trendpreneur

Disclaimer: This post is personal opinion, the views expressed here are not those of Google, and not influenced by any relationships the poster may have with the Big G.

There have been arguments raging on and offline about paywalls, the commons, old media versus new media, and ‘information should be free’ for — well, it feels like forever now. One of the (many) components of new media under fire is the army of filthy idea-stealin’ bloggers, people who merrily subscribe to paid content and then go and paraphrase it on their free-to-view blogs (or in some cases, just copy it). Paul Carr makes an excellent point about the commoditisation of facts, the human need for information and thus the Internet hivemind’s tendency to trend towards free.

Information being free is good, for obvious reasons, unless you’re someone who wants to get paid to create it. There are plenty of arguments for well-crafted columns, investigative journalism, paid political pundits and so forth. But here’s a thought about the oft-maligned practice of reblogging, rephrasing, and retweeting.

Language is variable.

The more ways an idea or piece of information is expressed linguistically, the easier it is to find — it’ll match far more search queries, as a simple starting point. Although, in an echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, perhaps expressing an idea in multiple languages, or with different phrasings and words, could change the way people think about the idea. Even if this happens, the idea reaches far more people than it would have if it were confined to one site, in one language, by one author.

From Google’s point of view, if someone takes a New York Times article, paraphrases it, and links back to it, the data miners jump for joy. Beautiful, delicious data. We learn new things about the relationships between words and concepts — maybe one article said climate change but another global warming. The link-back gives us contextual data that can help too. (Linking to a climate change article with the text “This article on global warming”, for example).

Of course, paraphrasing and rewriting has been going on for years, a staple of the essay or lit review. But as with voice recognition, having the power to implement and use a feedback loop at world-scale is a mind-blowing thing. Google has the power to build an entire semantic web out of paraphrased blog posts, and that’s before we even look at contextual links in Wikipedia or Twitter link summaries. If that’s scary, just think of the magic that happens when you search for something and get a result that isn’t the exact terms you entered, but is the exact concept. With a bit of data, intelligence and an army of semantic web PhDs, it just could happen.

Silicon Valley-based seed fund and incubator Y-Combinator have started nudging smart people without ideas in the direction of a few pet ideas they’re keen to fund. While I think on one level this is a great idea, I also can see a few problems: people abandoning existing half-formed ideas to pursue something they think has greater chance of being funded, people shoehorning themselves into topics off-kilter with their actual instincts and skills, and people trying to game the system by applying with a ‘request for startups’ idea but turning it into something else once funded.

Fortunately, the guys behind YC are pretty smart, and have almost certainly thought of more ways this could go wrong than I have. On the “great idea” level it is definitely a good way to 1. learn how the guys with the money and experience actually think, and 2. encourage people to focus on something worthwhile — though, as the HN comments say, if you don’t already have a few ideas of your own then are you really the right sort of person to be jumping into the startup world?

However, above all, these ideas get people thinking. The HN comments are already raging, the TC commenters are partly missing the point and partly supportive, and I expect to see plenty more discussion on the topic as more ideas to be funded emerge.

As to the RFS1 itself – ‘the future of journalism’ – it’s interesting to see people who are already getting it, and others who are already shooting far off the mark. At the moment, journalism’s trying to marry the need to make money with processes and a business model that stem back to the printing press, evolving over the years but still firmly rooted in a concept that people nowadays have trouble dealing with — paying for stuff.

It’s actually quite interesting to think how we’re innovating in this space – almost accidentally. FestBuzz is competing with several types of journalism, online and off; some of our ideas for later down the line marry different types of media, new and old, with data-mining and magic to do cool stuff. The thing about FestBuzz in particular is we found a way to make money off something that’s free to consumers without using advertising as our main source of income. I can’t help but think that some of the lessons we’re learning about how to bridge the print and online industries, how to deal with information producers and consumers, how to make information free to all in a way they want to consume it… all of that fits right in with this idea of reinventing journalism as something that might actually make money rather than die out.

But enough about us. There are plenty of other business models and ideas floating around to kickstart any thoughts you might be having on reinventing journalism starting with the need to make money, not the assumption that people will pay:

Pro-blogging.
Obviously a subject dear to my heart, this ticks the box of ‘paying people to write content’ which is something most journalists like to hear, but on the other hand: reduced barrier to entry, low pay rates, constant small trickle of content is more rewarding than occasional big articles (so the concept of a feature/column is somewhat worn away) – yet big flashy content is needed to attract viewers through viral means (digg etc). Less of a focus on daily news and current affairs, partly due to reduced access and budgets to cover them.

Citizen journalism.
A poncy term for “people on Twitter are on the scene of breaking news first”. People submit their news/pictures to a central site, news agencies pay a subscription fee, extra for exclusivity, some of which goes back to the citizen journalists cited/used in a story. Reduces costs for news organisations to have people on the ground in key locations, democratises news, allowing bloggers and online-only organisations to cover breaking news too, but still somewhat reliant on current business models.

