
readers. This is good for
the community and for
the newspaper.
have to teach people how to use a phone moved them to cover issues that they
book because they have never had access believe are more likely to be published and
to one before. consequently to generate income for them.
Some academics argue that what we are
As the cell phone (a smartphone is a rare doing is not citizen journalism at all, but
luxury item) is the most basic tool avail- rather a cadet training school or “journal-
able to citizen journalists, we spend some ism-lite.”
time explaining how to get the best results
from low-end cell phones. We teach stu- Conclusion
dents how to use the text facility and if they Grocott’s Mail and Grocott’s Online are
have cameras we teach basic photography benefitting from the additional content
skills as well. generated by the citizen journalists, who
Initially we focused our training on young are acquiring marketable skills in an area
people – high school pupils – because The course work includes basic journalism where unemployment is high. It is not cer-
many of them already use cell phones for skills such as using the inverted pyramid to tain whether we will be able to sustain this
texting and other social media. We believed structure a story and fundamental princi- project once the external funding runs out.
the younger generation would be far more ples of journalism ethics.
amenable to new ways of using technology.
For our first training group we selected a Our plan is to identify students with the
number of high school pupils who were al- best potential during their courses, and
ready involved in a social upliftment pro- when the course ends, we invite them to
gram called Upstart. begin participating in some of the activities
of our regular newsroom.
This group, chosen from various high
schools in Grahamstown, produces a Money Matters
monthly newspaper called Upstart for and When we made our funding proposal to
about young people in the area. the Knight Foundation, we expected the
new citizen journalists to be motivated by
Since the beginning of 2010 we have run civic activism. We thought they would gen-
four more citizen journalism courses, erate multimedia content because they
mainly teaching unemployed adults free of wished to expose problems in areas that do
charge. not usually receive media attention.
The course work is very practical and We have, however, found that the driving
hands-on. After explaining techniques on force for citizen journalists in our area is
how to conduct an interview, we bring in a the prospect of gainful employment. They
guest so that the students can try out their are almost all unemployed and eager to
newly acquired skills on real subjects. reach out for any prospect of a job, whether
on a part-time basis as a stringer or as a Steven Lang is the Editor of Grocott’s Mail in Gra-
We teach our students how to do basic step on the way to full-time employment. hamstown. He has worked for most of his career in
research and how to access sources of in- radio and television at the News Division of the
formation by doing Google searches or This expectation has distanced citizen jour- South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).
finding local experts. In many cases, we nalists from covering grassroots issues and
head-on. The other way in which political tles and is the word used to describe its
reporting (still the biggest and most impor- journalists.
tant story on our continent) is distorted is (See www.amabhungane.co.za.)
through ownership by political interests.
• The Taco Kuiper awards for South African
As journalists, we live in revolutionary investigative journalism. Philanthropist
often disturbing times and not knowing and publisher Taco Kuiper left a sizable por-
what the future holds is part of the chal- tion of his estate to the awards, which fund
lenge that must make us innovate to pro- good investigations with some impact.
tect our craft. There are emerging examples (Accessible via www.journalism.co.za.)
of how we can use the tools of new media
and also ensure that African journalism re- • Richard Kavuma, the award-winning
mains on its growth path. Ugandan journalist with joint funding be-
tween his newspaper and the Guardian of
• The Daily Maverick (wrenched from the London lives in a local village and through
ashes of its print sister magazine which micro-observation documents the process
floundered) is like the Huffington Post of of development.
South Africa and its publishers and writers
work virtually for free. • Open Society fellowships. Across the
(See www.dailymaverick.co.za.) world, George Soros’ fellowships are keep-
ing good journalism alive.
