Institutional Problems

Again, that's all true. But collegiate publications don't have the budget to fund innovation like many of the professional papers do. We also don't necessarily have the expertise, the time, or the willpower to actively try to break out of the institutional molds we're stuck in. I think one of the chief problems plaguing the collegiate press is a combination of institutional forgetfulness and inertia.

Every year the people who have been at a college paper the longest graduate, often having established a set of policies and a way of doing things that people continue to use long into the future, even if they are no longer best practices. I understand this happens in a lot of other industries too, but the degree to which it takes place in college newsrooms is highly exaggerated. Students have class, part time jobs, and the newspaper. How do they have time to reexamine the practices and policies they use every day to make them better when they already work OK?

The fact of the matter is that college editors can't sit around and wait for a professional newspaper somewhere to invent an ingenious new way of delivering the news, or break ground on a brilliant new business model. Every college paper has to find the time, energy, and resources to start innovating. Maybe that involves applying for a Knight grant? I'm not sure. But college papers are actually in a better position to reach out to their communities than most larger, professional papers. I think there is a bit of a misnomer out there in the "new media" crowd (of which I am a card carrying member) that simply working on a better website, blogging, integrating video and audio, and adding more interactive content will start to solve the problems of the industry. I think that's largely false.

Community Generated Content

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money. Newspapers need to be more local and more central, they need to offer social network and social bookmarking features, and they need to embrace a certain level of user generated content. That could mean a lot of things, though, so I want to explain how I am going to use my News Challenge project, Populous, to achieve some of those goals.

Right now at UCLA there are something like 800 different student organizations. There are far too many for the students to keep track of, and there is no real tool for these organizations to have a web presence, market themselves, or organize online. There are also no good directories for local shops and restaurants. These are all information needs on campus that need to be filled, and the Daily Bruin is working on doing that through Populous.

The Community News Network aspect of our project aims to provide every student organization on campus with the opportunity to create a website on the Daily Bruin's network. They will be able to do basic things like add members, have a blog, and contribute to a community calendar. Every time they want to do any of that they will be coming to our website.

We're going to fulfill a need on campus by providing this service, and we will also provide our readers a searchable database of the student organizations on campus and create a platform for an all-inclusive community calendar at the same time. And that's just part of the vision. We also understand that we're not the only people that can report on the news going on on campus, and we're never going to be able to cover everything. So we're going to let all of our users create their own blogs on our network so they can write about what's going on around them and in their lives.

An Alternate Business Model?

I think once we accomplish this network, essentially a robust news- and community-focused social network, we're going to be driving a lot more traffic to our website. Will it be enough to increase our online advertising revenue to compensate for our decline in print advertising? Unfortunately, no. That's where another philosophical decision we've made at the Bruin comes in: to use our website to generate support for, and interest in, our print product. They are going to have to work together and complement each other. My hope, and intent, is that once people see the Daily Bruin making more of an effort to engage the community in its news coverage they will be more interested in picking up the print version of the newspaper.

We are also going to redesign the print product to incorporate some of the community generated aspects of our website, and retool it to make sure the news and style of the print product complements, but doesn't repeat, what's online. But that's a whole new entry. My plan to increase the Daily Bruin's revenue has two prongs: one is to support our current business model with increased community interest and through our web presence, and the other is to flip some of the features we're working on into alternate business models.

Hopefully this approach will work out for us, and maybe other college publications can adopt it and start doing better financially. But it also concerns me that we're one of the only college newspapers thinking like this. We might be right, but we might not be, and the more people that are working on these issues the better.

There was an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the financial state of student newspapers. This is a topic of particular interest for me (I was briefly quoted in the story) and an issue my News Challenge project is trying to tackle directly. As the Editor in Chief of the Daily Bruin at UCLA, entering my fourth year working for the paper, I have seen first hand some of the financial hardships a collegiate newsroom can endure.

I have to disagree with the premise of the article in the Chronicle, though. It presents a relatively optimistic outlook for the future of student publications, citing strong ad sales at many of the schools interviewed, and a mostly free or cheap workforce to sell ads and write stories. While these things are true, the author presented recent cuts in publication at UC Berkeley's Daily Cal and Syracuse's Daily Orange as outliers -- blips that don't necessarily illustrate a trend.

To provide some background, the papers at Berkeley and Syracuse are well known among collegiate editors. They are typically looked to as good or excellent examples of financially independent student publications, and recently they have had some budget troubles. Both papers have made the decision to reduce their publication from five days a week to four. I would argue that two strong, independent student publications taking drastic cost cutting initiatives in the midst of a budget crisis should be seen as a canary in the coal mine. If other papers aren't careful, and don't take preemptive action, they could be caught in this mess very quickly.

At the Daily Bruin we're getting closer and closer to that precipice every year. When I was a freshman at UCLA the Bruin was in the midst of a budget crisis. That year, in lieu of pursuing a student fee referendum for additional revenue, our department made several hard budget decisions -- including reducing the money available for staff stipends from more than $200,000 to $130,000. We also reduced our travel budget, equipment budget, and cut our circulation by several thousand.

Other papers around the country are looking at a similar story, and they're not advertising it. Over the past couple of weeks and months I've had the opportunity to speak candidly with more than a dozen other collegiate newspaper editors and what we're experiencing at UCLA isn't unique. College newspapers are desperate for a plan to bolster their circulations, increase their ad revenue, and better their websites. In the next few years their lives could depend on it.

And the independent papers aren't the only ones that have to worry. There are relatively few student newspapers that can claim "independence" and it's a coveted title in our industry. The Bruin, and only a handful of other collegiate papers, aren't supported by a university department, receive no financial help from the university, and usually pay rent for office space. But many of those papers that have the benefit of departmental and other financial support from a university still sell ads for a significant portion of their revenue. These papers won't be able to escape the broader industry trends for long, and more than ever they are going to have to adapt if they want to stay relevant to their readers and make money.

Tomorrow I will explain how I think they can do that.