Subscription based news access.
Either online or via Kindle/mobile/iPhone, a centralised news gateway that you pay for (possibly freemium). Challenge: Convincing people to pay, and working out where the money goes. Multiple approaches here: personalised aggregation, collaborative news filtering, topic-specific news streams; access to ‘professional’ articles consolidated into one place; cross-media integration with paper headlines, multimedia, known brands; cross-platform access i.e. RSS on steroids, including filtered twitter, facebook, etc, streams.

Would you pay for an iPhone version of HN tailored to your own preferences (no articles on Erlang for me, please!)? Would you pay for a paper, virtual or physical, that consolidated the best of the day’s current affairs as voted by other people – the Times’ political commentary with the Guardian’s media coverage, the FT’s straight-faced finance with a little bit of Daily Mail celebrity-spotting sprinkled in for tea breaks? Would you pay to consume RSS as you do today but with the ability to collaboratively view it, chatting with other readers? The problem is to most of these the answer is never going to be an immediate ‘yes!’. Maybe you’d get a hit from sales of the iPhone app or other one-off costs, but many things along these lines have been tried and have failed admirably.

Topic-specific physical news.
Instead of paying £x for a paper which you don’t read half of, pay £x/2 for two halves of a different paper and build your own. Again, fairly linked to current models, but a sort of physical hybrid of the stuff above with the need (or desire) to consume a dead-tree version.

The final point for today (I could go on all afternoon, but there’s work to be done!) is on how to think about this stuff.

The above are all ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while, in one form or another – and you can tell where my recent thoughts have been focused. But if you’re set on reinventing an industry, you don’t start from an idea or an application, you start from the industry itself. How does journalism work? How do journalists and news providers make money? What do people consume? What do they pay for (note, they may not be paying in money, but in clicks, in eyeballs, in time..)? What other data can you get about the way people consume news and media, and the way it’s delivered to them? Where are the weaknesses in the value chain? Why does the business model look the way it does? (Hint, it’s in pg’s post.)

Then think about how people of 2010 (not that far away any more) might consume news. What’s different? What happens if the news organisations go out of business, or go online-only? Are their current sources of income viable long-term? Short-term? What other ways can they make money? What do they own and what can they sell? How do journalists get paid? How else can they get paid? Who else can write news? Who else can deliver news? Does ‘news’ mean what’s happening now, or anything that someone somewhere finds current and interesting? How do news organisations gain and retain credibility? How do companies and celebrities rely on the news machine to make money and gain fame? How do paparrazzi and news photographers fit in? What would the world look like if there was only one video news channel in each country? What levels of competition and collaboration are necessary to keep ‘good’ reporting alive? What can someone with a BBC badge do that someone with a ‘my-blog.co.uk’ business card can’t? Why?

So many questions. Have a cup of tea and a think. And in, ooh, about two or three months, maybe, I’ll write more about my personal view on these things and how what I’m doing at the moment fits into the picture.

It’s funny when something you take for granted starts seeping around to less, er, short-sighted parts of the world. We’ve all long thought social media was the future of marketing, right? But when the SF Chronicle (admittedly, possibly a more tech-focused paper than the Worthing Herald) gets the basic ideas right, it’s a sign that things are really getting mainstream.

Firms are learning that using the various forms of new media can establish a direct dialogue with customers about products or services. That approach can generate buzz, which can be as effective as an expensive advertising campaign or traditional media coverage.

The ‘net is one big conversation, and it looks like people are finally getting the hang of taking part.

Taking the notion of a user-powered brand to a new level, Skittles has been the talk of the town today as its website changed to consist of a ‘new meeja’ web 2.0 box-ticking mashup. Well, not really a mashup so to speak; the basic homepage is a Twitter search, with links to the company’s Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Facebook pages.

It’s great to see a company that’s selling a fairly old-school product start to jump on the social media bandwagon. Although it can easily backfire, with clued-in Twitterers posting ribald comments right left and centre, I’d guess that the social media traffic about Skittles for just today probably outweighs the whole of last year’s. After all, who tweets that they’re eating a packet of sweets? (Oh, wait.)

It looks like the end result of this is volume rather than quality of conversation. Everyone’s tastebuds are different, so a wave of people saying they don’t like Skittles (in fact, I don’t!) won’t really harm the overall perception of the product. The more dubious comments about cancer etc will mostly be taken with a pinch of salt, although the joy of the Internet is that even a side comment can explode into a meme and become entrenched; a tweet could, in theory, destroy Skittles (as the #skittlefisting tag is trying to).

What’s interesting to me is visualising the reaction to this change: looking at the proliferation of posts throughout the blogosphere, as well as the change in mood and tone of Skittles tweets over time. When did people start trying to game the system? When did (or will) they lose interest? How does the volume of chatter correlate with Facebook fan page subscriptions, YouTube views, Wikipedia edits? And how do these numbers relate to sales? Pretty cool to think about, especially as a case study. Apparently Omniture is providing analytics, so I’m especially keen to investigate what they deliver and where the gaps in their service are.