Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

TNTJ February: The value of hyperlocal to young journalists

TNTJ officially relaunches today and over the next month we’ll be asking contributors to look at hyperlocal journalism.

We are doing so in conjunction with Wannabe Hacks, who are running a hyperlocal-themed week starting today.

Independently-run, hyperlocal news sites are becoming an increasingly influential part of the local media landscape, with some completely outstripping their traditional media rivals in the use of new tools and technologies to reach their audience and cover events.

They are also turning into a valuable proving ground for student journalists.

We’re not setting a rigid debate topic this month, but instead opening the floor to whatever you want to write about hyperlocal. Feel free to respond directly to others’ posts or take your own tack.

A few points you might think about addressing:

What’s more important to you? Will experience working on a hyperlocal site stand you in better stead for landing that first job in journalism than a good result in your degree?

Where’s the money coming from? Can hyperlocal sites exploit business models that local newspapers are ignoring?

What’s in a word? Is the term hyperlocal a useful one, or does it just confuse the issue?

The TNTJ blog is an opportunity for journalists under 30 – students, staffers or freelancers – to post or cross-post their thoughts on a different area each month and contribute to a conversation about the future of our industry. A conversation among the people who will be an integral part of that future.

Feel free to copy posts from your own blogs, or post what you write for TNTJ anywhere else. TNTJ is run on a simple WordPress blog.

If you’re are already registered with TNTJ you can simply log in here, or follow this link to register.

Tune in next week for the return of TNTJ

After a short spell in the wilderness, Journalism.co.uk’s Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blog (TNTJ) will be active again from next week.

TNTJ is a great place for young journalists to make their voice heard, either by responding to the blog’s monthly debate topics, cross-posting content from their own blogs or flagging up content elsewhere that adds to the conversation.

Next week is also Hyperlocal Week over on the Wannabe Hacks site. To coincide with that we’ll be running a hyperlocal-focused debate this month on TNTJ, so start thinking small.

If you are under 30 and want to register for TNTJ, simply follow this link. If you are already a TNTJ member, simply carry on as normal.

If you are a interested in helping with organising or promoting TNTJ please get in contact via joel [at] journalism.co.uk or @joelmgunter.

Follow TNTJ on Twitter: @TNTJ

Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists – back in the new year

Despite a good first couple of months following our TNTJ resurrection in August, including 100 excellent contributions from young journalists across the globe, sadly interest waned somewhat in October with no responses to the discussion topic and some difficulty recruiting help.

We have been busy here too preparing for our upcoming news:rewired event, which we will continue to work toward until 16 December.

But come January we’ll be back with a new discussion topic and, we hope, a reinvigorated TNTJ.

If you are a young journalist interested in helping with organising or promoting TNTJ please get in contact via joel [at] journalism.co.uk or @joelmgunter.

You can register as a contributor at this link.

Watch this space.

Will Generation Y pay for news? September’s debate in review

You may have listened to music today using Spotify, or watched television on BBC iPlayer. You have probably used Facebook or Twitter, and perhaps Google or Hotmail. We have come to take free content and services for granted. Some of us might have come to think of free online email and social networking as an inalienable right. We live, as Ciaran Jones writes in his post, in a ‘culture of free’.

This cultural shift has obviously not bypassed the news business. The expectation of free content that it has fostered is a major factor in an industry-wide decline in revenue. September’s debate asks whether, having come of age with free access to a wealth of high-quality general news, will Generation Y pay for content? And should we have to?

Top of the list of issues for discussion is the paywall. “Can news organisations somehow persuade the young to give up their freebie habit and fork out for content?”, asks Liz Davies. Judging by this month’s contributors to TNTJ, no. Although the paywall clearly has its share of fans, most are not convinced by the charging-for-content argument.

From Mary Hamilton’s post:

What’s the plan to attract new readers to your brand above all others if it’s all behind a paywall? I haven’t yet seen one that works. It doesn’t matter how well-written or wonderful your editorials are – if no one can link to them they aren’t going to drive new traffic to your site.

