Is it over? Is it too late for local news organizations to change strategy and find new business models online?

Despite billions of dollars spent in attempts to bury local news organizations and yellow pages publishers, the puzzle is still in pieces. “It is still not clear that we have cracked the code,” Mark Canon said, estimating that more than $3 billion (and possibly as much at $15 billion) had been invested.

As Seth Godin recently riffed, there is still ample opportunity to use digital technologies to connect, then profit. He observes that while newspapers are “tanking,” news is on the rise. Connect readers to one another with hyperlocal news and you’ll have no problem finding sponsors and advertisers, as long you “actually and truly reach everyone.”

That’s why Gannett has invested in Cozi and Ripple6. Cozi is an online family planning tool which makes it an odd choice for a news organization. Or, if you’re focusing on connecting with an audience, an obvious one.

Local newspapers can stop kicking themselves for not creating their own Craigslist, eBay, local Wikipedia (it won’t help matters). But what about Yelp? Paying one (or a handful) of restaurant critics is no match for a community of informed and passionate users who are connected to one another on a site like Yelp, which of course, is growing like crazy.

Look at Citysearch’s new plan. This company launched in the early days (full disclosure: my wife worked at Citysearch in the late 1990s) and reinvented itself several times. But it’s still around and it’s new model is has as much to do with connection as content.

And, it appears, at least a few investors think users will pay to be connected to information on local services. Angie’s List recently announced a new round of investment and says it has 750,000 members in 124 markets. Members pay a monthly fee to access the reviews. The company has raised $66 million to date.

The bottom line is this: Focus on the opportunity to create value through collaboration and connection. Build or leverage the brand value to create momentum. Pick a market for its potential, not its past performance.

As Godin said: “The best time to do any of these projects was five years ago, so that today you’d be earning thousands of dollars a week. Too late. The second best time to start: now.”

I started teaching a distance learning course through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas this week. There are 70 students participating from Brazil, Argentina and many other places in Latin America.

The students are passionate about journalism and hungry to learn how to make the most of this new digital landscape. It’s interesting to see how much innovation and evolution is occurring at media organizations in other parts of the world and, judging by the students’ initial posts to our discussion forums, some Latin American news organizations are blazing some new trails.

The great change

Michel Queiroz is a 21-year-old reporter of a portal site and a former television reporter (FGF TV). He described a participatory content tool developed by his current site, www.OPOVO.com.br, that allows users to participate in polls, promotions and send photos with complaints via mobile phone. So he understands that collaboration is a fundamental tenet of Journalism 2.0.

“In the future, we’re going to expand the user participation at the content production, either by cell phone or computer,” Queiroz wrote in his forum post. “I believe that the great change at the journalistic routine is to create and promote the user collaboration. This is the Web 2.0. The receiver is also a transmitter of information.”

Becoming a natural process

Melissa Becker is a newspaper reporter in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil. She says the digital age has ushered in positive changes for her news organization, Zero Hora; as the tools are getting more familiar, the journalists are able to explore better ways to use technology.

“Newspaper’s reporters get used now to take pictures with a mobile and send the images from the news local to website’s staff post it some minutes later,” Becker wrote in her forum post. “Our story published on paper could be better, more complete with exclusive online contents. Readers’ texts posted in our blog get more readers when published in our weekly supplement. We are working at the contents online that could ‘link’ to the daily paper and vice-versa, and it’s becoming a natural process.”

Becker thinks change came a little late when compared to the U.S. or Europe but once they arrived in the form of a new web site, “it changed our way to work faster than I’ve imagined.” And while she feels it’s becoming a natural process, she writes that “everybody here is still learning this different journalism.”

A revolution

Alejandro Torres is an editor at eluniversal.com.mx in Mexico City who is learning this different journalism by doing it. He receives photos by phone from his reporters, who carry mobile phones to record video and take pictures. “After typing their stories, they go to TV department to edit and produce videos,” Torres wrote in his forum post. “Before all that, all reporters publish breaking news.

“Ufff!!! I am describing a complete different world. And the major changes have occurred in the last five or six years, but the last three years have been a revolution for many of us.”

Don’t forget to pray

Silvana Santiago, a reporter at www.lanacion.com.ar in Buenos Aires, believes the change is just starting. She remembers experiments as recent as a couple of years ago, like one that invited readers to send photographs of their neighborhood problems, that have become common practice (like the ability to comment on news stories). But, she notes, the road for this new technology is not always smooth.

“Even in the ‘mobile era,’ there’s a need to be ‘plugged in,’ because if you have to cover something live outside the newsroom it is still difficult to do it carrying the laptop, the cell phone, the camera, the passwords, and all the digital paraphernalia,” Santiago wrote in her post. “Not to mention the praying that starts from the very moment you leave the newspaper: ‘Let the Internet access work, let the Internet access work…’”

I predict I will learn as much - if not more - from the students as they will from me over the next four weeks.

