What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [65]
In 2005, just after it had finished installing new, smaller-format presses at a cost of $150 million, the Guardian invited me to talk with its managers about what would come next—digital. Editor Alan Rusbridger stole my thunder when he conceded that those presses were likely the last they would ever buy. “The last presses.” I couldn’t imagine an American publisher saying those words except with his dying breath. Rusbridger saw it as his job to deliver the Guardian over the chasm it faced from print to online, atom to bit. His mission wasn’t to shelter the old medium but to take its values to the new world as quickly, safely, and sensibly as he could.
Paper may not disappear. But if newspapers do not at least plan for the eventuality—if not inevitability—of the transition, they will be left protecting nothing but their presses. Again, protection is no strategy for the future.
Think distributed. News organizations can no longer rely on the idea that the world will beat a path to their door. People are finding their own ways to news through no end of new routes: friends’ blogs, aggregators such as Google News and Daylife, collaborative news sites such as Digg, feeds on Facebook or Twitter, apps on mobile phones, and who knows what comes next. As a college student said in The New York Times in 2008: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Thus news organizations should stop presenting themselves as destinations and start seeing themselves as services, pushing out feeds, offering content to networks of sites, getting their news to where the people are. This is the new home delivery, the internet as paperboy.
Be a platform. Join a network. You can’t do it all yourself anymore. By joining collaborative networks, you can get help. For newspapers, that may mean soliciting the public’s assistance in finishing stories. It may mean recruiting and mobilizing the public to report. It may mean setting them up in business. It certainly means welcoming their contributions and corrections (one way to follow the rule, make mistakes well).
Newspapers can provide collaborators with raw material to create products—news reports to comment on, video to remix, assignments to follow. The New York Times and NPR each announced programs to make content available for mashups and remixing via APIs (application programming interfaces). Newspapers can also provide functionality—blogging tools and the means to repackage, say, Google Maps into collaborative community resources. They can educate collaborators, sharing what they know about how to get access to public information, avoid libel suits, or shoot video (as the Travel Channel and some local TV stations do). They can give good sites promotion and traffic. They can generate revenue by setting up ad networks for these collaborators, following Glam’s example. The papers, in turn, get news and information they couldn’t afford to gather on their own at lower cost and with lower risk, and they become part of something bigger than themselves.
Or that’s the theory. A holy grail of online newspapers—as yet unattained—has been the idea of collaborative hyperlocal news networks: armies of blogging neighbors who gather and share news and photos from their school boards and street fairs. There have been many attempts to reach this goal and about as many failures, no shortage of them mine. I learned that it was a mistake to expect people to come to my newspaper site and contribute their work; often they want to own their own stuff in their own space. I also learned that bloggers need the means to support what they do—that is, money.
In 2004, I held a Meetup to persuade people to blog on NJ.com. Good idea, said journalist Debra