Is There a Way Beyond Ads to Compensate Microjournalists?

There was an exchange between RickG and me in the comments to the "A Focus Group Of One" post I did on thursday.

Rick said the following:

First, you don't report. You opine. That's fine and I very much like reading the site, but it's not a substitute for news reporting. For example, in Seattle we're debating a large transportation project... a good reporter will talk to various sources from the governor to urban planners and city officials, then synthesize that into a story. They'll do this over and over. Bloggers almost never do that. They won't have access to the officials and they might not even know who the urban planners are to talk to them.

Second, the blog approach does NOT scale for the reader. One advantage of blogs is that the urban planner in Seattle could offer their opinion directly on a blog...that's great, but it is one piece of a story and I as the reader have to find that. Again, a good reporter will bring together a lot of sources into one place and present the information from them in one article. With online stories, I'd like to see them link out more to things like an urban planning blog too.

So blogs aren't doing reporting for the most part. For the ones that do... what's the aversion to finding a model to actually pay the people who are doing real reporting? We seem to have gotten the idea that we should get value for nothing, not only in this case, but in music, etc. I don't think a direct translation of the subscription/local ads model will work for newspapers, but if we want people to spend time digging into stories vs commenting on them we need to find some way to pay for that.

As I was reading Rick's comment, I thought of that great song by Joni Mitchell:

They took all the trees
Put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till its gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

I think all the hand wringing about the death of newspapers comes down to this very issue. Are reporters/journalists like the trees in Joni's song? Will we miss them when they are gone? And if so, what can we do to ensure they don't go away?

As much as RickG has got me thinking, I'm not sold that microjournalism (aka blogging) can't get the job done. Look at what Henry Blodget is doing at Alley Insider for example. He's doing a lot more than opining. He's doing real work on a lot of the issues he's covering.

The same is true of many other bloggers. And as reporters/journalists leave the big papers and start writing for their own blogs/brands, I think they'll keep doing what they've been trained to do their entire career. Can they all make good money doing this? That's not nearly as clear. As we talked about in the "scale economics" post (I do mean we, read the comments), revenue per ad impression is going to be a dollar per thousand not ten or twenty dollars per thousand.

I make about $30k per year on this blog and it is read by 150,000 people per month (web and feed) and gets around 250,000 page views per month (web and feed). So that means I am still getting ten dollars per thousand on this blog running only one ad unit. If I was getting one dollar per thousand and running three or four ad units, I'd be making around $10,000 per year on this blog. And my numbers are pretty good for a one man band. And $10,000 to $30,000 per year isn't enough for most reporters/journalists to live on. So even if the microjournalism approach works from a content production point of view, it doesn't seem to work from an economic point of view.

As to Rick's point about blogs not scaling for the reader, I think that's a solvable problem. We've got a few investments, like zemanta and outside.in, that are working on aspects of smart aggregation and there are a host of other startups working on it. We'll get that problem solved.

So to me, avoiding the Big Yellow Taxi moment comes down to solving the business model question for microjournalism. Is there a way beyond ads to compensate microjournalists? Subscription seems like one approach but what can you charge for online? Participating in expert networks might be another approach. Speaking and writing books could be a third. My gut tells me that microjournalists are going to have to do more than just post to their blog to earn a living. In fact the blog will probably be the loss leader that keeps them in the game.

I am not sure that anyone has the answer to this question and that's why it's bothering so many people right now. I'm an optimist and I think we'll work it out. And our firm is investing in the services that play a role here. And we'd like to do more of that.

Comments

[Joyful Alte...:]

National news blogs can work. TalkingPointsMemo, particularly TPM Muckraker, "does journalism." We'd have never heard of the U.S. Attorneys scandal if this news blog hadn't put the pieces together from USAs being fired in odd circumstances in various places across the country in a brief time frame. And the founder, Josh Marshall, must be doing OK with his ads because he's hired a bunch of reporters and other staff over the past couple of years.

On the local level, I have in mind a good business model that should work for a one-person news blog. Cover one area---in these parts, it would be a township, 20,000 to 25,000 people---intensively. That's not too hard, because the police will turn over the blotter to anyone who wants it, they've told me; the volunteer fire companies are willing to share their activity reports and, in many cases, their fire scene pictures. Contact every church, civic association, band parents' association, hospital volunteer league, etc., and ask for their PR. Then go to the school board and township meetings monthly and write a report; that's the only journalism part. That's plenty of local news for a local area, and enough to have fresh stuff up every day. And everybody contacted for the news will know about the blog; most will take a look, even if just to check their own news contribution. Circulation, i.e., eyeballs, ought to build.
Next is financial. Every local pizza parlor and beauty parlor and florist is in need of a "specials" ad weekly or monthly, with links. Every funeral parlor, higher ed program, and insurance agent needs a tasteful long-running ad. Supermarkets and drugstores ought to run online versions of what they stick in newspapers, or at least links to them when enough eyeballs are available. Anybody who runs an ad in the high school yearbook or the local pennysaver is a potential blog ad buyer. And all the nonprofit groups are ad customers for their fund-raisers, a process that can be automated online. Then think of all the classifieds possible, from real estate on down.
There's no fortune to be made on this model, but it fills a need, and I think it would provide someone with a decent living. I hype it to people I know every now and then. I'm not interested in doing it myself, because I have too many irons in the fire that are profitable and fun for me, but I wish someone would.

Jan 11 11:49 AM