“Sustainability Models”
Notes by Sara Majka
EXCERPT AUDIO PODCAST OF THIS SESSION (AND PREVIOUS ONE)
Media Giraffe Project
June 5, 2008
(I was not official note-taker and was just jotting things down, so this doesn’t cover everything.)
Leonard Witt opened. Mentioned reelchanges.org, David Cohn’s spot.us, and Kiva (a non-profit that does micro-loans to people in developing companies) as examples of models.
The Blethen family has put newspapers back on the market. Jim Schaffer (Dean of the USM Business School) talks about his interest in acquiring them. Interested mostly in the Portland Maine Press Herald. He talks about a model he has been drafting up.
– Has received interest from foundations and someone interested in putting $1 million.
– Sees a model where he could convene non-profits.
Two parts:
Part #1 individuals and institutions.
Part #2 bi-annual appeal to people
The plan he has come up with is 20% off the current offer price that is being mentioned for the papers. He says there are some “deluded buyers” whose interest is marking up the price.
Someone in group mentions that his plan sounds like a co-op, or that it is like an art museum where what you get from your donation is your name on a plaque.
Jim discusses how the survival of the paper would mean the end of the print edition. Says a real estate person wanted to give money if they could get the downtown property. Another person was interested in giving money, but said it could be a liability at this point. Whoever got involved would be seen by the community as someone who helped end the newspaper. That person said to call once he did the dirty work. The dirty work that Jim imagined would be to lose Saturday, then Monday (???). When the dust settled, it would be a newsroom only. He thinks it will be a sellable edition if legitimate journalism. Jim has $50 million on the table with the assumption that the newspaper will produce cash for a certain period of time.
Jim adds that his plan would be to spin off the other two papers. They were smaller, more local papers that were not losing as fast. He says he has already found interest for one of them.
There is a group discussion about money, including what Joel Kramer started with for MinnPost. Is $10 million a lot of money for state? Other models will need to survive on less.
Tracy Record (West Seattle Blog) says they are trying to do it on $70,000. They are a two person newsroom. There is group talk about what kind of coverage you can do with such limited means. Can you do a two week story? someone asks. There’s talk about using stringers, what that means as a model, which is pretty much poorly paid journalism.
Leonard Witt interrupts to say he’s not as interested in that model. He wants young people who are going into the profession—like his daughter—to be able to make a living.
There is talk about citizen journalism, that there is some limitation there. Citizen journalists mostly do features; no one really wants to do investigative. Len says something he has found that works is to find out what someone can do, what piece, and get them to do that. If you stick to what someone can do well, it works better.
*** At some point I think we morphed into the next time slot’s group. I think that might have been led by Jeremy at Twin Cities Daily Planet who discussed their model, which I didn’t take many notes on. He also talked about MinnPost, how they compete for stringers and usually Kramer is able to pay more. $100 per post (most writers do two a week) and $500-600 per story. He talks some about advertising. That Twin Cities is getting money from foundations right now, but there is a window for that, then money will have to come primarily from advertisers. I think he said he wants to contract out advertising sales to another paper who already has relationships in place, and offer them a percentage of sales.
Leonard gives a figure that highlights how much advertising money is getting lost as there is a switch from print to online. Before, the advertising money per person per year (I think by this he meant the money consumer would spend that advertisers could expect to reach) was about $600-900 per newspaper. It is $35 for online.
There is a discussion that advertising itself it going to need to look different online. Someone says that Village Soup is making an open source platform for advertisers. Pay $1,000 and can update your ad whenever you want. Turning the idea from a print-model into the idea of “hosting” relevant content.
Patrick Phillips (The Vineyard Voice) asks how to share best practices for business models. How to aggregate all the information—how to share what has worked for people and what hasn’t.
(I didn’t say anything, but was curious if anyone was researching the different/innovative ways to advertise on the web or the ways people were already advertising and collecting it in a central location to share and study.)