The Worst of Times?

Yes ... and no

No one can deny it's a grim time for journalists. But not all that's happened in the last 10 years has been bad. Here are some causes for optimism.

The bad: The Internet is siphoning away advertising revenue and audience from print newspapers and broadcast news.

The good: The Internet gives us ways of displaying content and telling stories that are impossible in print:

• An unlimited news hole;
• The ability to provide interactive and customized content (i.e., databases with school test scores or local crime rates; calculators for personal finance topics);
• The ability to tell stories in multiple dimensions through video and audio;
• Connectivity: the ability to hyperlink to relevant content elsewhere, and
• The ability to correct errors instantly and update content without limit.

The bad: News organizations are cutting or eliminating their foreign, national and Washington bureaus. Even City Hall coverage is getting cut back. Few newspapers can afford subject matter experts on beats such as technology or personal finance.

The good: While newspapers cut 10,000 jobs in 2007 (-2.8%), Internet media companies added 9,200 jobs (+13%). The best subject matter experts (a.k.a. beat writers) no longer need be limited to writing for a single paper or syndicate. Now, you can find a bigger, more devoted, worldwide audience. New York Times personal-technology columnist David Pogue, for example, has created a small empire. In addition to his work for the Times -- a print column, an e-mail column and an online video each week -- he launched a line of computer books (the Missing Manual series), is a correspondent for CBS News and a regular on CNBC.

And cost is no longer a barrier to entry for even individual writer-publishers. For about $3,000 you can buy a Mac computer and a digital video camera that will give you all the hardware and software you need to publish your own multimedia website. The video editing software alone would have cost you $200,000 in 1990.

Fuck Google

Fuck Craig's List. Fuck Wall Street. Yes, we have ample reason to be bitter. Times have never been worse for newspaper journalists. The erosion of print readers and advertisers shows no signs of abating. One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since 1990 -- more than 10,000 in 2007 alone. For most who remain, the future appears bleak: more cutbacks, more work with fewer people. The pay, never great even at large Guild shops, can only get worse.

But no amount of bitching will prevent Yahoo from poaching our readers nor investors from seeking bigger profits. So, let's suck it up. First, we should give thanks, for we are far luckier than the manufacturing workers who have found themselves on the wrong side of technological change. As knowledge workers, we can benefit from the technologies that are threatening newspapers' survival: No longer does one need a printing press to publish, only a personal computer, an Internet connection and an idea.

Making a living as a publisher, however, requires entrepreneurial skills that few journalists possess. That is the reason for the TreeHouse Media Project, an effort to provide journalists with the business knowledge and technical skills to survive -- even thrive -- in this harsh, yet exciting new media world.

Teaching old scribes new tricks

“In an information economy, startup costs and fixed costs are so low that new competitors can spring up anywhere there’s an opportunity. Online banks, brokerages and others have taken billions of dollars of revenue from once-almighty firms. It’s a similar story in online media, as the former kings of TV, radio, music and publishing try to figure out where their advantage lies. Their vast infrastructure of transmitters and printing presses matter less every day. Today’s source of advantage is above all a good idea.” -- Geoffrey Colvin, Power: A Cooling Trend, Fortune, December 10, 2007.

Phase One of the TreeHouse Media Project will provide multimedia and entrepreneurial training. Together we will learn new ways to tell our stories and share best practices on revenue models that will support our work. We may collaborate on joint ventures. We will support our colleagues by telling our readers about the good work they are doing.

Current plans call for instruction in:

Multimedia & Technology

• Blogs & RSS feeds
• Video (reporting for the camera, shooting, editing, uploading to the web)
• Podcasting
• Web design
• Database design and deployment

Business and Marketing

• E-Commerce (shopping carts; marketing/advertising etc.)
• Marketing and advertising (e.g. Search engine optimization)
• Writing a business plan
• Legal issues: copyrights, fair use, choosing the right business structure, etc.)
• Creating revenue streams: a platform for book sales and speaking engagements; advertising; subscriptions; merchandise sales, etc.
• Finances / Accounting
• Sales (e.g. advertising)

We envision beginning with weekend or week-long seminars (likely in the Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. areas) this fall.

We will develop the curriculum, and choose our instructors, based on your feedback to our survey. The goal is not to make you experts on all of these subjects but to provide working knowledge so that you may intelligently obtain collaborators for the skills you lack. The seminars will be moderately-priced -- just enough to cover our costs.

We will supplement the in-person seminars with web-based instruction. Our Resource Center will offer market research; case studies on successful web publishers and their business models, and evaluations of hardware, software and web-based services. The Resource Center is a wiki page. We invite you and your colleagues to contribute.

In addition, I will be posting articles and links regularly on the Fuck Google blog. Perhaps we'll start a book club on media business titles. Share your ideas with us.

This opportunity may suit you if you:

• Are tired of living paycheck to paycheck.
• Have buyout money or a spouse to pay your current bills while you invest in your future.
• Want a greater say in your professional and financial destiny.
• Seek part-time work in addition to a full-time job.

Seed funding and ongoing support

"Democracy can thrive without newspapers but it cannot thrive without the sort of journalism that newspapers uniquely provide.” -- Davis “Buzz” Merritt, Nightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy at Risk

Bloggers have their place in the marketplace of ideas, but there is no substitute for trained journalists with a commitment to fairness and accuracy. Thus Phase 2 of the project will seek to develop an endowment for:

• Seed funding to carry projects through the start-up phase and allow them time to find an audience and advertising or other revenue support.
• Underwriting of journalistic ventures (e.g., investigative reporting projects) that are unlikely to ever be self-supporting but which are vital to society and democracy.