• Amabhungane, a project of the Mail & (See www.soros.org.) Ferial Haffajee is the Editor of City Press, a na-
Guardian, is an effort to train a generation tional South African Sunday newspaper. In 2004
of South African and African investigative • Emergent blogging platforms that are she became the first woman editor of a major South
journalists. It is like a cross between harnessing new platforms for news and African newspaper when she took over the editor-
ProPublica and the Centre for Investigative news analysis. (See www.kubatana.net ship of the Johannesburg-based Mail & Guardian.
Journalism. Amabhungane are dung bee- and www.ushahidi.com.)
found it almost impossible to do this docu- ble countries have their foundation firmly
mentary and to show some of the examples rooted in a free press.
of corruption and poor governance in
Kenya. There is still a long way to go. With inde-
pendent journalists fighting a losing battle
However, journalists still find it difficult to on censorship every year, with increased
submit their content online due to inade- violence and deaths being reported more
quate Internet speed and the lack of band- often in countries like Somalia, Libya,
width in most African countries. But, with Madagascar and even South Africa and
the entry of the undersea cables into the Kenya, exercising the right to information
African telecommunication system, the fu- is still a challenge.
ture seems to be getting brighter for the
African stories as told by
African journalist. A24 Media is trying to bring a little hope parachute journalists tend
and opportunity in a changing media land-
Internet and social networking sites look to scape. Our unique model is empowering
to lack the background,
be more relevant to the way African jour- African journalists across the continent, perspective and context
nalists will tell their stories, while the role giving them better revenue for their con-
of the mass media in developing countries tent, a wider audience and, most impor-
that explains their
is slowly losing its grip. Still, the more sta- tantly, ownership over their work. significance.
Since its modest birth in a small niche As Mizzima grows in capacity building,
along New Delhi’s crowded streets, journalism skills and equipment, the pos-
Mizzima has developed mechanisms to in- sibilities of an emerging culture of en-
crease both its network and output. And, hanced media freedom at this critical junc-
despite the official censorship and regular ture of Burmese history grows with it.
clampdowns on independent reporting, Today, Mizzima has over 80 reporters/staff
Burma also possesses some unique condi- based in India, Thailand, Bangladesh,
tions and “opportunities” for the free flow China and Burma.
of information. It is hoped that following Soe Myint is Editor-In-Chief of Mizzima News,
the election, with some civilians involved To strengthen Burma’s free media, Mizzima which he established in August 1998. He has worked
in power sharing arrangements and a actively works in association with other for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), Radio
growing civil society sector, media organi- Burmese media groups. A founding mem- Free Asia (Burmese Service) and Voice of America
zations like Mizzima can exploit this new- ber of Burma News International, a net- (Burmese Department). His book, “Burma File: A
found “scope” to improve networks and ac- work of Burma’s independent media or- Question of Democracy,” was published in 2003.
tivities inside the country. ganizations, as well as a member of the
However, the way technology is revolu- just a few months, if not weeks, which has The future of news is evolving. Those who
tionizing information dissemination, we aided the shift from print to desktop to mo- consume news may finally get to have a
would do well to recognize that if the ma- bile devices. As for mobiles and other greater say in what, where, when and how
jority wants to know something other than handheld devices, it would seem they can they are informed. It is an exciting period.
what editors want to publish, we have to now perform every function except make The media has to make the right moves,
accept the majority may find a way. popcorn. Of course, they can also be used to make itself more relevant and useful for its
have voice conversations. consumers. The next 10 years will see a
Even without any training, some of the rapid march in India towards digital media
biggest news, and even some exceptional It is interesting to see how some have taken even as print will grow then plateau.
follow-ups, are breaking on Twitter. In the lead in developing content deliverable
India, for example, during the Mumbai at- exclusively for these devices, including the
tacks, it was thanks to tweets that most got sync systems that allow one to get feeds
their initial information and even follow- tick-marked on a desktop to fly in to their
ups from various vantage points. handheld devices to be then read at leisure.