So, “is there any way they can engage us ‘millennials’ and still make money?”, asks Liz.

Well, diverse revenue streams and affiliation are high on the list of solutions that cropped up, and championed both by Mary and Adam Westbrook. Provided you have good journalism, writes Adam, you can build paid-for services around it, establishing a “symbiotic relationship between journalism and the revenue generators”:

Would this approach work in the mainstream media? Well, they’re definitely trying it out – the Guardian makes a significant chunk of cash from its Soulmates enterprise, and the Sunday Times’ & Telegraph’s wine clubs are famously profitable.

Online dating and plonk have nothing to do with the journalism – but they sure as hell pay for it.

Joseph Stashko points out that Rupert Murdoch has the affiliate businesses in place to support journalism, and yet is going the other way:

Rupert Murdoch owns a huge amount of consortiums and companies, and because of this he’s best placed to use the method of using non-journalistic enterprises to fund newsgathering. Yet he’s still obsessed with making people pay up front. I find it very confusing.

Caroline Cook sees more sense in Murdoch’s approach. “Time to start following the trend setter”, she writes. Here, via a metaphor about cheesecake, is her assessment of the situation:

If people are given a piece of delicious lemony cheesecake and told they can either pay for it or have it for free then it doesn’t take a genius to work out which option they will choose. However if the option for a freebie is taken away then of course they will pay, after all everybody loves cheesecake.

And another metaphor, for good measure:

At the moment the Times is the quirky kid at school who has gone out on a limb to dress a little wild but if everyone embraces the trend then suddenly it becomes kind of cool.

Stephen Hurrell is also behind the paywall, so to speak. His post declares that “paid for content is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing”. He goes on to challenge some of the common arguments against paywalls. Julien Rath, who responded with the first post in the debate, goes so far as to say that “it is necessary that all major national newspapers have a paywall”, and suggests: “The obvious utopian solution would be to have all major newspapers come together and figure out a common system of online distribution.”

Ed Walker has some more immediately realistic suggestions for media companies looking to make money online: mass audience, niche content, and location. See his post for some elaboration on each.

The original question for this month’s topic frames the issue as a generational one, something Nick Petrie was keen to challenge in his post.

Perhaps the question should be “What revenue streams can be used to support journalism?” Or perhaps not, but lets not define it as a generational problem; my generation has enough problems as it is.

Only one thing is really for certain in this debate and that is uncertainty. The Times has taken a big gamble, and out of the spotlight there are all sorts of part-paywalls and affiliate experiments taking place. Nobody knows for sure what lies ahead. I’ll leave you with one last metaphor, a rather good one from Ciaran Jones:

[W]hatever lies ahead, the future is not in trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It is in finding a new lamp to rub.

Details of October’s debate question will be posted tomorrow on TNTJ…

Q + A with Adam Westbrook

Adam Westbrook is an an award winning broadcast journalist. He has reported for radio from Iraq, has been nominated for several press club awards and now produces films for the VJ Movement and others. Here he talks about his forte and the subject of his book, entrepreneurial journalism.

You’re very active in championing entrepreneurial journalism, how did that come about?

I guess it came about in a couple of ways. Firstly, looking around the industry a year or so ago, you could see the decline in mainstream jobs and the increase in young people wanting to be journalists: it’s clear the maths don’t add up. But alongside this, it’s become a lot easier for people to become online publishers in the last few years: you can be up and running with an online business in hours with just a few pounds spent on web hosting.

Nowadays, I see all the A-level students who have been told, right after getting the results they’ve studied hard for, that the doors to university have been closed, and I realise if they had an entrepreneurial mindset that wouldn’t be a problem. Journalism or not, society isn’t going to provide the all jobs we were promised when we were growing up; it’s up to us to make them ourselves.