As far as development work goes, the Millennium Villages project based at Columbia University's Earth Institute has something of the celebrity status of say Angelina Jolie or Bono, both of whom in fact have become public faces for the project, which provides a holistic aid package to 12 rural villages in 10 African countries. Other well-groomed and well-known supporters of the project include George Soros, Brad Pitt, Madonna, and the founder of the initiative, celebrity economist, Jeffrey Sachs.

In fact, scanning the Millennium Villages' news archive, it can seem as though just about everyone who is anyone has something to say about the experimental initiative in holistic development aid. Except, that is, the residents of the 12 targeted villages.

The success of the Millennium Villages project, like most development work, depends largely on who you're willing to trust. Jeffrey Sachs is steadfast in his portrayal of the Millennium Villages as an unprecedented success in development aid. In a May 2007 article in Harper's magazine, however, Victoria Schlesinger says that villages like Sauri, Kenya have in fact been receiving foreign aid for more than 15 years and that the Millennium Villages project comes down to re-branding a longtime effort that has little to show for itself. Sam Rich, a development consultant writing in the Wilson Quarterly, is much more measured in both his support and criticism of the project: "if Sauri is to become a useful model for development on a bigger scale, and not just another development expert's white elephant, Sachs and others working on the project must acknowledge that they are still learning about Africa. Sauri is not yet a success."

So who do we believe? Is the Millennium Villages project the answer to solving world poverty or, as Schlesinger asserts, just another example of 'continuing poverty'?

The difficulty of finding unbiased voices about development and philanthropic projects is hardly limited to the Millennium Villages. NGO's and non-profits - relying on continued support from donors, governments and philanthropies - are eager to cast their work in the most positive light possible. Likewise, donors want to know and to show that their investments are efficiently bringing about positive change.

This natural double bias has brought about an entire industry of independent evaluation consultants, almost all of whom are based in the United States and Western Europe. While an outside consultant can give us a less biased view of development projects, they still don't have the historical and cultural context of the local community that is supposed to be benefiting from the investment.

Philanthropies and donors should stop spending so much money on costly consultants and start funding participatory media training workshops so that the target communities themselves are ultimately responsible for judging the success of development and philanthropic projects.

The Millennium Villages website frequently mentions the importance of local ownership to ensuring success, but local ownership does not come about unless locals are involved in the communication and evaluation process. Thanks to the increased accessibility of blogging, anyone with an internet connection or mobile phone is now able to participate in the international debate about any topic. Writing on the Communication Initiative Network, James Deane notes that the focus of next week's major development aid conference in Ghana will be on getting local citizens, rather than national governments, to shape development policy. Similarly, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told a crowd at TED Global 2007 that development aid in Africa will only be a catalyst for change if individual Africans are the ones to collectively shape the priorities.

Africa's ever-growing blogosphere has already taken on development policy, most notably in last year's "trade versus aid" debate. But for those discussions to be truly relevant, they need to take place among local voices at the local level; for example, among residents of the millennium village of Sauri, Kenya.

Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture.

Except that maybe you can. I believe that in many cases, the urge to find a business model is orthogonal to one of the most important social changes today, one that is reformulating labor, technology, and product in unexpected ways.

Let's take a step back and explore how we usually imagine a business. Conventional wisdom dictates that, in order to create a product, there needs to be a profitable business (a firm), or similarly a well-funded non-profit with paid staff. The firm is a mixture of capital, labor, knowledge, and technology. The firm does the work of creating a product, in the way the Washington Post Company puts out the Washington Post newspaper. (Or, at least, still put it out when this post went online.) The firm's profits provide the capital needed to sustain the enterprise, and the actual work on the product is done within the firm. All this is so obvious that it hardly seems worth repeating, but therein lies the problem: the business model that assumes a firm is so ubiquitous that many people unknowingly conflate the firm with what it produces. They think that a product needs a firm, and even that each tends to scale with the other.

While the model in which a firm produces a product is common and viable, some of the biggest product success stories in recent history don't actually come from businesses. That's not to say that no one is making money from these products; there is plenty of green in these fields. But there isn't a one-to-one mapping between business (in the sense of a firm) and product. These new products are generated under the alternate organization of knowledge, labor, and capital called the free software model.

Free software has already had a profound impact on the world of IT, and its impact is being felt in other domains as well. Many people have heard of free software, Linux, or "open source," or may have downloaded the Firefox web browser. But few understand how free software is made. I believe that the way free software projects are created and maintained could be a great model for the future of news.

Let's look at one tried and tested free software project: the Apache HTTP server. HTTP servers are the bit of software that lives on hardware servers, taking requests for web pages and then dishing them out. Since 1996 Apache has dominated the intertubes, and currently has 50% of the global market. It is a complicated, comprehensive piece of software, the necessarily fast and secure engine that serves most major web sites. Apache HTTP is not made by a business, nor is it even made by a non-profit; rather, it's made according to a free software model. True, it's technically hosted by the Apache Foundation, a 501c(3). But the Foundation was formed in 1999 -- three years after the product was launched, and after the server had about 60% of global share. The non-profit Apache Foundation was created to help manage the project, but little of the code is generated by employees of the Foundation. Moreover, Apache Foundation now hosts dozens of different projects other than the HTTP server, some that are nearly as successful.

So while the Apache Foundation clearly has a plan -- perhaps even a business model -- the product itself is co-produced by literally hundreds of other businesses and individuals. Apache HTTP and other massive free software projects are the fruit of the labor of a group of committed, er, "committers" -- people who are trusted to create and modify the project's source code and upload it to the community code repository. Their changes may well be integrated into to the next release of the software. A list of current Apache Foundation committers -- roughly 2000 -- can be found here, and the "trunk" (main version) of the server they're building together is here.

Why do these people work on a software project that isn't cutting them a paycheck? They might be working in a big company that uses Apache HTTP, and are paid by their company to tailor it or add functionality. Some have their own business or consultancy that is competitive precisely because they know Apache inside and out -- and they continue to work on Apache in their down time. Some are individuals who work all day programming for a company that takes their work and gives them a paycheck, but keeps the rights to their work and "manages" their contributions. These programmers then go home and program for a free software project, an egalitarian enterprise that they see as a contribution to society. There is no one personality type that describes a free software project committer; indeed, there's no one model of a free software project.

