I helped write a new report from the Knight Foundation, “Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability.” It’s loaded with information on how local sites get their revenue, how they spend it and what they are doing to engage their communities and create impact.
Don’t miss the cartoon that accompanies the report.
A new report for The Chicago Community Trust analyzes news flows in Chicago and provides a thought-provoking analysis of the city’s emerging news ecosystem and the roles of key information providers and sharers. It also shows the potential power of Web savvy community news start ups and nontraditional information providers as a new news environment takes shape.
In the national, often web-ideology-driven debate about value on the Web, news aggregators often take a big hit as parasites on organizations doing the expensive work of actually producing original content. Any aggregator who takes advantage - by stealing significant chunks of material from other sites and/or by failing to credit and link back to the original - deserve our disdain and more. After all, content producers (many of whom are professional journalists) need a paycheck just like the rest of us.
But the aggregators who play fair deserve another look
Here’s my full post at Knight Digital Media Center.
I really like this piece, “Four Reasons Any Action is Better Than None,” by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
Kanter points out that busy people get the most done. This sounds obivious at one level. But I take it as encouragement to keep moving and worry less about making mistakes, especially small ones that end up not mattering much anyway.
You can read Kanter’s post here.
Here are her four reasons:
1. Small wins matter.
2. Accomplishments come in pieces.
3. Perfection is unattainable anyway.
4. Actions produce energy and momentum.
This is great advice. I have a tendency to focus on the big things, often turning relatively doable projects into monumental efforts in my head. It’s when I get going, taking one piece at a time, that I discover not only that I can do the work but the creativity is coming through.
Have a great weekend!
I am heading to Boston and Philadelphia to participate in a couple of conferences about news and information in communities.
Saturday, April 9, I am on a panel on Tools for Change: Mapping Media in Your Community at the National Conference on Media Reform in Boston. I’ll be talking about different types of online community news sites that are emerging and I’ll pitch Knight Foundation’s new Community Information Toolkit for assessing information flows in communities.
Monday, April 11, at the Council on Foundations conference in Philadelphia, I’m helping launch a new guide - Journalism and Media Grant Making: Five Things You Need to Know. Five Ways to Get Started - which I co-authored with Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation. We’ve developed tips from foundations that are doing media grant making for foundations that want to get started. You can download a copy of the guide here.
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I contributed an essay on revenue trends in online community news to the annual State of the News Media report for the Project for Excellence in Journalism. You can read it here.
I’ve had a productive 10 months at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, where I focused on the emerging local online news ecology and identified promising sites from which we can all learn.
Here are key links:
Here’s a page with links to some of my writing during the fellowship. I created a list of promising news sites and figured out categories that I hope will help us understand them better. We also conducted an extensive telephone survey and I published results in a series of blog posts in June. (My research partner, PhD student Adam Maksl) is following up with a survey of users of some of these sites. Stay tuned for results in September.)
Next up: With help from Jay Rosen, I am organizing Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010 in Chicago Sept. 23-24. More than 100 online community publishers will gather in a first-of-its-kind meeting to share learning and identify common challenges. The conference is almost sold out and we have a great group of co-sponsors!
Here’s a recent Time magazine article on hyper local news that cited my work. Here’s what I had to say about the article and how it was framed in “Debunking the Replacement Myth.” (Didn’t much like, can you tell? :-).
David Stanley McLellan, a retired professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio and the author several books about international affairs, died Sunday, February 21, at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was 85.
Dr. McLellan was a son of hardworking immigrants who learned that with determination and education he could rise and make a difference in society. He went on to travel the world, champion civil rights and freedom of expression, interview world leaders, write dozens of books and articles, teach hundreds of students, and raise four children with Ann, his beloved wife of 65 years.
Dr. McLellan was born Dec. 24, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Charles and Jessie, were new immigrants from Scotland. His younger brother, Robert McLellan was born in 1928. Charles McLellan, a skilled bricklayer, initially found work but soon was unemployed as the Great Depression swept the United States. Charles McLellan sold household supplies door to door and worked erratically in construction, sometimes with his son David’s help, while his mother took cooking and cleaning jobs, and the family rented out the first floor of its small house in Harmon on Hudson and moved upstairs.