An article from the most recent issue of Fast Company, MTV’s Digital Makeover, featured several important lessons for mainstream news organizations.

MTV, which had a nice business providing cable programming for two decades, has been disrupted by the new digital ecosystem just like everyone else. In response it is launching “dozens of new initiatives” to find audience and revenue online as traditional revenues and viewership declines.

If it sounds like MTV is basically spreading bets around the casino to see what hits, that’s not too far off the mark. “The culture MTV grew up in — short form, experimental — translates well to digital,” says (Van) Toffler (who helped develop Jackass and Beavis and Butt-Head). “The great thing about growing up in cable as opposed to movies is that in movies, if you fail, you fail big. Our history is littered with shows that didn’t work, and you probably couldn’t name any of them. You have to take risks.”

TAKE RISKS: While MTV’s culture is naturally more inclined to risk-taking than a newspaper or local TV station, news orgs must get out of the bunker and start pushing out of their comfort zones if they hope to innovate their way into digital viability.

MTV now runs about 50 such vertical sites. The model is to take an idea and run with it using off-the-shelf Web 2.0 technology, then either promote or cut the resulting sites depending on how they fare. The cost of entry is low: Programming vice president Gaurav Misra’s team develops verticals in less than six weeks’ time for less than $50,000, in part by outsourcing programming to Russia, Argentina, Israel, and India. Says Toffler’s boss, MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath: “We don’t always have to swing for the fences.”

EXECUTE: Newspapers and other news outlets are full of bright people with good ideas. The problem is how difficult it can be for a new idea to see the light of day. Institutional inertia and bureaucracy keep good ideas hemmed in. The perfect is often the enemy of the good. But as MTV is demonstrating, a more experimental strategy is needed today. Try it. If it fails, pull the plug or reassess and devote more resources to it and make it work.

In Tacoma, we called this a “Pilot Project.” And that little semantic nuance allowed at least a few projects to get launched that otherwise would have remained only an idea.

And if you don’t have $50,000 and six weeks for a project, don’t worry. With open source technology and an enterprising developer, you can launch projects on a smaller scale with the same model.

I’ve spent the better part of two days at the Danish Media Festival, so I’m compelled to log a bit of my experience.

First, it is a festival, not a conference, as the conference director Esben Orberg reminded me at dinner. The purpose is to explore the practice of media with challenging discussions, then come together and celebrate. Last night, instead of an awards banquet that seems customary at most journalism conferences in the U.S., there was entertainment in several areas of the Odense Congress Center, including live music in one section and a satire of Danish journalists by a pair of well-known Danish journalists. (I was told I would have loved it, but wouldn’t have a chance at understanding it since I don’t know a lick of Danish.)

The festival has tripled in size since its inception in 1996, with some 1,500 attendees this year. There were 90 sessions, 200 speakers and 15 English-language sessions.

Attendees are incredibly orderly. The exhibition and reception area fills to capacity the moment sessions end and journalists carry on lively conversation. Then the minute the next sessions are about to start, the cavernous hall empties and people make their way into the separate rooms in a most expedient manner. (I would not have believed that 1,500 people could pile into one room and eat a sit-down meal and be to the next session in one our.)

I have met people from all over the world: Australia, Bahrain, England, and, surprisingly, one woman from from my neck of the woods. Fatema Fakhraie, founder and editor of Muslimah Media Watch, runs an operation I would have never guessed had its headquarters in Corvallis, Ore.

Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices Online, gave me an inside perspective on the state of Danish journalism and participatory media. She’s truly a global journalist, part Danish, part Puerto Rican who lives in Brooklyn and has a boyfriend in Germany. She told me that change and innovation don’t come easy in Danish culture, so Journalism 2.0 concepts are slow to take hold. I’ve heard that Danish media are still financially strong compared to their U.S. counterparts, but most fear that hard times are coming.

Kim Elmose, Blogeditor at politiken.dk, works with a staff of 35 online journalists at his organization which employs about 250. So Danish news media are not ignoring the web (Denmark apparently has one of the most robust internet infrastructures in the world), but Elmose said it may be stuck in a 1.0 mode. This was evident during the questions following my presentation, one of which centered on the practice of linking to competitive news sites. It’s commonplace in the U.S. and is actually the foundation of a movement called link journalism, but just growing in acceptance in Denmark.

As I discovered in Portugal, journalism is a shared experience even if practiced in different languages, and progression.

That was the the title of a discussion/debate staged at the Danish Media Festival today. In one corner, the self-described anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, Andrew Keen, and in the other … me.

(On a side note, the Danes really know how to throw a conference. There’s a live band, a speaker’s lounge, a bar and several different hang-out lounges, one with couches and another on artificial grass. Some 1,400 attendees are expected over two days.)