In India’s capital, New Delhi, the traffic po- The iPad, its clones, and other e-readers,
lice alert drivers about traffic jams through will continue to evolve to make the reading
tweets. So they are informing the public di- experience easier, faster and better. Once
rectly and in the process bypassing the FM the battery life is improved, the number of
or TV channels. In fact, it is these channels those who rely on these devices to stay in
which sometime follow tweets and report. touch will catapult into a different league.
The other major benefit of digital media is While all this is very exciting, it is also a
that it allows users to customize content. cause for concern. Readers have got so used
Users now have the capability to choose be- to free content online that getting them to
tween short stories or deep-dive into a sub- pay for it is a challenge. Can this be sus-
ject, whether they want to access com- tained on advertisement support alone? No Rajesh Kalra is the Chief Editor of Times Internet
moditized stuff or opinions. one is sure. Ltd, the digital arm of India’s largest media house,
The Times of India Group. He also heads the lan-
The rapid pace of transformation in the Initial experience has been that the change guages initiatives of the Internet arm.
field has reduced the product lifecycle to in the advertiser’s mind is slow in coming.
At the same time, the Kremlin kept trying Two weeks later, a journalist from Interfax
to find new methods for dealing with the wire agency was expelled from the area of
blogging community. In May 2009, the the Sayano-Shushenskaya station for his
‘Kremlin school of bloggers’ was launched, critical reporting. Instead, the popular
headed by Alexei Chadayev, an associate of blogger Rustem Adagamov, aka ‘drugoi’,
Pavlovsky. Their graduates are supposed to was invited to report on the relief opera- Andrei Soldatov is Co-founder and Editor, Agen-
organise pro-Kremlin information cam- tion. So he did, reporting favorably for the tura.Ru, Moscow which covers developments re-
paigns online. authorities. In October, Adagamov was in- lated to terrorism and the security services in Russia
vited to join the Kremlin press pool, a pro- and the former Soviet Union. He is the co-author of
The biggest industrial catastrophe of 2009 posal that he accepted. the book “The New Nobility: the Restoration of Rus-
was a striking illustration of the new gov- sia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the
ernment strategy. On 17 August, Sayano- Today, the Russian online media looks vul- KGB” to be released in September 2010.
Shushenskaya hydroelectric station, the nerable not only because of government
This media concentration creates a high- In many ways, La Silla Vacía represents a
level entry barrier for other competitors, model of the media of the future and a
making it seem ‘impossible’ to create an al- good example of how the Internet encour-
ternative successful media. ages press freedom. The democratization of
Another issue that we have covered that is At La Silla Vacía, each user has his or her
taboo in Colombia is how power is exercised own profile page, which contains a record
by media. There is a ‘pact of silence’ among of all his or her contributions to the page.
journalists. We can criticize everything ex- We have an audience editor, working with
cept each other. At La Silla Vacía, media is users who submit stories to the page to
not off-limits, which opens up the opportu- make sure that they meet the journalistic
nity for media to be held accountable. standards of accuracy, verification and in-
terest to readers; we have an Urtak tool for
Not only have we tried to cover under-cov- users to ask and answer survey questions
ered issues, but also in the way we cover in real time about political issues; and one-
them we try to break barriers people have third of our story ideas come from users,
to access information. At La Silla Vacía we who give us tips and information.
believe in the value of unprocessed infor-
mation. That’s why we use every tool to This experiment in crowdsourcing and
make original documents and reporting user-generated information decentralize Juanita León is the Founder and Director of
available to users. We also use open-source the information in a way that not only re- LaSillaVacia.com, the most influential political web-
tools like Ustream to allow users to directly flects the center of the country, but also the site in Colombia. She was a Harvard Nieman Fellow
interview our sources. And we use Twitter regions. It also opens up a path of self-ex- and is a graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of
to cover important events in real time, so pression and political engagement for Journalism. She was the launch editor of Flypme-
that people get direct access to raw infor- younger Colombians, who are skeptical of dia.com, and taught ‘Guerrilla News’ at New York
mation with as little mediation as possible established media and so often opt out of University’s School of Journalism.
from journalists. the political debate.