Young journalists these days simply can’t just be good at writing. Do you think it’s a bad thing or a chance for innovation?

It’s a great thing, especially for young journalists. It’s a chance to learn new skills which we never would have gotten the chance to try out a couple of years ago. Writers can learn how film making works, how to design motion graphics, organise events and even sell stuff alongside their work.

Of course, it’s criticised for spreading journalists too thin; but I think we’re all capable of being good at more than one thing. The aim, I would say, is to become a jack of all trades, and a master of one: do one thing extraordinarily well, but know your way around the other disciplines too.

In terms of innovation, that’s a mindset thing. We’re all taught in school that failure is bad. The naive, curious, experimentation that really leads to innovation is beaten out of us, so to speak, in the classroom. That’s a big problem for the UK in the future I think.

A lot of students will still feel the pull of big media organisations. How can more be encouraged to set up their own projects and startups?

From the outside, starting your own business or project is often seen as both scary and non-creative. With my blog and book, Next Generation Journalist (www.nextgenerationjournalist.com),  I’m trying to spread the word that it’s become easier and less scary than ever before, and that actually it’s a really exciting and creative process.

The benefits of being your own boss are pretty great too – you have the freedom & income potential a newsroom journalist would never dream of. People are making lots of money with websites they only spend $60 setting up: why can’t journalists do the same?

In the UK it’s harder, I think, because there’s just not the entrepreneurial attitude which is so embedded in other countries, especially the US. While American kids are setting up their own lemonade stands, British kids deliver newspapers for someone else.The system in the UK doesn’t make it as easy for startups as, again, it is in America.

But despite this, in a year or so we’ll start to see more successful startups emerge and more people will be prepared to put faith in their ideas.

How about formally teaching something that might lend itself to entrepreneurial journalism? A joint honours in Business/Journalism?

I am about to undertake some research on behalf of Kingston University, where I teach, on whether there is scope to include an entrepreneurial element to the curriculum. Some say you can’t teach entrepreneurship, but I think we can get students thinking about business earlier, and teach them some of the nuts and bolts.

My research will hopefully recommend some ways of teaching it on j-courses in the future.

The NCTJ dictates the course content of a lot of journalism courses. Would you like to see a change in their attitude to encourage more “forward thinking” amongst students?

Absolutely. I think as journalism educators we have a duty to prepare students for the world they are entering. That’s hard because not many of us even know what that world looks like!

Stephen Mayes, the head of the VII multimedia agency said recently that “this is the for entrepreneurs to roam the earth” and he’s right. The old systems which wanted people to work in offices and factories are on the way out. The playing field has been leveled and younger, smaller businesses have an advantage over the bigger lumbering institutions. The good news is if you’re prepared to take initiative and volunteer responsibility, there’s no limit to where it’ll take you.

The inevitable rise of the paywall

The next generation of journalism is in full swing as more and more content is moved online. The benefits are obvious; news can now be made public as it happens instead of waiting for the next edition of the newspaper.

But with the increase of online content comes the next big debate: should people pay for the privilege of accessing online content? It was a question asked in the latest young journalist debate on journalism.co.uk.

I won’t focus too much on The Times paywall. Plenty has been blogged about it and I wouldn’t be adding anything new to the debate. It is safe to say it is too early to tell if it has been a success, and still doesn’t appear to be an accurate way to measure it (unless the content provider themselves reveal all).

The arguments against paid content are simple: Online news should be free, nobody will pay it when it can be found free elsewhere and finally, it suddenly takes journalists and their articles out of the public view.

However, I disagree. I think paid for content is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing.

Writing for an online magazine over the last six months has been an interesting experience, not least because it has been easy to see the shifts in online content over such a short period of time.

For a start, we’ve seen the rise of blogs, niche and hyper local news sites. The popularity of these sites has led to some key changes, and the inclusion of blogs on Google News as well as the emphasis major new organisations have placed on hyper news sites show the growing reputation these kind of voluntary-run content channels enjoy.

