“We don’t put out a newspaper to make money,” says Paul C. Tash, the chief executive of the Times Publishing Company, which oversees the paper. “We make money so we can put out a great newspaper.”

Still the St. Petersburg Times is hurting as ad revenues and circulation steadily drop. I think Representative Journalism could help, at least in part. Indeed, they have at least one Representative Journalist in their midst, but just don’t realize it. His name is Thomas French, and here is what The Times story says about him:

He has spent years examining endangered species, alongside other tasks he juggles for The Times. He recently visited a local zoo to witness a 1,000-pound manatee being hauled into a truck so it could be released into the wild — part of a lengthy series on the behavior of animals in zoos and the wild that he plans to get into the paper by the end of the year.

“I don’t know of any business plan where this kind of in-depth reporting makes sense, except for one that is built on a long-term goal of excellence,” he said. “I don’t know how long they’ll let me do this.”

Thomas, the Representative Journalism business model will let you do it. Endangered species is not just a local St. Petersburg story, it is a statewide story. Surely the paper could find 1,000 people around the state willing to pay $100 each, who would want to join an endangered species Representative Journalism community built around solid reporting and research by French.

Everyone wins. French keeps his job and continues to do important reporting, the St. Petersburg Times gets a $100,000 revenue stream agumented at least in part by people outside its traditional circulation area, the people most interested in endangered species get  high quality journalism aimed at their passion and they get to lend their expertise to the coverage while becoming a part of a community of people with like interests. The community’s website with French’s stories and the newspaper’s graphics and photography  could be fantastic and build an international audience.

 I will contact the folks at the St. Petersburg Times later today and try to stimulate some interest.  I want to know if the idea appeals to them or to French. It should; I am certain that in this case Representative Journalism can save journalism and the manatee too.

Let’s take Dalton, a small city in Northwest Georgia. It is the home of Mohawk and several other carpet manufacturing companies. The aim would be to gather a community of 1,000 carpet manufacturing industry employees who want the finest locally oriented coverage possible of their industry. It would be an expert who knows more about the industry than almost anyone else.  An authoritative voice that produces traditional reporting, but also does white papers and original research that helps everyone locally to understand the industry and their place within it.

So could the community support that kind of reporter. I would think yes, in fact, there might  sub communities who would support more than one Representative Journalist. The rank and file workers might see the value via payoffs in better pay and better working conditions of having their own information font. We are not talking a booster, but simply a reporter/expert who provides so much valuable information on work conditions, industry pay standards and the industry as a whole from a labor point of view that the workers come to the negotiating table with superior information – a most powerful bargaining weapon.

Could you find one or two thousand people to form one or more Representative Journalism communities in or around Dalton? The numbers say yes. Here is information directly from a Georgia Trend magazine article:

• The carpet and flooring industry employs more than 45,000 workers in Georgia with a payroll topping $4 billion – the largest of any manufacturing sector in the state.
• The world’s four largest carpet companies, and seven of the 14 largest, are located in Georgia (Shaw Industries, Mohawk Industries, Beaulieu of America, Interface, Milliken, J&J Industries, Collins & Aikman Floorcoverings).
• More than 80 percent of the U.S. carpet market – which supplies 45 percent of the world’s carpet – is controlled by mills located within a 65-mile radius of Dalton. That equals about $10 billion in business activity within a golden tufted circle.

The Representative Journalist could write of the immediate concerns of factory workers in Dalton and at the same time tell the bigger national or international story. In fact, the hyperlocal journalism would provide the steady income to allow the Representative Journalist to produce more national or international stuff. In the past that would have been side work, but in this model it would be built into what he or she does. The carpet workers would be getting their local story told by a national expert. By being local but going national or international too that reporter would be providing added value and would be compensated for it terms of money, prestige and reputation.

