Another question raised in the Clay Shirky article is whether the salvation of news is in non-profit status. 

People donate money to organizations they believe are consistent with their values. People who would donate to news organizations would do so because they believe those organizations would also be consistent with their values. Non-profit news organizations would take on the values and missions of their donors.  This means they would be “biased.” If they were transparent and we had a thriving system of these organizations across the political and philosphical spectrum this might not be a bad thing, but most cities could only support one such organization. A commercial organization, however, responds to public demands, of whatever political persuasion they may be.

Non-profit status doesn’t seem to be the answer.

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Earlier this month on Clay Shirky wrote one of those “I told you so” pieces about the death of newspapers, to which one can only reply, “OK, we knew it then and we know it now, but what exactly do you suggest be done, Clay?”

In the comments, though, AB3A talks about “specialized journalists,” which reminded me of a conversation I once had with a teacher. I questioned the value of an “education degree” (developed to meet union control of supply state licensing requirements) and suggested that a teacher might be better off majoring in another subject like, say, math. My friend asked why I would want a teacher to major in math, to which I responded, “Maybe because she’s going to teach math?” With journalists then, a reasonable question to ask is if it’s easier to teach a science reporter about science or about journalism?

More to the point, though, is how can we get members of the community with specialized knowledge involved in the reporting of the news? Yes, community features on news Web sites help, but it really requires more effort. Why not “deputize” community members in certain areas and let them write on their own topics?  After all, they’d be well positioned to know the important stories in their areas. More content, greater expertise, more community involvement, and maybe one small way to help provide content as newsroom staffs shrink.

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It’s difficult to read the writings of Future of News High Priests without coming across fawning pieces about Twitter. But now HubSpot has released its State of the Twittershpere report for Q4 2008, and it contained some interesting facts about Twitter users. Many of these facts can make it look like Twitter is on the cusp of an explosion in popularity – 70% of users joined in 2008 and 5 to 10,000 new accounts are opened each day.

On ReadWriteWeb, however, Marshall Kirkpatrick takes a slightly different view of the numbers when he compares Twitter to Facebook.

HubSpot estimates that Twitter has 4 to 5 million users, 30% of which are ‘brand new or unengaged.’ They estimate that Twitter sees between five and ten thousand new accounts opened each day. That’s a nice number, but it’s far below, for example, Facebook’s astonishing 600k daily registrations and 140 million active users. Twitter is a fascinating little phenomenon – Facebook is mainstream.

Why is this important for users? Because most of the people you might really enjoy connecting with on Twitter are unlikely to ever use it. They are busy using Facebook instead.

Perhaps his most attention grabbing statement is this:

If Facebook stopped growing right now and Twitter’s numbers were at the upper end of Hubspot’s estimates (10k per day) – it would take 36 years for Twitter to catch up. [(135,000,000 more Facebook users / 10,000 new Twitter users per day) / 365 days per year = just about 37 years]

I’ve argued before that for news, Twitter is a feature, not a future. We can’t get caught up in Twitter the product, rather we need to understand what it accomplishes and apply that to news reporting. Twitter provides immediacy and first person accounts, and that is what news organizations must bring to their audiences, whether it’s through Twitter or not.  In fact, Twitter has plenty of problems itself separating the wheat from the chaff.  The white noise, and even worse, the black noise, can be overwhelming. Yes, Twitter is a great tool for news reporting, but those high priests who focus on it and other tools as some kind of salvation do as much harm to the future of news as those clueless executives they rail against for not “getting it.” Twitter – great app, must learn to use it well, teaches the importance of immediacy and first-person accounts.  Now, move on to figuring out that revenue model.

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Harvard’s Berkman Center released Media Re:Public, a series of papers “exploring the potential and the challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment.” I’m just starting to work through its 168 pages, but the findings are summarized here. Perhaps the most obvious finding to those who think seriously about the media is the notion that “Participatory media is great, has lots of potential. But it’s not doing everything we have counted on journalism institutions to do and left to its own devices, it never will.”