During my solo session, I tried to explain how journalists are more important than even due to the explosion of information available today. Participatory media, networked conversations and mobile connectivity have created a flood of information that require curating and navigation by trained and experience journalists.

I hit those same notes during the later debate with Keen, who worries that Web 2.0 will kill off the mainstream news organizations who have been responsible for the high-quality reporting we’ve enjoyed for so long.

He encouraged journalists to exert more confidence and establish themselves as the authorities. I, for one, am skeptical that more ego will help journalism build a future. On the contrary, collaboration with an informed audience is the key. If you don’t have an informed audience, just trolls and idiots in your comments, that’s your fault, not the internet’s.

Toward the conclusion, he suggested that a digital copy is now worth basically nothing, so news has lost its monetary value.  He suggested taking a page from the music industry and staging live performances in the future business model for journalism. (Just like the live music business is bolstering the music industry, what about journalists performing lectures and conferences?)

Far-fetched? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows for sure what will work. But I do know that optimism and innovation are more likely to feed the evolution of journalism than skepticism and inflexibility.

Journalism is an international passion and pursuit and I had the pleasure to experience this first-hand at an investigative journalism conference Friday in Lisbon, Portugal.

The one-day conference drew 120 reporters, editors, students and professors to a museum of communications history, an appropriate setting indeed.

Journalism 2.0 was translated into Portuguese last year, but not because I know the language. Fortunately there was simultaneous translation so I could follow along.

For my session, I tried to present new technology as a way to do better investigative journalism (slides available here). I showed some of the database pages that are popular theses days on U.S. newspaper web sites and encouraged students who are interested in journalism and technology to dive into database programming as a way to bolster their future career potential (applies to U.S. students, too).

The other speakers were experienced investigative journalists, two of whom had faced serious threats for their work. Their courage and fortitude were inspiring. (About the only threat I’ve faced is a features editor who jokingly suggested the editors at my last newspaper take me outside and kick my ass after I showed them the Epic 2014 video.)

Here is a look at the rest of the lineup:

Don Hale was the editor of the Matlock Mercury, when this newspaper became involved in the campaign to overturn the murder conviction of Stephen Downing. In 1973, Downing, at the time a 17-year-old with the reading age of an 11-year-old, was imprisoned for the murder of Wendy Sewell and served 27 years in jail. The conviction was declared unsafe by the Court of Appeal in 2001 and Downing was released. Hale was voted 2001 Man of the Year by the The Observer newspaper, Journalist of the Year by What the Papers Say and was made an Officer of the British Empire for his efforts and campaigning journalism, though he was also criticized for referring to Sewell as the Bakewell Tart.

Manso Preto is a freelancer Investigative Journalist. He is the author of the book “Minho Connection” (1992) where he details his investigation about a drug traffic network.  In 1992, the Portuguese Police, award him a medal of honour for his contribution and insights to the fight against drug dealing. Due to his investigation, he was invited (1998) by the U.S. Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) to spend a week in Los Angeles and in Washington, in order to assist DEA in some cases. Manso Preto was the first journalist in Portugal being convicted in court for refusing to disclosure its sources. His conviction was later reversed by a court of higher instance.

Ricardo Fonseca is a journalist in Visão, the most renowned Portuguese Newsmagazine. His investigative journalism work covers several fields, from the eastern European mafias to the illegal construction in Portuguese coast. However, his main work has been in the justice, crime and public safety.

José Pacheco Pereira is a professor in one of the major Portuguese universities and a much respected politician - member of the Portuguese Parliament for three mandates and Vice-President of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2000. He created a famous blog called “Abrupto”, which has around 70.000 visits per month, an impressive number if you consider that the total Portugal’s population is around 10 Million persons. The opinions he writes in his blog are often cited in the media and sometimes acquire the status of “news”. Many say that his blog was responsible for major changes in the Portuguese government and inside its political party.  He is also a permanent collaborator and commentator of the Portuguese written press and television.

The future is now.

I start my new “career” in earnest today, having said my farewell to The News Tribune on Friday. It was the best job I’ve ever had, working with the best people I’ve ever worked with. So the decision to leave was not an easy one.

I am indebted to the people of The News Tribune for the opportunities that I have before me now. Their willingness to innovate and experiment has provided me with the experiences that I am now invited to share with others in the industry at conferences and workshops. They encouraged me to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to the operation, which in turn led to an entrepreneurial spirit driving me into this new phase of my professional life.

Newsrooms will continue to innovate. But I feel that innovation on the business model should be more closely integrated to the content strategy than a traditional newspaper organization can allow. So I’m bold enough to think that I can help more from the outside than I can from the inside. In effect, I’m placing a personal bet that developing new ideas for news and information that are tied to the business model is the best way to move the needle for local publishers.

It’s risky, for sure. But risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and transforming the business of local news and information won’t happen without a healthy dose of it.

Continue Reading »