The Journalism Accelerator’s (JA’s) blog reports on a broad range of experiments unfolding in the field. Evolving daily, news and community publishers across journalism networks share much common ground, but have unique brands and market challenges. Posting content on the beat of news, we’re excited by the passion of publishers and hope to document some of the creative ways the business of news continues to re-imagine itself. The blog offers a range of feature content, much of it our reporting out to you what we’re learning from our experimentation across the JA. We think of the blog, related resources and featured items as compost that we hope helps fuel experiments, cross pollinating innovation and emerging practices with the wisdom of the field to seed new ideas.
Posted by Emily Harris on August 29, 2012
Topics:
Blog Community Revenue
About Ikaika Hussey
Ikaika Hussey helped start The Hawaii Independent with a handful of local journalists and activists in 2008. He previously worked in community organizing, and says he “knew a lot of stories” that he felt needed to be told. He says making sure to do sales along with editorial work every single day allowed The Independent to turn a profit last year. He expects another profitable year in 2012.
The Hawaii Independent started as a standard, albeit small, for-profit corporation five years ago. A handful of local investors put their money into the local news venture built by a group of local journalists and activists, including editor and publisher Ikaika Hussey. But after several years, Hussey went back to those investors and pitched a switch to a cooperative business model for the news organization. The change happened earlier this year; he mentioned the plans during the JA forum on local and niche news sites last February. We called him recently to follow up and learned that The Hawaii Independent now offers both subscriptions and ownership, with different benefits, following international cooperative principles and guided by organizational bylaws.
Hussey is inspired by The Banyan Project, his belief that independent media must be locally owned, and a vision of community contributors building solid journalism. The Hawaii Independent was profitable last year, and Hussey intends to send all member-owners a check at the end of 2012. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on August 21, 2012
Topics:
Blog Craft Technology
“Useful…right away.”
For developer Eric Mill, many goals came together in Scout. It’s a simple concept – a tool you might have expected to exist already. It helps public information flow freely – a key goal of Sunlight. And there is much more it can do. Mill says he’s proud of Scout because it’s “useful in an obvious way, right away.” Is it to you?
Last week we kicked off a new online conversation series by talking with Sunlight Foundation developer Eric Mill about Scout, a tool that alerts you to developments in legislation. This series is designed to help you learn more about resources you might not have had a chance to try yet, or share your insight into those that you know. To participate in or listen in on future conversations in this series, check back or follow @journaccel on Twitter to see what’s coming up.
Every couple of weeks we’ll choose from our growing collection of practical tools, reports, databases, blogs, platforms, new business models and more. JA “resource Q&As” go deeper into the tools and information featured on this site, bringing together both creators and those using the resource to help new iterations continue to align more closely with community interests and needs.
Scout tracks state and federal legislation, federal regulations and speeches in Congress on subjects you choose to follow. We picked Scout for our first resource Q&A because it’s easy to use and offers tangible results, such as cutting research time and delivering information you want quickly and directly. Based on comments in past JA discussions, including our forum on covering Election 2012, journalists value tools that are straightforward and practical. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on August 10, 2012
Topics:
Blog Community Craft Distribution Education Experiments Policy Revenue Technology
ProPublica managing editor Stephen Engelberg at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center. Image: Lisa Skube.
Raising money, gaining audience, having impact. Despite a ten million dollar annual budget, 34 reporters and partnerships with multiple major news organizations, ProPublica faces similar sustainability issues as many startup publishers. ProPublica’s managing editor (set to become editor-in-chief early next year) Stephen Engelberg spoke with a couple dozen journalists at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center in Portland this week. Here are his views on some of the major challenges investigative, nonprofit news organizations face today.
Stephen Engelberg had never done any fundraising before becoming second-in-command at ProPublica, the high-profile, nonprofit, investigative news organization set up in 2007. He didn’t have to right away; for the first three years ProPublica received ten million dollars a year from a foundation set up by Herb and Marion Sandler with their earnings from the savings and loan industry. ProPublica’s budget has remained the same, but the Sandler Foundation share fell to half last year. As Engelberg prepares to lead the first online-only news organization to win a Pulitzer Prize, money, branding, the expectations of donors and making an impact are on his mind. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on July 25, 2012
Topics:
Blog Community Revenue
AJ Leon, co-founder of the creative marketing company Misfit, Inc., opens up to the possibilities in Kaniche, Malawi.
