Building networks around news

PLEASE NOTE: My new blogging home is now at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I'll continue to update this site for the time being with the introductory portion of my posts, but to read the whole thing, you'll have to head over to the Nieman site!

Even though the public’s engagement with social networks is growing strongly, news enterprises have been slow to wade into the social networking waters.

Publishers, and especially editors, still tend to see themselves as curators of content: selecting, generating, massaging and presenting material for the audience they perceive, but not really networking with that audience except in rudimentary ways like comment forums that are not enormously evolved from the old channel of writing a letter to the editor.

A Bivings Group report published in December, “The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers” (which I’ve discussed previously) found that while the adoption of individual social media tools (social bookmarking, blogs, RSS, etc.) was pretty strong at the papers in 2008, only 10 percent, or 10 newspapers, had incorporated some form of social networking on their sites...

Read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Inventing the Information Valet

I spent a few days in Columbia, Missouri this past week, in the company of 50 or so people gathered by Bill Densmore at the spanking-new Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Bill is there on a Reynolds Fellowship, with the mission of inventing something he calls the Information Valet (which I call InfoValet for short). Our collective purpose at this gathering was to help him "blueprint" InfoValet.

Bill has been chewing my ear about this and other projects for years, but I must say that before getting to Columbia, I could not have explained the InfoValet concept to anyone (despite my perhaps intelligent-sounding post about it some time ago). As it turned out, neither could most of the other attendees at the conference. We came from a variety of backgrounds. Only five conferees currently work for newspaper-publishing companies, and a few others did so in the past. The rest were drawn from technology, law, new media, consulting, academics and electronic commerce. Which is to say, it was the right mix to brainstorm solutions to the ambitious challenge Bill was posing.

InfoValet is perhaps best described and understoood by looking at it from the point of view of each of its stakeholder components. Once operational, it will be a networked set of content providers, content consumers/web users, and commercial content providers/advertisers, linked by means of tools and technology managed by the fourth component, the Information Valet system itself. Like the proverbial elephant being manually examined by a group of blind men, here's how it might variously appear, fully realized, to these stakeholders:

Content consumers/web users:

• Would register their personal data via InfoValet and would, in a secure system, retain complete control over who could access that information.
  
• By doing this, they would also gain the convenience and security of not having to enter a raft of data over and over each time they register at another site to access information or make purchases. Their personal information would reside in only one place on the web.
  
• In return for allowing selective access to their personal data, they would gain two important benefits: (1) access to information more tailored to their demographics, needs and interests, and (2) a system of rewards in the form of cash or points based on their web usage and exposure to advertising content. These rewards would be greater if they are willing to share, selectively, a larger amount of personal information with advertisers for targeting purposes.
  

Content providers including newspaper web sites:

• Would act as portals through which content consumers initially sign up for InfoValet. As such they could gain a share of future transactions, including ad-viewing rewards, associated with individuals they have signed up--even when those users are elsewhere on the web.
• Would be able to sell and host advertising targeted more precisely at site visitors by means of InfoValet registrations

Commercial content providers/advertisers:

• Would benefit from more efficient, better targeted ways of advertising to InfoValet registered consumers, published through "trusted nodes"--local brands through which consumers have signed up for infoValet
  
• Could send new, more welcome forms of commercial content to InfoValet consumers

If that has you sufficiently confused, here's the conference's consensus "executive summary mission statement" description of InfoValet:

A permission-based ecosystem assuring privacy that allows you, in a trustworthy way, to share personal information so that content providers and partners can create a structure to provide you with content, applications and incentives tailored to you and your needs.

While a system like this will not necessarily save newspaper publishers (because, for one thing, it will take some time to gain traction), it has the potential to help save journalism by enabling online news publishing at a different scale. While the New York Times could be an InfoValet network member, so can a blogger or micro-local news site, and each can benefit proportionately to their traffic and content value to advertisers and consumers.

If this description makes sense and whets your appetite, here's a set of links where you can learn more:

• Bill Densmore's Information Valet Project blog
• The December 3-5, 2008 InfoValet conference wiki. This includes a great deal of detail on the discussion, alternatives considered, the consensus project outline, and next steps toward an actionable business plan
  
• The Information Card Foundation site--this system, presented at the conference by its executive director, Charles Andres, is seen as forming the secure customer registration and data protection system for InfoValet.
• Blog post on the conference, and further thoughts, by Chuck Peters, CEO of Gazette Communications, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
• Liveblog of the conference set up by Chuck.