“Red,” as his wife and old friends called him for his red hair, nevertheless went on to live a rich and fascinating life that often emerged years later in the stories he told his children and grandchildren. Rowing on the Hudson River, he saw Ann Handforth on a dock and knew instantly that he would marry her. Delivering a telegram to Eleanor Roosevelt on a train as a gangly teenager. Navigating an airplane over Shanghai and Hiroshima at the end of WWII as a frightened young lieutenant. Feeling the disdain of fellow Yale University student George H.W. Bush and his uppercrust friends as a scholarship student who worked in the school cafeteria. Meeting General Eisenhower by chance in a library in the South Pacific. Being interrogated by French police when he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Grenoble. Speaking out against the House Un-American Activities Committee and enlisting in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. Interviewing former President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, as well as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and others who shaped U.S. foreign policy.
Dr. McLellan often told his own story with a twist of self-deprecating humor. As a teenager, one of his jobs was delivering newspapers. That experience later inspired his essay “Dogs I Have Known.”
His newspaper route, Dr. McLellan later wrote, “opened two windows in my life. It meant that every afternoon for an hour and a half, as I read the news stories on the front page, I acquired a knowledge of what was going on in the world that exceeded that of anyone but the most educated and attentive person. Events like Huey Long’s assassination, the Spanish Civil War, Roosevelt’s Court Packing Plan, the rise of Hitler’s Germany, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of China and Stalin’s great purge trials unfolded before me day after day as I trudged on my daily rounds. …
“The other window that the paper route opened was into the lives of other people — better educated, professional people — whom I’d never have gotten to know had I not met them from time to time when making my weekly collection.”
Dr. McLellan was a navigator and bombardier in the Pacific in the final months of WWII. The memories of firebombed Japanese cities haunted him after the war, and he acknowledged he was lucky to have been spared the horror of ground combat.
After the Japanese surrender, his crew was tasked with flying supplies to starving prisoners in northern Korea. He charted the flight and found that they could fly over Shanghai on the way north and over Hiroshima on the return. As they flew over Shanghai, he recalled years later, the sky was filled with kites in celebration of the war’s end. When they reached their destination, one of the big canisters of supplies would not dislodge from the bomb bay. A bit like the scene in “Dr. Strangelove,” he had to climb out over, holding on to the straps and kick the canister loose. The return flight was far more somber, he said, as the flight passed over the destruction wrought by an atomic bomb.
Before the war, a track scholarship had been his ticket to Yale University in 1942. He returned to Yale afterward to finish a Bachelor’s Degree in 1948. Then he and Ann, who had married in 1945 just before he left for war, discovered Europe. They bicycled all over the continent. In Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. McLellan earned a License es Sciences Politique degree. After returning to Yale for a Master’s Degree in international relations, David, Ann and new daughter Hilary went to Grenoble, France, where Michele was born. There he conducted graduate research for his PhD dissertation. At the same time, as a contract employee for the Central Intelligence Agency, he scouted the Alps and measured fields where the Allies might land airplanes if the Soviet Union invaded Europe. The McLellan family photo collection from that time is dotted with images of Alpine meadows.
When the CIA invited Dr. McLellan to join its efforts in Vietnam, his wife Ann, now mother to three young daughters (Marjorie had joined Hilary and Michele), put her foot down at the idea of a separation. The family moved to Riverside, California, where Dr. McLellan would teach political science at the University of California and where son Eric was born.
In California, Dr. McLellan became deeply involved in Democratic politics and the civil rights movement. His parents had left Scotland in part to escape rigid class differences. As a child, he had felt the sting of being at the low end of a rigid social pecking order because his family were immigrants, and at Yale, he felt the scorn of his more privileged classmates.
One day on summer break, he watched as a visiting African-American college friend of his younger brother, Robert, was turned away from a public swimming pool. Dr. McLellan would fix his passion for justice and equality on rights for African-Americans. In addition to his public statements, he frequently and emphatically admonished his children about the wrongs of racial prejudice, went out of his way to befriend and support colleagues of color, and he and Ann opened their home to leaders of the movement who visited California to tell their story, recruit backers, and raise funds.