So let’s revisit the economics one more time, each community member pays $100, we gather 1000 of them. That’s $100,000. The network weaver, who assembles the community, gets a $10,000 in commission.  We’ll take $30,000 for overhead, editing and expenses. Remember the reporter/expert works out of his or her home so the overhead is low, and most of the expense money goes for travel. That leaves  $60,000 including health insurance for the reporter/expert. That’s the foundational pay. Unlike at local newspapers today, the Representative Journalism reporter/expert is encouraged to find national and international gigs too. In fact, it would be an employment condition.

Everyone wins. The reporter/expert gets a decent salary and national or international reputation. The folks working in the Dalton mills have one of the world’s foremost experts covering their local issues. Plus since it is a community, there is a constant exchange of information among all the community members and the Representative Journalist, thanks to our network weaver who is busy  strengthening industry worker ties via online and face-to-face meetings and conversations.

Next up I will be writing about an editing model to match this hyperlocal/national expert model.

There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them…

The truth is that many people everywhere are interested in almost everything.

Now I am going to explain via Representative Journalism how to work with those “people everywhere interested in almost everything,” including book reviews, book news and, probably most importantly, a bookish culture.

The idea first came to me when I read that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) would be dropping its book reviewer.

Jeff Jarvis, usually a man of vision, agreed with the decision, writing:

In a time of shrinking newspaper revenue and budgets, which would you rather keep: a book editor or a local reporter or editor? You can now link to lots of book reviews — more than ever — but if the AJC doesn’t give you local reporting, who will? If it doesn’t give its readers local news and reporting, then what is its real value?

Jeff, I am surprised, in this case you are not trying to reinvent, you are trying to simply downsize, rather than applying creative thinking. I want local reporting and book reviews too. It needn’t be one or the other.

As you read this, keep in mind that this idea could work with one Representative Journalism book community, but would work infinitely better if , let’s say, there were 50 book communities working cooperatively, maybe one in each state. Then it becomes a $5 million a year operation and since it is mostly — but not necessarily always online — that’s a lot of high quality book review talent with national impact, but also with a regional a flavor.

Any how here is how it works for one single book community:

First step, start engaging a book-lovers Representative Journalism community. In the AJC’s case, you could start to find a community among the more than 5,000 people who signed the petition: Help Protect Atlanta’s Book Review. We want at least 1,000 of them to become members of this Representative Journalism community — an exclusive club of book lovers.

The online platform or platforms have to make every member of this club feel part of the group and to enable them to find others with like literary interests, with the possibility of people having face-to-face self-organizing meet-ups, mini book clubs and other social events. Maybe even dating possibilities and cocktail parties. The AJC will have its handprints over every bit of it and people will appreciate that and value the AJC in ways never thought possible. In other words the AJC, will develop connections in a way that just throwing a newspaper, no matter how wonderfully written and reported, will ever have.

To join the club you have to pay $2 a week or $100 a year. One hundred dollars times 1,000 members that’s $100,000. One would assume that those 1,000 members buy a lot of books, so get a deal for them so that when they join they get $100 in coupons from booksellers, plus they get three pairs of tickets worth $25 each for a total of $150 for three major book events annually that the AJC will host exclusively for the club members.

So now the book lovers have paid $100 each to join their very own Representative Journalism community, but are getting in return $100 in book coupons and $150 in live book events, and will be a part of a vibrant online book community. If they can’t attend an event, they can donate their tickets so that young readers can attend events too.

Yes, everything is online oriented. Nothing need get into the daily newspaper, except as after events or as a special supplement. However, if the community really loves books, it might well want everyone to see what it is helping to subsidize.

Of course, the big question is can you recruit 1,000 people. You won’t know until you try. It will take some cross promoting with the bookstores and maybe public broadcasting. You might even consider paying someone a 10 percent commission for helping build the club. Ten percent of $100,000 is $10,000. Give the person an incentive; if book club members stick with the club for three years, they get a recurring $10,000 commission, so there is the potential for signing up 1,000 quality folks one time but making $30,000 over three years with automatic payments. This commissioned person is a network weaver. The glue that helps hold the network together.