Different free software (and free culture) projects have quite different labor, funding, and management structures. Wikipedia is largely maintained by non-programmers. Ubuntu (an alternative to Windows or OS X, currently used by millions of people) has a multimillionaire founder and front man, is backed by a private company, and borrows from an older product called Debian for much of its technical foundation. The Python Foundation coordinates Python (my favorite programming language), and its sponsor page has a list of corporate logos that would overwhelm a racing car. None of the products of these collaborative initiatives runs off of a single traditional business, though many people are making money from and through these products.

The projects I've mentioned so far are large, with hundreds or thousands of contributors. But the free software model isn't just for big projects. By far, the majority of free software projects are not massive; they solve a smaller problem, and have one, two, or three contributors. They may see little use, and need little improvement. But some of these projects are huge, and have scaled incredibly: Wikipedia's english edition, love it or hate it, has 2.5 million articles, and has incorporated edits from 220 individuals in the minute that I wrote this sentence. (The Wikinews project has, in contrast, been something of a dud. Indeed, it fails in the way that much contemporary American journalism fails, by trying to create a neutral point of view. But while the Wiki* projects share some similarities to free software projects, they are also different, and I don't think we can generalize much from Wikinews' shortcomings.)

These free software projects are based not in business units but in communities. Granted, in virtual, distributed communities rather than geographic ones, but communities nonetheless. None of these projects could have existed before the Internet, but projects like Debian also have quasi-Masonic systems of induction, including personal meetings and cryptographic signatures for all the trusted committers. Anyone who can contribute working code can join, and if they aren't too sociopathic they can rise within the enterprise. The more people involved in a project, the more "eyeballs on the code," meaning the less chance of a security hole, stale code, or inefficiency. This leads to great product: after all, Microsoft and Sun didn't cede the leading market position in web servers for over a decade because they decided they didn't want it. Apache was just plain better.

It's understandable that so many entrepreneurs default to a standard business model rather than the free software model -- even when they are creating web sites that will be served off of Apache HTTP. In many ways, the impact of free software is misunderstood or underestimated, in no small part because corporations like Microsoft have actively tried to block or obscure free software's success. But part of our unfamiliarity with free software models is because they are relatively new and quickly evolving, and their impact has mostly been felt in the guts of computers and networks. Every web user has "experienced" Apache HTTP much more than they have YouTube or Facebook -- easily thousands of times more -- but most of them didn't know it because Apache is doing its work transparently. Wikipedia and Ubuntu are, nonetheless, recent proof that it's possible to create goods and services that aren't just for hypergeeks, and even business schools are starting to take notice of how these remarkable products were made and are sustained.

At the Center for Future Civic Media we're not only looking at a journalism model, or even a firm-oriented business model. Indeed, many of our projects borrow the labor/knowledge/capital models of free software, activism, or other community-based enterprises. In the nearly two hundred years since LLCs and corporations started, they have produced most of the products we touch or use every day. But there's a new alternative to that model, and it's one that might lead to stronger, healthier, more informed communities.

But in this post I want to take a moment to examine the evolution of technology reporting, particularly from large/mainstream technology blogs (think TechCrunch). I am in part inspired by a blog post from Robert Scoble on how tech blogs have failed. The reason I'm interested in this space isn't just because I'm a huge geek (I'm a tiny geek, thank you very much). Rather it's because I believe tech blogs are the canary in the coal mine for the future of general reporting.

My theory: Reporting on technology issues are far more evolved online than most general topics.

Possible Reasons Include

1. Beatblogging effect: tech-reporters are always connected to their sources/readers through digital tools.
2. From above: Tech blogs are driven by personality. (Robert Scoble is a great example).
3. From #2 tech reporting online lets quality writers rise through "naked conversations" with audience.

Reporting on non-tech issues often lack these and other qualities. I don't know why and that might be another post. But let's keep going with this thought experiment - technology blogs are more evolved than local community reporting/blogs. So - we should study them to find out how general reporting might evolve as well.

Let's look at Robert Scoble closer. Here's a self-made tech-reporter who now has a book and works for Fast Company. He has reached a critical mass of readers and respect through blogging so that a company (Fast-Company) can sell enough advertising around him that he is able to report on technology issues full time.

Thought experiment:

What if Robert Scoble pitched his readers on a tech investigation he wanted to do? Sure, his output might go down a little, but his readers would know why - he would be working and digging deep for them.

Could it get funded in a week?
1. If his readers decided it was of value to collectively purchase Robert's time and reporting skills - sure.

I'm not insinuating that the first Spot.Us beta-test should be with Robert Scoble.
1. Don't think there should be a "technology" section at all. Business yes, but not tech for tech's sake.
2. Would prefer to test at a smaller scale to start. Sorry Scoble ;)

But imagine the scenario now with a reporter/blogger who covers a civic issue.
1. Might not have Scoble-esque numbers, but readers are just as passionate. Even more so, since their issues aren't being covered by a million-and-a-half tech blogs.
2. Potentially able to distribute the cost over enough people to purchase reporters time.

Non-tech blogs can now start to produce or publish high quality content they might not afford otherwise.
1. Non-tech reporters begin to evolve to reflect their wired counterparts, which is to say, now the general reporters are beat blogging, showing their personality and having naked conversations with their audience.

Independent content providers can dedicate themselves full-time to doing what they do best: report. If the public has a freelance budget, reporters don't have to wait for an editor to approve their story. Now they can seize the day and pitch the public.

Technology blogs can learn a thing or two here as well.

Technology blogs tends to be surface-level reporting because output = more eyes = more advertising = stay in business. I think this is partly what Scoble was talking about in how tech blogs have failed. Is there a way around this via someone like Robert Scoble selling themselves ala-cart as an investigative journalists in technology?

This is the model that I hope to see for spot.us. Yes, it's ala-cart, but that doesn't mean surface level reporting, it means reporting on demand. What we have now in technology tends to be surface level and I want to find a way so that general reporting doesn't become merely about more eyes = more advertising. General reporting is a civic resource and it needs to find a way.

And so, we move ONWARD!!!!!

(Cross posted from Spot.Us blog)

What put me in that mind is a special episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money. It's a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with.