Dr. McLellan was not afraid to take unpopular positions, even when they put him at risk. As a young, untenured professor in the 1950s, he spoke out forcefully and publicly against the repressive tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A furor ensued. He also said the Soviet Union would be too busy with a rivalrous China at its back to menace the United States, controversial words in the 50s and 60s. Despite political pressures to support the U.S war in Vietnam, he opposed it. In 1969, teenage daughter Michele was only mildly surprised to run into her father at an anti-war rally in Riverside.
David and Ann McLellan sought to instill a love of travel in their children and to open their eyes to the world beyond the United States. In 1966, he accepted a two-year post as director of the University of California’s education abroad program in Bordeaux, France. They enrolled their children in French public schools, determined that they learn another language and understand another society. The family — often riding in a VW bus and camping along the way — visited Scotland, England, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain. In 1968, the entire family boarded a train in Paris and spent several weeks visiting Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Prague.
Crossing by train from East to West Berlin, Dr. McLellan later recalled watching a guard prod the coal in the coal car, presumably to see if anyone was trying to escape to the West. While in East Berlin, the family also learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated and that Washington, D.C. was the scene of rioting. The trip ended in the Czech capital at the height of Prague Spring, just weeks before Soviet tanks crushed the Czech movement towards more freedom.
In 1970, Dr. McLellan joined the Political Science Department at Miami University of Ohio. As in California, he was a devoted and popular teacher. Although a full professor, he still struggled with the sometimes competing demands of teaching excellence and “publish or perish.”
“I remember so vividly what a beloved teacher he was to his students. He was one of the finest scholars the department ever had, but this did not take any time from his attention to students, which was limitless. He would sit in his office writing comments on mountains of papers from his exceptionally large classes. He had large classes because the students loved him so much,” Steven DeLue, a Miami colleague recalled recently.
Dr. McLellan published numerous books and articles centered on the Cold War, including the biographies, “Dean Acheson. The State Department Years,” and “Cyrus Vance.” He also edited a volume of Acheson’s letters. Daughter Marjorie, a history professor, recalls her father’s stacks of yellow legal pads filled with notes on interviews with Cold War decision makers.
Gaddis Smith wrote of the Acheson biography in a New York Times review “this is a good book; careful, thoroughly researched, the product of more than a decade’s work. Acheson’s voluminous published work and his rich unpublished papers have been used to excellent advantage. Acheson would be pleased with the portrait . . ” Reviewing the Vance biography in Perspective, Loch Johnson wrote “. . . this volume takes its place on the bookshelf next to the memoirs of Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski, and helps the expert and the layman alike to better understand this troubled troika.”
Dr. McLellan was awarded a Ford International Relations Post-doctoral Fellowship in 1959, a fellowship at the John Hopkins University Center for Foreign Policy Research in 1963, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni, Italy, in 1970, a Clare Hall Fellowship in Cambridge, England in 1982, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Washington, D.C. in 1983.
In retirement, he enjoyed looking at Impressionist landscape painting, listening to opera and Scottish folk music, reading Wordsworth and the British Romantic poets, and writing about his experiences. He found a haven of peace and beauty at the cabin that he built with his family on the north coast of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and he took great pleasure in spending time with his family, which grew to include three grandchildren.
Despite failing hearing and eyesight and the cruel onslaught of Alzheimer’s, Dr. McLellan remained remarkably connected to the world around him. He learned to use a hand-held scanner to read articles one word at a time on a large television screen. Until about a week before his death, he read several articles each day from The New York Times and was always ready to discuss or explain a thorny national or international issue, whether it was religious conflict or the economic meltdown.
Dr. McLellan is survived by his wife, Ann Handforth McLellan of Yellow Springs; son Eric, daughter Marjorie and son-in-law Gary Greenberg, all of Yellow Springs; daughter Michele McLellan of Phum Thum, Cambodia; son-in-law Roger Wyatt of Saratoga Springs, New York; grandson Jesse Greenberg of Los Angeles, and granddaughters Cara Greenberg of Columbus and Hypatia McLellan of Yellow Springs. His oldest daughter, Hilary, preceded him in death in October 2009.