What we’re seeing online now is the slow separation from the low-quality ‘churnalism’ swamping the internet and higher quality content, and it is a divide which is only going to grow.

Industry leaders such as Dow Jones and Reuters are slowly swallowing up good quality content channels and several of the larger newspaper groups in the UK are increasingly turning to hyper local reporters. The end product will be a thin band of high quality, well-written and well-researched journalism.

Yes, information can be found on one of the thousands of blogs focusing on a certain event, but people will always migrate to a reliable, trusted source wherever possible.

So why not charge for it? In true ‘online content’ style, I’ve compiled a list answering some of the bugbears mentioned when considering paywalls.

1) It is available elsewhere for free – This is true, but is it from a reliable source? Is it well written? Is it accurate? Eventually paid for content could become a sign of interesting, informative and worthwhile content. The thinking behind this is simple, if it isn’t good, people won’t pay for it and the website will not survive.

Paid for content could become an industry standard, in much the same way blogs and news websites use ‘Google News provider’ as a sign of quality and trust.

2) Why should we pay online now? – Yes online content has always been free, but it has never been embraced as widely as in the past few years. We pay for print journalism, why not online content as well? It is arguably better quality, with podcasts, videos, hyperlinks and interaction in the form of comments, forums and social media all adding an extra dimension to the content.

The possibilities for paid-for content are endless: iPhone applications, downloadable magazines, creating an interactive community of readers. If this is the future of journalism, why not embrace it?

3) Journalists will ‘disappear’ behind a paywall – Lazy journalists might, but those that embrace everything the internet has to offer – including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc, will know they can build a following, interact with readers and be as visible as ever.

4) It will be too expensive to pay for all the websites I visit – As mentioned above, the better news sources on the internet are slowly being gathered up by a number of news organisations. For example, Dow Jones now has hundreds of news feeds from reliable sources collected in the same place.

In this way, all the best content will be owned by a few large organisations, meaning a blanket fee for access to a large number of sites could be possible. Plus, the organisations will act as a vetting procedure, so the reader can be guaranteed the best quality news available.

5) People simply won’t pay – Perhaps not with the current model employed by the times. However, journalism needs to evolve and be creative. Downloadable magazines, interactive content, blanket paywalls for a number of sites – paywalls don’t necessarily have to be a strict monthly subscription for a single news site.

At the end of the day, people will pay if they think it is worth paying for. If your content is unique, interesting and useful, and you’re utilising the internet to its maximum potential, then a paywall will work.

It may even lead to less ‘churnalism’ and more high quality, well-thought out journalism – something everyone in the industry can agree is no bad thing.

This is not a generational problem.

I think perhaps the question has been framed badly, I don’t think it is a generational thing. As consumers we have never ‘paid’ for news, in the sense that the cost of consumption for us, supported the cost of production for the paper.

The cover price has been a token contribution, one that goes a little way towards conveying the supposed worth of the content and at the same time plays to the self-held image of the preferred demographic.

The argument has been made that journalists devalued their own content by giving it away for free on the Internet, but we need to look at the value line for individuals – how much are we willing to pay to be informed (and have we ever been truly ‘willing’ to pay in a meaningful way)?

The truth, I think, is not much. We love free stuff, we collect vouchers, points and loyalty cards all with the aim of getting free coffee or a discount on our weekly food shop. We go to great lengths to get cheaper utilities and mobile phone contracts – free is a very attractive price point. So trying to support journalism through charging at the point of consumption is a non-starter, especially because the bar was set at zero to begin with.

We also need to ask how much damage would be done to sharing, collaboration, discussion and debate online if content is locked away. Lots of great online analysis is done by expert bloggers or very well informed amateurs. If we loose universal access to content being challenged and debated then these discussions will fade away, so a paywall is not the answer.

