Studio 20 @ Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen interviewed Clay Shirky as part of the “Primary Sources” series last night. Mediabistro.com wrote about the event below.

NYU Media Professors Discuss Future Of Media By Looking Back

By Drew Grant on Dec 04, 2009 09:30 AM

Last night, New York University hosted a panel in its continuing “Primary Sources” series focusing on journalism, featuring professors and media commenters Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky.

While the topic may have officially been “New Media’s Present and Future,” the conversation quickly moved into the past: specifically delving into five years ago, which Shirky said most people mistakenly refer to as the Golden Era of Journalism — before the Internet came and took all the money away. Five years ago, Shirky stated, newspapers were losing readership left and right, but their revenue was booming. Ironically, now most newspapers actually have more readers due to their Web sites, but the money has dried up.

While most news orgs would have liked to take that conversation in the direction of how to get that money back, Shirky and Rosen were more interested in how the Internet plays into the public’s perception of the mainstream media.

Rosen, known for his work in the movement of public journalism, sited the longitudinal study that showed that in 1976 over 75 percent of Americans had “a great deal of trust” in the press, whereas 30 years later, only 4.5 percent did. Yet journalists on the whole, Rosen asserted, have only become more educated and better informed. So where did this mistrust of the media come from?

Well, from the small groups of Internet watchdogs, which perform the important function of “after-the-fact-checking,” as the professors put it. Starting (debatably) as early as Dan Rather’s MemoGate in 2004, and up to the recent Balloon Boy incident, the Internet has offered up information that contradicts what is being fed to us by our televisions or newspapers. Compare this to 30 years ago, when we may have had a pick of only several outlets of information in which to get our news, which stood as indisputable facts of the world at the time.

So is the Internet bad for all news organizations, undermining the public’s trust in once-reputable sources? Not necessarily, said Shirky, though news publications’ latest act of going to the FTC to regulate the information disseminated on the Web is absolutely the wrong direction. It is the act of forwarding a piece of journalism these days, not the publication of the piece itself, that gets these publishers an audience, he said. And by placing a pay wall or premium on your brand or story — as Rupert Murdoch and several other publishers are trying to do — you’re directly hindering that story’s ability to gain readership.

Then again, if we’re going by the adage of The Golden Age of Journalism, an audience isn’t as important as a profit.

Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen responds in a GRITtv interview with Laura Flanders:

“In the past, journalism schools have always been able to train people in skills for slots in stable media empires, and now those empires are crumbling. So, what we need to do in journalism school is engage our students in the puzzle of what the next journalism system looks like and teach them to be innovators and entrepreneurs and to start their own systems, but also to help the old media to figure out how to renew itself. So, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Watch the full video:

Sarah D. Wire tweeted about Studio 20:

Check out Sarah’s blog post below, and note Studio 20 Program Director Jay Rosen’s response in the comments:

“It’s not ideal, because we cannot formally admit you until we have your GREs, but it is workable,” Rosen added.

The Jan. 4 application deadline is approaching.  E-mail us with any questions!

Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen spoke at a conference at Yale this weekend. The experience inspired this post:

jayrosen:

I was asked to speak recently at a conference organized by Yale University with the title “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”  This irritated me. The question should have been “who will subsidize news production?” because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something.  Very rarely have users paid directly the costs of editorial production.

So here’s my list of known sources of subsidy, with examples to illustrate each. What I have left out please put in the comments and I will edit the list.  If you have a link that provides an example, that would help a lot.

1. Government can subsidize, through general tax revenues. As in some Scandanavian countries.

2. Rate-payers can subsidize, a solution that has to be enforced by government. As with the BBC license fee, or proposals to require Internet Service Providers to support journalism through a surcharge.

3. Political interests can subsidize the press, as with the party press in 19th century America or labor’s willingness to fund some new media operations today.

4. Philanthropy is a possible source of subsidy, as with the rolling grants that Paul Bass secures for the New Haven Independent, or the donations that flowed to the start-up, Texas Tribune.

5. Rich egoists will sometimes subsidize, as with Mort Zuckerman’s ownership of The Atlantic magazine from 1980 to 1999.

6. Advertisers are of course the most common subsidizers, though as Clay Shirky says, Best Buy never signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau. They just didn’t have a choice.

