The big article that’s making the rounds in journalistic circles right now is Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.
Relevant quotes:
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
[snip]
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. . . .
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
[snip]
No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
I want to point out a function of local newspapers that might not be apparent from this particular approach of "saving journalism." (Actually it’s about SUBSIDIZING journalism). It was only after being exposed to Facebook that the full extent of the value of the utility of this function was brought home to me.
When you join Facebook you are encouraged to join "networks" that assist you in connecting with people you may know. These usually are schools attended since that is the place many of us make friends who we subsequently lose touch with upon graduating and going our own ways.
But another common network is the city in which you reside. Now it is possible to presently use this geographic network on Facebook to do searches if you are interested in meeting potential mates. But, that’s obviously of little use for those of us in stable relationships.
What we want are networks that will facilitate meeting people who are within some proximity and who share various interests with us. In other words, what we need from Facebook is an application that will make our city network richer and deeper.
The obvious way to go about that is for local newspapers to become that application.
The present problem with newspaper websites is how to monetize them. The advertising revenues from the site do not cover the cost of maintaining the site. But think about the possibilities if a newspaper website could be tied to the real name world of Facebook and its ability to track consumer preferences and turn that information into marketing dollars.
Let’s say my daughter-in-law wants to go shopping for children’s clothes and would like to check the sales at the various stores in town. With the application I’m envisioning, she would go on Facebook, enter the Local Newspaper network-website, and then check out the sales from all the stores where she would like to shop.
Now, these ads would be the same ones that chain stores have printed as ad supplements for local newspapers. And, they could be "voluntary" ads, the same way they are in print media. But, now when someone like my daughter-in-law clicked on them, the company would have valuable data as to who was looking at their ads and what they were looking for. Information you don’t get from newspaper ads.
That, friends, is marketing data worth paying for.
It should be noted that this type of individualized consumer information cannot be obtained through the usual newspaper website ads, because you never know who’s doing the looking. But, Facebook’s real name (plus other information) policy creates a valuable information stream for marketers.
But why should people join this network-application? There are two main ones.
The first is to obtain a centralized place to list community events and to be able to search them based on various criteria. My own local newspaper maintains a calendar on its website. If this merger of Facebook and Local Newspapers occurs, then the "free" newspaper website would probably have this feature removed in order to push people onto the Facebook application-network. This is similar to how magazine websites like The New Yorker or New York Review of Books only post some of their content on-line.
The second is to form or join affinity groups. The most obvious of these would be neighborhood groups. This would be an easy way for neighborhood associations to have a central clearinghouse for events and activities. It would also make it easier to locate people you might know by forming this sub-network.
A young friend in my neighborhood said he would really like a neighborhood network feature on Facebook since it would quickly help him evaluate whether he wanted to accept someone’s friend request, the same way knowing that a person was in his alma mater network allowed him to.
The types of affinity groups are unlimited. If an organization has a website, you can always go there to find people in your area with the same interest. But, if there are only a few people in the whole city with that interest and none of them have the time or ability to create and maintain a website, what do you do? A Local Newspaper application-network could easily facilitate the fifteen people in a small city interested in taxidermy in actually meeting one another.
So what about the journalism function?
Starting the day with Facebook and this Local Newspaper network-application would allow you to quickly keep up with friends and with what’s going on around you locally. All the normal emphasis that local newspapers are placing on local news would draw people to the site in the morning in the same way that we older people start the day with the newspaper. Essentially you would just be delivering the paper on-line.
But, unlike with a "free" website, with Facebook you would know WHO you are delivering to. The website behind the Facebook wall could be organized in such a way that LOCAL advertisers could show up when various types of stories were accessed. The connections quickly come to mind as soon as you start thinking about the possibilities, I don’t need to spell them out here.
But this method isn’t a panacea for all the journalism present in local newspapers. Any activities that weren’t related to local functions would probably need to be spun off into self sufficient content providers. I live in a state capital and there are fine reporters on the newspaper who cover the state legislature and the governor’s office. Since these are of statewide importance, that content needs to be sold to state wide content aggregators. They would end up needing to be self sufficient in the ways discussed in Shirky’s article. Trying to use the methods I’m describing here to subsidize that form of journalism would probably be stretching things too thin.
My newspaper also covers sports reporting of the local universities. This is valuable content in and of itself and could probably be self sustaining through various means. But, keeping it behind a Facebook wall would be one way to bring in a lot of regional users to the network-application. If the stores placing ads in the paper draw from the region, this again would be a worthwhile tool for acquiring valuable marketing data.
This brings up another use. Let’s say you’re visiting the area to watch a sporting or cultural event and want to check out the restaurants or hotels or any other type of information. An application of the type I’m describing would be the logical place to go to find that information all in one place.
But instead of having all this centralized clearinghouse data out on a poorly monetized website, it could be behind a Facebook wall which would enable the publisher of the Local Newspaper network-application to be adequately remunerated.
That’s the key point. How do you generate enough money to keep the journalism functions viable.
The actual printing of paper newspapers wouldn’t have to disappear immediately. Rather they could become a niche market (like Starbucks) for people willing to pay for the luxury of "holding and feeling a newspaper while I drink my coffee". Eventually, as we dinosaurs died off, this market would go the way of the rotary phone.
It would appear to me that the infrastructure is already in place to support the change I’m advocating. All newspapers have a web presence and Facebook is gaining new users daily. The only thing necessary is for Facebook to write the software to make what I’m talking about possible. I’m sure they could probably get assistance in funding that effort from all the major newspaper chains about to go bankrupt. Looks like a win-win situation to me.