Stay tuned, when Bill has more to talk about, I'll be talking about it.

The end of the monolithic news organization

I've been wondering, in the context of the great search for new business models for news, whether the following could work as model for the creation, distribution and consumption of news content, as a complete replacement for today's vertically integrated news organizations:

• A network of completely independent journalists who gather news and post their news content on blogs
  
• A variety of aggregators who collect, organize and promote this output—locally, regionally, nationally, and around various niche interests
  
• A universe of news consumers access news, directly from the blogs of the independents as well as from the aggregators; and share, digest and repurpose news in social networks.
  
• Other enterprises provide related services such as the aggregation and organization of raw data (this might be Google) and the management of a set of localpedias and nichepedias (this could be Wikipedia operating at a more granular level than it does today)
  

Essentially, this model would expand to a societal level the Intellipedia model I described recently—not within a single organization but as a set of networked individuals and entities. The reporter becomes an entrepreneur, the editor becomes an aggregator and wiki moderator, the news librarian becomes a database vendor, the readership becomes a networked community, the publisher manages the flow of advertising revenue among all of them.

So where's the "monetization" part of this business model? Here are some possible components:

• Blogs for independent journalists: Anil Dash of Six Apart just created the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program, intending to help out a few friends but ending up with a wave of interest. Participants get, Anil writes: "a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online."
• Resources like David Cohn's brilliant startup, Spot.Us, allowing crowdfunding as one of the ways journalists get paid.
  
• Tools such as Attributor to help track use of content by aggregators and flow audience and advertising share back to the originators.
• A system like the one envisioned by the Information Valet Project to regulate the allocation of advertising and transactional revenue across all components of the network, including, potentially, news consumers themselves.

And, how do we get from here to there? Well, if the components of our existing news network, like newspapers, continue to self-destruct, we may well get there by default, with the survivors self-organizing themselves in this fashion. And newspaper organizations that get serious about reinventing themselves for the digital future might well want to look at models that involve networking of independent entrepreneurial components rather than monolithic enterprises.

InfoValet, at your service

Continuing from yesterday's introduction to Bill Densmore...

Bill is now at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, as one of their Reynolds Fellows, developing his Information Valet Project. For the full scoop on his project, follow his blog on the subject, and see the original proposal, (which is linked from his July 17 post, no separate URL available). The InfoValet (my shorthand) is described as follows:

A service network of “information valets” will replace the old physical product-oriented music, publishing and entertainment industries, replacing many CDs, newspapers, DVDs, perhaps even books. These valets will compete across geographic and topical spheres with search, advice, community, research, linking, hosting, data storage and other services. They will compete to be best at meeting the consumer’s diverse information needs within communities defined by individual users. Information resources will not typically be owned by the valet. Rather, the valet will be compensated for finding, shaping and referring them to the consumer, much as a retailer aggregates and merchandises for wholesalers.

What I'm interested in is the "finding, shaping and referring" part, which would seem to have implications for the news business. I'm still not sure if what Bill is trying to develop is simply an information commerce network, or an information commerce network that has some aspects of the Intelligent Interface Agents I referenced on Sept. 24, long envisioned but still unrealized "knowbots" that can take the drudgery out of surfing the Net.

Michal Migurski of Stamen, commenting on that post of mine, says, in effect: "Forget it, just use RSS feeds that reflect various largely human-edited aggregators; this is not going to be done by software agents." But I'm not convinced, and I hope Bill will build the idea into InfoValet -- after all, if your valet can't figure out your needs, what good is it? And indeed, Bill's proposal continues with this vision of the news organization of the future:

The next news organization is not principally a newspaper — centralized daily printing is going to become a niche product for the wealthy and depends on non-renewable resources and expensive manufacturing. Rather, it is a 24/7, platform-agnostic nerve center that finds, organizes, shares and makes sense of information from a vast array of paid, volunteer, independent and partisan sources — and then serves it how you want it, when you want it.

It will be a service organization — like a law or accounting firm — and it will be paid accordingly. At first, it will be extremely difficult to convince people to pay for such a service. But as the years go by, it will be seen as an absolutely indispensable way to get through the day. People will become as reliant on their "Newshare" as on their car, doctor, parent or colleague. Larger cities will have multiple "new shares" offering competing information valet services.

They will compete largely on technical grounds — which sorts best, who finds the real gems, and who provides premium information at the right price bundle? Advertising will be part of all this, but it will be an option—if you are willing to receive advertising, the cost of your "Newshare" will be less.