Then pay someone in the club or the network weaver $2,000 to help organize each live event. The promoter in return for his or her work also gets to enjoy a private meeting or dinner with the AJC’s book review editor and the authors. Plus add $2,000 for the venue and $2,000 for the speaker, mostly authors on tour; so costs for a planner, speakers’ fees and a venue is $6,000 an event. Or $18,000 for all three events. To leverage the investment cut a deal with a university, work with public broadcasting and book publishers and sellers. The events are only open to the book club members or co-sponsors, however, they can be turned into stories, interviews, and podcasts for the rest of your audience, which gets the news, but not the inside connection that book lovers will cherish. So far annually we have spent $10,000 for the network weaver and $18,000 for the events. That’s $28,000. We have $72,000 left. Take $16,000 for overhead, and you still have $56,000 to pay for the reviews and book oriented journalism and information.

Speaking of reporting and journalism. Make the book editor a part-time position working out of his or her home at maybe $30,000 a year including expenses. This would be enough to subsidize a scholar, novelist, professional book critic or nonfiction freelance writer who is moonlighting as the book reviewer.

The half time book editor, a big thinker, writes one high quality review/essay a week and is responsible for keeping the book chatter and interaction going with the audience. The book editor also has a stable of book reviewers write a total of five regional book reviews weekly each at $100 a review plus a free book. That comes to $500 a week for reviewers or $26,000 a year. To recap annually $10,000 for the network weaver, $18,000 for events; $30,000 for the part time reviewer; $26,000 for freelancers, and $16,000 for overhead for a total of $100,000.

Have you noticed, we never mentioned advertising — we needn’t, it is not driving this project. Community interest is, relationships are all weaved together providing its members with news and information about books that the AJC’s editor, its events and the audience itself are continuously exchanging in a nonstop conversation. The advertising, if there is any could be the gravy. You might even charge non members a premium fee to attend the events to have more money to pay for the reviewers and editor.

If the AJC doesn’t pick up on the idea, then how about the Oxford American with a Representative Community in each of the Southeastern states. Or nationally what about the New York Review of Books with regional editions. Or if all of them are slow to the punch, what about you. Steal this idea. It’s yours. Just give me credit.

Can it work? I don’t know. This is an open source idea. A Beta idea. It is not perfect. However, in the words of Eric Raymond:

When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.

I think this idea can be really neat in the foreseeable future. However it needs book lovers, idea people and alas money crunchers to critique it and to add to it. Let’s build it into something solid, something really neat. Let’s not wait for the future; let’s start it now.

With a touch of disdain Wasserman writes of the “the faux populism of the marketplace,” instead deciding when he was the  book review editor at the Los Angeles Times: 

I would simply have to rely upon my own literary acumen and taste, cross my fingers, and hope that a sufficient number of the newspaper’s readers would find in themselves an echo of my own enthusiasms.

There is also this dismal of populism:

Sure, two, three, many opinions, but let’s all acknowledge a truth as simple as it is obvious: Not all opinions are equal.

I agree with him, but he by default dismisses all the people who buy books worthy of reviews, enjoy the books and enjoy talking to others who have shared the experience. Rather than taking the Columbia Journalism Review/Nick Lemann stance of holding audience at arm’s length by stiff arming them directly in the face, they should embrace those book lovers and bring them into the fold.

So that brings me to my idea of how to have more great book reviewing spread across the nation. I would use high quality standards as Wasserman advocates, but without his almost palpable hatred for lay opinion even that offered by people learned enough to love the very books he most wants reviewed. He  writes:

 If I had a bias—and I did—it was toward paying attention to the unknown, the neglected, the small but worthy (and all-too-often invisible) authors whose work readers would otherwise not have heard about.