If you don't know "The Giant Pool of Money" you should (download the podcast) because it's probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard. I listened to it on a long car trip when everyone else was sleeping. Going in to the program, I didn't understand the mortgage mess at all: mortgage backed securities were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old respected firms?

Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam, why it happened, and to whom. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts and different levels, with no heroes. And the villains were mostly abstractions!

Typical of the program's virtues is the title. It's called The Giant Pool of Money because that is where the producers want your understanding to start. They insist.

Lots of people have noted how effective the program was. Adam Davidson told NPR's ombudsman, "By a very long margin, this is the most positive response I've ever seen to any story I've worked on." I knew there would be fans of this episode listening, so I asked the people in my Twitter feed what made it different and "explainey" to them.

• Mike Plugh: Compression of time and space, like in a classic movie, "a broad network of characters into a few representative types."

• Liza Sabater "Because when Richard finds out the bank lied about his monthly income, it sums up how the loans were just a scam."

• Denise Covert: "Because it used small words. Because it still used big words for those of us who could grasp them."

• Scott Karp: No demonizing. Instead, "why it seemed like a good idea at the time... What were they thinking when they were doing all this? And why did they think it would work?"

• Howard Sherman: It met the ultimate explanatory test. "I could actually explain the mortgage debacle to someone else." He calls it viral: you can pass the explanatory gains on. "It also made me really angry. Their incredulity was contagious."

• "You can almost lust, with the characters, after the money that the idiots have left available." Oh, sorry... that was me, talking on Twitter.

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to "The Giant Pool of Money." I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. Previously I had skipped over such reports because I just didn't understand the story. Now I did. 'Twas was a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information. Before that moment I had ignored hundreds of news reports about Americans losing their homes, the housing market crashing, banks in trouble.

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most "basic" acts are reporting today's news and providing other current information, as with prices, weather reports and scores. We think of "analysis," "interpretation," and also "explanation" as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior accounts.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and note it. (""Subprime lenders in trouble. Must keep an eye on that.") Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye out. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is up) I might then turn to an "analysis" piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps the work of an economics columnist. I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That's the way it works... right?

But there are certain very important stories--and the mortgage crisis is a good example--where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of them because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I've picked up a blinking red light from the news system's repeated placement of "subprime" items in front of me.

And on top of that, if I decide to buckle down and really pay attention to "subprime loans go bad" news--including the analysis pieces and the economics columnist--I am likely to feel even more frustrated because the missing master narrative prevents these efforts from making much of a difference. The columnist who says he is going to explain it to me typically assumes too much knowledge ("mortgage-backed securities?") or has too little space to actually do that, or is bored with the elementary task of explanation and prefers that more sophisticated interpretations of the latest developments appear under his byline. Or maybe, as with this story, the very people paid to understand the story barely know how to explain it. That's the opening theme of this column from The New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, "Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club."

I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, "Can you try to explain this to me?" When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: "Can you try again?"

And he does give it his best shot. I remember reading this column at the time and feeling grateful that someone at least tried. (He got about a third of the way there.) But Leonhardt's column wasn't displayed or classified in the right way. It should have been a tool in the sidebar of every news story the Times did about the mortgage mess. Instead it was added to the content flow, like this: news, news, news, news, "analysis," news, news, news, "interpretation piece," news, news, news, news, "Leonhardt: explain this to me," news, news, news...

That's messed up. That's dysfunctional. We have to fix that.

This American Life and its brilliant host, Ira Glass, started with the same feelings I had: ill-informed, overwhelmed, and out of the loop about the "subprime" story. But then they mastered it; and it is that trajectory--from drift to mastery--that the listener takes during "The Giant Pool of Money." In a way the star of the story is understanding itself. It struggles but emerges victorious.

What's basic? If the providers of information aren't providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don't deserve those customers and won't retain them. So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what's this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That's not about web design. That's a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

On July 3rd I announced that Spot.Us created a wiki that could accomplish our basic goals: The wiki would allow groups of people to come together around topics, let journalists create pitches and using a 3rd party e-commerce solution, we could crowdfund.

Two weeks later, we have successfully raised enough money for our first example of "community funded reporting."

Best part: You can duplicate this. I've used no secret technology and I tried to detail the steps I took at the Spot Us blog.

A note about this first example: I don't want to sell this as an outright "success." In the blog post I also note three weak spots that I have to work through.

Besides - that's not what Spot Us is about at this stage (pulling something off and shouting "success"). Remember, this is an experiment. We are at stage .01.

The analogy I like to use: This is like a pitcher getting ready in the bull pen. In fact, quit literally we are throwing "pitches."

We are warming up and this was our first practice throw.

To extend that analogy our first practice "pitch" made it safely into the hands of a catcher. We are one-for-one in our warm up pitches. Because truth be told - the pitch could have been wild and off the mark. As things went, I'm feeling looser and more confident already.

Considering this is very new territory, I am thrilled about successfully going through the motions. Creating the community wiki was an easy and fantastic decision. It took some time to feel comfortable with it, but now I think it demonstrates how Spot Us could work.

Next steps: continue with the motions of this first pitch. Technically we are only halfway done. Now the reporter has to produce the 1,500 piece of enterprise reporting he promised. This is akin to the catcher returning the ball back to the pitcher.

And finally: Spot Us intends to keep "warming up." There is nothing to stop us from winding up and throwing another practice pitch while the site is under development. In fact, I know another reporter who is constructing a second pitch as I type.

"For media workers, these aren't necessarily bad times. For every job shutting down at LA Times, there is probably one (albeit less well paid, less prestigious, and more nose-to-the-grindstone) opening up in new media. However, for media veterans, this downturn does feel similar to the widespread closures of coal mines and steel mills 25-30 years ago. What can we do with our outdated skills?"

That's pretty blunt talk, and I'm glad that Abbey had the courage to speak so frankly about the fear that established traditional journalists face. Not surprisingly, his strong words pushed buttons in thr journalism community. The very first comment left on that post was predictably cynical and reactionary:

"What do you mean by 'job' in 'new media?' I'm really interested to hear, as there are about as many interpretations as to the meaning of those words as there are colors in the rainbow. Personally, I take it as 'blogging' without 'salary/pay.' But I'm sure I'm missing something."

