Rescue Me: Local News Reporters Trapped Inside a Burning Business Model
Every now and then, somebody finds a way to bring a fresh perspective to something that up to that moment, you thought was pretty well explained already.
We all know that local news models, both broadcast and print, are collapsing, right? And we're pretty much in agreement that what comes next has yet to be fully understood. Who, we wonder, will pay us to report the news?
Clay Shirky steps up today with an insightful experiment that clears the decks and gives us a new way of looking at just what we truly need to save in local news. Save the local paper? Not exactly. Shirky says save the reporters.
Clay Shirky
Shirky was thinking about the high cost of "saving" a local paper--even one in a smaller city with a smaller workforce. His hometown paper has 59 names on the masthead, and he thought at first glance that's a lot of people to support for a future news model like nonprofit. At least it was until he started sifting through the paper (literally cutting it to shreds) in search of the news:
"I then cut up each page, labeling every piece in two separate ways. The first label was about content: News, Ads, and Other (opinion columns, sports, crosswords, and the rest.) The only judgement call was an article in the sports section about a judge’s ruling in the Major League Baseball steroids case; I put that in the News pile; the rest of sports went in Other."
Result? The hometown paper was a bit of a bait and switch: local news written by local reporters on the front and back page, and filler, fluff, ads and AP stories covering all the pages in between:
"The Trib seems to realize the importance of local reporting to their readers. The outside of the paper (front and back page of section A) was all local bylines and no wire service news, while the inside had not one local news byline. (Local opinion, yes. Local sports, doubly yes. Locally reported news? No.) The local reporters were (expensive) lures, put on the outside of a product that included none of their work, and lots of the AP’s, on the inside pages."
Boiled down and sliced up, the paper had the work of six local reporters--which turns out to be the entire "reporting" staff of the paper. So, in a sense, "saving" local news vis a vis that paper means saving six jobs, not sixty. And hypothetically (I do speak from some experience here, as a newly-hired community supported journalist) that is something a nonprofit formula could manage, if the community truly wants to keep local news reporters on the beat covering their town.
Shirky argues the six reporters, along with six more employees (editors and such--must we really save the editors?) would be the folks to rescue: "what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely."
This experiment could be easily applied to local television. On a half-hour newscast, how many stories are really news, and how many are truly local? Strip the fluff and filler away, and how many people do you need to do that work? In your station, who should we rescue?
Dispatch from the Frontlines: VidSF Co-Creator Steve Cochrane
Trying It a New Way: San Francisco's VidSF
Clay Shirky (who got a nice nod in Frank Rich's Sunday Times piece) has noted that the next evolution of journalism will emerge one way or another, whether it's the creation of a known monster like Google, or "some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of."
Steve Cochrane's not 19, but he may be one of those "kids" who figures it out. And even if he doesn't, he's one of the braves one out there trying something new, instead of rolling to work every day obsessing over whether we'll be fired that day, and bitching about the fate of local news. So on principle, Cochrane and his partner, Kieran Farr, deserve a lot of credit. But what, exactly, are they doing? And is it showing signs, you know, of working?
So to start this week with something to ponder beyond Frank Rich's "American Press on Suicide Watch," we offer our first Monday Morning Dispatch from the Frontlines. And thanks, Steve, for being the kid in class brave enough to share his project first.
DISPATCH FROM THE FRONTLINES: STEVE COCHRANE, CO-FOUNDER, VidSF
Hi, I’m Steve Cochrane, and I co-founded VidSF with Kieran Farr. First, I’d like to thank Mark for letting me have the run of his wonderful blog here. It’s extremely encouraging to hear such interest in our project.
So, why did we start VidSF? We noticed that our friends weren’t watching local news anymore. Kieran and I are both in our mid-twenties, and if anyone our age is watching news, it’s probably from The Daily Show and not from a local offering.
We had also worked together on a television station that Kieran founded while at college, Indiana University Student Television . It’s still going strong and we learned a great deal from the project, so we decided to try again with local news for the web. We’d like to say we predicted the collapse of local TV news, but we just got lucky.
