What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [66]
Collaborate. Collaboration is co-creation. It requires giving up some control of assets so collaborators may remix, add to, and distribute content. The newspaper gets more content and gets talked about, which is how it will get new links, readers, attention, loyalty, and Googlejuice.
In 2007, Brian Lehrer’s public-radio show on WNYC wanted to use its ability to mobilize the public for a project in collaborative journalism. Lehrer asked his listeners to go to their local stores and report the price of milk, lettuce, and beer. Hundreds did, giving the station data no single reporter could have gathered alone. WNYC plotted the data on Google Maps, showing which neighborhoods were being gouged. It also learned that some stores were charging illegally high prices for milk.
The BBC opened up many of its resources in a public laboratory called Backstage, which enables anyone to build products on top of its content and data. Remixes have included a service that took BBC news feeds and searched for related material from citizens on YouTube and Flickr; a service that found out which BBC stories were the most talked-about on the web; and one that mashed up road-traffic data atop Google Maps. The BBC—like Facebook—attracted scores of developers making new products that made the BBC more useful and brought new ideas to the media giant without the cost or delays huge organizations bring. Welcome to the open-source, gift economy.
Listen well. Just as About.com and Google monitor search requests to see what the public wants to know, so newspapers should create the means for the public to say what it needs to know and to assign work to journalists. BusinessWeek is soliciting such requests. Digg.com had its users vote on questions it would ask politicians at the 2008 political conventions. In 2007, I worked with trainees at the German publisher Burda, brainstorming products. One of them asked a question so obvious I kicked myself for never having asked it myself: “Why doesn’t the public assign us?” Right. Readers know what they want to know. Journalists need a means, like MyStarbucksIdea, to gather assignments. This mechanism turns the relationship between the journalist and the public on its head. The public is now the boss. If journalists are uncomfortable with that, it means they don’t trust the public they serve. Remember: Your crowd is wise. Remember, too, Weinberger’s Corollary: There is an inverse relationship between control and trust.
The internet kills inefficiency. Newspapers are inefficient enterprises—because, as once-rich monopolies, they could be. When Rupert Murdoch acquired The Wall Street Journal, he complained that 8.25 editors touched each story. At The New York Times, there are three editors for every writer. When Sam Zell took over Tribune Company, he had efficiency experts count how many inches of text writers produced. These may be shallow metrics, but they reveal much room to change. And that change is coming as, according to the blog Papercuts, newspapers laid off 12,299 journalists in the first 10 months of 2008. Once a paper decides what it is, it’s clear that it must marshall all its forces behind one goal. For local papers, that should be local reporting.
The mass market is dead. Long live the mass of niches. Papers should no longer make just one mass product, a newspaper. Some are producing new services for more targeted interests, locales, and communities: hyperlocal sites and papers; a local sports talk show; a local golf magazine;