So where will today's journos find tomorrow's jobs? Here's my take: Not in news organizations. At least, not in news orgs as we've grown accustomed to them over the last century. That ship is quite obviously sinking. While traditional news orgs probably won't disappear entirely as a species, they're getting rarer and smaller by the minute. They're a lousy career bet -- especially for established professionals with higher salary requirements and increasingly commoditized skills.

In my opinion, journalists need to start leaping en masse from the sinking ship of the newsroom and start working for search engines, nonprofits, think tanks, collaboratives, and other kinds of businesses and organizations. In fact, it might even be a good idea to trade in the label "journalist" for the more inclusive "person with journalism skills" -- a group that includes many talented, passionate amateurs as well as professionals from other fields. That kind of humility offers considerable flexibility and room to grow.

Also, today's journalists can -- and probably should -- consciously shift away from jobs that revolve around content creation (producing packaged "stories") and toward providing layers of journalistic insight and context on top of content created by others (including public information). Finding ways to help people sort through info overload is far more valuable than providing more information. Journos also should learn to cultivate and openly participate in public discourse -- something that provokes an inordinate and irrational amount of fear in the hearts of many traditional journalists. God forbid they acknowledge that they are, in fact, human beings with perspectives, opinions, and blind spots!

**Content creation has become a commodity. That won't change **-- so journos need to stop expecting to get paid mainly to write stories. Period. Several other commenters to Abbey's post protested that the quality writing produced by professional journalists will always be in demand, and there will always be jobs for that skill. That's a nice romantic idea, but honestly I don't think it's a realistic basis for a media career strategy. Ongoing journalism job cuts prove that point.

Quality writing/storytelling is only a facet of how journos have worked. Ultimately, producing stories or prose is not the core of what we do. Rather, our mission is to help people learn what's happening (or might happen) in their world and how it's relevant, so people can make better (or at least more informed) decisions individually and collectively. This can happen in lots of ways.

So if your personal mission has morphed over time to mainly be about telling stories, impressing colleagues, being famous, or winning awards (and be honest that's where a lot of established journalists' heads are really at), journalism might no longer be the best field for you.

Yes, a few journos will still find ways to do big investigative stories, and maybe get paid for that -- but probably not very often through news organizations. That's why I'm so intrigued by ventures like spot.us, and Many Eyes, and showusabetterway.com.

So where are those fabled "new media jobs" right now?

Look for editorial or community management positions (not writing or reporting) for Web sites -- and especially sites NOT run by traditional news orgs. Dive into a different kind of culture and start getting used to adapting. Also, check out venues like Paid Content, Media Bistro and Social Media Jobs. And if you're really hooked on in-depth research and reporting, consider becoming an analyst for a think tank or consulting firm related to your beat, where you'll get to publish reports and blog for an influential audience.

Accept that many of these jobs will involve an advocacy mission or specialized audience. This means you'll probably have to learn to practice the realistic, demonstrable ethic of transparency ahead of the ultimately unachievable and (dare I say) patently inauthentic ethic of "objectivity." Remember that journalism has deep roots in advocacy, and that writing for a general audience is not the only "real" journalism.

Even better: Learn how to be an entrepreneur and work collaboratively with teams of people representing all kinds of backgrounds and skills. Have the guts to develop your own ventures wherever you see a need. (People have LOTS of needs for news and information, many of which haven't ever been well served by traditional news organizations.) Learn how to be transparent, especially in public discourse. Be willing step outside your comfort zone, to be a beginner, to find and follow passion, to try and fail.

Sound too risky for you? Then pick a skill area that's in demand (like mobile media, or social media, or online video, or locative media) and make it your business to learn how to do that. Don't expect someone to pay for your training -- but do try to wrangle a job in your news org's online or mobile operations, if you're not ready to jump ship yet and don't have lots of time for (or aren't good at) independent learning.

The direct financial costs to learning online media skills independently are minimal; the biggest investment is your time and energy. You don't have to do it all, but if you need to maintain financial stability (to support a family, retirement, gambling habit, etc.) it helps to have more concretely in-demand production skills to offer than reporting and writing.

The big picture: Ultimately, if you're REALLY concerned with keeping yourself afloat in the media/news field (rather than just hunkering down in a comfortable silo and avoiding change) your smartest strategy is prepare your escape from traditional news organizations as soon as possible. It's pretty obvious that most news orgs are shedding traditional journalists as fast as they can get away with. It's not realistic to hope that your news org (or the traditional news business in general) will shelter you indefinitely.

It's far easier to learn to swim on your own -- and to jump off and get away -- before this sinking ship drags you under.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/07/swimming-lessons-for-journalis.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/07/swimming-lessons-for-journalis.html FinancialPhilosophy adaptationcareerevolutionjobsjournalismmobileskillsvideo Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:27:32 -0500 Geoff Dougherty A lot of the interest in citizen journalism over the past few years has been related to economics. Sign up a bunch of users on your site, get them to write stuff, sell ads along side the free content, retire early.

While some content that comes in this way is impeccably written and delightfully newsworthy, most is not. So news organizations interested in publishing quality content, and hoping to do it for free, are bound to be disappointed.

Partnering with citizen journalists to produce great neighborhood coverage involves money, and sometimes a lot of it. The journalists need training, and each story requires an editor's close attention all the way through the process, from generating ideas to dotting the final "i".

At various points during our year-long experiment with citizen journalism, I've wondered if it wouldn't be more economical to simply pay experienced journalists to cover Chicago neighborhoods for us.

But some cocktail-napkin calculations show otherwise.

Right now, we're working on plans for Phase Two of our citizen journalism program. It'll provide Chicago readers with at least one story a week from each of our city's 77 neighborhoods. We're shooting for about 5,000 stories a year.

To produce that coverage, we'll be recruiting more than 300 citizen journalists, training them, facilitating monthly story meetings in their neighborhoods, and assigning each journalist to work closely with a pro editor.

How much does it cost? We're still hashing out the budget. But it's not likely to exceed half a million bucks a year, even when you factor in marketing and recruiting costs. Our cost per story will likely be between $90 and $125. Costs for the first year of our program have been similar.