What’s the difference between news for TV and news for the web? As you all know, back before you had your Internet Blogs, and your Tweeter and MeSpace, making local news required a horrifically expensive studio and a time slot on cable. Because of this scarcity, a local TV news station only had to compete with maybe two or three other stations for viewer attention. At least, that’s what I’ve pieced together from multiple viewings of the historical document Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
Today, with compact cameras and dirt-cheap webhosts, the days of limited options are over. The level of competition has gone way, way up, and viewers are likely to flee a site if they have to watch even one sub-par video. When viewers are held in contempt, like the classic “bait the viewer with the most interesting story and withhold it until the very end of the broadcast,” they don’t have to stand for it, because they can get their news elsewhere. So it’s important that we really respect our viewers, value their time, and edit relentlessly. That’s why we have a rule that our videos can only be two to four minutes in length. There aren’t many stories that need more time than that.
Cochrane: "Being the Little Guy Has Never Held Us Back"
What’s working for us? We’re really happy that we decided to go the all-video route. There are many, many local news start-ups popping up, but they’re predominantly text-only. While a video site is harder to set up and more expensive to maintain than a text site, it definitely has its advantages. Video advertising generally performs far better than traditional banner ads, which viewers have trained themselves to ignore.
As for content, event coverage has been working great for us. There are lots of fun and quirky events in San Francisco to cover, like the Bring Your Own Big Wheel race and the Valentine’s Day pillow fight . So instead of the inane reporter stand-up , we interview the people involved and let them tell us why it’s important. We’re not going to be winning Pulitzers any time soon, but these events are fun to watch and quick to produce.
It’s also surprisingly easy to gain access to events, even if no one’s ever heard of us before. We’ll just send a polite email and almost invariably we’ll get a nice reply with a press pass and free drinks. Being the little guy has never held us back.
What’s not working for us? This one’s easy: user-generated content. When we originally started VidSF, we had the crazy idea that “anyone can be a video journalist!” We soon found that when you get a bunch of random people from Craigslist without any journalism or video production experience and have them tape what they want with no oversight, the end product is not very compelling.
So we’re changing our approach from user-generated content to more of an edited publication. Having to make that transition has slowed us down a bit, but that’s how start-ups like these go. In order to survive you can’t just set a plan in stone, you have to bob and weave.
This may be disappointing to some, but we’ve also noticed that our more laboriously produced and researched “serious news” videos are generally less popular than our lighter, more entertaining ones.
What about the whole “money” thing? This is probably the thing that readers most want to hear about, and unfortunately we don’t have much of an answer yet. We did recently build a custom advertising system that serves pre-roll ads -- brief video ads that play before a feature -- similar to the ads on Hulu . Currently we’re thinking through how we want to make sales, and we haven’t approached any local businesses yet, but we’re close. Will it work? We don’t know yet, but we hope to make lots of money, and we’ll see how that pans out.
Do We Save Local TV News… Or Save Ourselves?
But... We Ruled the World... How Can It Ever End?
Clay Shirky's recent column, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," has earned deserved attention among those of us pondering the question of what happens next, and whether the financial models of newspapering and making local TV news can survive the current economy. Increasingly, it seems the answer to both questions is "no."
It no longer seems like madness to suggest that what we're living through isn't the toughest times for local TV news as we know it, but rather, a revolution that will wash away the medium we grew up with, and usher in something different. That's scary stuff.
Shirky describes the insistence that newspapers must be saved this way: "When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie. "
Digital Guru Clay Shirky
That is meaty, heavy stuff, and it is as applicable, I believe to local TV news as it is to newspapers. Anybody who refuses to believe that what we've spent our careers doing must continue to exist is at high risk of being rendered irrelevant. And in TV, as in any business, irrelevant is noplace to be.
The save-the-papers debate, as Shirky points out, boils down to a journalistic truism: newspapers put asses in seats at city council meetings, and get deeper into stories than local tv newsers have the luxury of doing. They have more bodies to sift through overnight police reports and court filings. They are essential to the survival of a healthy society. If newspapers die, who will do that work? Certainly not the "you're live in the noon on the house fire" TV guy. He's lucky if he can grab a five-dollar footlong before he starts crashing for his 5 o'clock package.
"The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model," Shirky writes. "So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs? I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it."
Same again for TV. It's gut-check time. Are you thinking about surviving the downturn? Or figuring out what's the new thing--and how to thrive doing it?
The Rocky Said Goodbye After 150 Years
Shirky writes: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. "
Society doesn't need the six o'clock local news either. But it does need to know what's happening. We still have a job to do, it's just a question of where, and who's going to pay us. That's what I'm anxious to figure out, rather than answer the question of when the dry pipe in the sales department will start gushing cash again and all will be better. That sounds more than ever like denial.
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