7. Entertainment and the revenues it produces can subsidize news production, as with the early days of network television, when the news divisions lost money. Good old fashioned sensationalism also fits under this heading.

8. Soft news can subsidize the hard, as with travel and food sections that pay for other kinds of coverage. (A point suggested by Richard Gingras of Salon.)

9. Unrelated businesses are sometimes a sources of subsidy, as with the Washington Post Company’s ownership of the highly profitable Stanley Kaplan.

10. Then there’s logically-related businesses, as with Bloomberg L.P. and Thomson Reuters, both of which make big money providing data to businesses and then subsidize news production (mostly business news) from that. (More on selling data.)  See also USA Today’s Buzz Bureau. Another example would be selling web services—setting up a website or social media tools—to the people formerly known as the advertisers. (One example, in pdf form.)

11. Clever spin-offs can subsidize editorial costs, as with Techdirt’s Insight Community, basically a focus group business featuring the highly informed community that gathers at Techdirt. At the level of the stand alone journalist, this becomes: “Some people who blog make money because they blog,” as against revenue from the blog itself.

12. Educational institutions—especially university-based journalism schools—can be the source of subsidy, as with the partnership between Northeastern University’s journalism program and the Boston Globe.

13. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly likely to sponsor or support journalistic work, often in partnership with traditional news producers.

14. High earning spouses sometimes subsidize stand alone journalists with start-up sites.

15. Live performances featuring editorial talent, as with magazine conferences or this event: “KCRW & NPR Present ‘Planet Money — Live!’ at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.”

16. E-commerce, also known as selling stuff, sometimes works, as with Techdirt’s “Connect with Fans and give them a reason to buy” program.

17. The most passionate users (those who can afford it) will sometimes subsidize the production of news available to all through small donations, as with public radio’s membership model in the U.S., or Firedoglake at the Libby Trial, or the community-funding platform spot.us and its garbage patch story.

18. Premium memberships: those who pay get extra benefits,  and thus help to subsidize the rest. An example of an extra benefit: fruitful interaction with highly informed journalists.

Subsidy ideas in development:

A possible source of subsidy is what’s known as “lead generation.” It means providing good information to businesses on who is exceptionally likely to buy. I’m still trying to determine if this is actually subsidizing news production anywhere yet.

Scott Karp of publish2.com writes of the possibility of high value advertising that would represent a conceptual break with the whole display ad regime. If such a system existed it would be added to my list as a different type of subsidy. The idea is to create advertising of such quality and informational value to users that it enhances the value of high-end editorial production.

Currently in development are voluntary micropayment systems, which would represent a new type of subsidy. No one knows if they’ll be successful, of course. Two to watch are Emanci-pay (“a choosing system… readers, listeners and viewers can easily choose to pay whatever they like, whenever they like, for the media goods they use”) and Kachingle (“crowdfunding sites you love.”)

Also in the concept phase is Lyn Headley’s restrospective funding model for news. “A retrospective news medium is an organization that bestows a continuing stream of awards, each with a monetary component, on the producers of the best pieces of journalism it finds, shortly after each piece is published.”

Notes: I do not talk about subscriptions or paywalls in this post, because that is not a subsidy system: that’s direct payment for editorial goods.

Kevin Coates in the comments says: “The BBC has a profit-making arm which among other things, commercializes rate-payer funded content in other geographic markets. Profits go back to the BBC to supplement the rate-payer funds. Similar to your #7, but revenue does not just come from entertainment (e.g, if you view the BBC news website in the US, you see ads; in the UK, you don’t.)

Worth mentioning is the newsroom-as-cafe concept, which appears to be succeeding in the Czech Republic. Here, the idea is to take a business that already works—the bustling cafe—and turn it into a news gathering operation.

Studio 20 Professor Jason Samuels’ latest work for BET premiers at 10pm on Sunday. Samuels is the senior series producer of “Heart of the City”, a documentary show that concentrates on current issues in various African-American communities. Sunday’s episode, “Dying to Eat in Jackson” will take viewers straight to the capital of the most obese state in the country, Jackson, Mississippi to examine why African-Americans are disproportionally more obese than other Americans.

This story on Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen’s keynote presentation at the Media140 conference in Sydney appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s web site. Find notes from the talk here.