Memorials may be sent to the David S. McLellan Scholarship at Miami University, 920 Chestnut Lane,
Oxford, OH 45056
Cross post from Knight Digital Media Center Leadership 3.0 blog: Before they jump into charging for content, news organizations must bypass the “quality journalism” argument and answer these five questions instead.
I’ve hesitated to write about the notion of charging for online news content. I’m not a news business expert and I was not focusing on online years ago when some news organizations tried charging for content and could not pull it off. But with News Corp, The New York Times and The Boston Globe and other organizations considering charging for online content, I’ve been studying up and I want to add my voice to the chorus that’s saying “Don’t” or at least “Take a hard look before you leap.” (Special thanks to Steve Yelvington, Steve Outing, and Jeff Jarvis, whose blogging about paid content has helped me understand the issues.)
Last week, News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch stepped it up a few beats, announcing his news Web sites all soon would charge for access to content: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.”
Indeed. While it is evident that many news organizations provide quality journalism, I don’t think that really addresses the question of whether news organizations can profit by charging for content. (I also realize that doesn’t seem fair.) But after all, if quality content was the key, many news organizations would have been charging for years (and some tried and failed more than a decade ago.)
Instead, here are five questions I think any local publisher or editor needs to ask before charging for content:
1. Will the content behind the pay wall be unique and essential to users? Finances aside, I think this is a critical question for news organizations. It also is a question that journalists are ill-equipped to answer on their own. Sure, we have plenty to say about the value of our work. But we tend to see it through the prism of the time and talent we invest in it and we judge it by the approval of our peers. Journalism has struggled for decades to be consistently relevant, useful, engaging and credible. Sure, you say, your organization is the dominant provider of local news, so your content is unique and residents cannot do without you. Think again …
2. What about the competition? If you are in a market with decent local television, a weekly and few fledgling local news Web sites, you can probably assume those will be good enough sources for many of your users who won’t or can’t pay. Even if you don’t have competition now, a pay wall is likely to encourage start ups, small community-oriented sites that can be operated on a shoestring. Of course, you say, those sites don’t have the breadth of all the news we bundle on our site. But these days, with links, social networks, and RSS feeds, people can do their own bundling.
3.Is it even possible to put a lid on your content? Copyright law allows others to use a small amount of your content. What’s to stop another site from posting your headline and a few words? That may be all many people want to know. And how much time and effort will it take to monitor for fair use violations? What about politicians, agencies and others who want to get the word out. If your stories are behind a pay wall, won’t they just take their news to other distributors? Don’t forget, many people who now find you by search won’t click through to the paid stuff.
4. How many users are you likely to lose? That’s an open question. It depends on your market, your users, your pay plan and your journalism. Given the unknowns, be sure to look at multiple scenarios and the effect each will have on your online advertising rates. In the process, figure out when to declare defeat if it comes to that.
5. What is your plan for finding out what people in your community will pay for and providing it to them? Circle back to Question 1. Talk to your users: Where do they get their news? What do they come to you for? What will they pay for? How much?
The pay wall works for Murdoch’s wsj.com because users think it is essential for them to make money and many of them can write off their subscription fees either on their expense accounts or their income taxes. Some form of it may also work for The New York Times because it has unique national and political content and a brand that won’t quit.
It may also work in some local news markets that have the right combination of strong local content and brand, loyal Web savvy users with a little money to spend, and weak competition. More likely, though, it could be a lot more difficult and a lot less lucrative than appears on first blush.
Clay Shirky has written a piece that is at once brilliant and devastating. In “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Shirky argues, as I have, that we must uncouple the fate of journalism from the fate of the newspaper business as we know it. Only then can we start building a future that is more diverse, more chaotic but probably also more rich than what we know now.
Here’s how Shirkey sums up (but do read the entire piece):
“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
“When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
“We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”