By contrast, we pay our freelancers $125 or more per story. That number doesn't include editing time or overhead related to recruiting and managing those freelancers. With those expenses, freelance stories cost us between $160 and $200. So citizen journalism is clearly an economic win.

The benefits go beyond economics, though.

Each one of the 60 or so citizen journalists working for us is an advocate for our site. They tell their friends and family about what we do, which helps drive traffic and recruit other volunteers.

On a personal level, they combat the image of reporters and news organizations as elitists stuck in the ivory tower. It's hard not to like the press when the reporting on your neighborhood is done by your neighbors.

And in terms of civic engagement, we're getting dozens of people involved in their communities, attending school council meetings, interviewing their aldermen, and writing about zoning issues.

So there's a wealth of social benefits that come along with citizen journalism. And it's hard work. And yes, it's cheaper than paying reporters. But not as cheap as you thought.

David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen journalism business is going.

My contribution consisted of the observations that traditional newsrooms are becoming more and more disconnected from real people's lives, thanks to newspaper chain budget cuts, while people are becoming increasingly connected to each other, and to alternative news sources, thanks to the Internet and social networks. That random acts of journalism (a term I coined a few years back) need to be supplemented by sustained and deeper examples of journalism at the community level. That Digg-style crowdsourcing overly relies on mainstream media sources rather than original grassroots reporting. And that efforts like Spot.us, where citizens fund stories at the community level, are important experiments that bear watching -- and, more importantly, sustained support.

But what made the evening memorable was that these folks clearly got it. They didn't need to be convinced that corporate budget cuts were hurting journalistic coverage at the local level, or that certain kinds of stories weren't being covered because they fell outside the accepted frame of standard news conventions. They didn't need to be persuaded of the value of neighborhood storytelling. Instead, they asked tough, informed questions about the marketplace business model, mulled issues around fact-checking, editing and reputation, and suggested a revenue-sharing model to share freelance fees with the spot.us community.

Two days later, PBS's NewsHour ran a segment on the rise of independent nonprofit journalism, citing such efforts as Pro Publica ,the Center for Investigative Reporting, American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Global News, with correspondents in 53 countries, and the Center for Independent Media.

Something is beginning to stir. And I think it will have lasting consequences for us as a society.

I'm on the "board of advisers" for Representative Journalism and Leonard Witt, who coined the phrase, is also on the board of advisers for Spot Us.

So - I thought I'd take a post to look at how Witt defines Representative Journalism. It is very much in-tune with Spot Us. In fact, whenever I explain Spot Us - I also bring up RepJ as an experiment playing in the same space. In my mind the only real difference between RepJ and Spot Us is the scope of what we are trying to raise money for. More on that below.

The quick and dirty definition of RepJ (and Leonard Witt may chime in if I get it wrong): If you have a "community" (loosely defined) of 1,000 people who each donate $100 a year (that's only $8.30 a month) that's enough to hire a journalist or two to provide the news and information needs of that community for one year.

This is very similar to how I often explain Spot Us: "If you get 100 people to donate $20, that's enough to hire an investigative journalist to report on a topic that is important to those 100 people."

The main difference between Spot Us and RepJ is between funding a beat and funding an individual story. Now, obviously it's good to think big. And I do see advantages to funding a beat rather than a story. As I see it the two big advantages are....

A) You can do breaking news stories.

B) Since beats are broad like "education" or "the environment" the specific stories aren't known yet - which means accusations that money is influencing content are less potent (once again, I must point out my response to this innate fear from journalists).

But - as with all things there is no black and white answer. The downsides to funding a beat as I see it are...

A) Less connection to what people are funding ie: the value proposition is watered down. Journalism is still a finished product that is handed over and the public is less involved.
B) More susceptible to glossy coverage. Journalists will still be chasing views - to ensure their readers are happy and they get more subscribers.

Another recent example of funding a beat is  from the American News Project.

Side Note: (What I love about the American NewsProject is how simple it is. Create a new page, use Chip-In and you are off. Since Spot Us will start in San Francisco - when people in other cities tell me they want to experiment in community funded reporting - I point to this example and say: Pick your weapon of choice. If I were a freelance journalist I'd use ThePoint.com or Fundable to pitch stories to the public on a daily basis. But I digress.)

So why is Spot Us focusing on funding individual stories?

The first reason is simple - now is the time for crawling. When we have that down, let's talk about walking, running, etc. I would love to build Spot Us into a platform that could support journalists covering beats for periods of time - but I want to grow into that. I think it would be forced at this early stage.

Second: Taking notes on Kiva.org, DonorsChoose and other micro-financing sites there are some common themes. One is that the donor feels a connection to the person receiving the money and the story that is being told. On Kiva.org you see pictures of the person in the third world country and you learn about what they want to do with the money you will lend them, etc. That personal connection is lost when funding a beat.

Third: Funding a beat is not at all dissimilar from funding NPR, PBS or a large organization. In an online environment you have the ability to focus in on specific granularities - but large nonprofit news organizations still ask for charitable donations for their brand. When donating to NPR - you are essentially saying two things 1. I believe journalism is an important and integral part of our democracy and 2. NPR is a news organization I trust to cover important issues.

Those are both great things to agree to - but they are incredibly broad.

To donate to a specific story you don't need to overtly believe in the greater mission of journalism. You will still be taking part in that greater mission - but that doesn't have to be your motivating principle. Donating to a specific story means you don't have to trust anyone's broader news judgment to determine what stories should be covered - you are deciding for yourself. Of course - you still have to trust the individual to cover that story well - but that is another caveat which applies to everyone.

Again: I don't think there is a right or wrong approach. From my point of view - the only wrong move to make is not to try anything at all. So I point out Lenn's Representative Journalism because I see his organization as a "brother in arms" to the same cause as Spot Us. I just wanted to use this post to have an open conversation with Lenn - explain my thinking and approach to community funded reporting on a story by story approach and wish us both luck.

ONWARD!!!!!