By Rosanna Ryan

Academic and blogger Jay Rosen has some harsh words for journalists who are sceptical about social media: if you are not interested in democracy, you should look for a new job.

From his hometown of New York, Rosen used live video chat to address an audience of professional and amateur media producers at the Media140 conference in Sydney.

“If you don’t have a democratic heart, you don’t belong in journalism in the first place,” he said.

He says journalists should stop expecting “open” platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems.

Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.

“Things are not necessarily checked or made perfect before they are published,” he said.

“They are corrected, they are refined, they are edited and they are checked after publication.

“People coming from closed systems see chaos, but they need to see that open systems work differently.”

Earlier Media140 sessions had discussed claims that journalism was “dead”, but Rosen said he saw things differently.

“If [journalists] detach what they do from the medium, from the system it runs on, they can see that having more participants creates a better news system,” he said.

News Limited’s ‘cool new toy’

Rosen also weighed into the simmering debate about whether mainstream news providers should charge for content, saying that building “paywalls” would be akin to “unbuilding the web”.

He described the difficulty of transferring the mass media’s advertising models online. Targeted ads like those served to Google users were eliminating inefficiencies and driving the price of advertising down, he said.

On Thursday, columnist Caroline Overington from The Australian revealed News Limited’s hopes that a “cool new toy” would allow her employer to make money amid new media’s challenges to their economic model.

“What is it, I wonder?” journalist Margaret Simons asked on her blog.

“Some kind of deal with Apple, soon to release its new electronic reader? A competing product? Very intriguing.”

But Rosen suggested putting content behind paywalls would be a fruitless endeavour.

He said it would make the content more difficult to find and would not show up easily in searches, leaving journalists out of the conversations on social media platforms.

The Media140 conference is being held at ABC headquarters in Ultimo, Sydney.

Follow the #media140 tag for updates, or watch the live stream.

Notes from Jay Rosen’s talk were also published online.

Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen blogs about ten key ideas for the future of journalism in the social media age:

jayrosen:

Here are the ten key ideas I plan to share with the Media140/Sydney conference underway right now in Sydney, Australia. I will be speaking to the conference via Skype in a few hours.  The theme of the event is “the future of journalism in the social media age.”  These ten Twitter-able ideas are my contribution to that puzzle.

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

By Steven Safran

NYU is offering what could be a model for next-gen J-school, its Studio 20 concentration. The classes are led by Prof. Jay Rosen a longtime futurist and visionary, whom Terry and I quote often. I asked Jay about his class in an email Q&A:

Q. Was there one reason why Studio 20 came about, or was it an evolution?

ROSEN: I was chair of the journalism program at NYU from 1999 to 2005.  During that time I began to sense that the old model of “magazine,” “newspaper” and “broadcast” journalism tracks was going to crash because of what was happening with the Web and the economy of the news business.  So I began looking around for a different master image. That led me to graduate programs in the arts, which are often based on a studio model.  In architecture school or an MFA in painting, you take studio courses and everyone has projects.  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the studio concept was rich enough to replace the boot camp metaphor and division by platform.  But only if the projects had media partners to anchor them in the actual conditions out there today for editorial producers. So… that’s our approach: an “innovation studio,” working on projects with partners.

Q: What is the ideal student?

ROSEN: The ideal student knows before he or she enrolls that the old employment path in the news business has been disrupted; that specializing in a single platform isn’t an especially smart thing to do; that many different kinds of skills are going to be helpful and it isn’t realistic to expect J-school to simply “give” them all to you, or even to know what all of them are. At the same time, the ideal student brings to Studio 20 a level of mastery in one or two of the skills our “cool projects” approach will require, which could mean video, audio, design, production, database, programming, writing and editing, CMS systems and project management, just to name a few.  The way we put this is: “bring skills, share skills, learn new stuff.”  Finally, the ideal student is super comfortable with the Web and with the more open conditions the online world has brought to journalism.

Q: What will a student coming out of the class understand that a typical J-student may not?

ROSEN: How to “think with” the Web as an interactive and multi-media platform. How to reckon with the entire puzzle of sustainability. How to incorporate the users into the journalism from the beginning. How to run projects that test possibilities and bring a big learning dividend. How to iterate. How to start your own thing if you don’t see it in the world but it should exist. How to be a less dependent creature or more of a brand yourself.