The competition for mass-audience advertising on the web is such that it seems hard to imagine sustainable rates will ever support the amount of original reporting the United States has enjoyed for the last 50 years. Audiences are now atomizing and the only future for advertising is in presenting targeted messages to individual users. This means the entity that earns the right to receive value for advertising is going to be the one which does the best job of understanding and then servicing the needs of an individual user — including privacy. In the informationservice economy, you[r] information valet will be paid for arranging your attention when you look at an ad, and that payment will be a credit to an account, will offset your purchase of premium
information. This represents an ebb and flow of attention and info-currency, depending upon whether it is information someone wants you to have or information you want.

I'll buy the idea that with certain obvious safeguards against manipulating the system, consumers might share in the advertising revenue targeted at them. But I disagree with the idea that consumers will get over their enormous resistance to paying for online news content, and be willing to pay in some fashion as they once did for print. If the InfoValet system materializes, and I use it to shop online for music, video, games, software, anything downloadable—then the service itself needs to be free. And news, since it's already 99 percent free online, should remain on the free side of the package.

Carry On, Jeeves

As promised, a look at Bill Densmore's Information Valet Project (IVP).

Bill's on a fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, developing the ideas he presented in his proposal entitled "Building the Information Valet Economy." (And as it happens, he is the cubicle neighbor of Matt Thompson, whose ideas for "Wikipedia-ing the News" have been the subject of a couple of previous posts of mine: 1 2. This being apparently fertile ground, I may go explore what the rest of those Fellows are up to.)

Today, as background, I'm going to restrict myself to introducing Bill and attempting to explain the origins of his thinking. Tomorrow, we'll get into the IVP itself. Bill is a longtime friend and colleague of mine, going back to pre-Internet days. After he sold a Berkshires (Mass.) weekly called The Advocate, he spent a number of years nursing a firm called Clickshare through its development stages. The basic idea of Clickshare was (and is):

Clickshare allows a consumer to have one account at a most-trusted website and buy from other websites without having to pass around a credit-card number, register or give out personal information. One ID, one account, one bill.

This assumed consumers would wish to buy, from many web sites, small amounts of information (news), and pay for it in very small increments charged to their Clickshare account. Sounds simple enough, but then it got complicated in ways that I confess I never fully understood, including ways for consumers to earn small payments for viewing website advertising, and for sites to earn a share of the microcharges incurred by consumers originally signed to Clickshare accounts via their sites. As far as I know, the payments network aspect never got fully off the ground, and the system is used primarily to process things like subscription payments for individual sites.

But Bill was certainly prescient when he wrote, a number of years ago, these further words explaining the system:

"It was my thought that newspapers were facing a business train wreck in the new century if they didn't learn how to become digital infomediaries for their readers and customers," says Densmore. "The Internet provides the perfect solution in terms of universal access to digital goods. But what was missing was a mechanism for independent publishers to share their customers without losing them, and to profitably share each other's content with those customers.

"We conceived Clickshare as a solution the problem. But the Clickshare Customer Exchange Platform (TM) has evolved really to be the digital-content operating system for the new century and is broadly applicable to words, music, video, multimedia, software and services such as loyalty marketing, affinity groups and site access control.

"What's so unique? In the past, words, music, movies and software had to be packaged in newspapers, books, tapes and disks before they could be distributed. Their form and context had to be fixed. With the Internet, digital content can be stored in pieces on a content-owner's server and assembled 'just-in-time' in a myriad of customized packages for individual consumers. No content owner can foresee all the ways to package the pieces.

"With distribution now a commodity, agents with millions of users are now in a position to serve as retailers, adding value to content by finding it and sorting it in new ways, then acquiring it from content owners at wholesale "just-in-time" to instantly turn around and resell it to users. Clickshare Service Corp. is the first company to identify this new approach to content selling, and to develop a proprietary service which enables it."

In other words, when Clickshare was launched, "digital information" available online consisted mainly of words. But today, beyond words in news stories, a consumer might purchase music at iTunes, video via Blockbuster or Netflix, books from Amazon, or games or software from various sources, all with different payment methodology. As a customer your private information goes wherever you might shop online. Clickshare's system (aspects of which are patented) protects the customer's privacy, but more importantly (and as distinct from the likes of Paypal), it seeks to create a Consumer Commerce Network in which information vendors benefit from all future purchases made by consumers initially registered at their site.

In any event, Clickshare is still waiting for its day, perhaps largely because the vast majority of news sites have elected not to charge for most, or any, of their content. And Bill's at Mizzou, serving up the Information Valet, about which more tomorrow.