He concluded there was little reason for the New Haven Register or the Middletown Press to pretend to cover national news, or do its own wire editing, or to pay business-news wire services. He figured out that he would rather be paid to carry national business news than pay to produce it. So he did a deal with The Street, which now provides national business news content for the papers and the sites. The Street sells the related ads and pays Journal Register a revenue share, based on traffic. It’s not a lot of revenue, but it has reversed the money flow.
Attempts to create “local news” sites that span the entire country are prima facie problematic. What makes local news interesting and relevant is the very thing about it that resists homogenization — its individual, local character.
The radiator itself is a fairly inexpensive and simple kit: All told, the setup cost about $2,000. It works by pulling the feed from the @BostonUpdate Twitter list of Globe staffers, a list with 173 accounts at the moment.
Two grand for a TV that displays a twitter list? I know to a company like the Boston Glone that has a (theoretical) trillion dollars, $2,000 isn’t a ton of cash, but seriously? What story could that money have funded?
I have a crazy device that can display twitter lists too! It’s the Twitter desktop app and cost zero dollars.
The big thing is really talented people doing the sales,” Marshall says.
This is the secret to making money from online news.
But the other piece is that no one has figured out a way to present lots and lots of constantly updated information in a way that (a) is beautiful, (b) is effective at story discovery, and (c) privileges editorial control.
What if 20 people in Richmond seriously took it upon themselves to form a coalition that monitors all activities of city government by attending meetings and publicizing issues? What if a local organization developed a grass-roots policy agenda for city government based on serious discussions among voters? What if that organization then took active steps to force candidates to state their views in some detail, and to hold incumbents accountable to their campaign commitments?
Here’s what the newspaper business sounds like: the modestly talented son of the founder can generate double-digit margins based on little more than the happy accident that there are people who like football and buy cars living within 30 miles of his house. That’s the newspaper business, or at least it was until recently.
Far too often, Whitaker says, cable news outlets are like 5-year-olds playing soccer — a mob all darting here and there — chasing the story of the moment as one.
Journalists need to become social by sparking conversation with people whose hobbies, work, ideas or interests make them natural audiences, and then find ways for their stories to enrich the conversation.
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
