Journalists of the World Unite–and Innovate
I recently had an offline conversation with a journalist who was asking me lots of questions about the changes that are rocking journalism, including why should Drudge, for example, be able to make money off of repositioning content which he got for free.
Of course, the real question is: Why should journalists get kicked out of their jobs and those remaining be forced to do double duty, while so many others are profiting off of goods produced by their labors?
In a sense, like Drudge, much of what I produce here at PJNet.org comes initially from the journalists who go down into the mines everyday to extract the nuggets I use. Of course, in my case I give it away, but still I have a university salary that in effect pays me in part to produce, aggregate and give away information. So that brings me to my Manifesto:
Journalists of the World Unite — and Innovate
1. The Readership Institute has done studies and finds that as a group newsroom cultures tend to be passive/ defensive or aggressive/defensive types, neither of which are conducive to change. So issue number one. Change your attitude. Become offensive and aggressive.
2. Stop lamenting about the past, get innovative and figure out how you are going to make good journalism better.
3. Dump the Guild blog entitled: SaveJournalism.org; change it to something like ReinventingGreatJournalism.org. You don’t want to save it, you want to make it better than ever before. You have the new technology tools to do it.
4. Those of you in the Guild, demand a name change. The very word Guild conjures up a bygone age of ink stained wretches, trying to preserve rather than innovate. Get your best headliner writers to start an open source wiki and come up with a fantastic new name.
5. Make the world see that you are working on plans for the future that will smarten up journalism and not dumb it down. Don’t ever again do little wimpy stunts like this as reported in SaveJournalism.org:
In Minnesota, about 150 members from the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and supporters rallied together, releasing 100 black balloons into the air to spotlight the loss of quality journalism jobs at the newspapers since 2005.
6. In the past union weapons of choice were strikes and sometimes clubs–both built on guts and muscle. Now your weapon of choice must be your minds, your ability to gather information and to disseminate it. Go after lazy, overpaid management. Demand that they work with all their stakeholders, including journalists, and innovate to give the public reason to believe journalism has a higher purpose and a lucrative future. Expose the incompetents. Expose the overpaid. Expose ownership which cannibalizes the news organization resources to keep revenues high while destroying any long term viability.
7. Demand that 20 percent of your time be devoted to developing innovative ideas and products. Here is what Google tells prospective engineers:
– We work in small teams, which we believe promotes spontaneity, creativity and speed.
–Any Googler might have our next great idea, so we make sure every idea is heard.
–Because great ideas need resources to grow into reality, at Google you’ll always get the resources you need to make your dreams a reality.
— Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about.This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut — products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch.
So if it is good enough for Google, it should be good enough for you and your company.
8. Robert Picard in his paper Journalism, Value Creation and the Future of News Organizations includes you as one of the primary stakeholders in creating value. Don’t let anyone forget that. But he also says the assembly line model must be scrapped. If every newsperson is interchangeable, then you are but cogs in a machine. You must reinvent yourselves. Some will be news gathers in the traditional sense, some will be information providers, some will develop valuable new knowledge and some, I would say all of you, will be community connectors.
9. The total cost for a newsroom for a newspaper with 100,000 circulation is about $10 million annually. With a little thought, it might be possible to create an excellent journalism enterprise outside of the monopolistic enterprises now in place. Remember you will be aggressive and innovative, which means you have the power collectively to develop your own forms of disruptive innovations which will destroy the sustained models that in the past have made you second class citizens and reduced the quality of news.
10. Those still left in the Guild should demand that it become an incubator of disruptive technologies that will advance great journalism and destroy models based solely on profit motives. As journalists you have a higher calling, an obligation to the general society. Don’t let anyone take that away, better yet find a way of owning what you do so it can’t be taken away.
11. You need the help of the general public and specific audiences to make change possible. Be community connectors and define your own communities. Use the old rule of thumb of one full-time newsroom employee per 1,000 circulation or determine a more exact figure. Then figure how to join that community and be a part of it by providing high quality insightful news, information and new knowledge production. Do the math. One thousand loyal community members each paying just $2 a week for what you produce is $2,000 a week or $100,000 a year. Your community might be moms, basketball fans, political junkies, educators, hunters, government employees, healthcare providers, news junkies or environmentalists, the list is long and combinations infinite. One hundred community connectors each bringing in 1,000 of their own self-defined community members, equals a circulation of 100,000 with a purely paid circulation of $10,000,000. There might even be ad revenue on top of that, but your interest is providing news, information and knowledge production that has value for your geographical communities or communities of interest who will pay for what you produce. Worried about possible conflicts of interest and other issues? Good, figure out how to avoid them.
12. The open source lessons of software development like Linux and Mozilla Firefox is that collective intelligence is a powerful force; use your collective intelligence to build new and better forms of journalism. Share your knowledge, ideas and plans. Plant dozens, no hundreds, maybe thousands of start up idea seeds and then nurture those that start to succeed, learn from the failures.
13. Finally, begin to take an innovative posture now or get out of the way. The only other choice is not to innovate and then be moved out of the way. If you do nothing, you are doomed and so might be journalism. . So Journalists of the World Unite–and start innovating now.
newsrooms, Collective Intelligence, Guild, Journalism, Web2.0, newsroom innovation, reinventjournalism,