He also provides us with another — among many fascinating – truism:

people who buy books do so not on the basis of any review they read, nor ad they’ve seen, but upon word of mouth. What’s worse is that most people who buy books, like most people who watch movies, don’t read reviews at all. For those who do, however, reviews are an invaluable way of eavesdropping, as it were, on an ongoing cultural conversation of critical importance.

I am not sure if Wasserman actually heard himself write that part about “word of mouth,” you know as in conversation. That’s a key I will get at when I talk about Representative Journalism.

The other keys are plucked from Wasserman’s piece; for example,  when he speaks of how his LA Times book review sections had comparatively low readership, but:  

The core readership …  the paper’s “Cosmopolitan Enthusiasts” amounted to about three hundred and twenty thousand avid and dedicated readers for whom the weekly Book Review was among the most important sections of the paper.

Here is more:

…The New York Review of Books, the most profitable and erudite and influential review publication in the history of modern American letters. It enjoys a readership of 280,000—readers who remain loyal to its unflaggingly high standard—and has been in the black for nearly forty years.

I checked out its website, it charges $69 a year for a subscription. Now one more vital piece of information from Wasserman, whose attitude, as I mentioned above, I both love and hate. This part I love because I so fully agree with him:

I was convinced that because readers of book reviews are among a paper’s best-educated and most prosperous readers, it might be possible to turn a cultural imperative into a profitable strategy.

And here is the key to Representative Journalism now foreshadowed by Wasserman, who while talking about the resurgence of high culture writes:

There is money to be made in culture, if only newspapers were nimble and imaginative enough to take advantage of the opportunities that lie all around them…

The truth is that many people everywhere are interested in almost everything.

In 2005 there were about 222 million people over 18 years old in the USA. If only 5 percent of them loved to read books that would still be 11 million people. The average household have about two adults in it, so that leaves us with 5.5 million potential households. In Part II we will see how to tap in those 5.5 million potential households via Representative Journalism.

 Audiences will easily be able to see developing stories unfold in real time and could be an active part of the story development process. Since many Representative Journalism communities will be communities that get no coverage now, there will be little fear of the competition getting a jump on stories.

Equally tied into this transparency, this  weaving together of audience and producer are both crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. On a mechanistic level it will be easier to raise money than it has been in the past.  And the same thing might be said about the ease of developing ideas.

David Cohn pointed us to a NewAssignment.net interview with Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive which Eli Lilly helped launch. A key question was asked: How did a pharmaceutical giant invent something as radical as crowdsourced R&D in an industry burdened by protocols and status quo?

Part of the answer, and this is key to why crowdsourcing works, is that certain research areas, even within a giant like Lilly, have only a few researchers. Their frame of reference is just too small to compete with all the other knowledge that resides in the whole R&D crowd.

Now if Lilly with its, let’s say, five cloistered researchers in a unit, can’t get maximum information in their field of expertise, how then could only one journalist. The journalist will need the crowd, need the Representative Journalism community.

 Here is Bingham talking to interviewer Randy Burge:

Critical mass is also related to the diversity — how different the group is, how well you fill the cognitive space. The different thought processes, the different experiences, the different educational training, all those things somehow contribute to the “Eureka!” moment when you have insight into a particular problem. I want to get as much diversity in that process as I can.

So there is another lesson from the first week: diversity of thought counts. However, Binghamsays, there are limits. After enough people contribute you start seeing the same ideas recur and the law of diminishing returns comes into play. He also points out that people in charge of running a crowdsourcing project have to define it well and be sure it is doable.

Here is more from Bingham:

It is not unusual for us to have answers come in to Innocentive from our solvers that cause the people who have been trained, who are skilled in the field, and who have read all the literature — the seekers — exclaim, “Wow, that is really a unique idea. We would like to acquire that idea. We think we can work with it. It is a process we had never considered before.” Some of that ingenuity you can only find by going out to a crowd.

One other take home message, the interview with Bingham was part of the NewAssignment.net project’s Assignment Zero, which some people thought was a failure….but was it?