The Qataris, who were looking for a way to informing their visitors of the websites of tablish alternative media outlets and in cit-
be known, stumbled on a failed attempt by other Arab newspapers. By accessing these izen media initiatives.
Saudi businesspeople to produce a joint ef- Arab newspapers, Web surfers were able to
fort with the BBC. The failed Orbit News op- find out what was happening in their Initially the Internet was left under lock
eration in Italy provided the Qataris with a countries simply by reading what Arab pa- and key in traditional newspapers as
cadre of professionally trained Arabic pers outside their own borders were pub- owners were afraid of this newcomer to
speaking journalists. With little critical lishing. the information world. But with time, the
news to report on in tiny Qatar, the new availability of information, which pro-
station was able to deliver professional Online publications soon followed and in vided a wider point of view and a much
news by satellite to the entire Arab world. time provided opposition parties, ideolog- deeper version than what was being said
ical groups and various others with the op- locally, caused traditional media owners
The Internet provided yet another oppor- portunity to make their ideas public. With and editors to adopt and warm up to the
tunity for Arab news junkies. As it hap- Internet penetration still low in most Arab Internet.
pened, all 23 Arab countries were careful countries, it was important to employ the
about making sure that the local press was ripple effect. Internet media advocates in Alternative and citizen media initiatives
under control but could do little to stop any the Arab world began by trying to encour- were soon growing in the Arab world.
other Arab media outlet from writing age Arab journalists, thinkers and writers When Mahmood Al Yousifi (mahmood.tv)
about them. With cyberspace outside the to get online. used Google Earth to show the amount of
control of Arab interior and information unused land owned by the ruler and un-
ministers, an entirely new opportunity was Various civil society efforts helped by pur- available to homeless citizens, the Bahrain
opened up. chasing computers with Internet connec- government temporarily banned Google
tions and providing public space to allow Earth.
One of the first efforts began in Palestine. amplifying voices to obtain information
The Arabic Media Internet News online and then reproduce it using tradi- When Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas got
(AMIN.org) was established in 1996 with tional media. The success of this effort hold of a cell phone video showing police
the aim of publishing uncensored content. wasn’t initially evident, but its online brutality he posted it on his site (Misrdigi-
Their most successful effort was a section power was soon to be seen in efforts to es- tal.blogspirit.com), forcing for the first time
background, having studied for a Higher content we produce is high definition (HD) Our business model is designed so that the
National Diploma (HND) in Electronics and ready. We have invested heavily in training cost of operation is covered by income
Telecommunications and a Bachelors of and capacity building. through advertisement and sponsorship.
Science (BSc) in Broadcast Technology. I The concept is built around low margin on
had the full understanding of “how-it- Every one of our young Nigerians went large volume and we pre-sold a block of
works” from the outset. And with 16 years through training on how to write stories, time to an ad-buy agency to guarantee in-
of work and experience in broadcasting I report, shoot and edit them. They multi- come for the first three years. This model
saw a credible chance to succeed. I am also task in every facet of the job. Their employ- makes the company quite viable. This was
privileged to have had the assistance of an ment contracts stipulate high standards of accomplished before the investment drive.
ex-vice president of CNN as the tireless and professionalism and commitment to per- Investors in Nigeria were happy to commit
innovative project manager. Kenneth Tiven formance improvement. More importantly, money to the project.
came on board with me very early in this there is zero tolerance for corrupt practices
project. in journalism. We pay the best wages in tel- We have a staff strength of 120 people se-
evision in Nigeria as part of this commit- lected from nearly 5,000 who applied for
The NN24 team is young, energetic and ment. We also have well defined, simple- jobs. It took us about twelve months go on
fresh. We resisted taking experienced to-understand gift policy, a copy of which air and the unintended consequence of the
hands. The basic strategy was to give the can be found on our website delays was that from day one we looked
enterprise the opportunity of an uncom- (www.nn24.tv). NN24 is an affiliate partner grown up. Our output has been quite re-
promised beginning devoid of old and bad of CNN, and through this partnership, staff markable, and thousands of SMS messages
habits. Our approach with new technology of the company has the opportunity to at- confirm the happy disbelief of so many
required that we do just that. Our opera- tend a CNN Fellowship for three weeks at Nigerians that this is really a Nigerian
tions are fully digital, automated and the its USA headquarters in Atlanta. channel on the DStv distribution platform.