Courtesy Misfit, Inc.
Last week, Robert Burns Nixon, CFO of the San Francisco Fashion and Merchants Alliance, highlighted here several fashion industry best practices that might work well in publishing too. For example, getting direct feedback on concepts before going into full production, and holding trademarked events.
For more business insights from beyond the usual suspects, we invited AJ Leon, co-founder of Misfit, Inc. to, as Robert did, read the JA forums on local and niche news held earlier this year and respond. AJ offers insights where he sees promise for publishers to gain greater revenue, deepen connections and capitalize on the power of immediacy. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Misfit, Inc., started because it fulfilled a dream. AJ and Melissa Leon wanted to travel. They also wanted to do creative work for causes they support. So AJ left banking and Melissa left teaching. Slowly but steadily, they built a business that develops creative media campaigns all over the world. They are dipping into publishing now too, with a planned e-guide to renting out your home using Air BNB and a new multimedia arts journal. Before offering thoughts on business approaches he’s taken that might be useful to publishers, AJ found plenty to learn in the JA conversations on sustaining local and niche news. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on July 18, 2012
Topics:
Blog Revenue
What business tips from the fashion world might be useful to news publishers?
Image: Payam Emrani
As journalism and publishing continue to ride the wave of upheaval and innovation, what can we learn from people outside our own specialties, whether within the news industry or outside? We asked Robert Burns Nixon, Chief Financial Officer and a member of the board of the San Francisco Fashion and Merchants Alliance, Inc., to read the JA forum on local news publishing and reflect on similar challenges in the fashion world. Nixon dives straight into buzz, build and brand. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The San Francisco Fashion and Merchants Alliance (SFFAMA) is a nonprofit providing business and technology education through forums, mentorships and networking for designers, including many small startups. SFFAMA’s trademark event is San Francisco Fashion Week, held each fall, but CFO and board member Robert Burns Nixon is busy year-round. He develops partnerships and promotions for SFFAMA, plus handles the budget, planning and business strategy, which is evolving right along with the organization.
Robert Burns Nixon: We’re free right now, but we have a bunch of different groups (involved) and thousands of members. We’re planning to do a freemium model where you offer incentives; for a yearly membership, an automatic discount for all of our events, or other discounts that apply to partners, or special access to certain things. We’re still waiting for that critical number, whatever it is…say you have 5,000 people total and then you figure that maybe 5% of those may be willing to pay something.
Journalism Accelerator: What’s the value proposition you offer people? When you’re saying “become a member,” what’s in it for them?
RBN: We cap our membership first of all. We offer ongoing technology and fashion workshops. We have panel discussions and we do events where startups pitch, and then we have a whole range of different work functions.
JA: One thing that came up in the JA forum on local news was that community media startups trying to partner with bigger organizations, such as traditional newspapers, can find it difficult to come up with a way that would be mutually beneficial. What do you see in the fashion industry? (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on June 25, 2012
Topics:
Blog Craft Distribution Experiments Revenue
Collaborative growth: Working together to find your own way to sustainability and scale. Image: Pics of Trees
The JA/Collab Central forum on collaboration and revenue held earlier this spring surfaced more than two dozen examples of collaboration in action. This post examines one, an investigative report on deportations from the U.S. to Haiti, as a detailed use case of a collaboration yielding a high return.
Originally commissioned by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR) with a grant from The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, the project deepened the budding relationship between FCIR and Florida public radio station WLRN. It also provided early experience in content sharing for members of the Investigative News Network. Eventually, more than 30 news organizations, both commercial and nonprofit, published an online or print version of the piece.
This use case outlines a successful collaboration that laid the groundwork for a deeper partnership that included revenue. It shows how partners worked together in different ways, explores how they may do things differently in the future, and offers examples to consider as you evaluate the structure and yield of potential or current collaborations. (more…)
Posted by Jacob Caggiano on June 4, 2012
Topics:
Blog Craft Technology
Investing time exploring social listening tools can help tune your business strategy, connecting the dots for greater profitability AND deeper audience connections. Image: Intersection Consulting
Have you been keeping up with all the hype around “social monitoring” software? There are scores of tools out there that promise to deliver a secret treasure map of insight and intel: how to decode the value of your products by “listening” to your audience “talk” about them across social channels.