I am aware that none of what I have written so far offers a solution to get people to pay for news, but it is a bigger problem than finding a new revenue source, like micro payments or online subscriptions, it is about re-framing how people think about news. People have never paid for news, why should they start now?

Perhaps the question should be ‘What revenue streams can be used to support journalism?’ Or perhaps not, but lets not define it as a generational problem; my generation has enough problems as it is.

The culture of free

When I was younger, I used to like going to the library. The freedom to choose 10 books to take home, read, lose, find and rush back with on the expiry date was – and still remains – an exciting and pleasant prospect.

And so began my introduction into the culture of free. When I was a little older, and at secondary school, visits to my friends’ houses would mean the opportunity to listen to music they had downloaded from sites like Napster. (Incidentally, this is not an attempt to skirt the truth and blame others for being complicit in downloading music illegally. I genuinely never used Napster or Limewire or any of those programmes, which held for me both fascination and fear – both of being caught or of downloading some awful virus – the latter obviously outweighing the former).

But again, I got used to experiencing – and when people kindly burned CDs for me, owning – completely free of charge something I would have gladly paid for, if I had the funds to do so.

And so it came to pass with newspapers. First I stopped buying them during the week, when I could read them for nothing in our sixth form common room. And then, when I went to university, I practically stopped buying them altogether, preferring instead to spend an hour or two every morning after breakfast sifting through the websites of nearly every national newspaper.

Even though they were cheap in our union shop, I only ever picked them up to read expert analysis or comment on the news – usually, by the time the paper was in my hand, I had read not only the news in it but the newer versions of those stories too.

Newspapers were only for journeys or days when I had no access to the internet, like time spent holidaying or staying with friends or family.

Once again, I was getting for free something I would have quite happily continued to pay for.

Looking back on all that, it seems like there is a curse of availability. As soon as something is out there, freely – meaning both widely and free of charge – the temptation to actually dip into your pocket and pay for it is substantially reduced.

So the prospect of making Generation Y pay for content looks, to me, highly unlikely. The genie is out of the bottle now, and it won’t go back in.

The only way forward is to exploit the areas which people will pay for, by finding the niche or gap in the market. For instance, library use is dwindling – largely, I would guess, down to the availability of cheap books not only online, but in places like charity shops. There is no need to make a special visit to the local library – just call in to Oxfam or some such as you walk by on the high street.

The same is true with music. I’ll use Spotify and Grooveshark to listen to music, rather than actually buy it. But I’ll buy a ticket to a gig, or a live show on DVD, or go and watch the biopic of the artist off the back of that.

The key is in diversifying to survive, and finding what people want – and are prepared to pay for – that they cannot easily get for free elsewhere. In media terms – and particularly newspaper terms – that might be in customisable apps, or selling discrete portions of output (perhaps by micro-payment, perhaps by subscription service), or in podcasts or web chats or in something quite different.

But whatever lies ahead, the future is not in trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It is in finding a new lamp to rub.

Time to start following the trend setter

Let me take you 20 years into the future and introduce you to average Joe.

When average Joe was growing up everything was free. He got his music for free on Spotify. He got his TV for free on iplayer and paying for his news was a laughable concept because there was the BBC and the Guardian online and a whole host of news services which didn’t ask for a penny.

Average Joe didn’t go out in his slippers to get the newspaper on a Sunday morning. He had vague memories of average Joe senior popping to Tesco and coming back with sheets of paper with words printed on it but that was the older generation for you. Average Joe had no need to trade coins for news. It was all free.

Then one day the Times slammed down a pay wall. At first everyone scoffed because almost 90 per cent of its readers skipped merrily across to the BBC or other free services. But then, one by one, other news institutions decided to give this funny paywall thing a go. The New York Times went, then the Telegraph, the Independent, the Sun, and then all the others one by one until eventually everything was a money-trade off.

And what happened? Could average Joe really forget there was a time when everything was free? Or did he decide to pack it in all together, bury his head in the sand and live like an ostrich with no concept of what was going in on the world?