From what I understand - the web readers and judges loved the idea of community funded reporting and the journalists "vomited on the table." Obviously I'm here writing this post so I can only assume that either the journalists conceded or the techies won them over. Either way - my experiment in community funded reporting will become a reality. The idea for Spot.Us is to create a non-profit that allows individuals or groups to crowdfund enough money to commission freelance journalists to write important or uncovered news stories in their community.

Still - whenever I explain it to journalists, especially traditional journalists, I sense a wave of panic. The big concern that rushes to their heads is whether or not this will be a tool for people with an axe to grind.

A fair concern - one that I don't want to brush aside. In fact, there is a logical conclusion that I usually reach with journalists who come to me and begin discussing this fear and I hope to reach the same with you, dear reader, at the end of this post.

First, I must explain my initial reaction to it.

1. There is no such thing as clean money.

There is this myth that somehow the money involved in newspapers is free and clear. But when hard-pressed, most journalists can recall horror stories of an editor or publisher who cut a story for fear that it would threaten advertising.

Bottom line: You show me clean money, I'll find you fairy dust.

2. Transparency, transparency, transparency.

Given there is no such thing as clean money the best thing an organization can do is make their money transparent. Journalism's role isn't to dictate the actions that need to be taken - rather our role is to inform communities so they can make better decisions.

Even a project like ProPublica, which I think is grounded in nothing but the best of intentions, can be accused of letting money impact coverage. I'm not actually making that accusation - just asserting that it's possible. Either way - the accusation doesn't matter. We know where the money for ProPublica comes from. It is transparent and so we can make decisions about the content accordingly.

That's what it means to make money transparent. Spot.us is NOT going to strive for objectivity. Many would argue that is impossible for any journalism organization. What we will strive for is accuracy and fairness. To accomplish that while taking small donations from the public requires transparency.

3. Limit the size of donations (and the irony of it all).

From the beginning I've always wanted to limit the amount a person can donate. So if a person has a spare 3k, that's great, they can't actually donate all that towards one particular story. Spot.Us is about the wealth of networks and it requires a network to work. In truth, the person with 3k to spare can hire a reporter tomorrow, without spot.us. In fact, spot.Us will just slow them down.

The irony of this response: Whenever I bring it up - all the techies get upset and all the journalists give a sigh of relief.

Techies: "You mean you are going to limit participation? NEVER limit participation you fool!!!!"

Journos: Oh, thank goodness you've come to your senses. At least you are going to limit the level of participation. Now if somebody has an axe to grind they'll have a difficult time getting things rolling.

I'm actually very committed to limiting the amount a person can donate. Not only does it quell some fears - but it forces spot.us to target a particular type of user: A person that wouldn't be able to hire a reporter otherwise. That's what Spot.us is about - empowering people.

All the above combines such that for Spot.Us to work for somebody with an axe to grind all the following conditions would have to be met.

1. A group or network of people will all have to agree there is an issue they want to get reporting on.
2. A journalist would have to be willing to stake their professional reputation on reporting it.
3. An independent editor (assigned by Spot.Us staff) would have to give it a green light.
4. The final story would have to be published outside of Spot.us for anyone outside of the original group of funders to really get word of it - ie: A news organization would have to buy into the validity of the story as well.

Despite explaining all the above I still inevitably get "what if" questions.

Ahhh --- the "what if's." I'm pretty sure there was a Dr. Seuss children's book about the "what if's" and how they creep into your head at night. Truth is - I recognize there are an endless amount of "what if" scenarios related to Spot.Us. That's EXACTLY why it needs to be tested - and tested by somebody who supports the ideals of journalism.

4. Tasting the low-hanging fruit.

And here is where I try to bring it home.

It's an experiment!!!!!!

As I see it - community funded reporting is low-hanging fruit. The Knight News Challenge is all about doing research and development - the kind that isn't done elsewhere in the industry.

Now, it may turn out that this low-hanging fruit is poisonous. But aren't you glad that somebody is at least going to give it a good honest bite to find out? More importantly - aren't you glad it's somebody who shares the values of the news industry? Fact is, this idea is going to be a learning process. My goal isn't to solve the business woes of journalism. I don't think anybody can do that. But I do intend to taste the fruit of community funded reporting and report back as clearly as possible how it tastes. Fact is, this idea is going to be tried by somebody. My fear, however, is that those who get to it first successfully don't have journalism's best interest in mind - but the bottom line.

So what's the conclusion I usually come to? Yes, people have valid concerns and I intend to keep them in mind as I progress. And indeed - people who come to me with these concerns usually come to a similar conclusion of "yes, you should continue with this project, but keep these concerns in mind."

And that's where I begin.

Current status: Hiring a developer. By this time next week, I hope to have that wrapped up.

So it's not without some humility that I come to you today with a confession. My name is Dan Pacheco, and I am a print-is-dead-a-holic.

For the last four years, I've unintentionally helped fuel the fire behind the idea that the best way to grow online audience and revenue is with pure-play online products. We built our own social networking platform called Bakomatic, and have used it to create a network of 11 audience-focused participatory sites. In a few short years, we've managed to get 10% of the population of Bakersfield to create profiles, and an even larger number to regularly post their own stories, blogs and comments.

But something funny happened on the way to the online forum, and it directly ties to our Printcasting project, one of the 2007/2008 winners of the Knight News Challenge. Despite all of my futuristic ramblings about the virtues of social networks, our niche print products are also doing great, and in some cases better than their associated Web sites. And when it comes to money, the growth in print advertising revenue continues to exceed that of the Web sites.

Let me state this another way. The youth-oriented Bakotopia.com that I started was a pure online-only brand for its first two years, and as a Web site it never made a significant amount of revenue from local advertising. A year ago we debuted Bakotopia magazine - which is like a "best of" rollup of the same content online - and the same businesses who had a million questions about online ads instantly wanted to buy ads.

Then, to my shock, the same people who contributed to Bakotopia were rushing out to get the latest Bakotopia magazine, even when they'd read the same content on their computer screens. We can tell that when a new print edition comes out, they start submitting content online again in the hopes that it will be selected for the next print magazine. This digital-print hybrid behavior is true across all 6 demographic groups we've tried it with, including youth, who are supposedly not interested in print.

