TechPulse 360

The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) set up a panel of journalists and investors to talk about the future of news in the 21st century

No point in hiding our face in the sand.

Printed media is in danger: bankruptcy of the Tribune Company, Seattle is now a one-newspaper city (Seattle Times), Boston maybe next (the Globe might also have to stop its printing press leaving it all to the Herald), troubles at Philadelphia and Minneapolis newspapers and many other media outlet around the country have shut or are in turmoil.

With that as a backdrop, the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) asked a panel of journalists and investors to explore some of the hard issues the media is currently facing at the dawn of the 21st century at an event last night.

So what’s the future of printed media? How will journalism and the news business evolve with technology? What are the new opportunities for entrepreneurs? How can high-tech innovators build new business models around news and the barrage of newly unemployed journalists?

For Silicon Valley celebrity Guy Kawasaki, printed newspapers simply have no future.

“I think it’s going to take the death of the organizations, it’s just like car companies, there’s too many car companies. We’re maybe in this perfect storm where death may be accelerated but I think it’s an over-supply issue… I think newspapers are going to die, but wether journalism does, that’s the issue,” added Kawasaki, the chairman of Garage Technology – a venture firm – and Alltop founder.

Journalists and Bloggers: different ethics

The panel also raised the issue of bloggers vs. journalists. Are bloggers really journalists? For tech analyst and columnist Larry Magid, bloggers are just oblivious of conflict of interests pointing to a mommy blogger that is blogging about candies and is on a candy company payroll (Hershey’s).

“I call that a whore and not a journalist… And she’s not even apologizing for it,” said Magid.

Although not all bloggers are oblivious of conflicts of interests, many are and would simply not say anything negative about a company or its products for fear of loosing “access” or even sponsorships.

For acting director of Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism, Ann Grimes what sets journalism apart from other forms of communication is:

“the practice of verification and confirmation and it is key for journalists to understand that and we trained our journalist students at old-fashioned gumshoe watchdog reporting… We teach them standards and ethics we think it’s important for them to understand the role of the press in a democracy.”

Citizen journalism is just not sustainable

I remember just a couple years ago when citizen journalism was all the rage and, in some cases, still is, in France for example with AgoraVox.

But both Grimes and Magid questioned the sustainability and the agenda of the citizen journalists.

“Citizen journalism is hard to sustain… Journalism is a full time job: hanging out at City Hall, developing sources, doing the nitty gritty work that is required to really break stories…,” comments Grimes.

“The thing that concerns me with citizen journalism… is what is the business model to do the kind of really really hard work that traditionally local papers do (like covering City Hall, small businesses…)… and are they doing it honestly, objectively, thoroughly, and are they going to continue doing it after there mood changes,” adds

Lots of experimentations going on to monetize content

Many business models are currently being tried today to monetize content. Grimes cited a few:

1. Subscription
2. Hyper-local models, with deep dives in local businesses
3. Micro-payments
4. Non-profit models for niche sites
5. Big media companies are talking about profesionnal subscriptions with niche and deep verticals that you can get professionals to pay for
6. Devices like the Kindle which open up the way for pay-content

Venture capitalists want either “eyeballs” i.e. “traction” or revenue

But at the end of the day what venture capitalists want to see is either lots of traction or some revenue generation.

“If you’re pitching venture capitalists many of them will tell you that they want to see a proven business model… [Twitter] may be the only company that raises money without a business model but it does open up the possibility that if you are showing them [VCs] eyeballs that are exponentially growing,it’s a good thing… So show them a lot of eyeballs or a lot of revenues, either one will work,” said Kawasaki.

And here are some random comments heard from the panel about journalism: it’s hard and now real-time, and it’s both an honorable profession and a privilege to tell stories and to be read by many.

Ditto.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 10:37 am and is filed under news, startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.