The idea that citizen journalists, and by that I mean people who don’t get paid for their reporting, will replace today’s news organizations, is one of the more dangerous ideas being pushed by the high priests of the future of news. Dangerous because if accepted by media companies, it means their future is hopeless and it’s best to give up now, an act that would result in a tremendous loss to our society.  There is no doubt that citizen journalists will be a big part of the future of news, and at times the major part, but it will not be the only part.  News organizations need to figure out how to make the best use of participatory media, give it its due, and get back to the main challenge of figuring out the business model.  The more we get sidetracked by those who will have us all believe that unpaid journalists will adequately cover our news, the more time we lose that could be spent on our real problems. We need to figure out how people can make a good living as journalists, or we can kiss the idea of an informed citizenry goodbye.

By the way, isn’t Internet video great? Here’s a trailer for the papers!

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One of the problems that has long plagued the Web sites of legacy media companies has been the inability to offer users a single sign-in.  I don’t mean a single sign-in around the Web, I mean just a single sign-in on their own site.  Getting many different vendors and databases to play nicely with each other has been an impossible task.  There has been some hope that this problem might be ended with OpenID, but so far it’s been too complex and disorganized to really offer a good solution. The launch of Facebook Connect seems to hold more promise.

Facebook Connect is an elegantly simple solution that just works.  Yes it’s a closed system, and yes, it seems to really work for Facebook’s benefit, but it’s also a great user benefit. 

It’s hard to think about applications like Facebook Connect without wondering how it will affect online anonymity. It’s a small step to think about how much more civilized (and perhaps thought-out) the comments on newspaper Web sites would be if no one was anonymous.  Seems like a wonderful world, doesn’t it? But, there is a downside.  Anonymity allows people to post comments that have real value but which they would never say if they had to identify themselves.  Think of whistleblowers and crime victims.  Forgetting for a moment that it will be a while before everyone has a social network account that can be used this way, would media sites ever want to do away completely with anonymous posting?  The answer may be yes, leaving other avenues such as anonymous email, open for people legitimately worried about revealing their identity. The problem is that removes the spontaneity of an immediate post, and maybe even the desire to share information at all.

The other aspect of this loss of anonymity is about having to share personal information with companies across the Web.  A concern, for sure, but it’s not like we’re giving it to the government…

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Of the many “NewNews” Web sites that have been launched over the past several years, The Huffington Post is one of the few (perhaps only) that actually provides something of a model for the future of news.  While most of these sites are pure aggregators, The Huffington Post, which began as a blog and therefore primarily an aggregator, actually produces content.  On Monday, The Huffington Post, which calls itself “The Internet Newspaper,” announced that it secured a $25mm investment from Oak Investment Partners, an investment which apparently values the company at around $100mm.  That valuation, by the way, is higher than Lee Enterprises, a publicly traded newspaper company with over 50 daily newspapers. From the press release:

The Huffington Post (”HuffPost”) will use the proceeds to invest in the growth of the company and for select and focused acquisitions. The company said it would invest in its technology and infrastructure, increase its in-house advertising capabilities, and continue to expand its content offerings–including a new investigative journalism initiative and a rollout of local versions of The Huffington Post in select cities.

HuffPo has already launched a Chicago version.

The Huffington Post’s traffic soared during the latest election cycle, as one would expect of a politically oriented Web site, but this investment is a bet that, as Oak VC Fred Harman says, “…the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

As the HuffPo moves into new subject areas, it’s worth asking if the site really is “The Internet Newspaper.” It has progressed from March of this year when Eric Alterman wrote,

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with, much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other grounds as well. The site’s original-reporting resources are minuscule. The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

But has it progressed enough? It’s not clear, but there are certainly some things it does right. At first glance, several pop out – it has a transparent mission (much like the Guardian), it does a great job at aggregation, and it presents continuously updated opinion feeding off of that aggregation. That opinion also includes pieces written by celebrities, both from entertainment as well as politics. (It’s not clear what value Sean Penn’s ramblings really hold, but who can resist taking a look?) We’ll see how it does with new content areas and original reporting, but right now I wouldn’t bet against it.

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