Well, I don’t think there is any way we would shun the news altogether even if we do have to pay for it. People need and want to know what is going on in the world, it’s just at the moment they have the option to do that for free. If people are given a piece of delicious lemony cheesecake and told they can either pay for it or have it for free then it doesn’t take a genius to work out which option they will choose. However if the option for a freebie is taken away then of course they will pay, after all everybody loves cheesecake.

When it comes to the crunch the only way this whole paywall malarkey is going to work is if everyone does it. At the moment the Times is the quirky kid at school who has gone out on a limb to dress a little wild but if everyone embraces the trend then suddenly it becomes kind of cool. I think if we want people to pay, and call me biased but I think journalists do deserve to be paid, after all news is a commodity and an important one at that, then the other online news sites have got to follow their trend setter and start building the pay wall.

Average Joe might not have liked having to pay for his news to start with, but 20 years down the line, it’s what he is used to and it is the thing that stopped the newsroom light from being switched off for good.

Caroline Cook is a news reporter at the Wokingham Times. You can read her blog, Broadsheet Boutique, and find her on Twitter here.

Tricking news consumers

As a student journalist about to enter my second year at university, it’s with a certain amount of trepidation that I turn my hand to arguably the biggest question in journalism since the internet boom.

I can’t provide any answers. But then if I’d been able to, then I probably would’ve sold them and made a healthy amount of money. The fact that we’re having this recurring discussion means that none of us have a solid answer. For those of you who have to make a living from journalism, that’s understandably worrying. I count myself lucky that I’ve a couple more years to incubate before I’ll try to make a go of paying the bills by writing articles.

I’ve been somewhat pipped to the post here by the excellent Adam Westbrook’s post earlier this week. Adam is an authority on this topic and there’s not much else I can add to the salient points he’s already made. What I would like to reinforce is the quandry that has beset publications like the Times, the first national newspaper in this country to go fully behind a paywall. It’s clear that newspapers have to make acquisitions that have nothing to do with journalism.

The Guardian’s ownership of Autocar (as Adam pointed out) is a good example of this. But what puzzles me is the Murdochs’ reluctance to let their numerous enterprises pay for the ones that matter most. Rupert Murdoch owns a huge amount of consortiums and companies, and because of this he’s best placed to use the method of using non-journalistic enterprises to fund news gathering. Yet he’s still obsessed with making people pay up front. I find it very confusing.

Young people have got used to free stuff, that much is clear. If you feel like getting into Bob Dylan, you can BitTorrent his entire discography in a matter of minutes for no cost whatsoever. iTunes makes people pay for music, but why? Why pay for something that you know you can get for free? Clearly Apple have made it work due to a combination of factors. I’m not saying that this means the future of funding journalism is simple. What I am saying is that different methods work for different markets.

There is no one solution to fund journalism. That’s both arrogant and lazy. Arrogant because it assumes the audience and delivery of every publication is the same, when the reality is that there’s hundreds of different media organisations. Lazy because it’d be much easier if someone got the magic solution and doled it out to every news organisation overnight, but that isn’t realistic.

Instead of finding direct ways to make people pay for journalism, give them an incentive. Put on events, hold competitions available only to suscribers. In essence you’re “tricking” the consumer. By getting them to pay for something that seems reasonable (a discounted cinema ticket) you keep people coming back to the thing that ultimately matters (the journalism).

In some ways, the role that convergence has played in changing the role of the individual journalist can also apply to big media organisations. Journalists now have to know the basics of video, audio and social media as well as the traditional skills. In other words, they have to branch out. And that’s what newspapers have to do. Stop thinking about whether people will pay for your journalism, and acquire other franchises that’ll make it pay for itself.

Joseph Stashko has just finished his first year at UCLan. As well as helping to run and moderate discussion on TNTJ, he co-edits the hyperlocal website Blog Preston, blogs here, and you can also follow him on Twitter.