Here at the JA, we have been evaluating social listening tools for our own work. This post offers a summary of what we’ve found, for you to consider as you size up methods for deeper knowledge of and engagement with your audience. We’ll tell you a little bit about how each tool works, and share a framework so you can consider how social listening may advance your success. Our goal with this list isn’t to cite everything that’s available, but to present a comprehensive range of options we think may be most useful in your work.
There are a number of ways publishers might apply social listening techniques. Some are simple, some more complex. To help guide the build of our service model, we subscribed to and tested the capabilities of one social listening industry leader, Radian6, over the past eight months. While it appears to satisfy major corporate brands like Pepsi, UPS, and Dell, it didn’t do as well helping the JA achieve its objectives, which are less about brand loyalty and more about tracking emerging trends.
So we began to explore other options. If you’re considering the offerings of the big kids on the block (such as Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Lithium, Simplify360, or Alterian), know specifically what you want out of it before you go in. Also, don’t let budget stop you from experimenting. If you’re on a shoestring with little time to spare, you may find some tools you need in these free or low-cost alternatives.
Our best success in both choosing tools and getting a good outcome from social listening came from having a clear plan going in. Outlining your community and business requirements early on focuses your search for a social listening solution that provides the best fit for both budget and bandwidth. Know what you want to achieve before you start trying tools, and know how much time you have to invest in the effort. Going in with an idea of what you hope to learn sets up the experiment for a greater return on the effort.
There are four basic steps to successful social listening: discovery, analysis, management and integration. We list tools that can help with each element below. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on May 25, 2012
Topics:
Blog Community Experiments Revenue
Together stronger, sharing complementary skills enriches collaborative partnerships.
One of the best parts about getting professional colleagues together to talk is that everyone brings specific resources and examples to the topic at hand. Sometimes these are familiar to you, but a colleague’s experience offers a fresh perspective. At other times, you may discover details about a resource you’d previously only vaguely heard of, or learn about something you were not aware of at all. At last month’s Collab/Space conference and during the extended conversation on the JA afterward, people offered concrete examples of successful collaborative reporting projects and pointed out tools or tips that helped them along the way. We’ve collected many of them here. Feel free to add to this shared base of knowledge. Happy collaborating!
Are you thinking about a collaborative reporting project and want some examples to show your editor? Would you like to work with an organization outside your own so your joint efforts can have a collectively bigger impact? Do you need tools to make collaborating easier?
Find ideas and inspiration in these examples, models, articles and tools that people cited in the JA conversation on collaboration and revenue.
Collaborative reporting: Story examples
Collaborative relationships: Journalism
Collaborative projects: Cross-industry or outside models
Collaborative resources: Articles and tools
(more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on May 16, 2012
Topics:
Blog Revenue Technology
The JA’s most recent forum explored how collaboration could increase revenue for publishers. This JA interview, below, opens a discussion about innovation; how publishers are responding to rapid technological developments that often focus on commerce over content, and what role innovation plays in bringing bucks to journalism. For two perspectives, we asked Street Fight co-founder David Hirschman and Columbia Journalism Review staff writer Michael Meyer to share their insights. We spoke via Skype late last week, as David was finalizing the agenda for Street Fight Summit West, his organization’s California iteration of its annual New York conference, and Michael was adding startup #267 to the CJR’s Guide to Online News Startups. (more…)
Posted by Emily Harris on May 10, 2012
Topics:
Blog Community Revenue
Can the diverse flavors of collaboration slice up and reconstitute a fuller revenue apple?
The Journalism Accelerator, MediaShift’s Collaboration Central, and the Investigative Reporting Project at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism experimented with an extended conversation last month. A discussion about collaborating in journalism started among people face-to-face at a conference, then continued online with a sharpened focus on collaboration and revenue. There’s plenty to learn from the entire thread. This post identifies several major themes that emerged, setting the stage for a greater consideration of financial costs and benefits as journalists do more collaborations.
Journalist Carrie Lozano nailed a real need in her #1 takeaway from April’s “collaboration marathon” of back-to-back conferences in Berkeley. “We need to come up with useful cost-benefit analyses of collaboration,” she wrote on Collaboration Central last week.
That work is underway. Journalists and others experienced in collaboration began to assess the costs and benefits in a conversation that started at the Collab/Space 2012 conference, then continued online here at the Journalism Accelerator. The kickoff question focused on financial pros and cons, but people brought all sorts of costs and benefits into the discussion. Here are some highlights. (more…)
