“The web will feel a lot different in 5 years,” McCue said in a speech at TechCrunch Disrupt conference as reported by The Next Web. “It will feel a lot like print and be monetized differently than it is currently.”

I don’t want to come off as naive. I know he is saying this because his company makes a product that makes the web look more like print. With that said, his comments are still too narrow. The value and power of the Web (and specifically HTML 5) is in the user’s ability to play a crucial role in shaping their media landscape.

For example, I love using the magazine format of the Atlantic on my iPad. The long stories and large images work well for me. I can sit down and casually “thumb” through the magazine. In this case, I agree with McCue’s view: web browsing is changing.

The flaw in McCue’s argument comes when we think of other types of media use. For example, in the morning I want to crank through a lot of news quickly. So I use Google Reader. It is by no means pretty, but it is effective for what I need. I can scroll through the 50 or so stories in my local paper and quickly see where crime is occurring or what measures the county council are debating. In this case, I don’t want a magazine format. I am willing to sacrifice style for efficiency.

I am not saying either of these are going to be the future of the web. I am saying the future of the web is based in the user having more control to choose a format to match his or her need.

This site lets you upload data and visualize it using a wide variety of interesting displays: maps, word trees, tag clouds, tree maps, bubble charts, matrix charts, network diagrams, etc. Check out the more than 84,000 such visualizations that people have created for ideas of what to do with your own data.

I figured it would be easy for a first try. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have actually messed around with, but Nieman Journalism Lab came through again by posting a story and google doc dataset about media ownership. Specifically, the dataset contained the major investors of the large, publicly traded newspaper companies (Belo, Gannett, Journal Communications, Lee, Media General, McClatchy, NYTimes, Scripps, WaPo, NewsCorp A & B stock).

I am going to mess with this more tomorrow, but here is what I could get ManyEyes to do in about an 45 minutes of messing around (after I got the data formatted). My problem is not at all the technical side of it. ManyEyes is incredibly simple. I just don’t really know how I can display this data so it is at all understandable.

******UPDATE*******

I messed around a bit more and here is what I came up with:

What this graphic shows is all the organizations that (1) own more than a combined 1 percent of nine media companies and (2) have ownership in more than one of the media companies. The dots aren’t weighed. They are all the same size and just show any ownership. This is because when I chose to size the dots by amount of ownership a lot of the dots were very small (e.g., a company owning 0.41% of the media org had just a little speck). I wanted to make all the dots bigger, but it doesn’t seem to have that option.

Overall, that seems to be the problem with ManyEyes, it doesn’t really allow you to mess with much. In short, I can choose what data I wanted it to display but I can choose how to display the data. I think I am going to have to move on to one of the other software packages.

Here is a visualization posted by someone else. This displays the top 100 newspapers by circulation in the world.

In my lecture, I will be covering 5 different economic models of journalism. These are: (1) Niche Journalism, (2) Prospective Funding Journalism, (3) Non-profit Journalism, (4) Collaborative Journalism, and (5) Paywalls. None of these represent completely unique or new forms of journalism, but the influence of these different models has been growing over the last 10 to 15 years. Also important to note, these are not the only new models of journalism. There are literally hundreds of ideas out there. I choose these 5 examples, because pragmatically I have limited time and these seem to be the ones garnering the most attention, discussion, and experimentation.

1) Niche Journalism – Refers to media outlets that are made not for a mass audience, but made for specific subsets of the population. There are primarily two versions of niche journalism, hyperlocal journalism and topic-specific journalism.

These types of sites are using the same model as current mainstream media, the dual product model, but they are amazing for a different type of audience. Mainstream media seeks to gain a large, diverse audience. This general audience can then be sold to nearly anyone looking to advertise. Niche journalism, on the other hand, seeks to gain a very specific demographic group. The media organization can sell this specific audience to advertises whose products are specifically targeted for that demographic.

Examples:

• Patch.com
• MyBallard.com
• LostRemote.com

2) Prospective Funding Journalism – This refers to journalistic stories that are reported on as a result of funding from an outside source. MediaStorm.com and Spot.us represent two forms of prospective funding journalism. MediaStorm, created by award-winning journalism Brian Storm, has created a wide variety of editorial work for clients. For example, MediaStorm created “Crisis Guide: Pakistan” for the Council on Foreign Relations. Spot.us respresent a very different form of prospective funding journalism. Through the Spot.us community journalist can pitch stories. For example, Eric Ruthford, a journalist, pitched a story about the involvement of gangs in child sex trade. He pitched this story on the Spot.us website on September 20, 2010. Between then and now, he has received $1,100 from 72 sources to cover this story. Spot.us has thousands of story pitches on their site at anytime. In most cases, Spot.us works with local media to distribute the story to a wider audience. Spot.us is a non-profit organization, and the infrastructure is primarily funded through grants.

3) Non-profit Journalism – This refers to journalism created by not-for-profit organizations. Spot.us also partially falls in to this category. I included it above, because the actual journalism (the stories) are funded on a strictly prospective basis. There are many better examples of non-profit journalism. Generally, non-profit journalism is funded just like any other not-for-profit organization (e.g., grants and donations).

Examples:

• Propublica.com
• The Bay Citizen
• The Texas Tribune
• The Center for Public Integrity

4) Collaborative Journalism – This refers to journalism systems that brings numerous people or sources together to create stories or broader coverage of an issue. One of the newest examples of this is Storify. Storify allows users to easily pull information together from a number of social media sources to show readers how a story develops over time. Here is the demo video from Storify:

Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.