Right: www.nikkei.com
10 Waypoints Tagged to
the Future of News
By Bill Mitchell
8. Investigated: Investigative reporting represents one of journal- At Grocott’s Mail, a small paper in South Africa, editor Stephen
ism’s most refined processes: it requires extraordinary expertise to Lang expected that “civic activism” would motivate the citizen
sift meaning from raw data and info too jumbled or concealed to journalism made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
make sense otherwise. Investigative reporting remains a franchise In fact, he found that “the driving force for citizen journalists in our
that professional journalists are well positioned to lead, especially area is the prospect of gainful employment.”
with help from their audiences. How might you collaborate with
users on investigations into the most critical issues facing your In Japan, Takashi Tanemura reports that Nikkei’s media re-
communities? searchers expected to find significant user interest in customized
and personalized news. Instead, they were surprised to find read-
9. Trained: None of the above will happen magically. Staff mem- ers of online news mostly interested in getting the same news that
bers and contributors alike need new skills. Rajesh Kalra urges their friends and neighbors were reading in print editions.
training for citizen journalists “that would not only ensure that se-
lection of topics is relevant, but (that) quality can be maintained.” Speaking of surprises, what surprised me most about these 42 es-
How will you and your users get the training required for good and says is the impact they’ve had on my own view of journalism’s fu-
profitable answers to the questions in this list? ture.
10. Sustained: Done right, all of the above will create substantial I still believe our profession faces a chaotic transition. Exactly how
new value to users, advertisers and other stakeholders. What’s the people will get the news and information they need remains an
linkage, in your operations, between the sort of innovation sug- open question.
gested above and your bottom line?
But the report has shown me how some of the chaos is giving way
Making progress in these areas will not be easy, especially in coun- to clarity, revealing a global media landscape where the news
tries without a strong tradition of independent media. Several of about news is not so much bleak as breaking, revealing innovative
the essays describe some early progress, highlighted by a few more approaches – especially in the ten areas highlighted above -- that
pins on the map: are starting to grab some traction.
● Lagos, where NN24, Nigeria’s first 24-hour news channel, is fo- We’re entering an exciting new chapter of a fast-moving, high-
cusing on people as opposed to institutions, challenging local tra- stakes story. Its promise is beginning to outweigh its peril.
ditions by excluding both advertisers and the station’s CEO (our
author, Anthony Dara) from any decisions about news coverage.
T his project would not have been possible without the enthusiasm, dedication and
generosity of many people and we are grateful for their assistance.
First of all we would like to thank all of the contributors who generously donated their
time and expertise to write these articles for no payment, just a shared passion for jour-
nalism and its future.
A special thanks to our partners at Poynter, Bill Mitchell and Julie Moos, whose infec-
tious enthusiasm and hard work helped turn “Brave News Worlds” from a concept into a
reality. And to IPI Conference Manager Michael Kudlak, who prepared the initial report
concept and proved a calming influence during the project’s final days.
I would like to thank personally Louise Hallman for lending her support in search of
pictures and painstaking final proofreading.
Thanks also to the Associated Press and numerous photographers on Flickr, both ama-
teur and professional, for donating the use of their photos, and last but not least to the
team of Druckerei Holzhausen for their all their help in printing the final report.
Lauren Dolezal
Commissioning and Production Editor
Vienna: Harmony
of Old and New