Crazy, huh? But that's your ideology speaking. It should have been obvious that for a community of local people and businesses, a physical presence like a print product matters. A Bakotopian who frequents local clubs and art events can't help but pick up Bakotopia magazine to see who's in it. Businesses know this, and they see it happening, so they pay for the ads.

Another ideological road block is that this seems to be at odds with what you read about declining newspaper circulation. The truth is that there are two separate trends when it comes to printed publications. While an increasing number of people are moving away from the one-size-fits-all "daily brick" that is the traditional newspaper, they are moving toward multiple information products with tighter niche focus. A move toward niche interests is not the same as a move away from an entire platform. (A tangent to this is that the daily newspaper is slowly but surely becoming its own niche product, but that's another discussion).

Once we realized what was happening, we started thinking about how we could really tap into this new behavior. Most of our local media growth was in niche social networks with print products that contained targeted advertising, but we'd need hundreds or even thousands to make this strategy worthwhile. We could never hire enough editors, publication designers and salespeople to do anything on that scale, and wouldn't want to.

The solution we came up with was to make print part of the fabric of our local Web 2.0 universe and turn print publishing over to the readers themselves. I won't get into all the details here, but the basic idea behind Printcasting is that anyone can publish a printable newspaper, magazine or newsletter. You won't need any money, fancy software, design skills or even content to do it. The tools we'll build will let you choose content feeds from our social networking sites - and any blog with an RSS feed - and flow them into a professionally designed PDF document. Others can read and even subscribe to receive them online.

We'll track demographics of readers and allow local businesses to target their ads to specific audiences. And we'll track downloads too, so that if we see a citizen publication that's regularly in the top 10 we may print 1,000 copies of it and distribute them to local people who match the target. Why would we do that? Because we will also run our own ads in those publications (sort of an American Idol approach to publishing).

Finally, anyone who contributed to the financial success of a publication will get a cut of the revenue - from the content providers to the publishers to the network that made it possible.

It's a tall order, but we have time on our side. Thanks to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we have 9 months to build the product, and another 9 months to deploy it in Bakersfield and make it better. In the last 6 months of our grant, we will extend Printcasting to organizations in five to-be-determined cities, partnering with companies such as newspapers or print shops who want to get a local foothold on this new opportunity. At the end of the project, all of the code will be made available under an open source license.

Sound interesting? You can follow our progress and share ideas and feedback on a social network we've set up at http://www.printcasting.com. And of course, I'll be posting updates here for the next two years. In either case, we'd love to get your ideas and feedback. And if you're a PHP programmer with some contracting time, we should definitely talk!

Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is the international focus this year. There are projects in Africa, India, and Europe, as well as the U.S. -- all focused on connecting physical communities using technology and the Internet. There also seems to be a greater focus on rural communities and using mobile technology.

Another top-line highlight is that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web, will be one of the grantees for a project on transparent journalism that plans to create a tagging system for reporters so they can say how they source stories. That way, people searching for information on a particular event can then filter the search results according to the way the stories were reported.

Other interesting project winners:

> Freedom Fone in Zimbabwe will let people call into a voice database to hear audio news and pose questions on a voicemail system. It will help people in a country with little Net access get news via cell phones.

> Sochi Olympics Project will be a special website set up for the Russian town of Sochi that will be hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics. It will help them discuss the local impact of the Olympics and share their concerns and discuss issues in the community.

> Spot Journalism will help local communities raise money to assign a reporter to do an investigative report on a subject. The site will take in money by micro-payments, triggering an assignment to a journalist if enough money is raised.

> Radio Drupal will be a turnkey platform for radio stations to set up a web presence on Drupal, including radio archives, producing podcasts and streaming video and audio online. It will run on a test station and then be offered to other stations.

> Community Radio in India will help connect rural stations in India online. Plus it will help non-profits in India start to broadcast on the radio there.

It's been very exciting to meet the next group of Knight grantees here at the conference and I'm looking forward to seeing how their projects progress in the months ahead. Luckily, we'll all get to follow their projects right here on Idea Lab.

What do you think about the new round of News Challenge winners? Which projects interest you the most? Is there something you think is missing in the process? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: Oliver Luft at Journalism.co.uk asks a good question: Why doesn't the UK have a News Challenge like Knight's? I don't believe that the two UK-based finalists Luft mentioned ended up winning grants this round, but hopefully other foundations abroad will step up to fund innovative programs the way Knight is doing.

Photo of Ibarguen by Kristen Taylor of Knight (formerly of PBS).

While the organization was unfamiliar to me, the main topic of conversation at the convention was all too familiar: How do we find a new business model in a digital world?

The music world has this legacy product, the compact disk, which is declining in sales each year but still generates huge amounts of cash. On the other hand, the industry's new digital businesses (online and mobile) are exploding, but aren't generating enough money to offset the decline in compact disk sales.

Sound familiar, newspaper fans? Even the underlying irony is the same: "More people are enjoying more music in more ways than in the history of recorded music," said Eric Garland, co-founder and CEO of BigChampagne Media Measurement, a market research firm that analyzes online media. While passion for music is growing however, paying for it has become optional, Garland noted. The 5 million downloads from iTunes is dwarfed by the estimated 1 billion songs transferred for free via various peer-to-peer networks.

"We're going from a business that had a cash register between customers and the music to a model where at best we have at tip jar," Garland said.

So the music industry is experimenting with various business models, like subscriptions, selling music with other products (buy one can of shaving cream, get the new Rolling Stones album!), embracing social networking and marketing.

"It's sparked the most explosive period of innovation and experimentation that the music industry has lived through," NARM president Jim Donio told me.

Here's the other tricky piece of the puzzle: The industry still expects that in five years, half of all music sold will still be on a CD. At the end of the day, people still like the format and are attached to the idea and the emotional experience of walking into a store and purchasing their music, Donio said.

I listened hard for any obvious lessons or strategies that newspapers should consider, and I didn't necessarily hear any. Experiment wildly. Study the audience. Be platform agnostic. Embrace any format or device where users get their music.

It's worth remembering, then, that the problems savaging newspapers aren't unique. Movies, TV, almost any media is struggling with the same fragmentation hitting newspapers. They're asking the same questions. And still finding the answers just as elusive.