New Journalism Models and Spot.Us Public Funding

There's a recording of an interesting discussion, including my BNET colleague David Weir, about new business models for journalism. Another participant was someone from Spot.Us, a site at which the public can suggest stories and journlaists can seek community funding for reporting projects. It's an intriguing approach. A reporter can pitch a story and see whether people will pay money to see it. If you, the writer, get the funding and do the story to eventually place it somewhere, you pay back the money you were fronted and the contributors get a refund. If you can't sell the story, it becomes something available under a Creative Commons license, making it open for distribution. Looking at the site, I noticed one story about sustainable school lunches for which the site had raised $120 out of a target $380. Another story had raised $920 out of $1000. This is a site that is definitely worth checking.

Triangulating on the WSJ

We're starting to get indications of where the Wall Street Journal may be going, at least in part. Rupert Murdoch has changed his mind about making everything available on wsj.com for free. You know he had people undertake some significant financial analysis before reversing his decision, which suggests that the ad money that could come in simply doesn't compare with the paid subscriptions, as well as the difficulty that having all those articles for free might cause for the subscription base of the paper. After all, why pay if you don't have to? But that also suggests that papers hoping to make it online through the strength of advertising may face a difficult time.

So, he can't make enough online. But what is happening in print? Expansion of topics. He's convinced that a full page of sports and a new weekend magazine (edited by someone he's bringing over from another of his properties, The Times in London) will add to the value of the paper. It might at that, who knows? Certainly having some heavy non-business weekend coverage hasn't hurt the Financial Times. But before you figure out whether you should be trying to query, also realize that Murdoch has said that he things the front-page stories at the Journal are too long. That makes me wonder whether he'll try to add the coverage from people already in house, or consider freelance help.

In terms of contacting that new weekend magazine editor, look for my post tomorrow about Gorkana.com, an editorial move/update service that seems to have some potentially serious value, all without having to pay.

A Note From the Music World

Debra Cash sent another great link - this time to an article by musician David Byrne (at one time in the Talking Heads). He analyzes the current music business and identifies six distinct business models that musicians can consider for their recorded music. It's not that a writer can make direct use of all this, but many of the issues are similar, and the important thing is to see an example of a creator looking at his or her markets with a sharp business eye.

His analysis makes makes me think that there are (at least) nine basic models for writers:

• Doing someone else's writing Whether ghosting or true corporate work, there is a class of writing in which you sell your skills, but not necessarily the writing you want to do. You might get credit, or not. You might get royalties, or not. In general, you should charge more, because you're not getting much of anything else out of this. (Note that charging can include royalties, in something like a book deal.)


• Sell all rights for a fixed fee The positive part is that, if you are getting an economically reasonable amount of money, you avoid having to do the resales and don't have to wait for months or years to collect additional money. Unfortunately, writers often settle for sums that don't approach the potential value of the work, and they also give up all control over the writing going forward.


• Sell all rights for a combination of fixed fee and royalty In this case, you get an ongoing payment stream while, presumably, not having to sell. That can be good if the company obtaining the rights is good at what it does, and bad if they couldn't sell a blanket to a shivering person. Also, you still lose control over the writing.


• License all non-exclusive rights You don't get as much up-front (presumably), but you also don't completely lock yourself out of doing something else with the writing. It means little if you don't consider what else you might do with your intellectual property.


• Judiciously sublicense rights License a small set of rights, possibly allowing one publisher to make one type of use and letting another do something different. In this scenario, you need to understand the concepts of rights and how to divide them into sets that can be profitable but that won't preclude each other. (For example, if you license an exclusive in a major city to one publisher, you can't make a sale to a national publication that would require distribution in the same area.


• Self-publishing, subscription-based Here you produce your own content - whether in print, on the web, in an exectronic format, through skywriting - and get your audience to pay. You keep control of everything, but also have all the production and distribution expenses. It's maximum profit, but maximum expense, as well. If something doesn't sell, you are the only one out money.


• Self-publishing, advertising-based You produce the material and get advertisers to support it. You see this model in web sites, in newsletters, and you might eventually see it in books. (It's come and go in that world before, although not successfully.)


• Self-publishing, subsidized You write and get someone else to pay. It's different from advertising in that there is a closer arrangement. One entity, whether company or individual, pays to make the material available to others. We saw this model in art and music for centuries, in which Rembrandts and Mozarts needed patrons or wealthy nobles who would pay for their creativity. There's the potential of losing control here, particularly when dealing with a corporate sponsor.


• Self-publishing, self-subsidized In this model, you'd give away what you have because what you can get in return - whether speaking engagements, conversions of ebook readers to print copies, consulting work, and so on - more than makes up for the investment you've made in time and money in giving your writing away. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and creator of the phrase "the long tail," is apparently touting the concept of giving things away now, as you can see in this interview in Media Magazine.

There is no absolute answer for any of us, and there may well be many other models I'm not addressing. The issue is to start thinking - to get outside the "I write and then a publisher pays me" assumptions that may become even more economically unviable than they are today.

Free Media: Who Pays?

In keeping with getting paid for reuse, let's have a look at an article on MediaPost, via a note from the BoSacks Reporter. This is a must-read for creatives of all disciplines, I think, because it quotes a simple and brilliant summation of the issue of media and their cost. In this formulation by Shelly Palmer, there are only three models for paying for media (with an obvious fourth):

• I pay - in which the creator absorbs the costs of producing and distributing the material


• You pay - in which the reader pays with a subscription or some other type of purchase


• They pay - in which a third party that typically wants to associate itself with the content pays


• Somebody pays - a combination of two or three of the above

The reason this is such an important formulation is that it clears your thinking of all the details - Google ads, per copy pricing, selling through Amazon, and so on - that keep you from understanding the fundamental problem. And when you look at the fundamentals, suddenly some innovations aren't so that different from what we've seen in the past:

Palmer scoffs at the notion that Radiohead's "pay-what-you-want" album sales model is at all a breakthrough. While a third of consumers who downloaded the band's latest album paid something for it, the real point of the model was to get the band's music heard to generate residual sales in the form of concerts and merchandising.

"It's really the Jerry Garcia model," says Palmer, referring to the late lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged deadheads to record the band's live performances and distribute and share the recording for free, because it would generate a broader marketplace for the band's music and concert tours.

When you blog or give away material, you are either underwriting everything to promote yourself or, more likely, you hope to eventually sell something to the people who come by. Again, it's that give it away and make up the promotional activity in another area model.

This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with one of my book editors. She mentioned another writer she had used - polished, capable, understanding material, but unwilling to promote. Therefore, the books didn't do that well and when he wanted another assignment, she said, "You really need to be willing to help promote, otherwise I can't give you anything."

What she said goes right back to the three models. Each part of the publishing industry has the same issue: someone has to pay. The book publisher currently depends on the audience bearing all the costs, and the greater a response, the more readily it can undertake a new book idea. The writer gets paid by the publisher, but might have to do some self-supporting work to help bring the audience to the venture that eventually pays. If there are ads, people must pay enough attention to the ads to make the third party advertisers feel as though they are getting enough for their money. Instead of sweating all the details, take some time to get to the fundamentals and answer these questions:

• What do you offer?


• Who pays for your work?


• What must you do to ensure they get what they need?


• Are tehre classic examples of business models that might work for you?