WikiNews is another example of collaborative journalism. Like its more famous cousin Wikipedia, WikiNews is based off the popular WikiMedia collaborative editing software. Using this system, anyone can edit or create a news story on the wikinews site. Stories constantly change as new information comes to light.

5) Paywalls – This refers to media organizations charging for access to online content. There are primarily three types of paywalls – full, partial, and metered.

Full paywalls are when no content is accessible by the user unless he or she pays an access fee. Although used on some business journalism websites, full paywalls are not being seriously considered by many mainstream media organizations. Partial paywalls are when some content is accessible for free and other content is only accessible for a fee. New York Times Select followed this model.

Finally, in the metered model individuals can view a certain amount of count over a period of time, then they are charged for access. For example, a reader might be able to see 40 articles a month. Beyond that, the individual would have to pay for access.

Update: I forgot Travonna is located in the north end of the Short North arts district. Its address is 1195 N. High Street. Google Map.

Interviews:

• Hardy Interview
• Wheeler Interview

Photos:

Hypotheses
H1: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact individual-level enthusiasm towards the 2008 presidential campaign.
H2: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to attend a campaign event.
H3: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to volunteer for a campaign.

Sample estimates
Level 1: Survey of 25,000 college students at 50 colleges and universities in 4 battleground states during October 2008.
Level 2: Newspaper data, enrollment, public/private, and aggregate candidate contact data derived for 32 of the above schools.

Controls
Level 1: Sex, Age, Race, Candidate contact, Political ideology, Political party, news media use, and political discussion
Level 2: Enrollment, Public vs. private, and aggregate campaign contact.

IV
“Student newspaper availability” was created by multiplying the average print run for the paper by the number of times is pass printed per week and then dividing by undergraduate enrollment. This gave a value which was equivalent to the number of newspapers printed per undergrad per week.

DV’s
Enthusiasm: 4 point scale (ran as ordinal logit model)
Attend campaign event: Dichotomous
Volunteer for a campaign: Dichotomous

Findings
In none of the models did student newspaper availability have a significant effect on the outcome variable (p=.165 to p=.865).

But how do we do this. I think there are three important concepts that we need to think about. First, the reader/user must be engaged in the content. Once they are engaged in the content feelings of connection to the community and the news organization must be cultivated. News source must also provide the mobilizing information to allow people to get involved in the community. This is my modest idea.

So how do newspapers make money off this? First, we need to accept that because of increased competition the newspaper is never going to turn the profit margins it did in the 90’s. What it is going to make is a solid, consistent profit. Say goodbye to the 15% return. Say hello to the 2% return.

Now that we have that settled we can start really thinking about making money. There we come back to advertising and feedback loops. Good advertising is all about creating good feedback loops. The more you know the customer the better you can serve them. The better you can serve your customer the more money you can make for advertising. Secondly, the more Internet real estate you have the more you can sell. So offer more than just news and you can sell more than just news.

Anyway, I have been droning on for too long and this is merely a first draft from 2 years ago. I can think of a number of sub-discussions I can pull out from this essay and extend a lot. Maybe I’ll do that over the next while.

First Draft of:

Community Creation Measure

Nicholas W. Geidner

Prepared: 02.16.07

The community creation measure is based around the following three variables, engagement, involvement, and connection. Engagement measures whether the website allows the users to find out more about local stories and interests. This variable is divided into two categories, technical and content. The second variable, involvement, examines if the website encourages involvement with local organizations and interests. The final variable, connection, measures whether the website allows to users to connect to other users in the community.

Engagement

Content

1. Coverage of local stories – local news prominently displayed on the front page of the website
2. Neighborhood new – Hyperlocalized information based around the zip code or neighborhood of the user
3. Political coverage on all levels – Information on up coming elections from the township level up to the federal level
   1. Township
   2. County
   3. Regional
   4. State
   5. Federal
4. National stories localized – National stories connected to the local community
5. Interactive features – Addition interactive features for larger stories. This could include interactive maps, timelines, etc.
6. Polls
7. Streaming video – The website offers the user to view video assets for most stories
8. Regular online news option – Website offers a regularly scheduled online news program (ie. a noon 3-minute news brief)

Technical

1. Allowance for user submitted content
   1. Text stories
   2. Pictures
   3. Video
2. MyCoverage option – A feature which allows the user to customize the website to concentrate on the stories that interest them.
3. Tagging – A feature that allows users to tag stories or sort stories in some fashion
4. Alternative outputs – Website allows the user to access alternative formats
   1. RSS
   2. Cell phone updates
   3. E-mail updates
   4. Podcasts
5. Comments – A feature that allows the user to comment on stories posted to the website

Involvement

1. Community Calendar
2. Additions to community calendar – Allows the users to add community events
3. Contact information for local organization
   1. Political
   2. Social
   3. Religious
4. Volunteer opportunities – Announcements of where people can volunteer with-in the community
5. Station supported community events – Website promotes community events created by the station
6. Direct donations – Allow users to donate directly to community fundraising campaigns

Connection

1. Profiles – A feature allowing the user to create a personal, unique profile that they can be identified as by other users
2. Chatrooms – Does the website have any chatrooms where users can meet and discuss topics?
3. Message boards/forum – Allows the user to post messages on to a public message board or forum
4. Online social networking – Allow users to display profiles and look through profiles created by other users
5. Community meet-ups – Tool that encourages face-to-face meeting of users with similar interests
6. User created blogs – Allow the user to create personal blogs
7. Link to other local bloggers